You may (or possibly may not) have noticed that a few entries back I announced that am working on next year’s kindling–I mean I’m writing a book. (38551 words–ahead of schedule. Yeay!) You may also have noticed that my favorite Virtuous Midwestern Lawyer, Yankswon*, offered any and all needed assistance regarding plot twists of a legal nature. Well, this week I added a legal plot twist and was in need of his assistance. Having been made aware, however, of the fact that he is now deeply immersed in some real life legal drama, as lawyers (virtuous or not; Midwestern or not) everywhere have the tendency to be, I decided to wait until he became unimmersed before exploring the plot twist any further, opting to write something like this: “Blah blah blah…arraignment…blah blah blah…trial,” and promising myself to fill in the blahs at a later date. Except that I added several more “blahs” to my manuscript than I am showing you here, since they’re all valid words and count towards my 50,000 words. Not cheating, in my opinion, since I’ll be filling in more words than blahs later on.

Anyway, yesterday, while driving my younglings to school, I passed by the local police station as I do every morning. That’s when it hit me. “Aha!” I said to myself quietly, so as not to disturb my still comatose kids, “The fuzz! They’ll know the answers to all my questions!” Instead of barging in on them, I waited until I got home, called ’em up, and made an appointment to go talk to one of Maine’s Finest. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for my Yankee ingenuity, and happy that I could leave poor Yankswon* alone to battle the forces of darkness that plague the Midwest.

So I get to the station and begin the beguine. Without giving too much of my plot away (since I don’t want to spoil the ending for you, in case this doesn’t turn into kindling) I needed some information regarding domestic abuse. For example: hypothetically speaking, if the brother of a domestic abuse victim beat the offender within an inch of his life, how long would he be locked up before being eligible for bail? How much would that bail be? Etc…you get the point. So, I’m asking away and suddenly it occured to me that this copper was getting the wrong idea completely. Far from believing that I was a mere wannabe novelist in the midst of research, somewhere along the way she got it into her head that I was a crazed psycho planning some hideous plot to avenge the wrongs done to a friend or family member. I beat a hasty retreat while I still had my freedom, vowing ne’er to step foot over that particular threshold again.

Now, those of you who know me from my pre-blogging days will naturally find some ironic justice to this, since I managed to escape with my legal record clean of the (Alleged) Brownie Poisoning Incident of 1986. Those of you unfamiliar with that story will have to go on being unfamiliar with that story, on the advice of counsel. However, the moral of the story is this: Never trust a New England Cop when you’ve got the ear of a Virtuous Midwestern Lawyer. By the way, this story, unlike most of my stories, is entirely true.

*Yankwon’s name refers to the Civil War, not to baseball. Naturally I would never befriend a Yankees fan. I still have two principles left and that is one of them.