The Bullet (28 page)

“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 down 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

T
he 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 short, 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.”

“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.”