Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  Kennedy met Carter’s gaze in the mirror. She nodded in agreement. “We’ll look better in it,” Carter said.

  Kennedy glanced in the mirror once more as she was called to the interview set. With her hair fuller, face defined, and thirty-one-year-old body a strange revelation to her, Kennedy realized she looked exactly like Carter for the first time since they were sixteen.

  * * *

  —

  The producer and the host had assured her there was no need to be nervous, but as Kennedy sat in the armchair, she couldn’t help but feel guilt. Whatever she said now would be what she said forever. She hadn’t expected there to be more than one camera, an audience of men in cargo pants, moving cables and fixing her mic. How could she feel guilt when he’d let her sit in prison all those years?

  Dee smiled, then her face shifted to serious. “What do you remember about the day they took you to jail?”

  “Loneliness.” The word came out before Kennedy even thought about it.

  “Talk about loneliness.”

  She had never felt entitled to her feelings, and now she explored them tentatively with a stranger: “I was sixteen and I went from a world with my twin sister, seeing our friends every day, to sitting in white empty rooms for a year. I was in isolation until I was eighteen.”

  “What did you think about?”

  “Nothing. Nothing for those two years. Looking back I would say I went crazy. When I went to the general population it was better. I was scared too, but no one knew who I was.”

  “You weren’t ‘Dead Kennedy’ to them?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Did you think about Haley?”

  Kennedy paused, searching back to a time she’d tried to forget. “Not then but later.” The host looked at her, waiting for more, but nothing more came. Kennedy wore dress clothes but they covered years of battle armor. She wasn’t sure she could give it all up yet. She kept her back straight in the armchair, her chin tilted up slightly to ward off the presumption of fear.

  “You don’t remember the evening of her death, still,” Dee said. “But at your sentencing you claimed you were innocent while accepting the charges.”

  “The prosecutor was going to get a conviction any way he could.”

  Kennedy was retreating to defense talking points and unsure that what she needed to say would come out. Dee took it back to the personal. “Tell me about your friendship with Haley.”

  “We were best friends, quick. That’s how it happens when you’re young. She went to our school, but she was not from the same world as most of the families.”

  “Rich girl. Poor girl.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you give her things?”

  “Sure. We bought clothes together. My sister and I took her to concerts. I mean, we had things she didn’t. That was obvious.”

  “What did she give you? Why the friendship?”

  “Haley was free in a way I couldn’t be, because of how my family expected me to be. Haley would do and say anything. She wasn’t afraid of anyone.”

  “Like Berk Butler?”

  “That’s true.”

  “He’s denied that he ever had a relationship with Haley and said the night of her death he dropped you two off at a gas station, then drove miles away from the scene.”

  “They definitely had a relationship that spring and summer.”

  “Did Haley tell you that?”

  “I was passed out in his bathroom after a party. I heard sounds in the other room and I woke up. Haley was making out with Berk and his roommate Julian. I told her to stop, and she invited me in to join. They had taken E. I didn’t know what that was. I had never seen two boys kiss before. When the three of them got naked I went back to bathroom and locked the door.”

  The producer dropped his coffee with a splatter and both host and interviewee turned to look at him. He signaled Dee over to the monitors while two PAs dove with paper towels to soak it up from the carpeted floor.

  Angrily, Dee got up and covered her hot mike with her hand, though Kennedy could still hear her ask, “The fuck was that, Winter?”

  The producer whispered back: “Who’s Julian? I don’t have a Julian in my notes.”

  “I’m ready to keep this interview going. Are you?”

  A PA handed Dee a manila envelope. She came back and took her seat. “I apologize,” she said to Kennedy. “There was a sound issue. It’s amazing what editing can do.”

  “I’m worried about that.” Kennedy glanced toward the other room, where her twin sat on the edge of the bed, watching the shoot.

  “Keep being honest and you won’t have to be.” Dee looked over at Josh. The producer nodded back and they were good to go. Dee returned her attention to the subject. “Without going into details, you would say that Haley was sexually active?”

  “She would finish a phone call with a boy and she would hold up her pinky and say, ‘Got him. Wrapped right here.’ But looking back I think it was the other way around a lot of times. That confidence I loved about her. Maybe it was her fear of not being liked.”

  “You thought Berk liked you at first. Did you think Haley had stolen him? Were you angry?”

  Kennedy paused. She knew her feelings were showing on her face. “I thought he took advantage. They were older. And I knew Berk could be persuasive. I felt he was the one responsible, not her. She was my friend but he was—he was supposed to love me. I loved him, and I had told him so.”

  “Did Berk know Haley was . . . with others?”

  Kennedy took a breath. “Not until later. Haley liked people. She was giving.”

  Dee began to slide paper out of the envelope. “I have here a deposition given by Doug Macaulay. A late business associate, a friend of your father’s.”

  “And my mother too.” Kennedy felt her forehead wrinkle. Laine had alluded to her infidelity once with Carter, who had immediately told Kennedy.

  “This was taken by Macaulay’s own attorney just after your plea. It was given to the state police and never entered into evidence. He had a belief that your father, Gerald Wynn, and Haley Rae Kimberson—”

  Kennedy nodded. “Had a relationship?”

  “Um, yes.” Dee shifted in her chair.

  “That she was pregnant when she was murdered?”

  “Goddammit. Cut.” Dee slapped the letter and envelope on her knee and stood up.

  “You told me to be honest,” Kennedy pleaded as the producer, Josh, rushed over and crouched before her.

  “We need to build up to this,” Dee snapped.

  Josh asked quietly, “Kennedy, where is your lawyer? I think we should get them.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer. I hate lawyers.”

  The producer took off his ball cap to wipe his forehead. He was nervous as he spoke to Kennedy. “We don’t have all the evidence to back the, uh, assertion, that Wynn, your father, was a suspect. Maybe we should have a talk off-camera.”

  “Keep the cameras on,” Kennedy said, suddenly feeling a hot flush of anger on her cheeks. She’d been waiting fifteen years for people to listen to her.

  Josh looked back at Dee. After a moment Dee sat back down in the chair. Josh walked into a different room in the suite while dialing his phone, probably calling the network lawyer.

  “We’ll try it this way. Kennedy. Did Berk Butler have anything to do with Haley’s death?”

  “Yes and no.” Kennedy glanced at the camera. They were still filming.

  “Talk about yes.”

  “He kicked us out of his Jeep in the middle of the woods. We were just girls and we were high.”

  “You were doing acid?”

  “I had never been that high before.”

  “And he had given that drug to you?”

  “All the time that spring. But this time, it was more powerful than
we expected.”

  “And when you say ‘no’ you mean that he did not kill Haley?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know who is responsible?”

  “Yes.”

  Dee met Kennedy’s gaze and leaned forward slightly. She wasn’t going with the producer’s way of doing things. “Can you tell me?”

  Chapter 45

  Gerry waited in the hospital lobby in the wheelchair. The doctors had signed off on his paperwork and he could go home, but he needed a ride and an escort. He’d called the landline half a dozen times and Kennedy wasn’t picking up. That didn’t surprise him since she hadn’t come to sit at his bedside the whole time he’d been there. But Carter—she had that cell phone in her palm twenty-four/seven, never ignored it more than an hour. He tried to remember what they’d said to him when he first awoke in the hospital. Thinking about it gave him a headache that made his eyes water.

  After two, Gerry asked the staff what he could do and they said they could arrange a home care worker to take him. He said all right, then waited another ninety minutes for one to appear and take him back to Blueheart in a cab.

  Her name was Selena, and she told him he’d be just fine. He told her he was not fine at all but stopped short of saying he was a man with a broken heart. Back at the house, it was obvious that Kennedy had cleared out. Her closet was empty and the house was still.

  He could have informed Kennedy’s parole officer she was no longer living with him, but that would have been too much. Gerry was afraid of what his daughters could do now.

  A few days later—no calls returned—he felt motivated enough to get out of bed and go into his office to move out the filing cabinet from the closet. He was not surprised to see the panel left askew. Inside, his hand reached into the crack and found nothing. He peered in: the book and note were gone.

  * * *

  —

  At first, Gerry wanted to think his neighbors were looking at him because of how he’d changed after the heart attack: ashen complexion and his skin loose from losing fifteen pounds. But then he noticed it was other people too—people he didn’t know. Eventually he accepted why the baristas and parking lot attendants were assessing him with concerned stares as he ran his errands.

  He was sitting in the recliner in the family room when he saw the special report on WRLH promising “a new lead in the fifteen-year-old Kimberson murder.”

  A reporter in a trench coat stood at the end of the Wynns’ street in the drizzle: “The show Crime After Crime has been developing a story on the Wynn-Kimberson murder. A tragedy that touched all of us at WRLH back in the nineties.”

  Did they keep the family photos all this time? Who are they getting those from? Gerry asked himself as the camera cut from the man on his street to a montage of images: photos of the girls in tenth grade, Haley Kimberson’s funeral, Kennedy leaving court. God, she was so young.

  The anchorman was saying: “A source has told us the police were given groundbreaking physical evidence in the case.”

  “A source,” Gerry said to himself as he stared in disbelief. What in the hell could it be?

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Gerry received a call from a detective. He wanted to talk about the case. There were some new questions. Gerry explained he had just had a heart attack and the detective said he could wait. Take your time and feel better.

  Gerry had been alone at the house since the hospital, except for Selena, who would stop in every day to make sure he was eating and taking his medication. She brought a portable blood pressure checker and the squeeze of its band was the only contact he had most days. Kennedy had gone, and Gerry left it alone. Maybe it was better she was gone: Haley Kimberson never would have been part of their lives if not for her. Gerry wouldn’t have set up the internship for her at Macaulay’s office, like his daughters asked. He wouldn’t have stopped by there to see how the girl was doing. He might have been angry at Laine, sure, but nothing would have happened.

  After that first call from the detective, the phone kept ringing. The next call was from the real estate agent. There’d been a retraction of the offer on the house—the couple had changed their minds.

  “Won’t they lose twenty thousand dollars in fees?” Gerry asked her.

  “Yes, but they’re still taking it back,” Miranda said.

  After a few requests from media, Gerry started to let them go to the voicemail. Selena asked him why he didn’t ever answer and he replied that they were all telemarketing. By the second week, Gerry unplugged the phone entirely. He guessed 1993 would come back to screaming life soon. He had, he thought, started seeing plaid shirts and baggy jeans again.

  He hadn’t seen her ghost since the hospital—a hallucination from the medication, he told himself—but it didn’t matter. He had started to see Haley everywhere in every girl, as if a wind from the past whispered his sins into their ears. They just knew.

  Then it happened. He was in a restaurant in Blueheart when he saw Kennedy’s face in a commercial for an upcoming episode of that crime show with a title crawl, Kennedy Wynn Talks for the First Time.

  He set down his fork and coughed salmon into a napkin. He paid up and left immediately. He realized she was gone forever and he would have to start protecting himself. On his way home, Gerry pulled the SUV over to the side of Smoke Line. He had an idea of what this new evidence could be.

  * * *

  —

  “That’s definitely a job for a chain saw,” a tall clerk in a red smock explained to Gerry.

  “Wouldn’t that be noisy?”

  “It’ll be quicker,” he said. “With an ax you’d be there all day. What kind of tree is it?”

  “Black tupelo.”

  “I’m twenty and I wouldn’t try to take down a tupelo with no ax.”

  Gerry glanced at the kid’s physique. In spite of the smooth, youthful face, he had a corded neck, evidence he spent as much time working out as he did at his job. “A chain saw it is,” Gerry agreed.

  The clerk leaned in and spoke quietly, as if to avoid being caught by a manager in the act of losing a sale. “You know you can phone guys in town to take a tree down. Wouldn’t cost much more than a chain saw.”

  “Oh, it’s for destruction of material evidence. So I should take care of it myself.”

  “I see.” The clerk didn’t see, or thought Gerry was joking. “I’ll meet you at the front till.”

  * * *

  —

  Gerry walked deliberately into the woods. He was winded, but he found himself unwilling to give up. He put a hand out to touch a tree as he passed it, then another, and another. His gaze scanned the ground, the tree trunks, the detritus left behind by hikers or high school kids, or thrown from windows of passing cars. The air was cold and the ground was hard. It smelled of pine and peat as Gerry headed deep into the woodland, searching for the exact type of yellow leaf, but for the tree too. He knew the area that it must have been near.

  The wind had picked up and the hemlocks swayed. Walnut trees rattled. He turned to his right and faced the wind. Flying at him were dozens of small yellow and red leaves. Black tupelo. He could hear the brook, its sound thick, rasping as a voice. He breathed heavier and heavier, a distinct pain creeping through his jaw and down his arm. Here, it was here fifteen years ago.

  * * *

  —

  Gerry had been drunk on the Fourth of July when Kennedy had called him from a pay phone speaking nonsense.

  “We’ve walked into the flower called Nowhere. Come find us,” Kennedy said.

  He had fallen asleep at his desk earlier. The blotter held a mouth shape. Through a whiskey headache Gerry tried to make sense of Kennedy. What was wrong with her? Was she drunk too? “What do you mean nowhere? You have to be somewhere.”

  But Kennedy didn’t seem to process what he’d asked. �
�Dad, you have to come get us. Haley’s pregnant. I can see her baby growing inside her right now.”

  “Pregnant? What’s going on?”

  “Haley is life. Did you know that?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Come get us! The green demon can come back anytime.”

  He heard Haley laughing in the background before she took the phone from Kennedy. “We’re at a space station. It’s a mobile one.”

  Mobil. He knew the one. The gas station on the old road just past the woods. He felt for his wallet, looked around for his keys. He surmised Haley was drunk too. And talking about being pregnant. Jesus Christ, what was her game and what else was she telling his daughter? He grasped in that instant she did not understand how serious it could be. Gerry picked up the decanter and poured the last of the amber liquid into a coffee cup that may or may not have been clean. He swallowed it down. He grabbed the letter opener from the top of the cabinet and ran downstairs.

  When he woke up the next day he practiced saying it over and over again. That didn’t make it premeditation. His daughter had been incoherent. There was a green demon, whatever that meant. Drunk, he’d rationalized that when you go into the woods you bring a weapon. When he’d backed the car out of the garage, he was lucky not to have scraped it.

  He’d been on the links that day with a group that included Macaulay. It was pure humiliation. Every jocular word seemed calculated to gouge under Gerry’s skin: Wynn, you are the worst shot since Hinkley; Wynn, that’s my ball you’re putting and you haven’t even bought me dinner yet; Wynn, I slept with your wife and made her come like the Tivoli fountains. That last one was imagined, but still, Gerry had had enough and come home to find the house totally empty—a surprise. He knew the girls had planned to go out that night to the fireworks. Laine must have taken them. Her car wasn’t there. No one had left a note or a message. He considered himself lucky and imbibed some more; the evening fell away until the phone call.