Before You Know Kindness (39 page)

“Who are you talking to?” she asked, hoping to elicit some specifics.

Without turning around Charlotte mumbled, “People in the show.”

“That’s what I figured.” She pointed at one of the responses and monikers on the screen. “Let me guess: Dudester 1035 is a boy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he lives at 1035 . . .”

“Ten thirty-five Fifth. He goes to Buckley.”

“Does Dudester have a name?”

“Archibald.”

“Archibald?”

“Oh, sorry, that’s his name in the play,” she said, typing a response as she spoke. “His real name is Sawyer.”

“How old is Sawyer?”

“I don’t know. A little older than me.”

Catherine had a pretty good idea that “a little older than me” meant fifteen at least. Maybe sixteen. She hoped that no fifteen- or sixteen-year-old Buckley boy was chasing after her waif of a daughter—a daughter who seemed especially tiny right now in a pair of bright red pajamas that were sprinkled lavishly with ivory moons and yellow stars. Regardless, ten o’clock was late for instant messages when you were in the eighth grade and so she asked Charlotte to log off and join her. She sat down on her daughter’s bed and waited there, aimlessly stroking a teddy bear that three or four years ago had meant so much to her child, and which even now Charlotte couldn’t quite part with.

When the girl joined her, sitting down by the footboard with her legs crossed at the knees, she said, “I still haven’t done my history reading for tonight. But I think I’ll only need fifteen or twenty minutes. Is that okay?”

“Bedtime is supposed to be ten. You know that. But, yes, it’s fine to stay up a little late to finish your history. I think Sandy would be angry with me if I didn’t give you that extension,” she agreed, referring to Charlotte’s history teacher, an older fellow on the faculty whose actual name was Sanford Clunt but (thank God) insisted that his students call him by his first name instead of his last.

“Thanks,” she said, and then she jumped off the bed and retrieved her history textbook from the floor by her desk. When she returned to her mother she smiled and murmured, “Good night.” Then Charlotte waited, clearly expecting her to leave.

“One thing,” Catherine said, instead of rising.

“What, Mom?”

“Last Friday, when we had breakfast with Paige Sutherland, you got upset.”

“It felt like you were accusing me of shooting Dad on purpose.”

“I simply asked if there was something else you wanted to tell us. And the idea that there might be more to what happened than I knew only crossed my mind because you”—and she wanted to phrase this perfectly—“expressed some concern about a lie detector test.”

The child nodded.

“So?” she asked Charlotte now. “Do your father and I know absolutely everything we need to know about that night in New Hampshire?”

“Scouts honor.”

“You’ve never been a scout.”

“Then yes.”

“Yes?”

“Mom!”

“I’m just making sure.” She sat up and pulled her child to her, and held her for a long moment. She savored the fruity smell of Charlotte’s shampoo, and surprised herself by whispering into her ear that she loved her. She guessed she surprised the girl, too. Every bit Nan Seton’s daughter, Catherine knew she was not particularly effusive. Then she kissed Charlotte, stood up, and went to the door. From the frame she reminded her not to stay up too late.

When she returned to her own bedroom, she felt better. Not completely reassured. But better. A little bit better.

CHARLOTTE STARED
at the page in her history book, her eyes glazing and the words growing indistinct. She simply couldn’t concentrate. She wondered if someday she might be a lawyer instead of a great actor. She hadn’t lied to her mother; she had in fact answered her question with what she considered scrupulous accuracy. She had told her that she and Dad knew everything they needed to know about that night. That was all.

And her parents did know everything they needed to know. They most assuredly did not need to know about the marijuana or the beer. They did not need to know what she was feeling when she pulled the trigger. The truth was, she herself didn’t even know anymore.

The one absolute and inescapable reality was that she had crippled her father for life, and the best way she could help him now was to do all that she could to assist with his lawsuit and his campaigns for FERAL. And if that meant not telling the lawyers everything at the deposition, then so be it. So be it.

So—and she drew out the first syllable as if she were a little British girl in the late nineteenth century, before snapping the last two together—be it.

Twenty-eight

W
hen John arrived for a meeting in Chris Tuttle’s imposing office with its views of the lake on Friday morning, he was surprised to discover a second man standing by the window, watching a lone, large sailboat cut its way south through the water. Instantly, he decided that given the way this stranger was dressed—a denim shirt with a string tie and black pants tucked into a pair of auburn cowboy boats inlaid with snakeskin—the guy wasn’t a lawyer. He guessed the fellow was about his own age, maybe a couple of years older: His hair was starting to recede and his skin looked as worn as his boots. He had a pair of silver and turquoise bracelets on his wrist and similar silver rings on three of his fingers.

Tuttle motioned for the two men to join him around his desk, explaining to John as he introduced them that this stranger was a ballistics expert. His name was Mac Ballard, and since he’d been testifying the day before in a trial in Albany, Tuttle had been able to commandeer him this morning. He lived just outside of Santa Fe, and he wasn’t flying back until Saturday.

“When I called his office yesterday and learned he was only a few hours south of us, I grabbed him,” Tuttle said to John, as he retook his seat on the far side of his great steppe of a desk. “We may be a nonparty, but it behooves us to know all we can about your rifle.”

“You replace your gun yet?” Ballard asked John, smiling. He spoke slowly, forcefully, his voice a deep combination of inappropriate interest and menace.

“No.”

“Want a suggestion on a different piece of hardware?”

“No.”

He nodded. “I see. You already got your mind set on one.”

He started to say no once again, but he stopped himself. He knew it was completely unreasonable to dislike this man on sight. Ballard was here, after all, on his behalf. He just wished Tuttle had consulted him first. But, then, would he really have told his lawyer not to bring Ballard in? Of course not. His discomfort had nothing to do with surprise. Rather, it was because this Mac Ballard knew all about guns and he didn’t, and possessed a critical knowledge he lacked. It was because around Ballard, he was the moron who couldn’t pop out a round from a thirty-ought-six.

“John has no plans to resume hunting anytime soon,” he heard Tuttle answering for him. “Why don’t you two sit down? John, you want some coffee?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Thank you,” he said, taking the seat that didn’t have the well-worked leather pouch beside it. He wondered if the damn thing was a saddlebag with a strap. “We should get through this as quickly as possible—whatever it is, Chris, you want us to accomplish this morning—because I’m only working a half day today. And, believe it or not, I really do still have clients of my own.”

“Everything all right?” Tuttle sounded concerned.

“You mean the half day?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, yeah. As fine as things can be in my life these days. Sara and I are picking up Willow at school around lunchtime and driving to New York City. Her birthday’s coming up. That’s all.”

“Very nice, very nice,” Tuttle muttered. “Okay, then. I’ve told Mac what happened, all we know about the gun, and—”

“It was a good gun you had there,” Ballard said, jumping in. He had crossed his legs, his ankle precisely atop his knee. The boot—its toe looked pointy enough to gouge out a splinter in skin—was practically in John’s lap. “There won’t be a problem with the extractor. Trust me. It’s solid. Well tooled.”

“That’s what I gather. A friend of mine—a friend of both of ours,” John said, motioning at Tuttle, “suggested the same thing. A sportsman named Howard Mansfield. He’s a justice here in Vermont. He said it might be the ammunition. I was using Menzer Premiums, you see, and he said that sometimes a Menzer Premium in an Adirondack rifle—”

“Myth.”

“Myth?”

“Some people have this myth in their heads that you need Adirondack ammunition in an Adirondack rifle. What’d he say? The rim on the casing was too shallow for the extractor?”

“Essentially.”

“Malarkey.”

“Howard Mansfield is a smart man. As soon as we examine the rifle, we’re going to try loading some other bullets from that same box into the weapon. See if the extractor has difficulties with any of those.”

“Look, I don’t want to malign your pal. Maybe you got that rare cartridge with a defective casing. And maybe . . .” He paused for a brief moment, thinking, and John restrained his desire to jump in and tell this Mac Ballard just how smart Howard Mansfield really was. “And maybe you loaded and unloaded so many times that you really did manage to ding the casing. You know, you ripped off a small piece of the rim so the extractor would have nothing to grab. That, it seems to me, is a more plausible scenario than the idea the round was defective to begin with.”

“You realize the casing is gone, right?” John asked. “It seems to have been lost when it was with the New Hampshire State Police.”

“Your lawyer told me.”

“So we’ll never know if that’s what occurred.”

“I don’t think that’s it, anyway.”

“Then what, pray tell, did happen?” He’d worked hard to keep the disgust out of his voice, but he knew after the words had escaped his lips that he’d failed.

“Well, my granddaughter has a set of blocks—”

“You have a granddaughter?”

“Two, my friend. I fell in love young. Real young. You have any?”

“No, and I’m years away. My daughter still has a week and a half left at ten and my son is an infant.”

“You got a lot to look forward to. Anyway, my granddaughter has some wooden blocks. You know the kind, you’ve seen them. Rectangles. Squares. Cylinders. She’s two and a half. And the blocks have a wooden tray with cutouts in which she can place them. They fit snug. Real snug. As the expression goes, you can’t put a square peg in a round hole. The square will only fit in the square opening and the cylinder will only fit in the cylindrical opening—like a cartridge in a chamber. They have been very—and I mean
very
—precisely milled. Now, imagine you slipped something as thin as a cardboard match into the cylindrical chamber for the cylindrical block. What do you think would happen?”

John suspected he knew the answer and he considered volunteering it: The block would get stuck. But he wasn’t sure where Ballard was going with this example and he felt sufficiently stupid already. And so he decided he would allow Tuttle the chance to embarrass himself for a change. Tuttle, however, remained silent, too.

“Well, then,” Ballard continued, “I’ll tell you. The block will get jammed in the chamber. It’ll be wedged in there so tight that you won’t be able to extract it without a mighty good tug. And all it takes to wedge it right in there is that little cardboard match. And if you think those blocks are carefully milled, well, just think how carefully a gun company manufactures the chamber inside its firearms. Think how exactly the right caliber cartridge fits inside. Now, I’ll bet you loaded and unloaded your gun beside your truck. You did, didn’t you? Think back: It’s last November, and you’re loading and unloading, loading and unloading. True?”

“More or less. But it was beside my car or my friend Howard Mansfield’s pickup. I don’t . . . own a truck,” he said, wondering why the hell it suddenly seemed unmanly not to own a truck.

“Okay. Now tell me: You ever drop your gun?”

He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Oh, yeah. That’s why they have safeties—for guys like me.”

“It ever fall over?”

“You mean . . .”

“You just leaned it up against your—let me guess—Audi or Volvo while getting your ammo box at the end of the day. Or the beginning. The bolt is open, and it tips.” He leaned his arm upright at the elbow on his chair and then swung it toward the ground like a pendulum.

“That happened, sure. I know the gun toppled over once when I leaned it against a tree while I was having lunch and another time when I was getting ready to start out in the morning. And, yes, I was leaning it against my . . . Volvo.”

“There you go.”

“But I don’t smoke and I certainly didn’t slip a match into the chamber.”

“No, but a little dirt got in. Three or four grains of sand. That’s all it takes.”

“Are you saying three or four grains of sand kept me from extracting the bullet?”

“Yup.”

“Have you ever seen that happen before?”

“Yup.”

John sat forward in his seat, and turned the chair so that he was angled away from the toe of Mac Ballard’s boot. “I wish we had that casing,” he said to Tuttle. “I really want that—especially if the lab doesn’t find anything wrong with the extractor.”

Tuttle steepled the fingers on his hands. “If what Mac is suggesting is a legitimate possibility, we can test it—and we will. We don’t need that missing casing. Besides, I’m not sure it matters.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not a defendant.”

“No, but I look like an idiot—a complete moron—if the extractor works and we can’t find the casing!”

“Calm down. If the extractor does work—and bear in mind, we still don’t know if it does—we’re still left with three possible reasons for your inability to remove the cartridge,” he said, and he listed them on his fingers. “It had a defective casing; the rim was damaged when you were loading and unloading it; some dirt got lodged in the chamber.”

“It’s number three,” Ballard said, and for the first time since he’d sat down he uncrossed his leg.

“Anyway, John, the fact the casing is gone actually gives you a bit of cover. We have three possible theories, if we ever need one. Okay?”

John felt his heart thrumming in his ears, and he imagined his blood pressure positively geysering. It seemed unfair that something as infinitesimal as a grain of sand might have cost his brother-in-law his arm and his family so much.

CHARLOTTE HAD EXPECTED
the shrink to have a regular doctor’s office—like her orthodontist’s office, maybe, or the offices of the specialists her father had visited when they had first returned from New Hampshire. She’d expected a glut of magazines, most of them boring, that she would have to wade through until she found a
People
from her lifetime or a
Vogue
from the current season. Instead, there were magazines like
Highlights
—which she remembered from second and third grade—and
Sports Illustrated for Kids
and
Teen People
. There were books, too, some more dog-eared and pawed over than others
. The Wind in the Willows. Stuart Little.
A couple of Beverly Cleary paperbacks featuring Ramona. Moreover, the place was clearly an apartment—someone’s home, it looked like—with mahogany paneling on the walls and the kinds of furniture that Grandmother owned: lots of dark wood, and couches and chairs so plush it was like they belonged in a funhouse. The only difference was that the coffee table and end tables had long, deep scratch marks, which really didn’t surprise her since it was pretty clear that Dr. Warwick spent a lot of time with the Barbies and G.I. Joe playground crowd.

She’d never visited Aunt Sara’s office in Vermont, but she knew it was part of a group practice. In her mind she had always seen it as a regular physician’s workplace: chairs with bony armrests, beige walls, a receptionist behind a sliding glass window. Now she wondered if her aunt’s reception area felt more like a living room than a waiting room, too.

Actually, this place didn’t feel quite like a living room. Living rooms didn’t have a person who looked more like an au pair than a doctor’s receptionist sitting behind a delicate writing desk that seemed to belong in a museum. Charlotte guessed the young woman couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty, and she was writing something on the jazziest computer monitor she’d ever seen: It looked as thin as a plastic place mat.

Charlotte decided that she didn’t mind having to wait with a
Teen People
instead of a regular
People
(though she definitely preferred the more grown-up scoop in the normal edition), and she felt quite content. She was, after all, helping her dad with his lawsuit. Moreover, she really was no longer sure why she had fired Uncle John’s gun into the night. Maybe she would learn something. You never knew.

Her mom had picked her up right after second period and was sitting on the couch beside her, reading the short papers she’d had her English literature students write that week. She had a blue Sharpie pen in her hand—blue, she always said, because she feared students brought too much baggage to red—and was scribbling away madly on some poor kid’s assignment.

Finally a door opened and a woman Charlotte guessed was her mother’s age emerged, though Charlotte had once heard someone observe that heavy people were occasionally older than they looked. And this Dr. Warwick was heavy indeed, a series of round snowballs: midsized ones comprising her bottom and her breasts, a large one to serve as her torso and abdomen, and a smallish (at least in comparison to the rest of her body) one for her head. She was wearing black velvet pants and an ivory silk top that was a tad too clingy for someone so big. Still, this Dr. Warwick had the eyes and smile of a pixie and the most lovely blond spit curls clinging to the sides of her scalp. Charlotte liked her on sight.

She and her mother stood simultaneously to greet the therapist, and after they had made their introductions all around—including the receptionist named Anya who, it turned out, was a psych major at Columbia when she wasn’t here three mornings a week—Dr. Warwick ushered her into another room. The doctor had her fingers pressed gently on her shoulder, and Charlotte decided that she liked the feel of this, too.

KEENAN BARRETT
studied Paige Sutherland. He wished he had something that resembled her charisma. He wished he exuded the sort of telegenic charm that mattered so much more these days than an ability to frame an argument soundly. Alas, he was anything but magnetic. He was mannered . . . deliberate . . . old school. All qualities, alas, that didn’t play well on CNN.

The problem at the moment was that he feared Paige was about to make the kind of mistake that young charismatic lawyers often made: She’d convinced herself that she was so smooth and attractive that she could bluster and bluff her way through anything. He hoped he could disabuse her of this notion and persuade her to rethink her plans.