Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  “What happens now? Do you ask them to reopen the case?” Everett said as he got out of the Mustang.

  Dee took the tray and headed toward the building. She was already on her cell phone. “Winter, where are you?” She keyed in a code beside a double door. “Have you looked into our liability insurance yet? Tell me you did, or you’re fired.”

  Everett followed her down a hallway.

  “Because it’s goddamn important, Josh. This is not a little thing. We’re talking about potential evidence, taken from a private residence. Because if this thing opens up again a judge would never allow it, so come up with a better story.”

  Everett worried they were talking about him, that he had somehow failed as “Deputy Everett” but then wondered how they could already be working on the thing he was bringing them. He’d only called Dee half an hour before.

  She held the door with one high-heeled boot for him as she finished the call.

  “I do apologize,” she said.

  She unlocked a door and brought Everett into a three-hundred-square-foot space. It was stacked with gear cases and banker’s boxes, and housed one large table and three mismatched chairs. The window looked out on the main street. Everett was surprised that TV could happen in a space like this. He understood why they’d filmed in the hotel. In the small workroom, he could smell himself sweating and realized he’d had a burst of adrenaline after finding the knife. He felt shaky. Everett sat down on one of the chairs.

  She folded her hands on the table. “Kennedy pled, and she served the time. No one likes to be made to work, especially when the job’s already done. But things are getting serious now. That DNA evidence, we sent it to a private lab. If we get it back in time for the show, then the state will have to reopen.”

  Everett stared at the table, at the knife inside the plastic sewing tray. “I can accept that it’s my father.” He felt ashamed and exhaled deeply.

  She sat down across from him and fixed him with a steady gaze. “Why do you think that?”

  “The knife was hidden, at my home.”

  “The knife was there. But was it hidden? You’re making a supposition. Not stating a fact.”

  Everett had already told her on the phone where his mother had found it, dust furred, how she’d wiped it off and thrown it into a drawer. From his perspective it would mean that either his sister lost it there before the crime, or someone in his family put it there. No one else he knew had access to their garage.

  “My father did this.” Everett rubbed at his nose. It was a new belief for him and he wasn’t used to its being challenged. He also still wasn’t ready to say the word molestation and wondered if that was still the word used. “He did other things. To Haley. Probably more than he admitted to me.”

  “I’m sorry that happened. That’s horrible.”

  Everett watched as Dee got up and went to a safe in the corner. She bent down and unlocked it.

  When she came back, she set a bag down on the table. Inside was a long, thin metal object. Everett stared at it. It looked like a dagger, but not a real one, more ornamental, like a stage play version. It was about eight inches long, silver with a Lucite design on the handle. Dee asked if it meant anything to him and he shook his head. He had never seen Kennedy or Carter with it?

  “No,” he responded.

  Dee sat down across from him again. “This letter opener was made by a company in Columbus called Betterpoint between 1920 and 1980. They’re still in business, but not the letter-opener business. Guess people don’t open emails with a blade. I feel that it would have been a gift item, something given to Gerry Wynn during his career. A promotion? I can’t say for sure, of course.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “That’s between me and my producer. Who may not be that for much longer.”

  “Is . . . Is this—?” Everett felt the words get slippery. His pulse throbbed in his temples. He started to stand up, then sat back down again.

  “You can’t get too attached to knives. These are both interesting, but there are millions out there. DNA, on the other hand. That’s unique to a family: mother, father, child. Carter Wynn. Do you think we could get a sample from her?”

  “Carter?” Everett was beginning to feel like he had the time the police questioned him as a kid. They’d given him Twix bars and let him play with their hats and badges, but at the end of the day they were grilling a nine-year-old about his family and neighbors.

  “How long were you involved? Now, don’t look so surprised, there’s that pretty hair behind you right on your Facebook profile.” Dee smiled.

  He sat there, dazed, for a moment. “Not long,” he admitted finally, though everything about their relationship seemed strong enough to bend time.

  “Long enough she was angry you’re talking to us, I bet. Do you think she would help us?”

  Everett touched the corner of the bag and pulled it closer. He asked if it could really kill someone.

  Martin Luther King Jr. had been stabbed with a letter opener in 1958, Dee told him. King survived, of course. It was a lady, probably carried the damn thing inside her handbag. So it wouldn’t be the first time it had happened. In his sister’s case, no one questioned—including Berk or Kennedy—had had cuts on their hands. “That’s unusual,” Dee said.

  Everett held up his hand to stop her talking as a chill ran through him. He didn’t need her to explain, didn’t want to think about the weapon’s becoming slippery, being fumbled in anger. He looked down. The opener had dull sides.

  Dee moved to bag up the camping knife, slipping it expertly from the tray he’d brought it in. She took the two blades away, back to the safe. When he saw his evidence that he’d found being filed away, joining all the evidence from over the years—pieces of junk all as subjective as mercury running through your hands—he stood up. “I just want to know who did it. My dad? Kennedy? Kennedy’s dad?”

  “Here’s what we need to do, Everett . . .” Dee placed one hand into the other out in front of her chest like she was making a prayer or a bond with him. “You’ll give me your DNA. Then I want you to get her DNA. We test her DNA, it’s as good as testing her father’s.”

  “But DNA, that’s a little personal.”

  “No. It can be anything. Hair. Bit of saliva off a glass or bottle.”

  Embarrassed by his own naiveté, Everett paused, listened to the cars in the street outside the office. He supposed he could ask her, he said.

  “Or,” Dee suggested, “just invite her over, offer her a drink, and give us the glass after. Familial DNA is acceptable in Virginia.”

  “You mean, you take my saliva—”

  “For your father, and her saliva for her father.”

  Everett grabbed an empty sample collection bag off the table. “If you want the Wynn DNA, go get it yourself. They’re down at the hospital. I’ll give you mine, but it is going to say there’s a piece of shit out in Shenandoah who should be in jail. Not sitting in a redneck mansion that Haley’s murder helped pay for.”

  “Sit down.”

  She was firm in her command. Everett didn’t realize how loud he had gotten. He sat down and breathed again. Dee opened up a manila envelope and took out a wrinkled photocopy. She handed it to him and asked, “Do you know the name Doug Macaulay?”

  “That’s the lawyer from her co-op placement?” Everett shook his head as he took the paper. It was a typed letter dated August 1993. He read it and realized only an hour ago he’d told Carter all the wrong things.

  Chapter 38

  Kennedy and Nathan were walking hand in hand, and she was happy enough for a minute to forget what had happened in the woods.

  “Do you feel it? It’s good weed,” he said with pride.

  It was a conversation Kennedy must have had a dozen times, but long ago. Nathan flicked a finger up her wrist and she stopped, pulled him close. They paus
ed to kiss. After a few minutes, Kennedy came out of her pot fog and said this wasn’t why they’d come here. Nathan was persistent, continuing to bump and nudge her as they walked, groping her lightly until she said, “We have to find it.”

  “Don’t blame me,” he said. For a second she feared he’d bring up the photos she’d shown him. But he didn’t. He said: “I can’t resist your pretty eyes.”

  He stepped up on a log and began to walk along it.

  She moved ahead of him. December had made the woods a skeletal version of the way they’d been that July. She hadn’t told Doyle that this was where she’d actually found Haley, and he continued to talk to her, hazy from the pot, about nothing.

  As she and Doyle wandered farther in, the sounds of Smoke Line and the expressway faded, and he turned silent too. Kennedy watched the muscles in his back ripple and thought of that gun tattoo by his hip. I look at you and that’s not there, he’d said. But what kind of violence was Nathan himself capable of? she wondered. She was still unused to being around men.

  Kennedy knew she was feeling paranoid, now that dusk was coming. She suddenly felt as vulnerable as she had as a teenager, when she’d look at a boy and think his hair was like velvet and all the arm hairs and prickly parts of him were beautiful thorns that might catch her. She tried to remember to look for the tree with the initials carved into it. She recalled Haley at one time saying she had a favorite tree, but after so many years all the trees were alike to Kennedy. They were blank faces, and no trunk seemed to hold any special marking. Standing there with the smell of the bark, the dampness, the dull grass and fallen leaves, she felt her sense of time collapse. She could have been sixteen or thirty-one. Kennedy was high in the woods. She breathed deep and the air felt reedy in her throat. It could have been 1993 or 2008. She turned in the silent, dark wood, looking for Doyle but didn’t see him or hear him anymore.

  * * *

  —

  Sixteen-year-old Kennedy had come to the edge of the woods, where she would need to turn for home, and found herself not wanting to go. She’d pivoted and walked alongside the brushland in the other direction, to where she lay down in long grass and imagined herself swimming in the sky. She was alone with crickets and other jumping bugs, and an owl creating a symphony of sound and sparks, until she heard screaming in the dark trees that sent the bird and the swirling bug lights scattering. She assumed it had to do with Fourth of July.

  She remembered the yellow mist of dawn touching her, lying on her forearms like a whisper, and how she had gotten up and brushed herself off. Time still existed after all, and she headed for home, insect bitten and thirsty as the sun was coming up, to find Haley.

  But Haley wasn’t there, and when she phoned the Kimberson house she wasn’t there either, so Kennedy returned to the woods.

  * * *

  —

  Thirty-one-year-old Kennedy was cold in the woods and alone, again. She’d found her way to the creek. Where was Doyle? He’d been walking behind her, balancing on a fallen tree. Then he was gone. She called out his name, but he didn’t answer. The dead leaves rustled in the wind. She’d been waiting that night too, she thought. Haley walked off singing, and Kennedy stood in the Mobil parking lot, before starting home along Smoke Line. She remembered waiting there for someone. Berk had a pager. Had she called it from the pay phone? Had she called home? Numbers, do numbers even exist anymore? she remembered Haley’s saying.

  Kennedy sank to her knees and lay back on the ground, a little ways from the creek, unable to go exactly there. She stared up at a darkening sky that was also fifteen years older. A man, she said, out loud or in her head, she wasn’t sure. A man did this. I didn’t do this.

  She sat up and removed crisp yellow leaves from her hair, like a dead girl waking up. She understood now why, when confronted with a powerful emotion, Carter was always saying she couldn’t breathe. Kennedy crawled, then rose and stumble-ran back through the forest. Her mother had been right to warn her about men. She’d just warned her about the wrong ones.

  The knowledge left Kennedy absolutely alone in the universe. She turned, screaming Nathan Doyle’s name, but no return call came. Where had he wandered off to and why wasn’t he here when she needed him? After a few moments the screams of his name just turned into a long, wordless wail as she tipped her head back—if she screamed, she could breathe—and the pain that had built inside her for years climbed up into the branches of every tree that Haley had loved.

  Chapter 39

  Berk hadn’t seen the girl who looked like Haley since Thanksgiving, but a part of him wondered if he had done too much acid and, like all things nineties, it was catching up to him. He’d looked online and read about a condition called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, also known as permafried. But he never saw trails or tracers.

  He paced around the loading dock of the Butler’s store with his clipboard, trying not to think about it. No more phone calls from the TV show had come since his trip to DC to see Julian, and no one strange was trying to contact him through Facebook. He wondered how much worry he was making up on his own. Maybe he hadn’t needed to go see Julian, at least not for that reason. If he was making up all his worry about this, he wondered how much had he made up about the night Haley died.

  As he counted off crates of Romanesco on his list he paused and remembered that it was a fractal vegetable, each bud a self-similar recursion of itself. He considered the possibility of his life’s having been one long repeating dream since that July Fourth. It was plausible but silly, like an idea from one of those stoner books he had packed in the garage, maybe something by Terence McKenna or Jean Baudrillard. Besides, if this life was his hallucination of choice, he had to be punishing himself for something.

  He would rather punish Kennedy.

  An offer had come in on his house from someone who said they’d looked at one like it over in Blueheart—but wanted it cheaper. Berk’s subdivision, Bittercress, had a lower school rating and fewer shops. They were bidding way less than Berk could afford to accept. But Oz was pushing him to take it, at the same time Serenity had told him she was going to visit her mother in Nevada.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “However long I need.”

  * * *

  —

  Berk looked up from his clipboard to see a tattooed man hop up on the loading dock with one move and advance toward him. He assumed Nathan Doyle was another trucker who’d forgotten to get something signed. “Can I help you?”

  Nathan didn’t stop walking until his nose was an inch away from Berk’s face. “Stay the goddamn away from Kennedy Wynn. Hear me, boy?”

  Berk flinched at his breath and spit and stepped back. He glanced around and saw several of his stock clerks aware of the discussion he was having. He knew they’d help if things got heavy. Berk snickered and spat out, “You’re about right for Kennedy. Pure trash.”

  Before Berk could punctuate his sentence, Nathan’s fist smashed into his face. Berk saw black and then bright static as he went to the ground. For no more than a moment the static reminded him of the fireworks in the sky when he left Haley and Kennedy in the woods.

  As he was kicked in the stomach Berk saw his staff standing around. They did nothing to stop Nathan.

  Chapter 40

  For an hour Carter stared at him. Sleeping. His face was slack, someone at ease. She remembered, when she was young, one of her friends had said he looked like Richard Gere. She’d never seen it. Who had liked Richard Gere? Whatever pain her father was in, his face wasn’t holding it. Carter could only watch the evidence of his heartbeat and blood pressure on the machine. The nurses had said a doctor would come and talk to Carter shortly, but no one came.

  She hesitated to call Kennedy at work when she knew nothing but the steady blip of temperature, pulse, but in the end, she 411’ed the call center. They said Kennedy had missed her shift.

  She was
debating her choices when a text came.

  Rochester: When you were with your mom at the hospital that night, was your dad with you?

  She’d left to come to the hospital after the phone call, and he’d gone to meet Dee Nash to show her the knife. He must have found his phone. How did her parents’ being at the hospital back in ’93 mean anything? It didn’t make any sense to Carter, and Everett did not, in all honesty, have the acuity of a detective. Carter peered down at the text, then walked over to a row of chairs and sat. The hard plastic beneath her made it easy to recall the hours of waiting on chairs like this one.

  She remembered how they finally took Laine in for tests at midnight and there was more shifting from one waiting room to another, Carter gathering up their purses and Laine’s clothes and shoes since they had her in a gown. At two in the morning a bed opened for Laine, and Carter was relieved to get out of the hallway, where every stranger who passed by seemed to leave a periwinkle trail behind them, a visual smudge. Gerry came just after they were settled in the room, wearing his work clothes, a stiff white shirt and gray dress pants. She remembered how terrified he looked at the prospect of Laine’s being sick. In her mind, she could hear him going over things with the nurses. Then he’d walked over to Laine and croaked, “Get some rest.” He told Carter that since there was only one chair in the room, he’d go sleep in the car. He’d be there for them in the morning—page him if the doctor came in. She’d been relieved. She hadn’t known how to make conversation with him while high.

  Her cell rang, startling her from the reverie. The number showed the name Gerry Wynn. His landline. Kennedy.

  “Why aren’t you at work?!” Carter scolded. The lines I don’t want to be here alone with this. I was alone with Mom. Don’t make me do this again stayed inside Carter. She knew her sister had no idea about Gerry’s being there.