Kennedy said, “I have a note from Haley.”
Carter was silent, torn between two alliances, wanting to know where her sister had gotten it and what it said. But mostly, wanting her to come, be with her for the first time in a long while. “I’m with Gerry at the hospital. A nurse called to tell me he had a heart attack.”
“I don’t think I can come.”
Carter couldn’t tell if it was hesitance or petulance on Kennedy’s part. She blurted out, “I need you!” before hanging up on her sister. People in the waiting room looked up, and Carter fled their stares by going again to the snack machine, keeping her back to the room as she glared at the snacks without really seeing them. Everett could wait.
* * *
—
Carter saw Kennedy arrive before Kennedy saw her. She was wearing the pants and belt Carter had picked out for her before she was released from prison. On top she had a men’s T-shirt. Kennedy edged through the foyer with halting movements, as if she didn’t know whether to approach the information desk or choose a hospital wing.
Carter stood up, wiping the Dorito dust from her fingers uncharacteristically on her pants. Kennedy spotted her and headed over.
“It’s Nathan’s,” Kennedy said defensively when Carter stared at the shirt.
Kennedy’s shoulders twitched, in that catlike way she had, like she could feel and hear things no one else could. It was the hug she must have sensed before it landed. Carter grabbed her by the shoulders and pressed her ear against Kennedy’s, her elbow wrapping her neck and locking her there.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Carter said.
“Stop it,” Kennedy said, and it took Carter a second to realize she meant stop crying, not stop hugging her, not stop apologizing. Kennedy dragged her down into the row of chairs by the hand.
“Everett’s the only person that’s made me happy in fifteen years. And I know, I know. It’s probably because broken things go together.” Carter searched her pocket for a Kleenex. “Do you remember when you were young and a boy could look at you and it was so overwhelming you thought you would die?”
“I never felt that way. I just assumed they would look at us.” Kennedy lifted the sleeve of the oversize T-shirt and offered it to her sister to wipe her nose on. Satyricon, the logo on the shirt said. When Carter hesitated she said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s a metal band.”
“Gross,” Carter said. She managed to find a crumpled ball of tissue in her purse instead.
“I’m not angry about Everett. I’m mad you didn’t trust me.”
“I know.” Carter felt like her face was reddening; she took two deep breaths. She didn’t know how to begin to repair the space that had come between them. “I’m sorry about that too. He’s talking to a crime show about Haley. He said—”
“Are you going to talk to them?” Kennedy scratched at her cheek. “How many people watch that show, do you think?”
“You would never—” But Carter cut herself off. There was no such thing as never with Kennedy and she knew it. She had owned her part of the crime from the beginning. Touching Haley, trying to make her prettier—more peaceful, maybe—in her death.
“I was thinking about Haley earlier,” Carter said.
Kennedy interjected. “There was someone else who could have come to the woods that night. Nathan and I went out there and I remembered: I called someone.”
The double doors to the lobby opened and Carter watched as a man was wheeled in a chair through the lobby by an orderly. His mouth was bruised on one side and a white eye patch had been taped onto his skin. He passed them, unseeing. She clutched Kennedy’s arm and whispered, “Berk?”
Kennedy turned in time to watch Berk Butler being spun around and lifted into the elevator.
“What did you do, Doyle?” Kennedy said to herself, but to Carter she didn’t look all that surprised.
“Dad’s stable. Come see him.”
Kennedy didn’t answer. She took Carter’s hand. “I called him that night.”
“Berk?”
“Dad.”
“That doesn’t mean—why wouldn’t he ever tell us that?” Tears sprang to Carter’s eyes. She cleared her throat. “I don’t understand. You’re going to see him at the house when he’s let out.”
“No, I can’t. I’ll stay at Nathan’s apartment.”
Carter tried to read her body language. She had stiffened. “What about your parole?”
“Carter? Dad came to pick us up that night.” Kennedy took a folded piece of paper from her jacket pocket and passed it to Carter. “And I found this fifteen years late. She must have hidden it in the house for me to find, put it in my bed like we always did.”
“That night?” Carter reached for the note. She had forgotten that teenage-girl hands could fold a full sheet of paper so tiny.
Tears came again, steady enough to slide and fall, as Carter saw Haley’s name at the end of the letter and read what she should have known years ago. She reread it, then held the note even as she sobbed. Kennedy gently took it from her before it could get wet and was refolding it when a nurse came to them and passed a pamphlet to them: Coping with Grief and Loss.
“We also have a chapel,” the nurse offered, thinking they’d just lost someone close to them.
Chapter 41
When Gerry opened his eyes his two little girls were standing at the foot of his bed. Kennedy, he was pretty sure, on the left and Carter on the right. Yes, that was Kennedy, he thought, noting her hair was shorter. He tried to rub his eyes, but it hurt to lift his arms. They weren’t dressed in matching outfits as they usually were.
“Where’s your mother?” he said, but his hoarse voice croaked. He glanced around and saw the hospital room, a pitcher of water on a rolling table. Neither girl moved to get a glass for him. He struggled to sit up, and Carter held out what he thought was a homemade get-well card. Gerry shook his head. He must have been half dreaming. His girls were adults now, he thought, arguing with his own dream. The nurse had changed the IV bag earlier and he had no idea what was in it—maybe morphine; he knew that inspired crazy dreams. He smiled at the thought of Kennedy and Carter’s being young again.
“I hate you,” Carter said. She held out the note that Haley had written years before. There was nothing girlish about her tone.
Kennedy touched her arm. Gerry looked at her face, so similar to Laine’s when she was their age. He tilted his head and sighed. They were beautiful, his lovely girls, and they were together again.
“Stop smiling,” Kennedy said.
Carter held the note up again. “We know it was you.”
Gerry shook his head. “I’m so thirsty,” he said.
“Gerry!” Kennedy came around the side of the bed and took him by his arm, shaking him briskly. On her face was a hard expression.
He started. “You’re real,” he said. “Are you real?”
Kennedy nodded. “We are. But you don’t exist anymore.”
A nurse in pink scrubs appeared in the doorway. She said something Gerry only half heard about getting him too excited. She was at his side now, not his daughters. She pressed a button on the heart monitor. The girls were fading away, back toward the wall under the exit sign.
* * *
—
Gerry woke that night to a flash in the corridor. It was immediately clear to him that she had followed him there. The nurses and the doctor earlier had told him he needed to rest. They’d observe him for another day. When he tried to talk, they told him to sleep. Now she was here. He reached up and pulled the tabs off his chest, detached himself from their monitors. The nursing staff would come, but he wanted them to. He wanted them to see.
He gripped the IV stand and rolled it out into the hallway. Each step he took dragged. His chest and shoulders still hurt, as if he’d been punched. Gerry looked down the passageway, some doors open, s
ome closed. The nurses’ station was to the right. To the left, a bright vapor. Like something had been burning. There she stood. Her eyes were downcast, her lips moving as if she had been singing to herself before he interrupted her. Her yellow shirt was tattered. She looked up at the squeak of his IV stand. She stared at him, her eyes bruised, the orange lashes a bright contrast. She went back to muttering.
When he got closer he said, “I can’t hear you.”
He turned and glanced back over his shoulder. Why didn’t the nurses come? He walked a few more steps toward her. The air between them flickered, a shock like static. Her voice was almost guitar feedback, the kind his daughters once listened to.
“I knew you would come,” she said. “I knew you would come.”
She sounded happy, though her ashy face stared blankly at him. Her voice was like a recording, playing from the wrong figure in the wax museums of Gerry’s youth.
“Yes, I’m here,” he said uncertainly.
“Let’s go into the woods. I want to show you something.”
“We’re not in the woods,” he said, and took a step away from her.
Haley raised her arm to him, held out her fingers, fluttering them delicately, a girl inviting him to the dance floor. Her nails were full of dirt and a hole ran through one hand. Blood flowed down from the wound, a ribbon wrapped around her forearm.
“I knew you would come,” she said, again happily, her voice following the same cadence as before. “I knew you would come.”
He wondered what to say to a ghost.
Haley stared at him. “Let’s go into the woods. I want to show you something.”
The ghost girl turned then. Gerry followed her in his bare feet, his blue cotton hospital gown. The floor beneath his heels was wet with muddy water. As she put her arms at her sides and led the way the blood ran off the tip of her finger. Gerry stepped over the trail.
“I want to show you something.” Haley pushed open the stairwell doors and turned back, blinking at Gerry, waiting for him to look. A beetle ran out from beneath her disheveled hair and scurried over her cheek, but she didn’t flinch. Gerry peered into the stairwell and saw instead a gas pump glowing in the thick pool of night, the long stretch of Smoke Line one had to drive to get there.
Chapter 42
Even with Doyle sitting across from her in a yellow jumpsuit Kennedy felt the idiot was still worth it. If not for the protection then for his beauty, which he couldn’t erase, no matter how many green-ink tattoos and bad decisions he threw at it.
“I am sorry. Real sorry about this,” he said, showing her a palm, thumb up.
“Just tell me what happened.”
“Got in my head to do the right thing.”
“How did that, of all things, ever make it inside your head?” she asked.
“Meth. Needed to level out a bit after the woods. But it’s not really my thing. Butler was easier to find than your tree.”
Kennedy looked at his knuckles, still bloody and swollen, folded now in his lap. She looked around them, the concrete walls. County jail wasn’t high security, and they sat close together on blue chairs. “I’m on parole,” she said, talking low. “I can’t believe I’m even here. If I’m caught—”
“It’s cool. They know me here.”
“That’s kind of the problem with you.”
Nathan leaned forward, his gaze unwavering. “I stuck up for you. Ain’t a lotta people doing that. I’m right or am I right?”
“Just tell me what you did for me.” Kennedy arched an eyebrow at him. She wanted to hear him tell it.
“I go down to the Butler’s. I walk in—no one pays any mind. I look like I should be hauling or delivering. I get right in Berk’s face and tell him what my business is with him.”
She already knew how it would go but asked anyway. “Then what happened?”
“Rich boys fall fast. Best punch there is.” He made a small clocking motion with the bruised hand. “So he’s on the ground with all this old rotten broccoli and I’m kicking him and yelling so everybody can hear, ‘You killed that little girl, didn’t you? You killed her.’”
“He didn’t. He’s an asshole, but he didn’t kill anyone.”
“Still the most fun I had since I got out. ’Cept being with you.”
“How long are you going to be in here?”
“Six months for parole violation. Can’t do nothing about that. More if he charges. But he ain’t going to charge.”
“Of course he will. He’ll put you away and me too.”
Nathan shook his head and winked. “I told the police about those photos. Said that’s why my blood was up. They were real interested so they’re going to be swinging by his place soon.”
“All thanks to your good citizenship?”
“You better believe it.”
Chapter 43
Carter pulled up in front of the pizza place. Nathan Doyle’s apartment was upstairs. Kennedy had been living there since he went into county for assaulting Berk Butler. The rent was paid for the remainder of the month, and Kennedy said the place fixed up better once a mop had been through it and a few home items had been purchased from the nearby Target. Carter had offered to let Kennedy stay at her apartment, but when Kennedy said no, she didn’t argue. She knew they didn’t need to be slid in beside each other like books on a shelf. They were still repairing their relationship. They were similar people, but they weren’t the same. Time had made sure of that.
Kennedy must have been watching because she was already coming out of the building. She ran to the Honda and got in. “We’re really going to do this?” Kennedy asked as Carter drove. Then she answered her own question. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
“I’m so mad I can’t form sentences.” Carter braked early for a yellow light.
“Try this: Red leather, yellow leather. Red leath—”
“Don’t tease me!” Carter accelerated as the light changed.
“I’m not. How’s Everett?”
Carter nodded. “He says good luck.”
Carter and Everett were navigating the new lines of their relationship, one that allowed them to go out in public together. Earlier that week, they’d taken a walk through the Maymont estate, in the geometric Italian gardens, before returning to their much less organized lives. Not much was growing yet, but Everett had been sweet, laying a finger on that spot on her neck that made her squeeze inside. Neither of them had asked when they would tell Marly.
Kennedy pointed. “That’s it,” she said, indicating the address that she held on a contract in her lap. Carter parked the car in the lot between the bingo hall and the drab single-story office building where Crime After Crime had set up.
Carter opened her door and got out of the Honda, spreading her scarf over her neck and chest, not because of the cold but to hide in that moment. She felt a brief welling up of panic but didn’t want Kennedy to know.
Kennedy opened her door and stood up, one hand on the roof of the car, the other on the door. “Give me a good line in case I clam up. Something you would say. Something poetic and smart.”
“You won’t,” Carter said. She waited for Kennedy to shut the door, then clicked the key fob and the doors locked. “Catharsis begins with paperwork. They’ll probably have you speak to the lawyer before they take you to the actual interview site.”
As Carter trailed behind Kennedy she took in her stance, her neck and shoulders straight with resolve. She wasn’t blind angry, as Carter had been; she was determined. Seeing it gave Carter her own sense of strength.
* * *
—
Josh Winter was ready for them when they opened the door of the small office. He asked if they had their paperwork and the twins nodded. He snapped on a pair of blue latex gloves and picked up a swab test.
Carter opened her mouth and Josh ran the swab inside, then recapped it in i
ts tube. Kennedy opened her mouth, and he repeated the procedure.
“What if it turns out we’re not sisters?” Carter said to break the tension, and Kennedy laughed.
The producer snapped off the gloves and led them into the main office, where Dee Nash was waiting.
Dee came over to Carter and Kennedy. Her gaze shifted between them, but she seemed to know Kennedy. She took her hand first. Dee’s handshake included holding her grip longer than necessary and with both hands, as if meeting a dignitary. Then Kennedy sat at a table with the producer, Josh Winter, saying she understood as he briefed her on how the interview would proceed, initialing the papers he pushed across the surface. Carter had been right. They asked Carter again if she would consider being interviewed, but she shook her head. “Kennedy will be better at it.”
“One more thing,” Dee said. “If you have anything from that time, photos, or maybe objects that were passed between you and Haley Rae Kimberson?”
“I’ll see if I might have something like that,” Kennedy said, but she glanced briefly at Carter, and Carter felt their radio again. She could see from her sister’s face that she had thought of something specific.
Chapter 44
Kennedy stared into the bathroom mirror as the makeup artist danced a soft brush down her cheek. Out in the hotel suite the crew fussed, moved lights around, and wrestled with disagreeable gels. When Kennedy had arrived in her chosen outfit—boot-cut jeans and an old crushed-velvet jacket over a T-shirt—Dee Nash had said, “We have to help you out,” and sent a production assistant to the Carytown boutiques.
The assistant came back with two on-brand dresses—charcoal and black—and a marigold-yellow blouse with a bow. Kennedy had never learned adult fashion the way other women were able to: that day-by-day learning that accrued while childish phat pants gave way to hip-huggers, then to perfect slacks. Kennedy chose the black dress—it was the easy one—but the TV host shook her head and said, “Trust me. Go with the blouse.”
Little Threats Page 24
