Before You Know Kindness (36 page)

“You sound angry. You needn’t be. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t be angry at your deposition.”

He heard a small laugh escape his lips, unexpected and trilling.
I’m not angry,
he wanted to say.
I’m depressed.
His depression might have made him sound cranky, but one was only a visible manifestation of the other. Some mornings it took every bit of will he could muster to simply climb out from under the sheets on his and Sara’s bed, to emerge from the warm cocoon he had created with a little cotton and a nighttime’s worth of body heat. He might not have made it out of bed today—the depression this morning was almost a quilt, shielding him from all the nastiness the world had to offer with the cozy affection of a down comforter—if he hadn’t heard Willow calming Patrick in the kitchen (so distant, so very distant) while Sara was trying to get one child ready for school and the other for the Mother’s Love Nurture World. He had to help. He
had
to. If he didn’t, he understood, he would have ratcheted up the self-loathing yet one more notch, and that might have sent him so deep into his nest of percale and gloom that he would never have emerged.

“I won’t be angry,” he said to reassure Tuttle, and he tried to sit up a little higher in his chair. He realized he’d been slouching, just the way his own clients did when they were meeting with him.

He hadn’t really thought about it until just that moment, but he guessed they were depressed, too.

PAIGE LEANED FORWARD
in the ergonomic stool with a back that purported to be a chair. She used to have a chair that was a deep burgundy leather. Once she was the youngest lawyer in the firm who got to sit on the slick, supple skin of a dead animal. It was a big chair with plush cushions and wheels—an unmistakable sign of achievement and success. Then she started working with FERAL and she understood that the chair had to go. Now an associate who would soon be a partner (but wasn’t yet) had it, a woman from Harvard who spent lots of time suing automobile manufacturers over headrests, fuel tanks, and air bags. Nothing she did ever wound up in trial, and she made the firm mountains of money. She was likable. She was pretty. She was a rising star. Paige knew she would have detested her if she herself weren’t already a partner.

Now her eyes moved back and forth between the papers on her desk that had been faxed to her moments before and the telephone. She had known essentially what the fax was going to say for fifteen minutes before it arrived because the engineer at the ballistics lab in Maryland had called her and left a message on her voice mail. Then he’d followed up with this fax. The results? They could find nothing wrong with the extractor on the Adirondack rifle she had sent them. Not a thing. And they’d put the weapon through batteries of tests, using different brands of ammunition and test-firing the gun multiple times. Always, however, they had been able to extract both live rounds and spent casings from the chamber with ease. Never once did any round stick.

She’d called Spencer at FERAL a few minutes ago, but he was already in a meeting. She considered telling Keenan the news, but that wasn’t quite fair. Spencer was her client. Not FERAL. Spencer should get the results first.

She guessed she should not have been surprised by the findings, given how little faith she had in John Seton. Fortunately, this disappointment did not derail the lawsuit. In some ways it actually meant the stakes were even higher, because now it wasn’t simply one defective rifle, it was the whole Adirondack thirty-ought-six she was taking on: the model. They were going to sue a brand because there was a fundamental defect with the gun: A round remained in the chamber when a person emptied the magazine, and that—they would argue—was inherently dangerous. The company was putting an irresponsibly lethal weapon into the stream of commerce.

Well, it’s a gun,
that little voice of reason kept muttering inside her head.
Of course it’s lethal. Hello?
She thought of the Shakespeare quote one of the malpractice attorneys in the firm had engraved in bronze on a plaque on his wall:

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,

But in battalions.

Still, this was the information she needed to finalize her theory of liability and compose the complaint. Now, at least, she knew precisely what they were going to argue.

THAT AFTERNOON,
Keenan pulled back the bolt on the rifle an intern in Paige’s firm had purchased the day before at a sporting goods store on Long Island. It was the exact same model John Seton owned. Keenan was familiarizing himself with the weapon in his office while Paige watched, and a surprisingly articulate mountain man from some small, smoggy city in northern Pennsylvania patiently explained to them why the chamber and the magazine on a bolt action rifle could not be unloaded simultaneously. Dan Grampbell must have been six and a half feet tall, and Keenan would have been shocked if he tipped the scale at an ounce below three hundred pounds. His eyes were green, his mouth—what Keenan could see of it behind the massive beaver beard that swallowed up cheek and neck—was pink, and his hair, all of it, was the sort of orangish red he’d once seen on poppies at the botanical gardens. He was wearing an ill-fitting blue blazer over a worn flannel shirt.

Yet Grampbell also had a degree in criminal science from Penn State, and he spoke with the soft voice of a poet. Moreover, Dan Grampbell knew about guns. He knew a lot about guns. That was why he was here and why he was being paid an hourly rate commensurate with that received by the associates in Paige’s own firm.

“It’s a two-step process for a reason,” Grampbell was saying quietly. “If Adirondack chooses to settle, it will be because in their opinion settling is less expensive than the cost of a trial or enduring the negative publicity that would surround the case.”

“Let me try unloading it for myself one more time,” Keenan said. He was afraid that his clumsiness with the weapon in front of Paige was unmanly, and he was surprised at himself for giving a damn.

“Fine. It’s now fully loaded,” Grampbell observed. “There is a full magazine and a round in the chamber.”

Paige was grinning mischievously, and she looked to him a bit like a schoolgirl. Twice when he’d been trying to load the weapon he’d fumbled the dummy ammunition, one of the cartridges dinging off the dark oak of his precious mission desk.

“You’re on safety. Correct?” Grampbell asked.

He looked to make sure. “Yes.”

“Now, pull back the bolt—that’s right—and, voilà. The round will pop—”

Sure enough, it popped right into his nose, ejecting like a pilot from a doomed fighter jet. He yelped, and Paige’s pixielike chuckles were turned into a single burst of full-throated laughter. He wasn’t smiling, however, and so she put a cap on her mirth and extended her hands to him, open-armed, as if to say,
What did you expect? Really, now, what did you expect?

“The bullet certainly popped,” he murmured to Grampbell. He hoped he sounded liked a good sport.

“Next, you are going to push the magazine release by the trigger guard.”

He pressed the small knob and instantly four cartridges cascaded onto the floor, a pair rolling under the chair in which Paige was sitting, two others disappearing near the credenza. He’d forgotten to place his cupped hand beneath the magazine to catch them, even though Grampbell had warned him earlier that he should.

“You’ve now cleared the magazine. See?”

“I see.”

“A good thing to do at this point might be to close the magazine door.”

He looked at the dangling piece of thin metal. “Ah, yes. Remind me . . . please.”

“Press it upward straight into the gun. That’s all. It’ll click shut.”

He pushed. Sure enough, it closed.

“That wasn’t difficult, was it?” Grampbell asked, a completely rhetorical question. Keenan could tell that in Grampbell’s worldview, loading and unloading a weapon was child’s play. Any fool could do it—except, apparently, fools who were lawyers.

“What remains unclear to me,” Keenan said, “is why the chamber and the magazine cannot be linked. Why must unloading the rifle be this two-step process?”

Grampbell nodded. “The chamber is, essentially, a combustion chamber. It’s designed to withstand the pressures that come with firing the round. Typically, that pressure is in the neighborhood of fifty thousand pounds per square inch. In order to handle that, the chamber can’t have any slots or breaks in the metal surrounding the bullet. The rifle’s bolt—along with the cartridge casing on the bullet—actually completes the seal in the rear of the chamber.”

“And you need a seal . . . because . . .” Paige asked.

“Because without one the hot gases needed to propel the bullet down the barrel would escape to the rear, creating what you would have to consider an extremely hazardous situation for the shooter. The gun might even explode. Now, what this means is that the magazine can be nothing more than a reservoir of extra rounds. That’s all. And that’s why you need a two-step process to unload the weapon.” He shook his head, then continued, “In my opinion, that rifle you have there is still a mighty impressive engineering feat. You may not be able to unload the chamber when you unload the magazine, but I think it’s nevertheless pretty remarkable that when you cycle the used cartridge you simultaneously pull a bullet into the chamber from the reservoir. That’s a nifty little accomplishment, don’t you think?”

“And this two-step process is all the result of an . . . an immutable law of ballistics?” Paige asked. “There’s no way to design around it?”

“Oh, there’s an exception.”

“And that is?” she asked.

“A rifle with a fixed box magazine. Remington, Springfield, Savage—they all have a model like that. Those rifles have no floor plate like the firearm we have here, meaning the bolt must be opened to empty the rounds in the magazine. You literally cycle the cartridges one by one from the reservoir to the chamber. When you’re done, there can’t possibly be any rounds left in the firearm. The downside to this system, of course, is all that cycling. If not properly done, there is always the risk of an accidental discharge.”

Keenan placed the rifle down gently on his credenza. Even though they’d been using dummy ammunition, the long weapon frightened him.

“Well, I think this is all just messy enough to give FERAL some ink,” Paige said. “Especially since there is most definitely no indicator on the weapon telling you when there is or is not a bullet in the chamber.”

“And there’s that girl,” Grampbell added. “I’m no lawyer, but I’ve seen enough of these cases to know it helps the plaintiff when there’s a child involved.”

Keenan thought about this, and then he thought of all those hunted deer. All those Bambis with their big dark eyes. Those animals hadn’t a chance against an exploding projectile rocketed after them with—what was that number?—fifty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. No animal did. Just look at what a bullet did to the shoulder of their communications director. He made a pyramid with the fingers on both hands, and as he spoke he hoped his words didn’t sound as oddly chilly to Grampbell and Paige as they did to him: “But since the lawsuit will go to the heart of one of Adirondack’s best-selling rifles, I believe we can take comfort in the reality that, in this case, they will not settle right away. Which is, of course, precisely what we want.”

The mountain man looked puzzled for a moment. He was even making a small silent
oh
with his mouth beneath that great ruddy beard. But then Grampbell turned toward Paige Sutherland—and she looked downright petite beside him—and he stretched the seams of his blazer with one massive shrug.

ONLY WHEN CHARLOTTE
had mastered the ability to drop the final
g
’s in her words—
eatin’
and
drinkin’
and
goin’
—did she start trying to spit out the
t
’s that marked the end of some words or soften the vowels that resided in the midst of still others. Sometimes she feared that she sounded more like a Cockney aunt from a
Monty Python
sketch than a spoiled but unhappy little girl from the colonial aristocracy, but the drama teacher told her—in a stab at a British accent herself—that the accent was comin’ along just fine.

She was running lines now with her father on the couch in the living room. He was holding a copy of the script open with his left hand, pressing it flat against his knees at an angle that allowed them both to see the dialogue on the page. Occasionally he would lean forward to hold the pages open with the weight of his sling-enclosed forearm and use his functional left hand to reach for a toothpick pretzel in the small bowl on the end table beside them.

“Are you goin’ to be my father now?” she asked, closing her eyes after glancing quickly at Mary’s line. This was how she found it easiest to learn her part: She would read the dialogue once, repeat the words in her mind, and then say them aloud with just a hint of an accent.

“I’m your guardian. But I’m a poor one for any child,” her dad answered, replicating impressively in her opinion the stoic voice of the orphan girl’s tortured uncle. “I offer you my deepest sympathies on your arrival.”

This time she didn’t have to lean over to glance at the script because the next line—the very last in the scene—was one of Mary’s best. “Did my mother have any other family?” she asked, emphasizing
other
exactly the way the young actor did on the CD she had from the original Broadway production.

Her father removed his fingers and let the script fall shut. “Very nicely done,” he said. “You’re good.”

She was flattered, but reflexively she rolled her eyes. “I’m okay,” she said.

“Your grandmother—my mom—used to have an excellent ear for accents. It was mostly a party trick, but sometimes when I was a little kid she’d leave me howling with laughter.”

“But she never acted, right?”

“Just school plays.”

“She never tried anything more?”

“I doubt it.”

“Why?”

He nodded, apparently pondering his response. Finally, he said, “I’ve always been sorry you were so young when my mother died. You would have liked her.”