The Bullet

by Mary Louise Kelly

  “You make me sound like quite the catch.”

  “Make that a married, middle-aged baseball fanatic, with kids and a house in the suburbs and—”

  “Yet you called,” he cut me off gently. “Why?”

  Why indeed? Why risk my heart on a man with baggage, a man who had lied to me, a man who might—who knew—be lying even now about being separated?

  “I miss you,” I said. But it was more than that. I had allowed Will to touch me at a level deeper than I had allowed any of my previous, predictable lovers. Perhaps deeper than I had been capable of, just weeks ago. If he came with baggage, then so be it. I was carrying quite a lot of baggage of my own by now.

  “I miss you, too. Come home.”

  • • •

  NOT UNTIL SOMETIME after midnight did I stir beneath the white sheets, open my eyes, and realize that Betsy Sinclare was still lying.

  I had been dreaming of a girl with dark hair tied back in pink ribbons. Still in your pink pigtails, Betsy had said, hiding behind your mother’s skirts. Pink pigtails. That detail had not appeared in the press accounts at the time of the murders. To my knowledge, no photograph of me from that day had been released. Possibly Ethan had described my appearance to his wife, but it seemed an odd detail to have mentioned. So how could she have known? How could she have known the color of my ribbons unless she had been there and seen me?

  I sat up in bed and ran my fingers through my now-short, now-blond hair. Watched a shadow crawl across the bedroom wall, cast by the headlights of a passing car. What was Betsy up to?

  The phone in Atlanta rang and rang. I was about to hang up and redial a third time when she picked up. She sounded exhausted. “I told you never to contact me again,” she rasped. “I’m going to hang up, and if you have the slightest scrap of sense, you’ll do the same.”

  “How did you know I was hiding behind my mother’s skirt when she died? Betsy? Or that my hair was tied in pink pigtails?”

  Several seconds of silence, then: “I have no idea what your hair looked like. I don’t even remember saying that. What kind of crazy questions are these? Caroline, if you keep harassing me . . . God is my witness, I will tell the police the truth. I’ll tell them who shot Ethan. Do you hear me? I will call them right now.”

  “I think you were there. In the house on Eulalia Road that day. I think you saw me.”

  “You are out of your mind.”

  “No, I’m not. You were there. You saw it. Tell me what happened.”

  She was breathing fast, little pants of air whistling down the phone line.

  “They’re all dead, Betsy. Everyone who was in that room, except you and me. Who are you protecting anymore?”

  She held out another few seconds. When she spoke, it was in a snarl. “Your mother knew how to provoke a person. You have no idea. Sadie Rawson would stand there, all snooty and superior, in her too-short skirt and her too-high heels, wiggling her bottom. Just throwing it in your face, like the floozy she was. I only went over there to make her give me the necklace. To make her stop parading it around all over Buckhead.”

  “What necklace?”

  “The one Ethan gave her. A sapphire floating on a gold chain. Maier and Berkele mailed the bill to our house. I had to write them a check for it. To keep our account in good standing. Do you have any idea what that feels like?” Her voice rose to a shriek.

  “So . . . you . . . you and Ethan went over to the Smiths’ house together? To ask for the necklace back?” But this version of events didn’t make sense either. A knot of dread was hardening between my shoulder blades.

  “I drove over myself. To make her give it back and to tell her never to show her face again, not anywhere within a hundred feet of my family. She told me to go to hell. She taunted me, said my husband had never loved me and the necklace was hers to keep.”

  From deep within me, something caught. A sapphire. A sparkle of blue. I could see it. I remembered. Deep blue against a white throat, a cloud of black hair, warm arms holding me close. Female voices raised in fury.

  “I didn’t go over there to kill her. I’m not a monster. I only wanted to scare her. I had Ethan’s gun—the one he kept in his nightstand—and I took it out, to show her I meant it, to make her listen. And then your daddy walked in! In the middle of the afternoon! I forgot he worked those crazy pilot hours. Boone started carrying on and shouting at me to keep quiet and I told him his wife was filth and he came at me and he was going to grab the gun and I just—I just—”

  “You shot him?”

  “It happened so fast. So fast. He fell over and I was going to help him but your mama flew at me. She hit me, she said I would go to jail forever, that my babies would be orphans. That she would make sure of it. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t let her do that.”

  I closed my eyes. Saw the gleam of blue again. There had been noises. Great, cracking explosions of sound and then a pinch in my neck and my mother, sinking soft against me onto a red, tiled floor. Did I in fact remember this? Was I inventing the memory now? Did it matter?

  “I didn’t know you were hurt. I wasn’t thinking about you at all. I was in shock and I called Ethan. He was there in minutes. He dug the bullet out of the door, but he couldn’t find the other one. And it was only then that we . . . that we . . .” Betsy drew a great, shuddering breath. “We thought you were dead, too. You weren’t breathing, or it didn’t look like you were. I wouldn’t have left you. I wouldn’t have left a child.”

  “Why did he help you?” I whispered. “You had just killed the woman he loved.”

  “One of many women he thought he loved over the years,” she said bitterly. “I was his wife. The mother of his children. He wasn’t going to let me go to prison, was he?”

  My tongue lay thick and heavy in my mouth. I had to concentrate to lift it, to force it to form words. “So he didn’t do it. Ethan didn’t shoot my parents. You did. He was protecting you, all these years.”

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “Sadie Rawson’s necklace. The sapphire. You took it?”

  “It won’t ever be found, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  My mind flashed through the events of recent weeks, struggling to recalibrate. “What about—who broke into my house in Georgetown the other night, then? Who took the files from my surgeon’s office?”

  “I’m sure I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. But one can imagine that a professional might find ways to accomplish all sorts of things for the right price.”

  A strange, almost comfortable silence settled between us. Two women who had done their worst to each other, sitting alone in our darkened bedrooms, thousands of miles apart.

  At last sweet Betsy Sinclare cleared her throat. “I’m going to say good-bye now, Caroline. But let me leave you with this thought: You shot an innocent man and you’re going to get away with it. Don’t be stupid. Keep your mouth shut. Walk away.”

  Fifty-eight

  * * *

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2013

  There is a café on the rue de Grenelle where you can sit and order a café crème and watch the patrons come and go. It’s a humble establishment, not one of the famous Paris cafés. Sartre never held court here. Neither did Hemingway, nor Picasso. They preferred les Deux ­Magots, a few blocks farther east.

  I’ve always favored the rue de Grenelle café for precisely this reason. It caters to the neighborhood, not to celebrities or tourists. Old men greet each other. A woman tears pieces of her morning croissant and feeds them to her dog. An elegant couple in their twenties, still dressed in shimmering evening clothes from the night before, sit smoking at a table on the sidewalk. He kisses her and she lifts her face to him and you see that she is tired yet achingly beautiful.

  I sip my coffee and watch them. I despise coffee, never touch the stuff. A surprise to find myself craving it this morni
ng. A surprise to find it tastes delicious, rich and nutty. You think you know yourself. You think you know whether you care for coffee, whether you care for cigarettes, whether you like to swear, whether you could kill a man. You think you know what you are capable of. Then one day you discover that, quite literally, you are not the person you thought you were.

  Onto the café table before me I shake the bullet from its leather pouch. It rolls unevenly, coming to rest against the raised chrome rim. Ethan Sinclare had not pulled the trigger; had perhaps never pulled a trigger in his life. I had imagined myself administering justice. A pure, biblical justice. An eye for an eye. In fact I have murdered a man who—if not exactly innocent—was not guilty either. The true killer is alive and well. She is at this moment ensconced in her Buckhead mansion, poised to live to a ripe old age surrounded by loving children and grandchildren. Anger bristles through me. Justice is not served. Old wrongs are not righted after all. My own action adds yet another notch to the groaning tally of wrongs, but does it cancel out the original act? My instinct is—no. The scales are not yet balanced. Laid before me then, a choice: Follow Betsy’s advice and walk away? Or go back and finish what has been left undone? It is mine to decide when this story will end.

  For now, I rise. Push back my chair and walk north to the river. Halfway across the Pont Royal, with the Louvre straight ahead and the Musée d’Orsay at my back, I stop. Pigeons flap lightly above my head, circling a bread crust abandoned on the paving stones. The walls of the bridge are low here, barely waist high. I lean forward over the jade water. Hold out my fist.

  It takes only an instant for a bullet to split the air and steal a life. Only an instant to wreak such sorrow. The heart breaks and it cannot be mended, not to the shape that it once was.

  Today, though, the bullet will drop like a harmless pebble. Like an acorn dropping from an oak. The water will swallow it with barely a ripple, or perhaps with no sound at all.

  I stand beneath the vast, pale sky and I open my hand and let it fall.

  Can't get enough Mary Louise Kelly? Check out her chilling debut, Anonymous Sources!

  A young reporter must match wits with spies, assassins, and a terrorist sleeper cell targeting the very heart of American power after she is assigned to investigate the death of a powerful Washington insider’s son.

  Anonymous Sources

  * * *

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  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Among other things, this is a book about the bond between siblings.

  C. J. Kelly taught me most of what I know about brothers. We are improbably close, considering we were born eight years apart and that we spent much of our childhood bickering over whom Mom and Dad love best (Ceej: just admit it already). My brother is hands down the person I would want beside me in a bar brawl. I couldn’t be more proud of the family he is building with his beautiful wife, Jenn, and their son, Cache. Of my early readers, C. J. is the only one to write a comment that made me cry. In the margin of a scene where Caroline hollers at one of her brothers, he scribbled, “This rang so true. I love you.”

  Our parents’ first house was a fixer-upper on Eulalia Road in Atlanta. I have only happy memories of life there, but it was in that white-tiled kitchen that I imagined the murders of Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith unfolding. When I announced my plan to write a novel set in Atlanta, Mom and Dad got so excited that it became impossible to dedicate this book to anyone else. Mom volunteered to conduct stakeouts on Eulalia, and then—purely for research purposes—subjected herself to multiple rounds of margaritas and cowboy shrimp at Georgia Grille. As for Dad . . . let’s just say he embraced the project with such enthusiasm that he is now the proud owner of a 1970s-era .38 Special.

  My family in Scotland was no less supportive. Marie and James Boyle whisked our boys away to Edinburgh more than once, to allow me peace and quiet to write. My husband’s brothers, Anthony and Martin, lent their names to Caroline’s brothers. Dot Boyle and Hilary Wilson shared daily updates on their young daughters, which was incredibly useful in helping me imagine the inner world of a three-year-old Caroline Cashion.

  Among my girlfriends, I owe special thanks this round to Sasha Foster, whose expertise in criminal justice shaped Beamer Beasley into a richer character. Kate Gellert made a point of buying a copy of my first book every single day, for months, in order to boost my bestseller rankings. Does it go without saying that she enjoys a special place in this author’s heart? My heartfelt thanks to Kate and to the many other friends who mixed cocktails, addressed invitations, and offered toasts—­including Marilyn Baker, Nancy Taylor Bubes, Heather Florance, Heather Hanks, Maggie Hedges, Hannah Isles, Susie King, Val LoCascio, Colleen Markham, Leslie Maysak, Anne Mitchell, Lan Nguyen, Shannon Pryor, Becky Relic, Megan Rupp, Jonathan Samuels, Casey Seidenberg, Linda Willard, and Tammy Mank Wincup. You guys throw a mean book party.

  In Italy, as my book deadline approached, my panic mounted, and I took to typing eighteen hours a day inside the garden shed erected in our living room (literally, a steel garden shed, painted lime green, in the middle of the living room—long story), dear friends Kerstin Jacot, Christina Petochi, and Charles and Christina Hellawell took over the mothering of my children. They delivered the boys to and from school, fed them meals, and I believe at one point were even putting out our trash.

  My Florence book group kept me sane by dragging me away from my laptop to read everything from Hemingway to Russian political history. We have a reputation as a drinking club with a book problem, for reasons we can never quite remember the next morning. Certainly it has nothing to do with the leadership of Alison Gilligan and Diana Richman, who organize our ranks with grace and a ruthless efficiency from which military commanders might learn much.

  My thanks to Bita Honarvar and Sandra Murray, for access to the Journal-Constitution archives. To Carolyn Atkinson of the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, who helped me plot how Caroline might go about tracing her inheritance. To Marc Vinciguerra, who corrected my Parisian slang. To Brian Martin, who not only let me steal his syllabus but who was alone among early readers of The Bullet in proposing a psychoanalytic reading of Will’s masculinist judgment of Caroline’s multiple boules. (Editors at the New York Review of Books, take note.)

  Perhaps my greatest stroke of luck in the book-publishing process was meeting Victoria Skurnick, of the Levine-Greenberg-Rostan Literary Agency. She is a force of nature, and my advice to anyone who ever crosses paths with her is to shut up and do exactly what she says. Trust me: it saves a lot of time. Karen Kosztolnyik is the kind of editor that writers dream of. She managed both to love this book from the get-go, and to make it a million times better. My thanks to Karen, as well as to Louise Burke, Jen Bergstrom, Jean Anne Rose, and the entire team at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

  I share my protagonist’s weakness for the Euro look. Happily, my Euro husband favors Italian suits and Scotch over skinny jeans and cigarettes. Nick drove carpool and did grocery runs and learned to cook a formidable chicken curry, to give me time to write. He listened to me ramble about possible plot twists and then came up with some of the best plot twists himself. Peach, I could not do this, or anything else that I do, without you by my side.

  Our son James spent much of last winter plopped beside me, penning his own first novel. He already possesses, at the age of ten, both a way with words and an appreciation for the challenges that fiction writers face. (“Mom,” he sighed one night, “it’s a ton of work when you have to make up all the characters and all the action and the ending and everything, isn’t it?”) Our younger son, Alexander, endured months of suspiciously early bedtimes, so that I could sneak away and continue writing into the night. In the morning he would cock one sleepy eye, wrap warm arms around my neck, and whisper, “Did you finish the chapter?” Yes, lovely boy, I finally did.

  About the Author

  * * *

 
; Photo by Katarina Price

  MARY LOUISE KELLY has traveled the world as a journalist for NPR and the BBC. As an NPR correspondent covering the spy beat and the Pentagon, she reported on wars, terrorism, and rising nuclear powers. She was educated at Harvard University and at Cambridge University in England. She lives in Washington, DC, and Florence, Italy. Visit her website at www.marylouisekellybooks.com.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Mary-Louise-Kelly

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Mary Louise Kelly

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