There was no other choice but to take the Suncoast van over to see the lawyer, not that there was any problem in doing it. It was just as well that John and Sally left a little early, since finding a place to park downtown was on the difficult side, and they wound up with a long walk to get to the office.

Ralph Brunswick’s office wasn’t big and sumptuous, like John had been halfway expecting; while not cramped, it had the look of a place where work was done. That gave John a little bit of hope about the whole affair.

Brunswick proved to be a heavy-set man with dark hair, wearing a dark suit, and looking like a lawyer to John. What’s more, he looked like one who could get things done. “Good afternoon, Mr. Engler,” he said. “Herb said you had a little problem with an accident claim.”

“Not me, but Sally, here,” John said, pausing to introduce her. “To make a long story short, a load shifted off a truck and onto her car a week ago tomorrow. Her car was totaled, and her daughter was badly injured. I don’t know how bad the hospital bill is, but I can tell you it’s not going to be small.”

“They never are, not these days,” the lawyer shook his head. “So, Mrs. Hanson, I take it your insurance isn’t going to cover anything.”

“It’s Miss Hanson, although I’d prefer it if you’d call me Sally,” she said. “As far as the insurance, I only had the cheapest coverage on the car, and I doubt if they’d cover anything.”

“Did you happen to bring your insurance paperwork and a copy of the accident report with you?”

“Yes, I did,” she replied. “John has them.”

John dug the paperwork out of his briefcase and handed it across the desk. “Did you happen to see the accident, Mr. Engler?”

“No, but I helped pick up afterward. I’m an EMT.”

“And what’s your relationship to Miss Hanson?”

“Just friends,” John replied. “We went to high school together, and I hadn’t seen her for years until I got called to the accident scene. When I discovered she and her daughter were essentially broke and homeless, well, I offered to put them up for a while.”

“You’re lucky to have a friend like that, Sally,” the lawyer smiled. “Now give me a chance to look this over.”

Brunswick spent a couple minutes looking over the accident report. “Well, from the looks of it you clearly have a case,” he said finally. “And realistically, there shouldn’t be much problem with it, since the trucking company was clearly negligent. I’d suspect we can settle this without going to court, but I’ll warn you it’s going to take sixty to ninety days to get everything arranged, possibly more. What kind of damages are you seeking?”

“Well, I’d like to have my daughter’s hospital bill settled,” Sally said, “and it would be nice if I could get the car replaced. On top of that, I think John deserves something for putting up with Teresa and me through all this.”

“Do you have any idea how much the hospital bill comes to?”

“Well, no,” she shook her head. “We, uh, had a little trouble getting Teresa out of the hospital, and we never got around to a final billing. John can explain it better than I can.”

“Mr. Engler?”

“Some administrator there was holding Sally up for a down payment on the bill before they’d allow Teresa to be released. Since Sally was essentially broke at the time, with no health insurance, an associate of mine and I, well, we sort of had to take things into our own hands to get her out of there. We snuck her out through the emergency room.”

“Um-humm,” Brunswick said, but with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. “Sally, you’re on Medicaid, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s difficult to get them to pay anything, and the guy didn’t want to listen to what I said.”

“Well, this could be interesting,” the attorney smiled. “I can appreciate their wanting their money but holding a child hostage to accomplish it seems rather extreme. That could make life a little interesting, and may delay the settlement with the trucking company a little. It’s not anything that can’t be solved, but these things take time. Now that there’s both Medicaid and a potential settlement involved, I think we can iron things out a bit. Now, what was your car worth?”

“I don’t know. Not much. It was a piece of junk, but at least it ran.”

“Well, for the sake of discussion, let’s say twenty-five hundred dollars,” the attorney said. “I know you can’t get much of a replacement car for that figure, but it would give us something to work with. Now, Mr. Engler, would you say that two hundred dollars a day would compensate you for your time and effort in taking care of Miss Hanson and her daughter?”

“I haven’t asked her for a thing and don’t intend to.”

“Whether you actually take anything for it is immaterial,” Brunswick smiled. “What we’re trying to establish is a figure we can use for damages in the lawsuit. Once it’s paid, you and Miss Hanson can work out a figure that is agreeable to both of you.”

“Hold it,” Sally said. “You’re saying I can get a couple hundred dollars a day just for staying with John?”

“Not quite that simply,” the lawyer smiled. “Again, we’re looking for a figure we can use to establish damages. When and if it’s paid, well, you and Mr. Engler can work out the details between yourselves.”

“How long would that go on?” John said.

“Well, if we do it right, until the settlement is agreed to. It might cause things to be hurried along a bit. Besides, we have pain and suffering for your daughter that deserves compensation as well.”

“So what would your fee in this be?”

“I’d be willing to do this on a contingency fee basis of twenty percent off the top,” Brunswick smiled. “Of course, that figure gets added to the damages, as well.”

John looked at Sally, who was staring back him. “Holy shit,” she said softly. “I never even dreamed that could happen.”

“It’s better than I expected, too,” John said. “Look, it has to be your decision to go ahead with this. I’m just driving you around.”

“You’re comfortable with this, then?”

“I think so,” John agreed. “Mr. Brunswick, you really don’t expect this is going to get complicated and drag out for years, do you?”

“There’s no way of being sure, but I doubt it. It’s clear that the damages are going to increase the longer this goes on, so it’s in the trucker’s insurance company’s best interest to get this settled quickly.”

“Sure, let’s do it,” Sally said. “I realize it’s going to take a while to work this out and John may have to put up with me for a bit, but I can see it’s going to be worth the wait.”

“Very well. There’s some paperwork that will have to be filled out, but I’ll get my secretary going on it. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

“Well, yes,” John said. “Although I don’t know how much help you can be.” He went on to explain about the problem with getting Teresa enrolled in school, and getting her school records from her last school without giving away her current address. “I don’t know how much of a threat this Hector really is,” John finished up. “But Sally seems to think it’s a credible threat and it has her worried.”

“Interesting,” Brunswick nodded. “To tell you the truth, that’s a little bit out of the way of things I normally deal with, but I suppose I could call up and breathe heavily on someone if you think it would help.”

“It might,” Sally said. “But that woman at the school was pretty insistent that they have her records and couldn’t promise that the old school would keep our new location a secret.”

“We’re looking into alternatives,” John told him. “So far we haven’t worked out anything. Everything either looks like it’s going to take more time than we can throw at it, or is going to be more expensive, or both. But it looks like we have to do something about school for Teresa pretty soon or we’re going to have someone from a social services agency knocking on the door and making pains of themselves. Sally and Teresa have been through enough trouble that I don’t think they need that on top of it.”

“Well, keep me posted, and if I can think of something I’ll let you know. And like I said, if you need someone to do a little legal intimidation, I might be able to help.”

It took a while to get finished up in Brunswick’s office, but soon John and Sally were walking back toward the van. “Jesus, John,” she said, “I sure never expected that.”

“I figured we could get you something if I could get a lawyer involved, but that was a little more than I expected,” he admitted. “Sometimes in this world you just have to know what strings to pull, and finding that one may have been what was needed. You’re not going to get rich out of this, but in a few months you should be in pretty good shape.”

“If you’ll put up with us for that long.”

“I said I would and I will. Now, once Teresa is up and around again, we might want to look at getting you a place of your own, but that’s an issue for then, not for now.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she replied. “But there’s still the school issue to deal with, and that’s beginning to look like it could turn into a real pain in the ass.”

“What it means is that we haven’t found the right string to pull yet. Maybe the thing to do is to go back over to the school and tell them that on your attorney’s advice you can’t reveal the name of Teresa’s old school. That might work, and if they bitch about it too loud you can always tell them to call your attorney.”

“Well, maybe,” she shook her head. “I sure want you standing next to me if I have to do it, though.”

“I can if I have to,” he shrugged. “But that still leaves the question open of whether Teresa should be going to some regular school in a wheelchair at this stage of her recovery. I don’t think we’ve explored all the options yet. I agree we need to do it quickly, but maybe just sending her to a regular school isn’t the best option for right now.”

“There has to be something.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll come up with it. You have a good reason to stay around for a while now, so there’s no point in wasting it.” He looked up, and noticed a used bookstore a couple stores ahead; he knew there were several downtown. “Let’s stop here for a minute,” he told Sally.

“Why?”

“Because Teresa told me she’d been missing her books, and I promised I’d get some for her.”

“God, I hated to have to leave her books behind. She really got a lot of enjoyment out of them, but there was only so much room in the car.”

“Good, then let’s perk up her day and see if we can get her to quit worrying about school for a while.”

The used bookstore, Brant’s, was lined floor to ceiling with books of all kinds. A heavy-set young clerk with glasses came over to them. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked.

“I have a young girl staying with me who’s going to be stuck in a wheelchair for a couple months,” John said. “She’s really missing having her favorite books to read. Do you have things from, oh, Mercedes Lackey or Anne McCaffery or Tanya Huff?

“Sure, we have a pretty good collection of them.”

“Good,” John said, reaching for his wallet. “I know nothing about it, but here’s fifty bucks. Go as far as you can with it.”

“You want me to pick something out for her?”

“Sure, I wouldn’t know what to get her anyway. Sally, why don’t you help her? You might spot a familiar author or title or two.”

“John, you really are a good guy, you know?”

“Good guy nothing. This is cheap compared to having to have someone paint over the scratches where Teresa has been climbing the walls.”

“You said that before and I know it’s an excuse. You just like to make her happy.”

“So you caught me. So sue me. You know where to find a lawyer, now.”

“Jesus, John. How did Teresa and I get so lucky?” She turned to help the clerk look for books; John just stood back and watched. He glanced at his watch; it was getting to be along in the afternoon. After a moment he thought maybe he’d better check in with Annamaria; the way this day had started, there was no way of telling what had happened at the office. He pulled out his cell phone and hit the speed dialer.

As usual, Annamaria answered quickly. “Thought I’d better check in and make sure the place is still standing,” he said. “Any fresh disasters happen?”

“No, it’s been quiet, amazingly enough,” she reported. “Well, fairly quiet, anyway. Warren called in, he’s back in Alabama. You need to go over to the police station to file a formal complaint against his wife, but that’s just signing some paperwork. If you’d been here when the officer came by you wouldn’t have to do that.”

“No big trick, I’m still downtown,” John replied, wondering what this incident was going to do in the war between Warren and his wife. It could probably change things, and Warren might not recognize that yet. Maybe he ought to get a little snoopy the next time he talked to him, but that might not happen for several days. “Anything else?”

“Yes. The adjuster was here about the door, it’s a no-brainer, he said to go ahead and get it fixed. I went ahead and called the glass company a nephew of mine works for. They can’t get to it today. Well, they could if the glass was actually out, but it isn’t, so I told them no rush. They ought to be here tomorrow or the next day.”

“We can wait that out. It’s important, but not imperative.”

“That’s about what I told them. The adjuster came by about your car. Not good news there, he doesn’t seem to think it’s totaled, so you’re going to have to get three estimates.”

“In a way I’d kind of hoped it was. That’s probably going to take a month or six weeks to get it back.”

“Maybe not. I have a cousin who has a nephew by marriage who runs a body shop. He’s already said he can get over and look at it, maybe this afternoon. I’m still working on the other two estimates, but I should be able to come up with someone.”

“Boy, you have relatives all over the place, don’t you?”

“I have a lot of them, that’s for sure. I’m afraid you’re going to have to go by the insurance agency again to take care of the paperwork to get a rental car while it’s being fixed. You could have signed off on that if you’d been here, too. Are you still trying to solve that school thing you were talking about earlier?”

“Yeah, still working on it, and not making a lot of progress. At least we managed to get something rolling about a settlement over Sally’s car getting wiped out.”

“Well, that’s good. But look, I may have an idea on a school. I have this cousin, Rosa, who knows this girl who’s an illegal. She’s sending the kid to a place called the Manatee Alternative School. It’s supposed to be for kids who have problems with regular school, learning difficulties and like that, but apparently they have a home-schooling arrangement for kids who are homebound. And since this kid of Rosa’s friend is an illegal, it sounds to me like they don’t actually worry too much about where the kid has gone to school before.”

“That has potential,” John admitted. “Especially since this would only have to be a temporary thing. Where is this place located?”

She named a street address; the street was unfamiliar to John. “Where’s that?” he asked.

“Up off of State Route 70 in the Oneco area, probably only a couple of miles from your place.”

“That sounds do-able,” he said. “Maybe Sally and I ought to take a run over there.”

“I thought it might work, too,” Annamaria said. “I didn’t talk to them or anything, but you might want to get on your pony and gallop over there if you want to do it today. If they’re like most schools, if it’s after three in the afternoon the only person you’re going to talk to is the janitor.”

“Well, it’s not that far,” John replied. “Maybe we ought to think about trying to deal with that one before we go to the cop shop and the insurance agent. Annamaria, you’re an absolute jewel, you know that?”

“Considering that I have to be pretty loco to work for someone like you, I guess I’m all right. It takes a little excitement once in a while to keep the blood flowing, you know.”

“Still, you’re a jewel, and I’m going to have to do something real nice for you for taking hold of all this stuff.”

“Now you’re just talking sweet to me. Are you going to be in sometime this afternoon?”

“We’ll have to see how it goes with this school, the cop shop, and the insurance agent, but maybe Sally and I can drop by for a few minutes.”

“Well, see you then. If not, then in the morning.”

“Good enough. You take it easy, Annamaria.”

John punched off the phone. Well, there were several issues that all promised to be pains in the neck that she’d taken care of on the fly. In fact, it was probably better that she’d taken care of them because sooner or later he’d have built up an attitude on them. Still, the last few days would have gone a hell of a lot worse without her help.

He soon became aware that Sally and the clerk were building up quite a stack of paperbacks. Good; that would ease things for Teresa a bit. It appeared they were winding up, and sure enough they were; soon the clerk was going through the books, trying to make sure they weren’t getting duplicates and checking her totals. “We’ve got $47.50 worth,” she announced finally. “Do you want me to go back and find a few more?”

“No, that’ll do for now. Keep the change,” John smiled. “Maybe I’ll be able to bring the kid in here someday and she can really go wild.”

“I hope she enjoys herself,” the clerk said, starting to load books into a grocery-store-sized paper bag. It was going to take a couple of them to get everything. “There ought to be enough there to keep her going for a while.”

“It’ll help get the sting out, that’s for sure.”

Soon John and Sally were heading up the street, each of them carrying a large bag of books. “John, that was a really sweet thing for you to do for her.”

“What the heck,” he said. “I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in a wheelchair for a couple months when I was her age. But now that we’re out of there, I have more good news. Annamaria may have cracked the school issue. I won’t go into it, but she found an alternative school that among other things, deals with homebound kids. I don’t know a thing more than that about it, but the next place we’re going is to check it out.”

“She did? That’s wonderful! How did she do that?”

“She does things like that. She has a raft of friends or relatives, and sometimes it seems like they can do just about anything. I mean, like Raul and the plumbing, or Carlos and the computer. This is apparently another one of those friend-of-a-friend things. We do need to check it out, since it may not be exactly what we need. We’re just going to have to see.”

“How about the business about her old school?”

“Don’t know yet, but that’s what we’re about to find out.”

Getting through the hassles at the alternative school took longer than John had expected, but it looked like it could work fine for Teresa. The result was they didn’t make it to the police station, the insurance agency, or the Suncoast office, so they decided to just head for home. All that stuff could be handled the next day, and if nothing else went wrong, it looked like it might actually be a relatively routine day.

Sally and John walked in through the kitchen door, each of them carrying a bag of books, to find Carlos and Mandy fooling around on the computer, while Teresa was having a discussion with a dark-skinned girl about her own age. “Hi, Mom, John,” she said. “This is Carlos’ sister, Josie. She’s been telling me about some of the boys at the school she goes to. I think we’re going to have some fun together.”

“Well, it looks like we may have the school issue worked out,” Sally told her daughter. “It’s not a done deal yet, since there’s going to be someone here to do an evaluation of you tomorrow to see where they’re actually going to have to place you, but we were able to put off the school records thing at least till next fall. John doesn’t think it’s going to matter by then, and he may be right. We’re still working on that one though.”

“I guess that ought to be all right, but I’m still looking forward to being able to go to a regular school. But Josie said it would probably be a big problem for me to go to her school in a wheelchair anyway.”

“There are some kids who do it,” Josie said, “but not very many. They have to go to special classes and need an aide because you can’t get everywhere in the school in a wheelchair.”

“Schools are supposed to be barrier-free, or at least have alternative accommodations made,” Mandy broke in. “I was working on that issue a couple jobs ago.”

“Maybe it needs more work,” John replied. “I mean, not that it matters right now. Besides, Teresa, your mom and I have something for you.”

They set the books down on the kitchen table and Teresa rolled her way over to see what it was. “Oh, wow!” she said as she pawed through the sacks. “Books! A lot of the ones I had to leave behind. And there’s a Pern story I’ve never read. And another one! Oh, this is going to be so neat! Thank you, Mom! Thank you, John!”

“Maybe it will make the next couple months go a little quicker,” John told her, “and if you run out of those, there are more where they came from.”

“There’s some more good news, too,” Sally told her daughter, “but maybe it should wait till our guests have gone home.” She turned to Carlos and Josie, who were smiling at Teresa’s new book collection, and her smiling face. “Are you kids staying for dinner, or what?”

“We could,” Carlos said, “but we’d have to call home and tell Mom.”

“You might as well stay around, then. I mean, if that’s all right with you, John.”

“Fine with me. Teresa needs to be able to spend some time with her friends, after all.”

Just then John’s cell phone rang. “I sure hope that’s not more trouble to louse up a happy occasion,” he said. “Maybe I’d better take this one out in the garage.”

“Might not be a bad idea,” Sally said. “I’ll see what I can throw together for dinner.”

John headed out to the garage, but was back in a couple minutes. “Sally, this is sort of for you,” he said, “but the gist of it is, how would you like to have a part-time job?”

“A job?” she frowned. “I’m still going to have to be taking care of Teresa, now that Mandy is going to be leaving.”

“Not in this case,” John smiled. “Look, that was Annamaria. One of her relatives, Consuela, has a cleaning service. They have a couple buildings they do on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. Someone just quit on her, and she’s shorthanded. It’s probably about four hours’ work each night. I’m thinking you might want to take her up on it, since it would give you some money that didn’t come from me, at least till the insurance business gets settled.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds like it could work,” she nodded. “I take that to mean you’ll keep an eye on Teresa in the evenings when I’m at work?”

“Of course I will. You know that. Maybe she can even teach me something about computers. Or Carlos can, since it looks like he might be here a lot.”

“Yeah, I think I can do that. In fact, it sounds like a pretty good idea. I suppose she wants me to start tonight.”

“That’s why Annamaria called.”

“I can’t say ‘no.’ We both owe Annamaria an awful lot, and I guess this is the first step in repaying her.”

“That really is sort of how it works,” he replied, handing her the cell phone. “Speed dial two. Annamaria said the gal can pick you up, at least tonight.”

“We’re still going to have to do something about dinner.”

“Big deal. We have three kids in the house, and the Pizza Hut is speed dial three.”

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