Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  Setting the decanter down, Gerry stooped, armed himself with the largest of the knives, and circled through the other rooms. In spite of the disturbance he didn’t really believe there was anyone in the house but him. He knew what he’d seen in the blink of an eye but didn’t want to admit it: it was Haley. She’d been wearing the outfit she died in, mud-smeared garments they’d all seen in the crime photos.

  Gerry picked up the knives in the kitchen. When he had put them all back in the block, there was one missing. He couldn’t think why. He checked the sink and the dishwasher. Perhaps Kennedy had taken it. There was nothing really there to say he’d seen a ghost. The house could have shifted. Kennedy could have left the knife block askew on the counter. Or maybe he had moved it himself when he took the scotch out of the cupboard, he reasoned. Since he tried to ration himself on the hard stuff, he didn’t like keeping it within easy reach. The water in the upstairs hall could have been tracked in earlier, or just a spill from his drink, like he’d already told himself. He sat down at one of the island stools.

  A ghost of a girl. What was he, fourteen years old? It was just his guilt manifesting from looking at that dirty book. Anyway, he hadn’t thought of Haley Kimberson in years. He thought of his own girls, the impact it had all had on them. He thought of Marly and Ted Kimberson and the boy and how they behaved afterward.

  The telephone rang, and Gerry startled. His arm shot out and knocked his drink, but he grabbed it again and it didn’t spill or topple. He picked up. It was Kennedy.

  “Some people here are going for pizza after shift. I’ll get a cab. Be there in a bit.”

  “Okay, darling. Hurry home,” he said, feeling a genuine need to see her, to have someone else there with him.

  “You sound— Are you okay?” she said, and he realized he was out of breath.

  “I was worried.”

  “Don’t be.”

  Gerry went upstairs to squirrel away the Madonna book. As he trudged back through the hall where he’d seen the ghost, if that was indeed what it was, he felt cold and his fingers trembled again.

  He stood staring at the hall light, as if it might glint bright again, wondering if it really had. He put the book away and then hurried into his bedroom at the far end of the hall. He looked into every corner and the closet before shutting the door firmly, telling himself that he always closed his door at night, it wasn’t because he feared the ghost would come back for him.

  Chapter 21

  Kennedy called softly, “Dad—you awake?”

  As she went up the stairs she felt as startled as he looked. Vulnerable. She knew why she felt that way after being with Nathan Doyle but didn’t recall her father’s looking vulnerable ever. Could he tell? “What is it?” she said to him.

  “I thought someone was in the house earlier.”

  “Someone? How do you know?” Kennedy felt her hands and then every part of her body go cold. Someone is stalking me, she’d said to Doyle, but she’d thought she was exaggerating.

  “There’s a knife missing from the block downstairs. Did you take it?” He clasped her hand, where they stood, he at the top of the stairs and she two steps down from the top.

  “There wasn’t one missing before?”

  “No.” He eyed her, scrutinized her face. For a second he looked afraid of her, and she wondered if—after years of hiring lawyers and declaring her innocence—he might actually believe she had committed the crime.

  “Well, I didn’t take it. I’ve been at work this whole time.” She wriggled out of his grasp as she removed her coat, then turned to pad back downstairs.

  “You always take your shoes off at the door?” Gerry asked. He pointed to her shoes across the front hall. She was in her stocking feet.

  “Of course. Why?”

  He gestured to the floorboards. “It’s just . . . there was dirty water all through here.”

  Kennedy went into the kitchen to check the patio door. He followed. It was shut tight and locked. She felt along the edge for any place in the rubber that a crowbar or screwdriver could have been shoved through it, but it was intact. She moved to the counter, examined the knife block.

  She was just about to write his concern off as paranoia—when she saw it. She kneeled and swiped at something with her thumb.

  She brought it over to him. In her palm was a yellow leaf, egg shaped, about three inches long.

  They both stared down at it. He sucked in a breath. He asked when she’d last gone out in the back garden, and she shrugged. Not since she’d gotten the job at the call center—she hadn’t run in a couple days. Her thoughts turned to Berk Butler, the way he had come through the dark. The necklace he’d placed on the patio table. The way he’d advanced on her even after seeing the steak knife in her hand, like he had no fear. Her legs felt weak, and she reached for one of the kitchen stools and sank onto it.

  “Should we call the police?” Kennedy was certain her face had turned pallid.

  “It’s just a leaf,” Gerry said, trying to joke it away.

  But a knife was missing, and they both knew what damage a blade could do.

  Chapter 22

  In the passenger seat beside Everett, Dee Nash held a thin file folder in her lap. He could guess there were forms, police reports, witness statements, other things, similar to what was in the box he’d taken from his dad. She still hadn’t told him what was in that manila envelope she’d brought to the first meeting. He knew she must have seen photos of the wounds. Probably worse than he could imagine: hideous smile shapes blackened with blood, dull and deep. The skin had been punctured easily as paper. It was why he hadn’t gone through the box yet.

  “I remember feelings. Moods,” he told Dee. “Not so much, you know, facts.”

  “Children always hear more than parents think they do,” she said, lifting one side of her mouth but not both.

  He remembered his parents’ forgetting he was nearby as they discussed the details of the case with lawyers on the phone, or sometimes over barely eaten dinners. He peered out the windshield. Outside the parked vehicle, Dee’s producer, Josh Winter, was walking back and forth filming the school’s empty quad. A wired young guy in a blazer and ball cap, he paced, smoothly shooting exteriors of Everett’s old high school on a digital camcorder. Everett wasn’t sure he trusted him as much as Dee. He seemed to keep forgetting his sister wasn’t just a story. Riding in Everett’s Mustang, they’d already circled once around Longwood with Everett driving and pointing out locations to them: his mother’s house, the playground where they hung around when Haley was younger, the convenience store where they bought chips and Cokes. He held back the detail that once he’d watched her shoplift an extra candy bar.

  Josh had been in the front seat, shooting footage out the window, saying, “This is great, this is great.”

  But now Dee had climbed into the front, where she could see him and converse with him.

  “We’ll do the on-the-record interview later. Don’t worry about today. We’re just talking,” she reassured him. “I saw your Facebook profile. You have the same birthday as my son, André.”

  It surprised Everett that she was old enough to have a son his age, but more so that she’d gone and looked at his profile. He thought of the photo he’d put up and how Carter’s hair was visible in the background even if her face wasn’t.

  “You have a girlfriend?” Dee asked.

  “Sort of. Not really.”

  “That’s normal enough. You’re young. She know about your past? Or Haley?”

  He cringed into the steering wheel but when he realized he was doing it, he made it look like he was stretching. “It’s too soon in the relationship.”

  Dee nodded. “Tell me about Haley’s boyfriends from that time. Any that you remember besides Berk Butler?”

  “Ty Anderson. He was from our subdivision. My pa didn’t like him . . .”

 
“How come?” She was interested now.

  Everett put his tongue against his lip, thinking how to phrase it. People had always said Ty looked like Lenny Kravitz. But Haley said he didn’t, that it was just a white way of saying he was black in a school that was mostly not. “Ted Kimberson wasn’t the most open-minded.”

  Dee made a sound in the back of her throat.

  “Ryan Whittles—I remember hearing his name. They seemed to hang out . . . a month maybe? There were other boys she liked, I think, but she didn’t really have a boyfriend, like someone who called at the house.” Everett thought his parents had not been prepared for a child who moved at daughter speed. One day it was Jem and the Holograms. Next she’d been caught stealing lip balm at the Body Shop. In contrast, Marly still treated Everett like a little boy. He worried whether he would betray himself in the interview with Dee, let out all these stories he was still holding back.

  Dee nodded her head. “I know these names from the files. So I know they were checked at the time; the question is always how closely.”

  “How closely,” Everett echoed.

  Dee faced him. “I know it’s tough. It’s your family, but this violence tells us that this was someone who was very intense in their feelings. Personal. Probably happened quickly.”

  Dee nodded to the man outside the car and he gestured that he was going to circle the campus.

  Everett thumbed the key chain in the ignition. A Butler’s discount card hung from it. “So you should look at Berk Butler again. I remember him picking her up that night. He stood at the door, looking in, but not too much. He hovered. Didn’t take his sunglasses off. I went back to the Nintendo and Haley ran out, told me to tell Mom that Kennedy picked her up. Probably because he was older and all. We’re talking thirty seconds.”

  Everett closed his eyes and tried to picture Berk’s vehicle. He couldn’t even recall what kind it was. He reckoned he must have told all this to the officers at the time, but now it was a fog.

  Dee opened the file and looked at his face. “That was the last time you saw your sister?”

  He felt his breath hitch.

  She touched his shoulder. “You were a child, Everett.”

  “I don’t know if she got in the front or back seat. If anyone else was there.”

  She looked at the file. “At the time, your mother told the investigators Haley’s black bra was new. Most of them were white. Do you remember that?”

  It was about him and his mother, this file, he realized, glancing over. That’s why it was thin. It was notes on what he and Marly and Ted had said the day Haley was found. There weren’t going to be photographs. Everett felt himself relax a little as he shook his head.

  “Josh’s thought was that a black bra was her trying to be . . . more mature. Do you think maybe she had someone older she wanted to impress?” Dee asked.

  In no way did Everett want to think about Haley’s bras, even if he did remember the strangeness of the black one that year, dripping dry on the shower bar amid the usual white and taupe ones. He shrugged.

  Josh came back and opened Dee’s door, waited for Dee to get out and pull her seat forward so he could squeeze into the back. Everett had volunteered to drive because he knew the area, but he hadn’t thought about how impractical the Mustang was for multiple passengers.

  Josh spoke while still looking at his footage. “She bought a knife at a yard sale with Kennedy and Carter. Do you remember anything about that?”

  “Her teacher, Mr. Harding, caught her with it at school. She got detention and was real upset about that. Haley liked Mr. Harding. Ma said he was the one who set her up with an internship.”

  Everett watched as Dee threw Josh a reprimanding glance.

  “We don’t know that’s the weapon,” Dee said firmly.

  “Four and a half inches, not serrated,” Josh answered. He knew Haley’s murder like Everett’s father knew baseball stats.

  Dee raised an eyebrow at him. With two of them there, it began to feel a lot more to Everett like those conversations with police officers.

  “My pa was always saying he would take us camping, but he never did. That’s why she had it.” He grabbed the key chain, started up the car, checked his rearview mirror, and headed out of the lot. “He wasn’t great about following through on things. He’s recovered now, but—”

  “Did they get along?” Josh asked from the back.

  Everett took a corner too sharply, realized he should slow down. “He wasn’t in a great mood with anyone, I’d say.” Everett remembered the clink of beer bottle caps hitting the recycling bin within a minute of his father’s coming home from work. He’d always tried to steer clear of drunk Ted. The only time his father seemed relaxed was when he was watching baseball, a sport Everett had played and watched mostly to gain a few hours of peace with him.

  Josh said he had the footage he needed, if Everett wanted to drop him off at the coffee shop lot where they’d met.

  “Your father hasn’t returned our call,” Dee said, and asked if Everett had discussed the show with him. Everett pulled the car into the lot and parked beside Josh’s car.

  After Josh disappeared into his car, Dee suggested Everett drive around and talk a little more. As he cruised up and down the streets of Longwood, Everett said he’d gone out to see Ted and Judy and come home with a box from the civil trial. Dee turned quickly in her seat, the softness she usually employed gone.

  “Have you found anything in it you think we should see?”

  “I haven’t really looked.”

  Everett was driving along the east side of the woods. In his peripheral vision, the trees were brown and yellow shadows dancing. He and Haley had hiked there. She’d taken him to fish in the creek, though he doubted there were ever fish there. It was probably just an older-sister game of make-believe, to keep him busy when their parents had to work late. She’d taken him to some of her favorite spots, and he remembered how they lay on their backs, staring upward at the branches, the peaty smell of damp earth. She’d carved her initials in one of the trees, he remembered her telling him. He may have responded with something like, Don’t tell Captain Planet! Trees are living things.

  Everett peered ahead at the road as the sign for the Mobil gas station flew past. In the trunk where he’d stashed it, he knew the box smelled mossy, damp, like the earth he’d lain on with his sister. He had peeked in and seen what looked like police files alongside a family album and some old VHS cassettes labeled by year, names of vacation destinations he could barely remember. He’d put the lid back on and left it in there.

  “Why don’t you bring me the files at the office?” Dee suggested. “I don’t mind helping go through them.”

  “I couldn’t take them out. They’re still in the trunk,” Everett said.

  “The trunk of the car?” Dee’s voice rose. She looked over her shoulder as if she had X-ray vision and could scan them from where she sat. She directed him to do a U-turn and go back to the Mobil lot. They could have a quick flip through them there.

  * * *

  —

  Dee combed through much of the box quickly, wearing a pair of reading glasses, sorting manila envelopes into piles she twisted around and placed behind her on the backseat. Almost all of it was transcripts of depositions. Sitting in the front seat, Everett tried to read them, remembering some things but confused by others. The box was wedged between Dee’s feet on the passenger-side floor. She was more efficient and confident than he was, or maybe she retained every bit of information with a glance—Everett wasn’t sure.

  “The thing about this case is it’s rich kid against rich kid. Butlers vs. Wynns,” Dee said, looking up from a transcript. “And when you get that many lawyers in a room, oh my, the victim disappears. No one knows what the truth is anymore.”

  “I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” Everett smoothed his hands over his je
ans to try to get the sweat off them. He wondered how all this typing—the ums and the uhs left in, the wandering questions and answers—could add up to horror, remembered how twisted his dreams were throughout his childhood, how he’d be almost swimming rather than running from someone or something unknown through the black woods, how he’d see his sister trapped somewhere and not be able to get there.

  “This is good.” Dee tapped a file folder against her chin, then set it back in the box. She glanced at the station. “We need some coffee,” she said excitedly.

  After she’d gone, stepping out from the car, careful not to upset the box, pushing her glasses case back into her purse, Everett watched her walk across the lot. He had no idea who half the people in the transcripts were. Experts in the effects of LSD, child psychologists, and even knife-wound specialists who argued—using words like plunge lines, spines, and ricassos—that “a young girl simply could not inflict those wounds.” That statement struck him and echoed what Dee had told him at their first meeting.

  Everett dug his hand down in the box, feeling around, and found an envelope unlike the rest of the things in it. It had the Longwood Baptist Church logo in the left-hand corner and his father’s name where the addressee should go. Everett picked it up and opened it. There was something heavy in the bottom of the envelope but he pulled out the sheet of paper first. It showed a simple female body diagram with many dots marked on it, mostly on the torso, one on the right hand, and over her pelvis a large pen circle. Gestational Age: 6 wks was written on the side.

  Everett looked back at the envelope. In the return address was “Dr. Carpenter.” He was a deacon at their church. Everett remembered his slicked-back silver hair and cough-drop smell. Grady, his dad called him. As a kid, Everett had assumed he was a medical doctor. Now he realized the old man was a coroner. But Everett didn’t remember ever hearing his parents or anyone else talking about Haley’s being pregnant.