Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  But Crandall bet there was more to it. He stood between Jake and the Defendant, looking back, taking it, letting it build. Then he stepped away, so that Jake’s look fell on the Defendant, who, for once, blinked.

  “No,” Jake rasped.

  He stared at the Defendant, then he swallowed so he could speak more clearly.

  “No, sir. That fucking weasel did not.”

  A few of us among the clans who’d covered a trial or two gathered at a diner most evenings after we’d made our calls and filed our stories. It had settled into a routine, since most of us had stopped drinking and there was little else to do without a family on a weeknight in the Bluff.

  Janelle liked to join us and ask questions. She seemed to think it was a J-school seminar, one served with fried catfish, a tangy vinegar slaw, and a little iced tea.

  That night, after Jake testified, she asked us what we thought, particularly about that part at the end. We tossed it around for a while until the black-raspberry pie arrived, then we summed up: It might’ve been the most truthful piece of testimony we’d ever seen.

  I cannot now remember exactly how the narrative went. Yes, yes, I wrote a story. Lottie testified damn near all day, so that night, I probably wrote two, maybe three.

  But this is about what I didn’t write then, and what I remember now, without access to the stories in the morgue, are the fragments: a quote, a sight, a sound. Each one taught us a little something.

  When grace walks among the anxious:

  “Why, Clay. I’ve been waiting to meet you.”

  Lottie stopped right in front of me and that’s what she said.

  Knowing today was her day, the clans had gathered outside the courthouse earlier than usual to film, photograph, and bay. I doubted she would say anything to anybody, so I had positioned myself inside a couple of steps up the broad stairway that led to the courtroom, high enough to see her whether she took the stairs or the elevator once she came through the door.

  At Marley’s insistence, I carried a camera. My orders were to get at least a shot or two of Lotty so that people could see what she looked like and how she was holding up after months in hiding.

  Through the window in the tall, exterior door, I saw Wood’s purportedly unmarked car jerk to a stop at the open end of a waiting, blue-and-brown wedge of state and county cops. The car doors slammed, and there was a pause before the wedge drove through the clans and into the courthouse.

  I was in luck. The wedge drove the stairs, the wider end pinning me against the rail. Probably it was Moze who put an elbow in my ribs.

  I had banged off a couple of reasonably in-focus and evenly exposed shots and was just pulling the camera off my face when she stopped. She caught me off guard, and at first, I could only stare.

  A short woman, she stood no taller than my breastbone. Her hair was brown, frosted with gray, short, and curled under in rows tight against her head. It didn’t look it, but knowing her preferences, I suspected a wig. She was dressed for church: a charcoal skirt, a gray, plaid jacket, and a high-collared, pink-and-gray, flowered blouse.

  For her age and what she’d been through, her face was remarkably unlined. She tendered no smiles, just a look of casual, tranquil interest that made me think time spent in her company would make me feel calm. It allowed me to recover my senses.

  “Ms. Nusbaumer,” I said, “I’ve been waiting to talk to you. How ‘bout an interview?”

  “Someday maybe.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the cops, who were clumping back down the stairs after realizing they had left her behind.

  “Today’s busy,” she said.

  She patted my arm.

  “In the meantime? I read your stories. They’re pretty good, but I’d like you to stay out of my house and leave Bunny alone.”

  Wood took her arm more roughly than I thought necessary to move a lady of her age and size. He held her away from me with one hand, and with the index finger of the other, he poked me once hard in the chest and waggled it threateningly under my nose.

  He said nothing, but no words were necessary. We were all wound pretty tight about how this would work out.

  This way to a juror’s heart:

  Said Crandall: “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  “I used to have young friends.”

  She looked at the jurors when she spoke.

  “I probably don’t anymore.”

  She made eye contact with each one before she dropped her gaze and tipped her head to hide a regretful smile.

  “I ‘spect they’re afraid of me now.”

  The genesis of anguish:

  “Emily was our capable one. The boys—Kyle and Timothy—they meant well, but they were young and that runty, little one who burst in first kept screaming at us. He acted like he was hopped up on something, he was screaming and yelling so.

  “I was frozen. I couldn’t think what to do. But Emily, she was at the kitchen table, and she was calm. She watched him and she watched the boys and she watched me, and I could see it on her face. She was trying to think what to do.

  “But she was young, too, and he had a gun. When the runty one yanked her up from the table and pushed her down on her knees toward me, I found her eyes. They were very sad. She just looked at me and she shrugged.”

  Life’s price on the day in question:

  “The runty one kept screaming: They’d kill us if we didn’t do this, he said, didn’t tell them that, he said. He wanted money and he kept yelling he’d shoot us dead if he found one penny we didn’t tell them about, so I told him every place I could think of there was a penny. I showed him my purse. I pointed over my head to the couch ‘case there was change there. I said he should look on my bedside table. I’d’ve given them anything.”

  Hell’s breath:

  “The atmosphere changed when the whispery one arrived. I don’t know where he’d been, but he came in later after the runty one.

  “The runty one stopped screaming at us then. The other man walked around and turned out all the lights but the one over the kitchen sink. He took the phone off the wall and yanked out the cord.

  “He went down the line and asked the kids how old each of them was, calm, like he was taking a survey. When he asked me, the runty one laughed before I could answer, and the whispery one told him to be quiet.

  “’Well, mama,’ the whispery one said, ‘how old?’

  “’I’m not your mama or anybody like you,’ I told him.

  “I heard him standing over me breathing then. Just breathing. Deep, slow breaths with his head up. The sound or maybe how long he stood there like that made the kids whimper after a while.”

  Life’s cost on the day in question.

  “I am so sorry.”

  She looked into the gallery searching for the Crawfords and the Russells. All four sat upright, rigid, wet tracks on each stone face. Until Lottie testified, they did not know exactly what happened to their children in that double-wide, Naomi said later.

  When Lottie found them, she looked at each of them and said again: “I am so, so sorry.”

  She cleared her throat and looked back at the jury.

  “I forgot about Papa’s gun,” she explained. “They asked me if I had any guns and I said no. I forgot my father’s gun was propped in the back corner of a closet in the spare room. I never used it, and I wanted to keep it away from the children. It was a .22 and I forgot.”

  No excuses, nothing about duress, just “I forgot.”

  “And the whispery one said, ‘You don’t have what we came for then.’

  “I turned my head and raised up and saw him standing there over me. He looked back kind of cold. He didn’t hit me. He just took the gun he was holding and moved it toward my face. He didn’t even have to touch me with
it. I just put my face back in the carpet. It smelled like dust and popcorn.

  “’Time for trick or treat,’ he said.

  “They’d put Emily down beside me. I could feel her there. Her shoulders and hips were touching mine.

  “She knew before I did. She flinched when he said it.”

  How courage talks:

  For the first time, her voice broke and she began to tear.

  “Do you need to take a break, Miss Nusbaumer?” Secrist said. “Maybe have a glass of water?”

  She smiled at his kindness and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand like a child. She shook her head.

  When she had taken enough time to steady her voice, she said: “I’ll be good. It won’t be any easier putting this off.”

  What a child does the first time she’s shot:

  “Emily jumped and shuddered. Once.

  “’Oh, God, I’m trying,’ she said, ‘I’m trying.’”

  I checked my notes against the transcript. That’s what the court reporter had, too. Who knows what she meant. It’s such a mystery.

  What a child does the second time she’s shot.

  “There was no movement. No sound. Her weight fell away. I felt her die beside me.”

  When you know you’re dead:

  “The whispery one kicked my foot. I tried to stay still. I don’t know if I’d breathed or what.

  “He said, ‘Better shoot mama again.’

  “And they did.”

  What you do if you live:

  “I must’ve passed out, least for a second or two. They were gone. It was dark.

  “I wiggled my feet. I sat up.

  “I said, ‘Is anybody alive?’

  “Nobody answered.”

  The sound dead children make:

  “I heard trickling. Like a little creek. Trickling.

  “It was the kids. Their blood. Trickling.”

  Impulse and a tall window:

  Crandall looked from Lottie to the row of four oak-encased windows that ran along the side of the courtroom opposite of the jury. Wood blinked a time or two when Crandall asked him for his pocket knife and slit open the evidence bag. Wood obviously had no clue what Crandall intended to do, but until the moment presented itself, I’m not sure Crandall did either.

  Crandall took out the orange, cotton blouse that Lottie had just identified as the one she wore the night she was shot. He walked away from Lottie and turned. Like it was a matador’s cape, he snapped out the blouse and held it up and to one side.

  Light from the windows behind it streamed through a shredded hole the size of a cantaloupe. Motes swirled and died in the beam.

  Tailoring for retribution:

  At Crandall’s request, with Secrist’s blessing, Lottie stood, removed her jacket, and hung it on the back of the witness chair. She stepped down from the witness box, walked in front of the jury rail and stopped in the middle. She turned her back to the jury.

  When Crandall nodded, arm over arm as though she was hugging herself, she reached behind her and with each hand pulled away the back of the blouse. It had been split up the middle to the collar.

  Some jurors gasped. Others craned their heads to see.

  She slowly turned left then right, more than enough for those of us in the gallery to see, too. It did not look like skin, more like a ragged piece of mottled and shiny, pink vinyl that had been pasted on back there.

  “Is the portion of your body you are now displaying to the jury—your back—the part of the body where you were shot?” Crandall asked.

  “One part,” she said, “yes.”

  “May we see the other part?”

  Lottie let the flaps of her blouse fall back into place. She retrieved her jacket and put it back on before she returned to her position with her back to the jury. She leaned forward at the waist and, with both hands, slipped her thumbs under the back and gingerly wriggled off a wig.

  With everything they’d seen or heard already, you’d think these jurors would’ve have been ready for it, but when she stood up straight, for a second time, they blinked and sucked in their breath. Her hair was short and thin on the top and sides and missing altogether at the back. There, her scalp was lumpy and inflamed. Think ketchup on cottage cheese.

  Crandall said: “Is the back of your head, which you are now displaying to the jury, the other portion of your body where you were shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will your hair grow back?”

  “It hasn’t yet. At this point, I’d say doubtful.”

  Throughout both displays, as she answered Crandall’s questions, her eyes never once left the Defendant. And under that gaze, she offered up to him a serene and karmic smile.

  A shallow stew of empathy and ink:

  There was silence, long silence, as though no one in the place knew what to do next, and maybe they did not. In that silence, I heard it land: a single tear, a blot upon her notes.

  Out of the tight, precise lines emerged a moth’s black shadow. I started to turn my head, but Janelle tipped up the hand she held to her pad to wave me off.

  The back side of enchantment:

  Particularly near the end, he sat rapt, his elbows propped on the table, holding his face in hands. He watched her and listened to her as though she told a marvelous tale solely for his delight. Legs noticed and frowned, but by that time she’d begun to think twice about nudging him.

  Why she smiled:

  Reardon let Legs cross-examine. He would not want the jury to think he would beat up the sole, surviving victim in this case, and maybe he thought a woman questioning a woman would insulate him from that notion. Regardless of whatever the other reasons may have been, the defense had only one line of simple questions, which surely Legs could handle.

  “You said at one point you raised your head and turned to look at a second man over your shoulder?”

  “I did.”

  Lottie would not look at Legs, who was trying to pull her eyes away from the jury by standing at the defense table. Lottie gazed instead at the tissue she held crumpled in her lap.

  “And that man was wearing a mask, was he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you did not ever see that man without a mask, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You did not see him without a mask when he entered?”

  “No.”

  “And you did not see him without a mask at any time after he entered you trailer.”

  “No.”

  “So you cannot tell this jury what the man in the mask looked like, can you?”

  Lottie looked up at the jury. “I saw what he wore.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He had black hair on his chest,” she said, still talking to the jury. “And there was a silver cross that gleamed in the light from the sink.”

  Reardon jumped up and barked: “Objection.”

  “Overruled,” Secrist said before Crandall could speak. He had been watching the Defendant throughout Lottie’s testimony.

  “Complete the answer,” he ordered Lottie, even though there was no question before her.

  “The whispery one had black chest hair. His collar was open. He wore a silver cross on a silver chain around his neck. It gleamed up out of that hair. I saw it in the light from the sink.”

  She talked fast so she could say what she had to say before someone cut her off. But Secrist’s glare sealed Reardon’s mouth, and Lottie, like the rest of us, could see that Legs had no idea where she was going or how to stop her. Lottie took a moment to smile.

  “That man there you sit next to?” Lottie said, speaking to Legs but looking at the Defendant. “He’s got black chest hair, and he’s wearing that cross or one just like it.”

  I write my stories not for Marley or the general manager or,
for that matter, the paper’s readers in general. No, I write each one for Chuck Duprey.

  Our Chuck is a big, bluff farmer with a blowhard’s spiel. Each day, his ego compels him to climb down from his tractor and make his way to the Pug to take his noon meal. Five days a week, for an hour, he’s the headliner. He chooses a victim from among those just trying to get through their burgers, toasted cheese, and BLTs and, in a booming voice, questions, wheedles, kids, insults, and cajoles that person about the slightest details of his or her life.

  I am a semi-regular in Chuck’s show. When I arrive before he does, he makes a point of joining me uninvited at the counter to question me about my stories. If I have written in the previous day’s edition that the sun was shining, he demands to know who my source was and what I meant by that.

  There are more than a few people who would like Chuck better dumbstruck or dead, but I’m not one of them. To the contrary, I’m grateful to him.

  Every time I sit down to write a story, I try to write it so Chuck will ask me not a single question. I want every fact thrice sourced and every sentence cold, hard, and clear as store-bought ice.

  Writing for Chuck makes me a better reporter, but only once have I reached my goal. Jake told his story from his point of view, the butt end of the gun. Lottie Nusbaumer told hers from barrels’ end. Our Chuck said not one word to me after I wrote of Lottie’s testimony, but I’m pretty sure that was more testament to her character and Crandall’s strategy than to any skill of mine.

  The Program’s poets spend a lot of our time talking about “the ambush” or “the gambit.” They are talking, of course, about addiction’s twofold power: To leave you at once blind to the approach of overpowering impulse and limp and defenseless when it arrives.

  Since I have been sober, sometimes when I am alone and still, I can sense them . . . always plural, always black. They form deep in my head, among the viscous folds of my brain. They drag loose, then drift upward toward consciousness like stink bubbles through muck.