Twenty-eight
When 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.
“I just don’t see why it will be relevant,” Paige was saying in response to his concern. His office didn’t have the sort of small round conference table that Dominique’s had, though this was because he liked the way his massive mission desk made everyone with whom he met look small and inconsequential. Right now Paige and Spencer were sitting across from him in two straight-back mission chairs.
“It will be relevant because they are going to want to know why John couldn’t extract the bullet,” he told her, referring to the writers and reporters who they hoped would be at the press conference next week.
“And I’ll tell them we delivered the gun to the lab,” she answered.
He glanced at Spencer, who was looking down at the fingers on his right hand. His arm was still in that sling, and since his return Keenan hadn’t seen him make any effort to take a single note with his left. Hadn’t even seen him pick up a pen. Keenan wasn’t completely sure he was listening now, or—if he was—whether he was following the nuances of their conversation. It was as if he’d been shot in the head, not the shoulder. He was so placid. So yielding. So serene. Keenan wondered if this was the result of his painkillers or whether the ache in his shoulder and back simply precluded him from concentrating on anything outside his body. Either way, this was a different Spencer from the one who had left for New Hampshire at the end of July, and Keenan wasn’t sure what he thought of him. The fellow was certainly more likable. But he wasn’t especially helpful. While the old Spencer would have had strong opinions on what they should and should not say at the press conference, this new one hadn’t offered more than a sentence or two in the last fifteen minutes.
Keenan decided that he didn’t even like his associate’s new beard. He understood why Spencer was growing it, but the sad fact was that it made him look a little dim: He resembled the cavemen Keenan saw going to Ranger ice-hockey games at nearby Madison Square Garden, the beefy, lumpish, ancient-looking hominoids who painted their chests red and blue and then took off their shirts for the cameras. This troubled Keenan for a great many reasons, though the foremost right now was the reality that in four days Spencer was going to be the focal point of a press conference.
“If that’s all you tell them,” he said, directing his response at both the other lawyer and Spencer so he could see if there was anyone home behind those whiskers, “then once the gun’s fundamental soundness is revealed—as it will be as soon as Adirondack inspects it—we will lose a sizable measure of our credibility and our message will be undermined. People will not be listening to what we have to say about hunting if they believe the legs have been cut away from beneath Spencer’s lawsuit. If the lawsuit appears groundless, we have no forum.”
“I’m not going to say the rifle didn’t function the way it was meant to. We’re contending, pure and simple, that Adirondack has been manufacturing a dangerous product because a bullet remains in the chamber once you unload the magazine. If the extractor had been defective, that would have been a nice bonus—nothing more, nothing less.”
“That isn’t my point.”
“What is your point, Keenan?”
“I believe it is in your client’s interest to acknowledge upfront—next Tuesday—that Mr. Seton’s weapon worked perfectly. We need to be the first to say it performed exactly as it was designed to, so reporters do not misconstrue what we are claiming and get it into their deadline-obsessed heads that we’re implying the rifle was in any way defective. We simply cannot allow Adirondack to trump us in the media in a week or a month or whenever with the announcement that the gun was inspected and no mechanical defects were discovered.”
“The gun worked?” It was Spencer, looking up finally from his useless right fingers.
“Spencer,” Paige said, smiling gently at her client, “haven’t you heard a word we’ve been saying? Haven’t you been listening?”
“I guess the reality only hit me just now.”
“Yes,” Keenan said, “the gun worked.” He couldn’t imagine how the hell they were going to put this guy on the dais in a couple of days.
“But we’re not going to say that it didn’t work,” Paige added. “Our point all along—”
“If the gun worked, then why couldn’t my brother-in-law get the bullet out?”
“That’s exactly the question we need to answer,” Keenan said.
“He’d been getting the bullets out for two weeks. Probably more when you factor in the time he spent in his hunter safety courses,” Spencer continued.
“We can ask the lab to look into that,” Paige said. “But I’m sure it was just your brother-in-law’s unfamiliarity with the gun.”
“My brother-in-law’s a pretty sharp guy. The hunting is appalling, of course. But he’s not stupid.”
“No, of course he’s not,” Paige said, though Keenan could tell that she didn’t believe that for a minute. “But it may just be that he didn’t know how to unload the weapon—which, given its apparent complexity and the fact you have to do two things to unload it, seems plausible enough to me.”
“People who are a lot less capable than John do it successfully every day.”
Keenan immediately sat forward. “That, Spencer, is a sentence you need to divest yourself of instantly. Do you understand? Expurgate that very thought from your mind this very second. Please.”
“Oh, Keenan, I won’t say that on Tuesday. I’m just telling you here in the privacy of this office that I agree with you: It’s something we need to understand.” Then he placed his left hand on the front of the wide desk and pushed himself to his feet.
“Where are you going?” Paige asked. She sounded alarmed.
“To get a dog. I was going to wait till Monday, but if I bring her home today my family will get to spend the weekend bonding with her.”
“What? You can’t get a dog now,” she said, a slight tremor of panic in her voice. Keenan guessed she was afraid that her client—near catatonic for the vast majority of their meeting, and then suddenly sharp but oblivious to the party line for the rest—was losing his mind.
“Why?”
She looked at her watch. “Because it’s Friday morning.”
“That’s not a reason why I can’t get a dog, Paige. People all over the world get dogs on Friday mornings.”
“I meant we still have work to do.”
He paused in the doorway and smiled. “I think you and Keenan do. But I’m all set. I know my lines for Tuesday.”
“Do you?”
He nodded.
“So you’re just leaving to go get a . . . a companion animal?”
“No, I’m just leaving to go get a pet: a creature that will be completely dependent on my family for its food and its shelter.”
“Fine, then: You’re just leaving to go get a pet?”
“That idea really disturbs you, doesn’t it?”
“It’s just . . . weird.”
“Would it make the Puritan inside you more content if I got the dog later today?”
“Yes!”
Keenan was surprised at the enthusiasm in Paige’s voice. Apparently, she’d never seen a client excuse himself from a meeting with her to go get a dog.
“Okay, then. I’ll tell Randy we’re getting the dog later—her schedule permitting.”
“And then you’ll come back here?”
“No. I have plenty of other things to do. We have a Granola Girl on Howard Stern next week, and I want to make sure she knows what she’s in for—and that she doesn’t have to take her top off, no matter how many goldfish he threatens to kill if she doesn’t. And Joan’s ‘Don’t Gobble the Gobbler’ campaign needs a little work: It sounds like we disapprove of Thanksgiving, and not just eating turkey. And Dominique’s holiday fund-raising letter is pretty extreme. And you know what? Even if none of the projects on my list interests me this morning, I think I could entertain myself just fine by screwing around with my new left-handed keyboard and mouse.” When he was finished speaking he gave them a small wave and started down the corridor to his office.
After a moment Paige asked, her voice barely above a whisper, “Do you think he’s stable? He just went from a near stupor to this zeal for some dog.”
“It’s for his daughter. The dog. It’s a belated birthday present.”
“Keenan?”
“Yes?”
“I’m worried about him. I’m worried about his health.”
“You?”
“I know. I’m not just worried about his behavior at the press conference. I’m worried about whatever’s going on inside his head. He really does seem . . .”
“Different.”
“Uh-huh. Whatever happens, we have to make sure that we get a decent settlement out of Adirondack. He—his family—might really need one.”
“Well, then. Let us be certain we do two things. Let us make it absolutely clear at the press conference next Tuesday that Spencer’s lawsuit in no way rests on a malfunctioning firearm: We must say crisply and without reservation that the gun worked exactly as Adirondack designed it. Second, let us be certain that we have an explanation for John Seton’s inability to extricate that final cartridge from the chamber. Are we in agreement?”
She inhaled deeply, and he thought he detected a slight shudder of real humanity inside the fortress she built from René Lezard pinstripes and a coiffure from Richard Stein.
“We are,” she said, and he allowed himself a small smile.
SHE TALKED ABOUT BREARLEY and the musical she was going to be in, and she talked about being a single child. She sank deep into the cushions of the easy chair opposite Dr. Warwick and told her what she liked about her summers in New Hampshire and what she found burdensome and boring. She began with short answers, not because she was trying to be difficult but because there were moments when she honestly wasn’t sure what the correct responses were. The truth was that it never had been a big deal to have her mom in the school building with her, and more times than not she actually enjoyed the sensation. But her aunt Sara once told her how much she had disliked being the school secretary’s kid when she’d been growing up, and so Charlotte found herself wondering now what it meant that she wasn’t disturbed by the fact her mom taught at Brearley.
Likewise, she certainly had tried to find excuses not to work in her dad’s vegetable garden this summer (and everyone did seem to view it as Dad’s Vegetable Garden), but if she revealed this to her psychiatrist, would the woman presume she was so angry with her dad on a subconscious level that she’d shot him on purpose just so she could escape a little weeding? That was ridiculous. But she’d heard enough from her New York friends who were in therapy to know that grown-ups seemed to love to blame the subconscious and were thrilled when it could take the fall for their kids’ misbehavior.
And, she had to admit, she had no idea herself just how murky her subconscious might be when it came to her dad. Who could say what sort of ooze was deep in there, what kind of roiling animosity was festering in the gray matter behind her eyes? She loved the way he was there for her now—this week, this month—but this serious interest in her life was a new phenomenon.
No doubt about it: This conversation was a tightrope. She thought she had managed to keep her balance so far. Thank God, Dr. Warwick hadn’t ushered her over to the corner of the room with the dolls and the blocks and the trucks and subjected her to toy therapy. If this nightmare had occurred two or three years earlier, Charlotte guessed, she and the shrink might be on the floor right now dressing Barbies.
“Do you want to talk about what happened in New Hampshire?” the doctor was asking. Her voice was silken, soft. It reminded her of a female hypnotist she had once seen interviewed on the Discovery Channel.
“Sure.”
“Do you think about it often?”
“Every time I see my dad I think about it.”
“Because of his sling?”
“And his beard.”
“He didn’t use to have a beard?”
“No. It’s really hard for him to shave now, so he just stopped. His beard isn’t in all the way yet. But it’s getting there. It’s mostly black, but it’s got some white and some red in it, too. The red is really surprising, because he doesn’t have any red in his hair.”
“What do you think about when you see him?”
She considered this for a moment and didn’t say a word. Unlike many adults, silence didn’t seem to disturb Dr. Warwick. She just sat there and waited.
“Well, I think about how much he must hurt,” she said finally, both because she did think about the pain he was enduring and because this response seemed appropriate. She guessed it was what she was supposed to say.
“What else?”
“I think about how his life has changed. All the stuff he can’t do.”
“Is there a lot?”
“Oh, yeah. Tons. He’s right-handed. He can barely open a bottle of ketchup these days.”
The doctor rested her chin in her hand and smiled. Charlotte suddenly detected a trace of perfume and she recognized it from . . . from New Hampshire. It wasn’t a perfume that her mother or her aunt or Grandmother wore, that wasn’t why it was familiar. Rather, it was an aroma that reminded her of one of the flowers in the cutting garden they’d put in. The tall purple ones, she guessed, but she wasn’t positive. She wished she knew the plant’s name.
“Has that changed your relationship with him?”
“The fact he can’t open a bottle of ketchup?”
“That’s right.”
She shrugged. “Sure. I do a lot of stuff for him I never did before—stuff he would never have let me do before. At first, he thought he was going to be superindependent—despite the injury. Then he figured out he didn’t have a prayer. And so I tie his sneakers for him. I make his coffee for him. I don’t do the real personal stuff, like flossing his teeth and helping him get dressed and undressed. Mom does that. When he burnt the crap—excuse me—when he burnt the heck out of his hand, she was the one who kept putting the lotion on it. But I always feed the cats now—which is a real production, because of course we’re not a normal family that feeds the cats normal canned cat food. That has meat in it, so we can’t. It used to be that whoever happened to be in the kitchen would feed the kitties, but now it’s always Mom or me. And because Mom is so busy making sure that Dad’s zipper is up or something, I try to be the one to feed them. And that means getting down the vegan vegetable stew, the Foney Baloney, the seitan, and the vitamin supplements and then mixing them all together. And our cats are so finicky, we can’t mix up a huge batch ahead of time and then store it in the refrigerator. It has to be room temperature, which means opening a fresh can of the stew each and every time and then mushing in the other ingredients, including the Foney Baloney which does have to be refrigerated and so it really has to be blended into the canned stuff. It is only completely impossible to do it all with one hand. Mom just wants to start buying them Friskies or something to make our lives a little easier, but I know that isn’t what Dad wants, and so I figure I better be the cat chef for now.”
“For now,” Dr. Warwick repeated.
She nodded. She thought of that Saturday afternoon in the summer when everyone had been sitting on the porch in Sugar Hill talking about the party at the club that night—maybe six or seven hours before the accident would occur—and she’d decided to go wandering around the house to the cutting garden. She’d knelt amid the purple flowers that smelled so much like this woman’s perfume. She wished she could go back there now. To that moment.
“It sounds like a lot of work,” the doctor continued.
“Having vegetarian cats? Oh, yeah. It’s hugely difficult. But what else could we do? I mean, think of who my dad is. He and his boss, Dominique, are, like, two of the most notorious vegetarians in the country. Dad’s been on The Today Show, you know. Twice. And he’s been on the CBS Early Show and Nightline and tons of other news programs.”
“You sound like you’re very proud of him.”
“I am. But being Spencer McCullough’s daughter is a lot of work. Do you know something?”
The doctor shook her head and waited.
“I have never been inside a McDonald’s. I may be the only teenager in the developed world who hasn’t been inside a McDonald’s. My friends, even the ones who don’t eat meat—and there are a few—think it’s pretty extreme.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
She sighed and savored the smell of the perfume. That day had been warm, the parents had all arrived, and she thought she was going to dance at the bonfire that night with . . . Connor. At least she thought now the teen boy’s name had been Connor. Had she really forgotten? Was the boy really that forgettable? In any case, she knew she had been very happy that afternoon. She remembered putting one of those purple flowers in her hair, slipping it underneath her headband and imagining that she’d wear it that night to the bonfire. Then she remembered taking it out because she feared that she looked like a hillbilly.
“Charlotte?”
“Yes?”
“You said it wasn’t easy being your father’s daughter—even before his injury. Would you like to tell me more about that?”
“About being Spencer McCullough of FERAL’s kid?”
“Is that who you are?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Not Charlotte McCullough?”
“Oh, I’m her, too,” she agreed, but she understood now what the doctor was driving at. Still, here in New York she was Spencer McCullough’s daughter—even, often enough, at Brearley, where if she had been anybody other than simply Charlotte she should have been Mrs. McCullough’s kid. Or, if it was one of the older English classes filled with juniors and seniors who her mother insisted call her by her first name, Catherine’s kid. But even at Brearley she was frequently defined in terms of who her father was and what he stood for. It was always good-natured and sometimes kids were impressed by her father’s notoriety, though there was no shortage of celebrity moms and dads among the Brearley parents. Other kids’ parents were important politicians, or they ran big corporations and were frequently in the New York Times business section or the Wall Street Journal, or they were simply richer than God and everyone (somehow) knew it. Sometimes their mom or dad—or their grandmom or granddad—was a famous actor. Nevertheless, what her dad did stood out, and so he was the subject of conversation as often as any other student’s parent. FERAL did some pretty outrageous stuff, and whether it was photos of naked models at some antifur extravaganza or the those horrible photos of monkeys from research labs that her father’s group plastered on the bus stop kiosks, it was going to be of interest. Heck, the fact that she herself had never eaten a Sabrett hot dog was of interest, what other people ate in the lunchroom when they sat beside her was of interest. I hope you don’t mind my eating the lasagna today, Charlotte—it’s got meat in it. Charlotte, how can you not eat roast beef? I only eat chicken: Is that okay? What’s wrong with eating fish? They’re, like, cold-blooded, aren’t they?
“Is there a difference?” It was the doctor.
“Excuse me?”
“Is there a difference between Spencer McCullough’s daughter and Charlotte?”
She thought about this. Of course there was. Especially in New Hampshire, where Grandmother’s friends and the kids at the club viewed her more as a Seton than a McCullough. It was completely different from New York. She guessed there were people in Sugar Hill who weren’t even aware of what her dad did for a living. If anyone there made a big deal about vegetarianism and animal rights, it was likely to be her. Either she would be trying to torment Grandmother for force-feeding her cousin sausages or she would be turning up her nose with great drama at something that was cooking on the long barbecues at the club. Even the night of the bonfire, she’d made a point of telling one of the older girls what really went into a hot dog.
And that garden. Those gardens. Her father’s gardens. The day of the accident when she’d wandered alone into the cutting garden: That hadn’t been the first time. Did she go there as Spencer McCullough’s daughter or as Charlotte? She’d actually spent more time amid those flowers in the weeks before all the parents had arrived than either her cousin or her grandmother. Yes, she hated weeding. But didn’t everybody? Weeding, after all, was a chore. But flowers weren’t all work. They weren’t even mostly work. And alone in July she had meandered among the rows of loosestrife, astilbe, and phlox; she’d knelt before the daisies and lilies and savored the rich aromas that rose up to her from the flowers.
Especially those purple ones.
Now she breathed in Dr. Warwick’s perfume and closed her eyes, recalling those days before she had shot her father. Shot. Her. Father. Oh, to be back in the garden on an afternoon smack in the middle of the summer, your parents on the porch on the other side of the house, everything the way it had always been and forever would be.
If only she could go back.
If only.
She was aware that she was crying now, the tears creating small, shallow runnels along the sides of her nose. When she opened her eyes, she saw that the therapist was handing her a box of tissues. She took one, and then she took the box. She thought she had finished crying back in New Hampshire. Apparently, she was wrong. Apparently, she was a complete mess.
She remembered she was supposed to answer a question that had something to do with her father, but she was no longer sure what it was. And so she just shook her head and blew her nose and let the psychiatrist sit there and watch since—as she’d noticed before—the woman really did seem happy enough when her patients didn’t say a word.
WILLOW KNEW it was exactly 289 miles from the end of her family’s driveway to the garage on Ninety-second Street in Manhattan where they parked the car when they visited Grandmother. She’d been picked up at school today which added another two miles since they had to double back past their house, and so when she looked over the headrest at the odometer she saw they were still a few miles short of the point at which they would be precisely two-thirds of the way there. But they’d been on the Taconic for easily forty-five minutes now, and she felt clearly as if they were in the home stretch. Even though they had stopped twice in the first half of the trip so they could have lunch and then change her baby brother’s diaper, they would still be in the city by seven.
Beside her Patrick blinked in his sleep in his car seat, and he scrunched up his face as if he’d just eaten a lemon. She knew he’d probably wake up pretty soon. He’d given her almost two hours of peace in the car while he’d napped, and that was about all she could expect. And so she leaned over and reached for the bottle with the breast milk Mom had pumped before leaving her office. Willow guessed that the first thing her mother would do when they arrived at Grandmother’s apartment was get Patrick latched onto her chest: She could tell by the way her mother was fidgeting in the front seat that her tanks were getting pretty full and it was time to start dumping fuel.
Her parents were listening to the news out of Manhattan now that they were in range of the New York City AM stations. Her dad loved it. News Radio 88, 1010 WINS. You give us twenty minutes, and we’ll give you the world. It was one of those signals, her mom said, that thrilled Dad because it meant he was almost back to his childhood home.
She gazed out the window at the trees along the highway which, this far south, hadn’t even begun to change color, and she kept her eyes open for deer. She almost always saw a few on the Taconic, usually in groups of three or four, one of whom would be staring at the cars as they sped by on the highway while the others browsed contentedly among the trees and shrubs at the edge of the forest for food.
She thought it was interesting that in the last two months she’d never felt any anger toward the deer. She knew this whole disaster was not their fault, but she also knew from her mom that anger very often wasn’t rational. The closest she guessed she’d ever come to feeling any animosity toward the animals had actually occurred well before her cousin had shot Uncle Spencer. She remembered she had felt a twinge of resentment toward them when her parents had first learned that the baby in Mom’s tummy was going to be a boy, and her father suddenly announced his interest in hunting. She’d wondered why it hadn’t crossed his mind that hunting might be something he could share with her. After all, there were girls in their village who hunted with their fathers. Yes, it was mostly boys with their dads. But last year their neighbors Carolyn Patterson and Jocelyn Adams had both gotten animals during the state’s Youth Deer Hunting Weekend.
The truth was that she had absolutely no interest in the sport, and there was no way in the world she would ever have gone with her dad into the woods in search of a buck they could kill. Her dad probably understood this. She wasn’t exactly the type to shoot an animal and then pull out its guts. And she wasn’t known for being real happy in the cold. Still, it would have been nice if her dad had asked.
She was looking forward to the Cloisters tomorrow more than she had expected. When she’d told her art teacher they were going, Ms. Seeley had brought her brochures and a National Geographic magazine article with breathtaking color photographs, and given her all sorts of suggestions of what to look for. She’d reminded her to keep her eye out for the jugglers at the festival at the park beside the museum, and to give the guys doing the Gregorian chants half a chance.
Mostly, however, Willow was anticipating her conversation with Charlotte. She wasn’t looking forward to it in the same way she was excited about the Cloisters, for the simple reason that she and her cousin might very well end up fighting. And she hated fighting. But she had to see if she could change her cousin’s mind. See if they could come to some sort of agreement about what they should say at the depositions. She understood her cousin’s point that they didn’t want to get Gwen in trouble and that it was in Uncle Spencer’s best interests for them to lie at the deposition: Complete honesty might undermine both the lawsuit and FERAL’s antihunting campaign. But that didn’t make lying right. And while the truth might make things more complicated for Uncle Spencer, she sensed it would make things easier for her own dad.
At least she thought it would.
Though it would also make things worse for Charlotte. And that, Willow had concluded, was the big problem. If they told the lawyers they’d been smoking pot and drinking beer that night, then Charlotte would seem far from innocent.
This had to be at least part of the reason why her cousin was continuing to insist that they lie at the deposition.
When she brought their whole story up with Charlotte, the older girl would be defensive. Obstinate. Even a little melodramatic. But she reminded herself that she could be stubborn, too. Besides, she had the high ground on her side. She was the one advocating that they reveal everything they had done that night.
Next to her Patrick opened his eyes completely and stared up at the ceiling of the Volvo for a moment, and then turned his attention to her. He smiled and reached up his arms. He wanted to be picked up, but she couldn’t lift him from his car seat while they were speeding south on the Taconic. And so she took the tiny fingers on both his hands in hers and kissed them one by one. Then, still smiling down at him, she inserted the bottle of milk into his mouth.
SPENCER GUESSED that the Setons would all want to meet Tanya, especially Willow, but he had to believe that John would have the good sense to steer clear of his family’s apartment. The depth of his anger at his brother-in-law continued to mesmerize him. So much else that used to annoy him no longer did, and he actually thought he was handling his disability with something that resembled grace. He hadn’t even lashed out at his physical therapist today while doing his reps with the man during lunch.
He presumed that his refusal to speak with John was causing the man serious pain. It wasn’t that he believed John put an exceptionally high value on their friendship or missed talking to him in a meaningful way. Even if his brother-in-law hadn’t left a loaded gun in the trunk of his car, they probably wouldn’t have spoken more than once or twice in the last two months. But Spencer understood that by refusing to talk to John he was placing a magnifying glass on the guilt that his brother-in-law was enduring, and—as if that guilt were a dry leaf—igniting it. John would never understand the pain he had lived with through August and the better part of September (and would live with forever to some degree) or the disability he would carry with him to the grave, but he would know what it was like to be shunned.
Just thinking about his brother-in-law got him worked up, and so he sat back in his chair in his office and gazed out the window at the gold deco letters that spelled Empire State on the building across the street. His shoulder was still aching from his therapy, but he knew from experience that it would only get worse if he brought his left hand anywhere near it to massage it. It was best just to leave it alone.
“Spencer?”
He turned, and there was Dominique.
“Yes?”
“I ran into your mother-in-law last night in Central Park.”
He tried to read from her expression what Nan had said to his boss. He vaguely remembered introducing the two of them at one gathering or another, and he presumed that Nan must have taken the initiative to speak to Dominique: Heaven knew Dominique certainly wouldn’t have been the one to strike up a conversation with some senior citizen of whom she had at best the haziest of recollections.
“Really?”
“Yes. I was jogging and she was taking a walk with a very lovely golden.”
“Her dog.”
“So I surmised.”
“She just returned to the city from New Hampshire. She couldn’t have been back more than a few hours when you saw her. What did you two talk about?” This was, of course, not merely his mother-in-law they were discussing: It was also Safari Master John Seton’s mom, and so he was deeply interested in whether she had broached her son’s monumental idiocy.
Dominique shrugged. “Oh, we didn’t talk about much. She’s a charming woman—as you know. I believe she wanted to tell me she was a member of FERAL.”
“Well, she writes us a check once a year. But she also has a mink that she loves to trot out around Christmas, and she still doesn’t believe the human species can survive without meat.”
“I understand.”
“That’s all you talked about?”
She rested her index finger, its nail this morning a vibrant shade of plum, against the slightly bronzed hollow at the very top of her sternum, and seemed lost in thought. Then: “That’s all I can remember. Oh, wait: She asked me to say hello to you.”
“Very nice.”
“What are you working on?”
“A bit of everything. Thanksgiving. Our holiday fund-raising pitch . . .”
“Well, if there is anything I can do to help, you’ll let me know?”
“I always do.”
She smiled and continued down the hall. He had the sense that there was something more to Dominique’s conversation with Nan Seton, and either the woman honestly couldn’t remember or didn’t want to burden him with the specifics. Or, maybe, she just didn’t want to tell him. He guessed if it was important he’d find out eventually, and so he returned to the pages with the recipe ideas for vegetarian Thanksgiving celebrations that Joan Robbins wanted to pitch to a variety of daily newspapers. Most of them focused way too much on tofu and squash for the mainstream media. But there were a few ideas with potential, especially her lists of halftime snacks for the football-watching crowd that were free of animals and animal-sourced products—and could be found in any local supermarket. It was the second element that made it so clever in Spencer’s opinion. If you had any hope at all of keeping the average American away from the sour cream dips and Buffalo chicken wings, you had to make sure your alternatives were no more than an aisle or two away from the Budweiser and didn’t demand a special trip to the natural foods grocery store.
He had just verbalized a few suggestions for Joan into his brand-new digital recorder, when he saw that Randy was waiting for him in his doorway. The young woman was wearing a white linen broomstick skirt that fell to her ankles and a red drawstring blouse with the ties so loose he could see the front clasp of her lilac bra. Reflexively, he averted his eyes. Sometimes the part of the woman that had aspired to be a fashion model—that exuberant exhibitionist who had been so comfortable as a nearly naked FERAL Granola Girl—still dressed like a catalog tart. It was a tendency, Spencer knew, that served her well when she was working the male contingent of the press face to face.
“Ready to become a doggie daddy?” she asked.
“Yes, indeed,” he said. He rose, surprised by the sharp ache he felt in his left wrist, and he wondered if he had overworked his left hand and arm today with his physical therapist. Fortunately, it only seemed to hurt when he bent it, and so he didn’t anticipate any problems bringing their new dog across town. He glanced at his watch. It was barely twenty past three. Catherine and Charlotte were still at school, and would be for another two hours because rehearsals this week were lasting till almost five thirty. Assuming there were no last-minute hitches at the shelter, he and Tanya would be waiting to surprise them in the living room when they walked in the front door.
THE PLAN WAS SIMPLE, especially since they would be taking a taxi from the humane society to the apartment. Spencer would walk the dog to and from the cab, and Randy would carry the paperwork, the ratty pillow Tanya loved, and the goody bag with plastic dog toys the shelter was giving them.
Unfortunately, Tanya wasn’t real happy about the serpentine cab ride through Central Park. Twice she fell against Spencer in such a fashion that the first time he fell forward and cut the palm of his left hand against a jagged edge of the half-open ashtray that was built into the back of the front passenger seat, and the second time he bounced against his right shoulder and cried out in agony—which, in turn, caused the poor dog to dive onto the floor of the cab where she cowered for the remainder of the ride. By the time they arrived at West Eighty-fifth Street, his pants were speckled with drops of his blood, he was on the verge of vomiting in the back of a New York City cab for the second time in the month, and the dog was whimpering at his feet.
Then when Spencer pushed open the door with his left hand, the leash wrapped carefully around his wrist, Tanya made a sudden leap for daylight. Spencer had no right arm to brace his fall, and so he was pulled down onto his knees on the sidewalk, his shins cracking so hard into the curb by the cab that he feared for an instant he’d broken both his legs. Still, even that pain was nothing compared to the excruciating, lights-flickering torture he was experiencing in his shoulder as a result of falling atop his right arm.
“F*ck!” he hissed into the pavement. “F*ck, f*ck, f*ck!” He rarely swore, but this seemed an occasion on which it made little sense to bother stifling a profound and much needed desire to vent. The only good news was that he had managed to hang on to the leash, and so Tanya—though straining hard—was still with them. He had a vision of her racing down the sidewalk, dragging her leash, until someone or something spooked her and she ran into the street, where a delivery truck slammed into her and sent her cartwheeling through the air to her death.
Randy raced around the other side of the cab and knelt before the dog, stroking her behind her ears and murmuring that she was okay, she was going to love her new home, and she wouldn’t have to ride in any big, bad cars for a long, long time. She didn’t, he noticed, make any effort to see if he, too, was going to be all right, but he guessed that an animal was always going to get more sympathy than a human from Randy Mitchell. She did, after all, work for FERAL.
He slowly climbed up onto his knees, glancing briefly at the dirt and tiny pebbles that were lodged in the stinging cuts in his hand, and turned back toward the taxi. The driver had emerged from the vehicle, and for a moment Spencer was touched: The fellow apparently wanted to see if he was okay, and he felt a small, grateful smile forming on his lips.
“Eight seventy-five,” the cabbie said, his voice not exactly menacing, but a far cry from compassionate. “One of you two owes me eight dollars and seventy-five cents.”
Randy put down the pillow and the papers from the shelter and started to rummage inside her purse, and Spencer was about to stop her. But then he stopped himself. He couldn’t imagine how he could possibly reach into his pocket for his wallet with a dog’s leash wrapped around his one good wrist and his one good hand a bloody mess, while every cell in his shoulder and his shins and his left palm was screaming for mercy. And so he just turned from the cold eyes of the cabdriver to the confused and frightened ones of his dog and tried to compose himself. He could pay Randy back upstairs. She could wash out his hand for him, and—though it would incapacitate him further—cover the gashes and little cuts with gauze. He could change his pants, time-consuming as that little act might be. Or not. These khakis were goners already, so he probably wouldn’t bother. Either way, soon he would be inside his home with this dog, a gift for his daughter, and he would fix himself a gin and tonic and Percocet. And then everything would be fine.
Or, at least, as fine as things got these days.