Before You Know Kindness (32 page)

Twenty-three

“M
eat is a social food—a shared food,” Howard Mansfield told John over lunch, dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin between bites of his patty-melt sandwich on rye. “The family or the tribe gathers together after the hunt. They celebrate, they reaffirm their bonds, they rejoice in their kinship. It’s been that way forever. And though most of us these days are pretty damn far removed from the meat when it was living and breathing, we still approach it as a ritual food.”

“Thanksgiving,” John murmured. “Or the great Easter ham.”

“Or even the backyard barbecue. Nothing like the smell of a little seared flesh to awaken in all of us that great tribal need for connection.” Mansfield was a month shy of fifty. When John had first moved to Vermont, the older man had been a partner in the Burlington firm where John practiced. Then Mansfield left to be a judge and John left to be a public defender: a job John thought would be more interesting than handling the city’s municipal and real estate business—his specialty at the firm—and allow him to feel better about himself when he came home at night. And feeling good about what he did was important: He knew how entitled his childhood had been, and he understood exactly what had driven his mother to volunteer her time in the dingiest classrooms she could find in the city. Now Mansfield was on the Vermont Supreme Court, and John was running the county public defenders’ office. They saw each other infrequently, no more than once a season, but it was Mansfield who had taken him hunting last fall, and it was Mansfield who had suggested ten months ago that he simply use a ramrod to extricate the jammed cartridge from his gun’s chamber. The two of them were having lunch now at a Burlington diner with the improbable name of the Oasis, a classic aluminum-sided train car with a green rendering of a palm tree on the restaurant’s neon sign.

“My brother-in-law would argue that meat is about power,” he told Mansfield. “The only reason it became a social food was because peasants got to eat it so rarely. When they did, it was a big deal. A feast.”

“Vegetarians—people who choose not to eat meat even when it’s available—have always been comfortable with their nonconformism. They’re not social misfits, but they are social renegades. I’d wager there has always been a little distance between them and the bonfire.”

“You know, I don’t believe Spencer has a lot of friends other than his FERAL cronies. He moved a lot as a kid, so he has no buddies from childhood. And he and Catherine have been their own little world since they fell in love as freshmen, so he doesn’t have many pals from college, either.”

“Your sister’s a vegetarian, too, right?”

“Yes, but not a vegan. And, for the record, she does have friends.”

“Women friends?”

“And men.”

“Really?”

“She’s a magnificent flirt.”

“Brothers always think their sisters are flirts.”

“Are you speaking as a Freudian?”

He smiled. “Nope. As an older brother.”

Outside a dairy delivery truck began to back into an alley across the street, the vehicle’s horn automatically emitting the loud whooping cries it made whenever it moved in reverse, and the two men grew silent. When it was parked Mansfield continued, “So: You want my opinion on who your lawyer should be.”

“That’s right.”

“I hate to be predictable, but I believe your best bet is our old firm. I’d ask Chris Tuttle or perhaps even your friend Paul Maroney.”

The two attorneys were indeed among the candidates John was considering. And though he was pleased that Mansfield was validating his choices, he wanted to know why the older man had said
perhaps even
Paul: It suggested there was a chink in Paul’s armor that he hadn’t considered. And so he asked Mansfield whether he had a preference.

Mansfield raised his gray, beetling eyebrows, and put down his sandwich. “You and Paul are a little closer than you and Chris. True?”

“I don’t think I’ve spoken to Chris in a year. Maybe longer. I see Paul every so often for lunch or a beer and sometimes at events at Willow’s school. Paul has a son a year younger than Willow.”

“Well, they’re both equally capable. But Chris is more likely to approach your situation with complete objectivity. And that’s what you need.” Mansfield was known among Vermont attorneys for both his fairness and his preternatural patience—attributes that made him an excellent hunter as well as a justice. With the exception of his three years at law school in Pennsylvania, he had never lived anywhere but Vermont.

“And you believe I need objectivity because I can’t see my situation well enough on my own—because this is my brother-in-law and my niece?”

“Yes. Also, Chris hunts. Paul doesn’t. It might be nice to have another hunter in the room with you when the lawyers from Adirondack are deposing you. They are, of course, your real adversaries.”

“I must confess, these days I feel pretty damn antagonistic toward Spencer, too. He won’t even talk to me. Refuses to take my calls, doesn’t answer my e-mails.”

“You have indeed widened that hunters versus gatherers canyon that seems the salient feature of your family’s topography.”

“Spencer and I used to be friends! Really. We used to be friends.”

“Are you and your sister speaking?”

“Yes. And the girls are talking: Willow and Charlotte. I presume they all think I’m a moron—all the women, that is. My sister. My wife. My daughter. My mother. My niece . . .”

Mansfield nodded, and John watched as he put the last three shoestring potatoes on his plate in his mouth at once. John had barely touched his own lunch, a turkey sandwich. His appetite had been decreasing ever since the accident, and these days, it seemed, he never was hungry. He’d lost ten or eleven pounds from a frame that even before the last day in July had tended toward lanky.

“You’re not a moron,” Mansfield said when he had swallowed the French fries. “You just didn’t know.”

“Actually, I just didn’t cope. There’s a difference.”

“Tell me: What kind of ammunition were you using?”

He shrugged. “Menzer Premium. Why?”

“I had a thought this morning. The lab with the gun will check this out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the trouble stemmed from the shell’s casing—not the gun’s extractor. Maybe it was the casing that made it so difficult for you to remove the round.”

“I doubt that. I never loaded anything in that gun but Menzer Premiums, and they always worked fine when I was learning to use it.”

“Adirondack machine-tools their rifles with extreme precision. Same with their ammunition. In my experience, nothing works as well in an Adirondack rifle as an Adirondack cartridge. The company is a bit like Remington in that regard: Remington rifles, in my opinion, work best with Remington ammunition.”

“What are you saying, the cartridge was faulty?”

“Just conjecture. Maybe the rim on that one round was a tiny fraction of an inch too shallow for the extractor—or too wide. All it would take is one minuscule imperfection that might not make a difference with a Menzer rifle or a Winchester or perhaps even a Remington—but it did on your Adirondack. That’s all.”

Abruptly he felt a little sick, a little faint. He bowed his head against the sensation, and the sounds of all the conversations around him faded into one indistinguishable drone. A single thought dominated his mind: What if the problem were indeed with the casing, and the casing was gone? He knew the New Hampshire State Police had returned the gun to him on the . . . the eleventh of August. He knew the date because it was the day after Spencer had returned to his mother’s house, and the very day he and his family had returned to Vermont. If, in fact, that trooper had arrived with his rifle an hour later, they already would have been on the road home.

He knew there was no reason why anyone in New Hampshire would have removed the spent casing from the chamber, but he had no recollection of seeing it in the gun when it was returned. Absolutely no visual picture whatsoever. Granted, he had barely looked at the rifle. He’d actually been repulsed by it.

But he had checked the magazine and the chamber before handing it to the paralegal who had driven up from Paige’s firm in New York to retrieve it. The last thing he wanted to do was accidentally turn a loaded rifle over to someone who’d probably never handled a gun in his life.

And though he wasn’t absolutely sure, he simply could not recall seeing the spent casing in the chamber. He could, however, see in his head exactly what the chamber looked like . . . empty.

“John?”

He opened his eyes and gazed up at Mansfield. “Yes?”

“You okay?”

“I . . .”

“Yes?”

“I actually thought I was going to faint for a moment.”

“I’d say it was something you ate, but you’ve eaten so little I’d say it was the opposite: It’s because you haven’t eaten.”

He reached for the sandwich and took a small bite, then washed it down by finishing most of the water in his glass. “I don’t recall seeing the casing in the gun when I got it back from the state police in New Hampshire,” he said.

“You checked?”

“I wanted to be sure the gun was unloaded before I turned it over to Paige’s firm.”

Mansfield was staring at him. The justice looked as if he had instantly digested this information and drawn a conclusion. He didn’t look anxious—Mansfield never looked anxious—but he did seem concerned. John sensed that the older man had thus come to the same conclusion he had: If the problem had been with the cartridge’s casing and the casing was gone, then there would be no apparent reason for his inability to extricate the cartridge other than mind-numbing incompetence. Yes, FERAL would still proceed with the lawsuit against the gun company, insisting that Adirondack was producing an inherently defective product because a live round remained in the chamber when you unloaded the magazine . . . but he himself would be crucified. It was bad enough to be perceived as a person who failed to take a broken rifle to a gunsmith; it was even worse to be viewed as a person incapable of extracting a cartridge from a functioning one.

He told himself this didn’t increase the likelihood that his own brother-in-law would sue him to see how far his insurance policy would stretch, if only because his sister wouldn’t let Spencer try such a thing . . . but anyone else in Spencer’s situation would.

“Well,” Mansfield was saying now, “maybe your memory is a little fuzzy and the casing was in the chamber after all. And maybe it won’t matter in any event, because the extractor will turn out to be the culprit.”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “I think I’ll call the state police anyway and see what the police report says. Who knows? Perhaps the casing is bagged up in some evidence drawer, and some minion can track it down.”

Mansfield smiled at him and nodded, but John recognized it as the sort of smile he gave Willow when he was trying to make her feel better but didn’t believe a word he was saying.

YOU DON’T KNOW
what I saw, you don’t know what I’m feeling!
Her daughter’s impassioned roar at her from the backseat of the car last week when she was driving the child to ballet. Sara didn’t believe a morning or an afternoon or a 2 a.m. feeding had gone by since then when she hadn’t thought of it. Yet, so far, she had made absolutely no headway learning what was behind it—what may have occurred that awful night in New Hampshire that her daughter was keeping to herself. The girl remained uncharacteristically histrionic when the subject came up, adamant that no one could understand what
she
saw or what
she
was feeling, yet absolutely unwavering in her insistence that she was hiding nothing.

Sara was resolved to change all that now. Monday was one of the two days a week when she only saw patients in the morning so she could be home when Willow climbed off the school bus. With Patrick upstairs napping, she was determined to accomplish more in their time together this afternoon than merely help her daughter with her homework and dive into a new box of cereal with her. Cereal had become the girl’s after-school snack of choice these days, since the school nurse had used the first day of health class to remind the sixth grade to read the nutrition labels on packaged foods. Once Willow understood that she was getting 710 calories and 40 percent of her fat for the day from the Cobble Hill jumbo iced honey bun, she avoided her once favorite snack like it was infused with the Ebola virus.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asked her daughter, her voice as casual and nontherapist-like as she could make it, as she poured the milk into their twin bowls. They were sitting at the kitchen counter.

“Uh-huh,” Willow said distractedly. She was reading the back of the cereal box. On the front there was a vibrantly colored cartoon creature—part lion, part human, part space alien—while the back featured the beast on its way through a labyrinth in search of all the food groups in the nutritional period. Sara tried not to analyze the Jungian sensibility behind the image.

“It will be about a subject I know you don’t like to talk about.”

“Math?”

“No.”

Willow looked up at her now, instantly understanding that—once again—her mother was going to try to discuss the accident. “I don’t want to talk about Charlotte and Uncle Spencer,” she said. “You know that.”

“I know, sweetheart. But I do.” She almost added,
And my feelings count, too,
but was able to stop her therapist-speak in its tracks. Instead she continued firmly, “And I’m your mother, and so we will.”

“You’re adding tension and stress to my life, you know.”

“I’m doing no such thing, and you know it.”

The girl dropped her spoon in her bowl and gazed out the window. The maples in their yard hadn’t yet started to turn, but Sara knew they would any day now. Certainly most other trees had.

“Something is bothering you, sweetheart,” she continued. “That’s painfully clear. And I mean that: painfully clear. Your father and I both know that you’re keeping something inside you, and—”

“You can’t know that. You can’t know what I saw, you can’t know—”

“What I’m feeling,” Sara said, finishing her daughter’s sentence for her. “That’s right, I can’t know what you’re feeling. We’ve been around that block, Willow. The truth is, you’re using that line the way your cousin would—as a very dramatic bit of subterfuge.”