Adam. He was all anybody could talk about, on the news every night, national news now, at large for eighteen days and counting. People called her out of the blue, clients, friends she’d forgotten she had, reporters, and they all wanted to know what she knew, wanted details, gossip, dirt. What it all boiled down to, no surprise, was sex, though nobody came straight out and said it. How could she have had sex with a maniac, that was what they wanted to know. How could she have kissed him, invited him into her bed? And more, and juicier: What was it like? Was it good? Was it hot? Did he get rough? When she went out, she tried to keep a low profile, wearing bulky clothes and a hat, always a hat. But she did have to work, after all (no subbing, though, no way, not with all this notoriety), and when she went to her clients’ houses just to see to their poor dumb horses that wouldn’t have known or cared if she’d gone to bed with a hundred maniacs, with the Taliban or the whole U.S. Army, she couldn’t have a moment’s peace. Here were these people she’d known for years, women mostly, decent people, her clients, for Christ’s sake, and they just draped themselves right over her while she manipulated her hoof pick and clinch cutters, sniffing and probing and working at her like paleontologists looking for the bones revealed in the dirt.
Then one day she went down to work at the Burnsides’ because the Burnsides were marked on her calendar and she had to earn a living, no matter what the rest of the world was doing or thinking or saying. There were cops everywhere, as if it was some sort of convention, but she tried to ignore them because they weren’t there for her, and when she came into Calpurnia, the fog, which had pretty well curtained everything in to this point, got denser suddenly, so dense she had to put her lights and wipers on. She almost went right on by the turnoff but caught herself at the last minute. There was nobody else on the road—even here, forty miles south, Adam had managed to cast a pall over things. Because they couldn’t catch him. He was too smart for them. Too hard. They’d sent all those SWAT teams out there, helicopters with their infrared tracking devices, dogs—the very dogs Roger had told her about, Good dog, Good dog—and he’d outmaneuvered them all.
When she swung into Cindy’s driveway, the gravel giving way under her wheels, she saw there was another car parked there in front of the barn, not Cindy’s or Gentian’s, but one that looked familiar somehow. Whose was it? The answer would come to her the minute she pulled up beside it, shut down her engine and climbed out of the car with her tool kit: it was Adam’s mother’s car, Carolee’s. Because here came Carolee marching out of the mist with Cindy and Gentian flanking her, the two of them looking as if they were going to war while she looked like she’d just been punched in the gut. “Hi,” Sara said, though Adam’s mother was somebody she could definitely have done without seeing.
Gentian, a big man, once powerful, but now gone to seed around a face that drooped in folds right on down into the collar of his shirt, stopped in his tracks and the women pulled up then too. The look he was giving her was fierce, outraged. He spat out the words. “He shot Corinna and Lulu.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
Cindy answered for him: “Adam.”
They all looked to Carolee, the mother, but Carolee had nothing to say, either in affirmation or denial. She was having enough trouble keeping her face composed. What she’d done—Sara could see this in a flash—was come down here to help out, to do something, anything, to get away from the terrible tension at home that must have been even worse for her than it was for herself. She’d given birth to him. Breast-fed him. Potty-trained him. Held his hand when he went to kindergarten and agonized over every inappropriate display and skewed adjustment through what must have been a chaotic childhood to a squirrelly adolescence and now this—they were hunting her son and he was their quarry, no different from the deer the sportsmen bungee-strapped to the hoods of their cars, and who hadn’t seen the blood there striping the windshield and tarnishing the bright resistant strips of chrome? In that moment, Sara went outside herself and saw what this woman—her enemy, who’d rejected her right from the start—was going through. She said, “It wasn’t Adam.”
“How the hell would you know?” Gentian still hadn’t moved, but she could see how furious he was, his fists clenched, the old splayed muscles tightening on their cords, something working beneath the skin at the corner of one eye. “Did you see him? Did you ask him?”
“It wasn’t Adam.”
Cindy said, “He’s on foot, Gent. It’s forty miles.”
The picture of Corinna came into her head then, not the big-ribbed corpse she’d see bloodied in the field in due course, but Corinna after she’d had her first calf, proud and watchful and erect on her stiffened legs, her ears up and her nostrils to the wind. A dog had appeared at the periphery of the meadow one afternoon, a thousand yards away, a dog on a leash being walked along the street on the far side of the fence, no threat at all, not if she understood the situation. But Corinna didn’t understand the situation. Corinna had perceived the danger in the way the light scissored between those four trotting legs and she charged halfway across the field, flinging up turf with her savage cutting hooves that could have decapitated that dog in a heartbeat and maybe his owner too. That was instinct. That was all she knew.
“Forty miles, shit,” Gentian spat, turning bitterly on his wife. “You tell me who else is crazy enough to shoot defenseless animals like this? Who else is out there killing things with a rifle? Huh? Tell me that?”
No one answered him. The fog lifted and fell in beaded threads and tugged at the light in waves that seemed to pulsate across the yard. The gravel shone with wet. Gentian was red-faced. Cindy looked ashamed. And Carolee? Carolee looked as if she never expected her feelings to be spared again, looked like a pariah, mother of the murderer. And what did that say about her then? She was the girlfriend, no denying it, and that made her guilty too. As guilty, in their eyes, as if she’d pulled the trigger herself.
35.