Read Online How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Gillian Roberts - Free Book Online

have a gut feelin’ about the man. Bet he won’t be easy to find, and I bet he isn’t at that bar tonight. Or tomorrow, or ever again, for that matter.”
    I didn’t accept the bet. The odds were all on Mackenzie’s side.
    * * *
    The arraignment felt like something out of Kafka. We sat in a small but intimidating courtroom. Sasha, up in front of a dark wood barrier, looked as stained as the mahogany, like a sepia print of herself, a browned-out reproduction of what had formerly been living color. I waved at her, smiled, but she looked too frightened to respond.
    The judge listened impassively to a full account of the violence of the crime and its damning circumstances. I wished I knew more about the mechanics of raising bail. Did you have to put something up as collateral? Were there good and bad bail bondsmen? Was there some expertise we lacked that would lead to further complications? Did Mackenzie know about this side of it, or did his interest flag after he’d caught someone?
    What did those trained eyes see when he looked at me?
    My reveries came to a sharp end. So did a lot of hope. The judge did not grant bail. Sasha would stay behind bars. She was a real and present menace to society.
    I couldn’t believe it and neither could the lawyer. “I protest, Your Honor!” he said. “This woman has no prior record, and is innocent of this crime as well.”
    “File a motion,” the judge mumbled.
    The lawyer nodded curtly.
    They apparently were comfy with the pas de deux of law, the dance of power, but meanwhile, Sasha, wide-eyed with fear, was taken back to jail. I thought I had seen this movie already on the late show, starring Susan Hayward. They were going to fry my friend for a crime she never committed, and worse, everyone was behaving as if this were proof positive that the system worked.
    * * *
    I was allowed to see the real and present menace to society—but only after Mackenzie had a series of good-old-boy consultations with his peers on the Atlantic City force, and only for five minutes, they warned me.
    It was like watching somebody emotionally drown. Sasha would bob up to the surface, her old, buoyant self, then be pulled under, over and over again. I reassured her that all would be well, but her IQ wasn’t sinking, only her spirits, so I stopped making nice or treating her like a child and cut to the chase. We had problems.
    “The old man saw somebody who looks like you, or who was pretending to be you,” I said. “Somebody who knew how to set you up—somebody who knew you had that room. Who?”
    She shrugged. She was being dragged under the waves again. “Didn’t find Dunstan, did you?” she asked in a lifeless voice.
    “No. You remember anything more about him that might help?”
    “Not much, except one stupid thing that probably doesn’t mean anything. The night I met him, three weeks ago, before I’d really even spoken to him much, a person—a very drunk Brit—came up and called him Edgar.”
    “Called Dunstan Edgar?”
    She nodded. “Insisted he was Edgar, and in fact, was somebody named Jeannie’s husband, too, from some little town in Yorkshire. Said how glad he was that Edgar wasn’t dead after all. Always thought Edgar was too good a sailor to fall overboard, like they said. And he really did seem pleased, as if he’d found a long-lost friend. I thought it was funny, everybody did. One of those drunk things that you have to be there for. Except Dunstan just got more and more annoyed, and finally said something like, ‘Whoever Edgar is—or was—he’s still dead, so get lost.’ The Brit finally said he was sorry and backed off. That was all there was to it, completely forgettable, except that Dunstan was unduly pissed for a long while after. I mean, people are always mistaking me for somebody they knew back in high school. That’s all it was. Not much, I guess, except maybe to show he has a temper or a poor sense of humor and tolerance. And other than that, all I know