Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  The week before Gerry had watched through the front window as Kennedy got out of her sister’s car, slammed the door, and raced toward the house. Carter pulled out of the circle drive, her wheels leaving black marks even though normally she was a timid driver.

  “Why didn’t Carter come in?” he called after Kennedy as she threw off her shoes and flew up the stairs.

  Gerry followed her up the stairs and stood in the doorway to her room, watching her body shake where she lay facedown on the bed. “I’m never not going to be Dead Kennedy. I’m going to live in this fucking room forever and this is never going away.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Carter said I should take responsibility.”

  It was the central dogma of the Wynn family that Kennedy was innocent, as surely as the host was the body of Christ for Catholics, or life was suffering for Buddhists. “She just needs time to adjust to you being out,” he said to her.

  It wasn’t the first spat the girls had had over the years. That whole first year, when Laine was in chemo and he was working on Kennedy’s defense, the girls had barely spoken.

  He worried about Carter’s being alone, without her family, or even Alex, to talk sense into her. She had always been more fragile than Kennedy. You could look at Carter sitting across the table and watch her fall into a deep place inside herself.

  Gerry had picked up the phone to call her and broker a détente when the Wynn doorbell rang. He expected to see a neighbor, but instead a thirtysomething man in a blazer and a ball cap was standing there, bent and distorted through the peephole. Gerry stepped away without answering it. He wondered if Kennedy’s release from prison the week before had been a little too quiet and this was the start of things again.

  A few minutes later he went back to the foyer and opened the door to an empty porch. The man had left a business card tucked into the doorjamb, just like the so-called journalists had fifteen years ago. Gerry snagged it out.

  JOSH WINTER, Producer

  Fingerprint Productions

  Gerry turned the card over. He flicked it against his palm. He reached back inside and grabbed his coat, then strode to his car. He was on the highway in a minute and downtown at Carter’s small apartment in twenty. Colonial pillars held up the covered porch, but once you were inside, the apartment was a dark hall and three rooms—living, bed, and tiny kitchen. The beauty of the place was still evident but it had been made affordable for student renters or couples early in their careers. He felt a pang of guilt for not having offered to cosign on a lease when she broke up with her boyfriend. He’d expected she would only be in the apartment a month or two before she and Alex renewed the relationship.

  * * *

  —

  Carter handed him what he thought was a coffee along with a look of reproach.

  “You’ve got to talk to your sister,” he pleaded with her. He took a drink and grimaced. It was some kind of herbal tea.

  “The doctor doesn’t want you to have coffee. And this isn’t your concern, Gerry.”

  “She needs us. She needs a reason to get up in the morning. You’ve destroyed her when she needs to rebuild.”

  “You’ve destroyed her. Not me.”

  “You’re using again, aren’t you?” Gerry got up and grabbed a small ornamental box from a shelf. He lifted the lid and looked inside.

  “Put that down, Gerry,” Carter said. “What I meant was: you built this narrative of injustice. The Kennedy you want to exist doesn’t. She is what she is and she did what she did.”

  Gerry continued stomping around the one-bedroom apartment, looking in spots where the pamphlets had told him to look: inside books and cups, under mattresses. Addicts can hide anything.

  Gerry had never forgotten Carter’s call in the middle of the night her first year at college, crying that she needed help. She had been thrown out of a motel in Tampa with nothing but sandals and her pink flip phone. Why aren’t you in Chapel Hill at school? he asked. Carter confessed that she had dropped out weeks before and moved to Florida with some DJ. You did that? For some clown who presses Play for a living? Gerry thought but bit his lip. He booked a ticket for Carter at the airport, nonrefundable, to bring her home where he could take care of her.

  Even if they didn’t always like him, his daughters came to him for help. Middle-of-the-night-call taker was his job.

  “This is controlling behavior. You don’t get to come to my apartment and go through my things. They told you that. In therapy.” Carter straightened books on the shelf he’d already checked. She said with resolve: “I’m not on drugs.”

  Gerry squinted at her. He wanted his daughter well, but he also wanted them all well—all together in this—and he knew that sometimes achieving what you wanted meant coming down hard. Daughters seemed to attract chaos. In the universe of women he’d wound up in, Gerry found it necessary to enforce rules.

  Carter pulled out her iPhone and brought it over to him. He peered at the screen. “What does this mean?” 5 months, 20 days, the screen read. The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

  “That’s how long I’ve been sober.”

  He handed the phone back to her. “This doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a number on a device. Doesn’t tell me anything.” He regretted slipping into lawyer mode, arguing nuances. He walked over toward the door and began rummaging through pockets on the coatrack.

  “Dad, stop!” Carter yelled.

  When he looked at the garment he was holding he saw it was a man’s corduroy blazer.

  “Whose is this?” He shook the coat at her.

  “No one’s,” she said. The color had gone from her face. “It’s probably Alex’s and got mixed in my stuff.”

  He reached into the pocket of the sport coat, looking for hexagon-shaped pills or baggies of powder, he didn’t know what. What he pulled out was worse. A card. Like the one that had been stuck in his door. A different name though.

  DEE NASH, Host and Executive Producer

  Fingerprint Productions

  He tossed the card down between them on the coffee table. They both stared at it.

  “It isn’t mine,” she said after a moment.

  He grabbed her by the hands. “Don’t, don’t,” he begged. “This is all of us, Carter. I know you’re mad at her, but it’s all of us—even your mother, god rest her. We can’t let this happen.”

  She broke free of his grip and picked up the card and returned it to the pocket.

  “You won’t talk to them,” he said. He had forgotten about the coat itself for the moment.

  “No, but I can’t stop it from happening,” Carter said, turning her back on Gerry and taking her cup out to the kitchen sink.

  He followed. They stood there for a second, close, like they’d once been, then Gerry said, “If none of us talk, it simply stops.”

  Carter replied, “We’re not the only family that’s part of this.”

  Chapter 9

  The former homicide detective was surprisingly warm in personality, her hair parted in the center and straightened around a broad, heart-shaped face. Upon arrival she’d hugged Everett firmly and told him with a laugh that the network was picking up the tab.

  “How’s your food?” Dee Nash asked Everett as he pushed a fork through and around his brisket. She was dressed more casually than on the ads. She’d put on a jean jacket over her expensive blouse—he suspected to make him more comfortable.

  “Good. It’s a little dry. Sunday’s the better day for Extra Billy’s.”

  “You used to come here with them, didn’t you?” Dee leaned in. “Your mother? Haley?”

  “Sometimes. My dad brought us. When there was money.”

  Earlier, when Everett and Dee had walked into the restaurant, he’d noticed all the women at the tables and on staff turn their heads, some mouthing her name. Dee saw it too an
d told Everett the women would all go home with a story of You know who came into Billy’s today?

  Everett looked up from his food. “How did you know about Billy’s?”

  “My grandparents lived in Norfolk during the war,” she said.

  “You’re from here?”

  “They followed the navy west. So mostly I grew up in Torrance, near LA.”

  “So you’re really from California?”

  “Sure, but you know, there’s more that connects you and me than you to them.”

  “Who’s ‘them’?”

  “I’m black. You’re country. We both know the difference one street makes. How you can be safe on one block, then the next you feel like an alien in your own town. You do get that feeling from the rich folk, don’t you? That tone underneath the niceness.” Dee looked with some reluctance at her oversmothered Caesar salad, pushing the croutons to one side.

  “Maybe.” Everett nodded.

  “I’m not the media, Everett. I’m not like the ones who took your sister’s name and blamed her for her own murder. You know why the press did that? The defense attorneys. They told the papers whatever would make their case look stronger. Selective evidence. Lies even. The Wynns had the money to hire people like that. Your family? You had the DA. You had nothing.”

  “It’s over. Years ago, you know. I don’t want to be like Mom.”

  “Everett. When I was a cop, I specialized in domestic violence cases. My show is for the women I could never save back then.”

  “A girl killed my sister.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Everett set down his fork and looked ashen. “Please excuse me,” he said as he started to get up. She might have been from TV, but Dee had started to sound like them: the People from the Internet, with their conspiracy theories and facts only they knew and if Everett could just please, please give them his phone number . . .

  Dee changed her tone. “Wait,” she said.

  Everett sat back down cautiously.

  “I’m not saying Kennedy Wynn is innocent. The evidence I have is new, but it is not exculpatory.”

  Everett winced at the last word and felt he was in the back of a classroom.

  “It means that someone else may have been involved.” She paused, as if waiting for a dramatic commercial break. “Take one hundred murdered women and ninety-nine of their killers are men. Look at the brutality of the wounds. Ribs broken. Little girl in a full-length velvet dress wielding a knife with that intensity? This case simply makes no sense as it has been told. The mistakes of that prosecutor—”

  “Kennedy admitted it. I don’t understand.” Everett leaned forward, inclining his head as if he hadn’t heard properly.

  “No. She made an Alford plea, and that’s different. The DA wanted to send a couple of rich kids to trial. They do that around election time. But they didn’t have enough evidence to try both Berk Butler and Kennedy. So they put one against the other and saw who took the deal first. As well-off as the Wynns were, the Butlers had more: more money, more lawyers.”

  It was true that his mother still refused to buy anything from a Butler’s store.

  “What do you think of Carter?” Everett was surprised at his own question.

  Sometimes he had read what the People from the Internet had written about the case, which felt like peering into someone else’s hallucination: It was a government LSD experiment; the military’s Radio Quiet Zone is only an hour away; Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, wanted to delegitimize grunge and drive Cobain to suicide; it was Carter who did it. He remembered thinking, That’s bullshit. It was the first time he’d felt protective of Carter.

  “What do you think of her?” Dee returned.

  “She’s a victim too. That’s how I see it.”

  Everett felt embarrassed for even saying Carter’s name.

  “We’re looking at a possible male accomplice or accomplices.”

  “Kennedy killed my sister.” The fact defined Everett more than he could admit.

  “Murder is an immense truth. All the little lies fall away from it. Except when they don’t. Sometimes the truth threatens us more than the fictions that have been told.”

  He took a drink from his soda. “So what’s this new evidence?”

  “This.” Dee reached into her bag and took out a manila envelope. It was wrinkled and sun lightened. She set it on the table but kept her hand on it, as if to say, This is mine, and for Everett to know what it was he would have to trust her.

  Chapter 10

  Gerry was napping in his recliner in the family room—Kennedy wondered if it could still be called that when no one had lived there for years except him—and she walked through the house, running her hands over the objects she remembered and new ones that she didn’t. She stepped into Gerry’s office. The desk had a stack of paperwork on it, but to one side, as if he wasn’t really working on it. Sitting atop a file cabinet was a mug with bubble lettering, a relic of the eighties. Laine had given it to him. Pencil Me In, it said.

  Kennedy picked it up. An amber residue in the bottom. Carter had said he’d quit liquor when she did, but that obviously wasn’t true: he simply didn’t drink as much as he once had. Kennedy set it back down. She dropped into her father’s chair and opened his desk drawer, which was full of office items barely in use anymore. She might have seen the folded one-inch note if a flicker of movement in the backyard outside hadn’t distracted her.

  Out there in the dark, someone was moving. Between the gazebo and the Japanese pond. Her father had shown her the Japanese pond her first day after lunch—a new acquisition recommended by his cardiologist, though Kennedy couldn’t believe a pond would actually calm him unless it was filled with Glenlivet.

  The figure moved and Kennedy stood up quickly. She knew who it was, even though it was too dark to see his face. She knew his shoulders, his motion. She grabbed the letter opener from the drawer, then set it back down. It wouldn’t defend her if she really needed it, she thought. She ran downstairs and pulled a knife from the block in the kitchen, slipped it up her sleeve, holding it with one hand. She looked out, hoping she was wrong. Then, after a moment, she slid open the back patio door in the kitchen. Nine wasn’t late, but it was November-dark, late enough. She flipped on the outside light and he halted at the patio stairs without climbing them.

  Berkeley Butler still had a football player’s stance, as if he was ready to run, even though the years had added padding to him that wasn’t part of the uniform. His blond hair was shaved short, and it took her a moment to realize it was because he was now balding. A white stone of scalp nudged up just slightly from his brush cut. He’d been twenty-one with floppy hair and a hemp necklace when she knew him, but he’d seemed so much older than her that she’d never thought of him that way: boy. Her father was the one who called him that. To her, Berk had been masculine, charming, and aloof, as broad chested and moneyed as the Wrong Boyfriend in a John Hughes movie. Now he was a man of thirty-seven in a work jacket with a logo patch on the chest that said Butler’s. She’d gone into prison knowing only boys. She’d learned about men from the other women—enough to understand what Berk was then and what Berk was now, standing in front of her.

  He stood there as ordinary as daytime. She stared. His eyebrow still had the distinctive split in the middle. She’d thought it sexy at the time. It was only later, during the investigation, when he agreed to testify against her, that she’d seen him as anything other than beautiful. She remembered how the patch of hair in the center of his chest always smelled like clove. How hard had she tried to make him love her? She tightened her grip on the knife under her sleeve.

  “What do you want, Berk? I’m not going to talk to you.” Kennedy raised her voice a bit more than she needed to, wondering if she could actually wake Gerry. He was far away though, the house too expansive. She’d had an imaginary conversation with Berk
for years in her mind, and now suddenly he was in front of her and her mind was blank.

  “I wanted to see the girl who wrecked my life all grown up now.” Those thin, pale pink lips parted in a smile. “She looks fine.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and then leaned forward and put something on the patio table. Kennedy heard the click of it, metal on metal, before he took his hand away and she saw it. It was a necklace. The size of a quarter and perfectly round: a yin-yang on a worn black cord. He smiled again crookedly. “Don’t want to get caught with evidence right now.”

  Kennedy stepped closer, her bare feet on the cold stones of the patio. The necklace belonged to Haley. Kennedy wanted to reach out and take it but she also didn’t want to get any closer. She felt her shoulders tighten. She couldn’t remember if Haley had been wearing it that last night. She stepped back.

  “There’s no more evidence. Everything is over and that necklace is just something you stole. Like my life,” Kennedy said.

  “I did two years.”

  “With stockbrokers. I did fourteen with murderers.”

  “I have to tell you, I kind of made a mistake. I talked to some TV people. Thought I could make some money, but I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Because you’re a lying sack of shit?”

  His chin tilted up. “Am I? That’s not how I remember it. You were the last one with her.” He gazed at the necklace on the table. “She gave this to me, by the way. Because she loved me.”

  Kennedy weighed the statement and decided it was the other way around: Berk had felt more for Haley than she had for him. Berk was a good talker, and she could imagine him convincing Haley to give it to him. Or his roommate Julian, who was never far away, winning it from her in some drinking-game bet. The past had to be stared at to reveal itself, and even then it was all interpretation.

  “Journalists are your problem, Berk. Not mine. There’s nothing more anyone can do to me,” she said.

  “I can think of some things.” In the Wynn backyard, Berk smiled again and let his head loll to one side above his coat collar. “You still a virgin, hiding in the bathroom every time someone else wants to?”