The rain on the cedar shingles of the South Ward didn’t fall in sheets. It dripped with the dull, persistent rhythm of an unpitched gutter. Tomas Reed sat at the long frame stand table in the Office of Unfinished Claims, his thumbs working the stiffened leather of his calfskin wrist brace. The leather was dark with two years of horse grease and sweat, molded to the knobby ridge of his left forearm bone where the scar tissue puckered white. The October damp seeped off the canal. Then, the gristle inside his forearm tightened like a wet bowstring, robbing his third and fourth fingers of twenty pounds of closing pressure. He didn’t rub it to make it heal. He simply bent the hand four times against the edge of the ash table, counting the pushback until the joints gave their dry, familiar click.
Across the frame stand, Hester Quill dipped an ivory folio-knife into a pot of cold vinegar and sliced cleanly through the linen cord binding the High Court trial mandate. Her wire-rimmed glasses sat low on the bridge of her nose, the dual lenses catching the yellow flicker of the animal fat dips. Her knuckles were stained blue-black with dark oak-ink, an indelible mark piled up over forty years of town litigation. She didn’t look up as she smoothed the calfskin membrane flat with the heel of her hand.
