“Why . . . why would you think that?”
“That’s why we took the guns. He had a bad habit of pointing them at people in his family. This one time his wife took their son over to her sister’s house to watch a movie. She left a note for him, but it fell off the fridge, so Kellaway didn’t find it when he got back from work. He began to think maybe she took off on him. When she finally got home, Kellaway pulled his little boy up into his lap and asked her if she knew what he’d do if she ever really left him. And he pointed a gun at his son’s head and said, ‘Bang.’ Then he pointed the gun at her and winked. He’s a grade-A fucking psycho. The kid isn’t dead, is he?”
“No. It’s nothing like that.” Lanternglass told her about the mall.
By the time she finished, Dorothy was out of the bathroom, leaning against the wall beside her, cheek resting against her hip. “Back to bed,” Lanternglass mouthed. Dorothy didn’t move, pretended she didn’t understand.
Acosta said, “Huh.”
“Did he have an exception that would’ve allowed him to carry a gun in his place of work? For his job?”
“Not a mall cop. If he was a real cop maybe. Or a soldier. I don’t know. You’d have to track down the transcripts of his hearing.”
“I checked the public-records Web site, and there was nothing in there about a divorce order.”
“No, there wouldn’t be. He never got divorced. The wife is very timid, got a case of Stockholm syndrome. He didn’t allow her to have her own cell phone for years. Or her own e-mail account. The only reason she left him is that she’s more scared of her sister than she is of her husband. And a restraining order would be filed with the courthouse. You can’t pull that offline. I can get someone to e-mail you a copy of the injunction if you want. Tomorrow, day after?”
Lanternglass was quiet, thinking it through. She’d need to see a court transcript before Tim would let her run with the allegation that Kellaway had pointed a gun at his wife and child. But she could at least get something in tomorrow’s edition about the restraining order, get it out that he’d been forbidden to carry a weapon after . . . what? Menacing his wife and child? “Menacing” was a safe verb, she thought. Tim might let her have “menacing.”
“Yeah,” Lanternglass said. “I’d appreciate that. But if it’s all right, I’d like to squeeze something into tomorrow’s edition about this. ‘A source within the sheriff’s department says . . .’”
“Oh, the hell with that. Use my name. Even better, see if you can get my picture. I love to see my face in the paper.”
“It’s all right to directly source you?”
“By all means. Kellaway and I really hit it off, the one time we met. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear I’m still thinking about him.”
The tuba wailed.
“Is that a foghorn?” Lanternglass asked.
“That’s a whale!” Acosta yelled. There was more cheering in the background. “They’re serenading us!”
Lanternglass didn’t know how Dorothy heard what Acosta was saying, but all at once she was jumping up and down.
“Can I hear? Can I listen?”
“Ms. Acosta? My daughter is wondering if you’d hold your phone up so she can hear the whales.”
“Put her on!”
Lanternglass lowered her phone and pressed it to Dorothy’s ear. And stood and watched her daughter. Eight years old. Eyes very large, face calm, attentive. Listening while the world sang to her.
July 13, 8:42 A.M.
KELLAWAY WOKE BEFORE NINE, PEELED himself off the couch, and padded into the bathroom to take a leak. When he came back, ten minutes later, with toast and coffee, his own wide, bristly, impassive face was on the TV, above a chyron that said GUNNING FOR TROUBLE? He had passed out with the television going and the volume turned all the way down, had slept heavily and well in that silent flicker of uncanny light. He had felt easier with a gun again, had drifted off with Jim’s British Webley & Scott on the floor beside him.
He sat on the edge of the couch now, unconsciously holding the gun in one hand and the remote in the other. He turned up the volume.
“. . . heels of the story that Randall Kellaway was released from the army after allegations that he repeatedly used excessive force in his stint with the military police,” said the morning news anchor. He talked in the style popularized by Wolf Blitzer: in fragmentary sentences, with emphasis on any word that was reasonably dramatic. “Now, the St. Possenti Digest, out with a shock report that Kellaway was forbidden to possess a firearm because of threats he made against his wife and young son. Sheriff’s Sergeant Lauren Acosta confirming to the Digest that Kellaway would not have been granted an exception to carry a weapon because of his job as a mall security guard, and that possession of the .327 would’ve been a clear violation of the injunction against him. No word yet why Mrs. Kellaway applied for the injunction, or the nature of the threats leveled against her by her husband. Mr. Kellaway and the St. Possenti police have yet to return our calls for comment, but we expect Chief Rickles to make a statement today, when he appears at the Miracle Falls Mall for an eleven A.M. candle-lighting ceremony to remember the fallen in the recent attack. Randall Kellaway is scheduled to light the first candle and may also comment, we don’t know, but we’ll be there, live, to cover . . .”
It was her, of course. It was the black, Lanternglass, who had turned up yesterday evening to ambush him when he walked out of the local TV studio. She couldn’t leave him alone. She didn’t care if he ever saw his kid again. For her he was just a character in a nasty story that she could use to sell some papers.
He had not dared to admit to himself until now that a part of him had begun to believe he could leverage his sudden unexpected celebrity into getting it all back: Holly and George, sure, but something else, too. “His rights” were the words that came to him, but that was and wasn’t quite it. It wasn’t his right to have a gun, or not just his right to a gun. That was only part of it. It seemed to him that there was something obscene about an America where a grinning Latina could tell him to stay away from his own son, and never mind he worked fifty hours a week, never mind what he had sacrificed as a soldier representing his nation in a hostile, foreign land. The thought of the tiny black woman grinning at him while she poked her cell phone in his face, asking him her loaded questions, made him feel feverish. It seemed grotesque that he lived in a society where someone like that could make a living out of humiliating him. She didn’t care that George would hear on the TV that his father was a sick man who pointed guns at his own family. She didn’t care what kids said to George at school, if he got teased and harassed. Lanternglass had decided he was a criminal from the moment she laid eyes on him. He was white and male. Obviously he was a criminal.
Kellaway clicked off the TV.