The Bullet

by Mary Louise Kelly

  The fundamental thrust of the story remained the same, though. Betsy Sinclare swore that she and Ethan had been attacked by a crazed man wearing a ski mask (“like you wear in Aspen,” she had said. Priceless). I surfed around, checking other news sources. Alexandra James had not touched the story, and why would she? Ethan Sinclare may have been prominent in Atlanta, but he had not enjoyed national stature. Reporters outside Georgia had no reason to take an interest. I read every scrap of information I could find and then leaned back in utter bewilderment. After a while I cleared my search history, shut down the computer, and walked upstairs to the front desk. Screw disposable phones. I didn’t know where in this neighborhood to buy one, and I didn’t have time to run around. Was there somewhere I could make a private call? I asked.

  I was shown to a quaint, wooden phone booth in a carpeted hallway running off the lobby. I had had no contact with my family since leaving Atlanta. No way to do so without compromising my security. But I was now frantic to speak with someone who would be on my side, to confirm whether it could possibly be true that Betsy Sinclare had not ratted me out.

  Two minutes later Martin accepted the charges. “Sis! You know it’s, like, six in the morning here?”

  Powerful, childlike relief coursed through me at the sound of his voice. “Martin. I know. I’m sorry, I—”

  “It’s okay. I was up already. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. You said you were disappearing off the grid for a while.”

  I frowned. How much farther off the grid could a person get? I had fled to a different continent, cut up my credit cards, shaved off my hair, and changed my name to Simone. I’d converted my cash to loose diamonds and—aside from this call—limited my communications to burner phones. But Martin knew none of this. He didn’t even know I was in France.

  “Sis? You there?”

  “I’m here. Bit of a delay on the line.”

  “So how’s Mexico? Enjoying the beach life?”

  “Oh, you know. Mexico’s hot,” I said evasively. “Is, um—is everything okay at home?”

  “Here? Sure. I checked your house over the weekend. Some trash blew into the storm drain, but I swept it out, and everything else looks fine. Haven’t actually laid eyes on Mom and Dad in a few days. Work’s been crazy. I’m getting slammed by this Abu Dhabi deal. But, let’s see . . . Dad’s got some new road race he’s training for. Not sure what Mom was up to this weekend. I guess church, Flower Guild, the usual.”

  This all sounded spectacularly . . . normal. The police had not showed up. My family did not yet know what I had done. Incredible.

  “This must be weird for you, being out of touch. I know you usually talk to Mom, like, seventeen times a day.”

  “Slight exaggeration.”

  “Not much of one. I was thinking about it. How if I were you—if I’d lived through what you have—I wouldn’t let Mom and Dad out of my sight, either. I mean, I know you don’t remember anything. But maybe deep down you do remember your first parents, and the way that you lost them, and it made you . . . it’s made you stick close to Mom and Dad, all these years.”

  I winced. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve tried and tried to remember, but it’s all . . . blank.”

  We were both quiet for a moment.

  “On a different note, have you talked to Tony?” asked Martin. “You should call him.”

  “Okay. Why? Anything wrong?”

  “No, no. Only that your married doctor called him.”

  I did a double take. “Will?”

  “Yep. Tony threatened to—um, how to put this tactfully—he threatened to cut off Will’s dick and feed it to the snakehead fish in the Potomac if he ever came near you again.”

  Tony would have meant it, too. “But why did Will call Tony?”

  “You should ask him. Tony, I mean. I’m just repeating secondhand. But I gather Will’s desperate to talk to you and you haven’t been answering your phone. So he was trying to get Tony to pass along a message.”

  I thought about this. I certainly hadn’t been answering my phone. It was buried in sludge at the bottom of the Chattahoochee River.

  “Will moved out. Out of that house we drove to, the one on Lorcom Lane. That’s what he told Tony, anyway.”

  “Jesus. Fuck.”

  “Whoa. You really have unplugged. Don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear before.” Martin sounded amused. “My offer to kneecap him stands, for what it’s worth. Anyway, I gotta run. Drink a margarita for me. And listen, Sis, will you be home for your birthday? Or Thanks­giving? Mom’ll want to know.”

  “I don’t know.” It was the truth. My birthday was in fifteen days. Thanksgiving fell two days after that. If the next couple of weeks proved remotely as interesting as the last one had been, I had absolutely no idea where I might be.

  • • •

  ONLY ONE PERSON knew for sure why Betsy was lying.

  Contacting her seemed a staggeringly stupid thing to do, but I couldn’t see that I had an alternative. I waited until midafternoon, when it would be nine in the morning in Atlanta. I used the time to purchase yet another prepaid phone, this one from a reputable phone store and loaded with a hundred euros in credit. On the off chance that she ­actually took my call, I didn’t want to risk being cut off.

  A hushed female voice answered the phone at the Sinclare residence. Mrs. Sinclare was resting and not accepting calls, the woman informed me, but the family appreciated my thoughtfulness at this difficult time.

  “I think she might want to speak with me,” I insisted. “Could I trouble you to check? Please tell her it’s Caroline calling.”

  The voice hesitated. “I’m not sure. What may I say it’s regarding?”

  “I’ll hold,” I said, ignoring the question. “If you could tell her that Caroline . . . Smith is on the line.” That ought to get her out of bed.

  A long pause followed, punctuated by several clicks, as if an extension in another room was being picked up and the first one disconnected. I heard breathing.

  “Mrs. Sinclare? Are you there?”

  More breathing, then a hoarse laugh. “Do you know where I’m standing right now? In my laundry room. My goddamn laundry room. It’s the only place in the house where I can shut the door and escape all these people who’ve come to be helpful. And the funny thing is, you’re the only person in the world who would grasp the irony in that. In my hiding in here with the dryer lint, to take a call from you.”

  “I’m sorry. I never meant for you to—”

  “Shut up, you little tramp,” she spat. “I’ll do the talking. We’ll speak this once, and then never again, do you understand?”

  I was too stunned to respond.

  “You’ll have seen the newspaper stories by now, I imagine. You’ll have read my account of how my husband died.” Her voice sounded flayed, raw from weeping. “You will have noticed there was no mention of you. There will never be any mention of you, not in connection with my husband, do you understand?”

  No, I did not. “Why did you lie?”

  She drew a shuddering breath. “Your whore mother tried to destroy my family thirty years ago.”

  “Your husband did destroy my family thirty years ago,” I retorted. “You’re not the only victim here.”

  “That was all . . . behind us. Decades behind us. There was no reason for you to come here. No reason to rip open old scars. And there is nothing—do you hear me?—nothing that would give me greater pleasure than sending you to prison for the rest of your life.”

  “So why did you—”

  “Shut up!” she hissed. “I said what I said because I had quite a long time to think, tied up and gagged in here on the laundry-room floor. You made sure of that. If I identify you—if I tell that it was you who killed Ethan—everyone will wonder why. Don’t you see? Why would some hoity-toity professor with no prior record gun do
wn my husband? The police would want to know the motive.” She was crying now. “Every­thing would come out. All of Ethan’s affairs. Everything about him and Sadie Rawson. And that something terrible happened that day and that two people died and somehow their baby girl got shot.”

  “You mean me.”

  “I mean you,” she whispered.

  Then she said, “If I tell the police the truth, it would ruin you. But it would ruin me, too. I would be a pariah. Known all over Atlanta as the wife of a . . . a philandering murderer. The wife of the man who shot a baby girl and left her for dead. You were so little,” she moaned. “Still in your pink pigtails, hiding behind your mother’s skirts. Can you imagine the shame if all that came out? It’s not the kind of thing that people would forget.”

  “So you—you made up a story about a crazy man with a gun?”

  “It was the only way out that I could think of. People will believe me. They already do.”

  She was clever. And correct. People would believe sweet Betsy Sinclare. I felt impressed, and a little sick.

  “I will not allow my family to be ripped apart. Not now. I will not allow Ethan’s name to be dragged through the mud. I swear to God, you’ll have to come back with your gun and shoot me first.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said softly.

  After some minutes she sniffled. Coughed and cleared her throat. “Does anyone else know? Have you told anyone?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  The hoarse laugh again, even sadder now. “I’ve lived with my husband’s secrets for a long, long time. I can live with this new one, too. Please don’t call me again, Caroline. I am asking you—I am begging you—to keep your mouth shut. Leave my family alone.”

  The phone line went dead.

  I wiped tears from my eyes and thought about all the ways we hurt the people we love, and how long those wounds can fester. How had Faulkner put it? The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  Fifty-seven

  * * *

  The police were not looking for me.

  They never had been.

  I had embraced the fugitive mind-set so firmly that this would take time to sink in. I found myself doubting, still casting glances over my shoulder. Seventy-nine euros and eighteen cents of credit remained on my phone. I tapped it to make one final call to Atlanta.

  “Caroline. I’m glad you decided to call me back,” said Beamer Beasley. “You still in France?”

  I was sitting on a low, stone wall overlooking the Seine. Bateaux Mouches glided past on the river below, their giant, open decks dotted with tourists. The Eiffel Tower loomed on the left bank. It was late afternoon and the sun was a low, orange ball, warm on my face and arms. Now I felt myself go cold. It was his use of the word still. Anyone with caller ID could see the +33 country code and divine that I was speaking from a French phone. But still implied that this wasn’t news. Still implied that Beasley had already known I was here.

  “Yes, still in France.” No point denying it. “How did you know that?”

  “I took the liberty of making a few calls. Once I verified you never got on that plane to Mexico.”

  “And why were my whereabouts of interest?”

  “Well, originally, to inform you about the death of Ethan Sinclare. I assume you’ve read the news reports by now, though.”

  “Yes.” My leg had begun to tremble. “What a . . . a terrible shock.”

  “It certainly is. His poor widow is taking it awful poorly. You’ve never met her, have you? Betsy Sinclare?”

  I said nothing, waited to see where he was going with this.

  “The thing is,” he said. “The thing is, there are a couple of curious details that haven’t made their way into the newspaper. A couple of loose ends, I guess you’d call ’em.”

  “Oh?” My leg jounced up and down uncontrollably. I pressed my palm down against my knee, trying to hold still against the stone wall, trying to fight down the panic.

  “Mind you, I’m not working the Sinclare investigation myself. So this is only what I happened to overhear in the hallway. Watercooler chitchat.”

  “Beamer, out with it,” I heard myself rasp.

  “Well, Mr. Sinclare was old-fashioned about technology and whatnot. He did own a cell phone, which we can’t find. But he didn’t keep his calendar electronically. He recorded his appointments in a little, purple leather book. We found it in his back pocket.”

  “Ah.”

  “And the day he got killed—the day Mrs. Sinclare says he surprised her with a romantic pastrami-and-rye on the good china—he had an entry for Lunch with C. The time slot overlaps exactly with the coroner’s window for his time of death. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Not particularly,” I hedged. “Maybe he canceled lunch with someone, in order to eat with his wife.”

  “Betsy Sinclare says C meant her. Says he always called her Carissima, dearest one, ever since their honeymoon in Rome. Sweet, isn’t it?”

  I waited. Wary.

  “I just mention it in passing. Now, the other curious thing. Two hairs. Two long, dark brown hairs. Caucasian. They were removed from Mr. Sinclare’s sweater sleeve. Tech can’t find a match for them.”

  I closed my eyes. The image of Ethan Sinclare’s squeezing his hand around my neck swam into focus. My hair sheeting across my face, covering his arm. Two strands of hair, my DNA, at the crime scene. On the victim’s body. How could I possibly explain that?

  “Betsy Sinclare is a blond, as you may be aware. The alleged perpetrator is described as African-American, so the hairs aren’t his. We’ve ruled out the housekeeper.”

  “Ethan’s granddaughters?” I asked weakly. “His secretary?”

  “Checking all of them. But you know what, Caroline? You know what my theory is? My theory is, once a ladies’ man, always a ladies’ man.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Beasley sighed. “When I overheard the guys discussing the hairs, and how they couldn’t find a DNA match in the system, I might have mentioned that Mr. Sinclare had a reputation for occasionally wandering outside the marital bed. I might—Lord forgive me—have suggested that it would be a kindness to the victim’s widow not to make too big a stink about another woman’s hairs being stuck to his sleeve. I might have even gone so far as to strongly advise my colleague in charge of the investigation that we show some compassion and not add to the poor family’s grief.”

  “But . . . your colleague’s job isn’t to show compassion. It’s to find out who killed Ethan Sinclare.”

  “Mm-hmm. But we have an unassailable witness—a churchgoing, God-fearing grandma—who’s prepared to swear on the Holy Bible that her husband was shot by a big, black guy who broke into their house. So that’s who we’re looking for. My colleagues aren’t going to devote a lot of energy to chasing Caucasian brunettes.”

  I took this in.

  “Doesn’t mean they won’t match the DNA eventually. All these new advances, every year. Like that Maintenance Man case I told you about. Those hairs from Mr. Sinclare’s sleeve . . . whoever they belong to would want to be awful careful not to find a reason to get their DNA tested. Not ever to end up in the national database.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “For what?”

  “Just thank you.”

  “You know, it’s taken me a long while to grasp this. But sometimes justice is served in ways that have precious little to do with the criminal justice system.”

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, SITTING cross-legged on Madame Aubuchon’s bed, I laid two objects on the white sheets.

  The first was the disposable phone, reduced now to a mere forty-­three euros in credit. I had used it to remotely access my old voice mail and had discovered no fewer than nine messages from Will Zartman. The first eight were sh
ort, only a few seconds each in duration, presumably of the Call me, would you please call me variety. I deleted them. But the last one ran nearly three minutes long. I couldn’t bring myself either to erase it or to listen. Next to the phone I unfolded the second object, a piece of paper from inside the leather pouch knotted around my neck. I smoothed it flat against the sheets. Angular handwriting, black ink, the name François, and a phone number.

  My hand hovered. Hesitated. I reached for the phone and dialed.

  “Hey,” I said when he answered, then leaned back against the pillows.

  “Hello?” came the cautious response. “Caroline? Is that you?”

  “It’s me.”

  Will heaved a deep breath. “Thank God. Are you okay? Where are you?”

  “In Paris. Long story.”

  “But you’re okay? How’s your neck? Your wrist?”

  “Fine. Better every day.”

  “Thank God,” he breathed again. “Marshall Gellert said you missed your last two appointments. That you didn’t refill your painkiller prescription. I didn’t know if you—”

  “My brothers said you moved out.” I didn’t have the patience to beat around the bush.

  “Oh,” answered Will in a quiet voice. “Yes. We’re separated. My wife and me. Caroline? I made a terrible mistake not telling you, I know that. There was never a—”

  “Never a good time? Is that what you were about to say? See, because I would argue that before you kissed me that night in Atlanta would have been a good time.”

  “I know. I know. I thought you’d run screaming for the hills.”

  “Well, that’s true. I can’t say I was exactly yearning to get involved with a married man with two kids and a soft spot for Garth Brooks.”