The Fall Guy by Barbara Fradkin Page A

made out the words plaintiff and defendant . Then the name in bold letters right in the middle stopped me cold.
    Jeffrey Wilkins
    2 Wilkins Point Road
    I’d just done a job for Jeff Wilkins. A big job, building a new deck on his fancy waterfront cottage. We’d squeezed it in just under the size limit. So no permit, no paperwork, no taxes. My mouth went dry.
    I put on some bluster. “What is all this about? Somebody complained?”
    The smirk grew wider. “Don’t you read the papers? Watch the news?”
    â€œNo,” I snapped. I never read the paper. My jerry-rigged TV antenna did a fine job of getting me the hockey games and nature shows I liked to watch, but I never bothered with the news. Who wanted to know what big-city drug dealers and snake-oil politicians were up to anyway?
    Then he said the words I was most afraid of hearing.
    â€œYou might want to get yourself a good lawyer.”

CHAPTER TWO
    A s soon as Mr. Fancy Car peeled out of there, I was on the phone to Aunt Penny. I didn’t have much money, but I did splurge on a phone. When you lived five miles down a gravel road, how else were customers going to contact you for that big job? Aunt Penny owned the little grocery store on the main highway that runs through the village of Lake Madrid. If you don’t count the cottagers, Lake Madrid has maybe six hundred people, none of them from Spain. Someone was dreaming big.
    Penny’s Grocery has been there for at least a hundred years, and the floors tell the tale. The cottage people never shopped there—they used the big supermarket farther away—but the locals knew it’s where all the gossip was. Aunt Penny stocked milk from Gerry’s farm and corn from Ripple’s down the road, instead of all that stuff trucked in from Peru.
    Everyone stopped in to pick up gossip along with their lottery ticket and their DVD for the night.
    That day, Aunt Penny sounded run off her feet.
    â€œI got some legal documents here about the Wilkins job,” I said. “Do you know what that’s about?”
    â€œI can hardly tell that, can I, Rick, with you there and me here?”
    â€œBut I mean, has there been anything in the news?”
    â€œAbout Wilkins? Oh, you mean his wife.” She stopped and I could hear her talking to a customer. I thought about Wilkins’ wife. I’d seen quite a lot of her when I was working. A tiny blond who flitted around inside the house like a trapped chickadee. Wilkins hadn’t given her a car, so she was stuck at the cottage watching American Idol and decorating shows all day. She was so bored she even tried talking to me.
    Aunt Penny was back on the line. “Look, Rick, I got a lineup here. You better bring the papers over and I’ll have a look.”
    I hated running to Aunt Penny with my troubles. You never knew when she was going to bite your head off. Nothing warm and fuzzy about Aunt Pen. But she always seemed to sort things out. I loved the insides of an engine, and I was good with my hands, but not so much with people. I didn’t actually stutter anymore, but, boy, sometimes I got so tied up in knots I just wanted to bolt from the room.
    There were a whole lot of people at Aunt Penny’s when I walked in. I knew every single one of them, but that didn’t make it any easier. I’ve been the butt of jokes among the locals ever since my lawnmower-powered scarecrow blew up and scared the Canada geese from Ripple’s cornfield clear into the next county, along with most of his corn.
    â€œHey, Rick,” said Bert Landry, piling his groceries on the counter. “That old tractor of mine mowed its last blade of grass yesterday. You interested?”
    One time a few years back, I had fourteen tractor lawn mowers in my back field before I put my foot down. Now I’d learned to laugh and shake my head. “I hear they make good scarecrows,” I said. A line Aunt Penny had taught me.
    Laughter