Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  The girl's small sobs and sniffles made it difficult for Catherine to understand every single word, but she was getting the point. She crabbed over to her daughter and held her again, this time not grasping her shoulders as if she were about to shake some sense into her but instead enfolding her in her arms and pulling her head to her chest. The dog came over to the two of them and started trying to wedge her snout in between them, and Catherine didn't stop her. Any moisture left on her skirt or her blouse by a wet dog nose was nothing compared to the impressive stream of tears flooding against her chest.

  "I was stoned when I fired the gun, and drunk," Charlotte was saying. "I'd been smoking marijuana and I'd drunk a whole beer. Maybe I would have tried to shoot a deer anyway, I don't know, but I do know I wasn't thinking clearly. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to get Gwen--"

  "Gwen? Who's Gwen?" Spencer asked.

  "She's a lifeguard at the club," Charlotte answered, hiccupping as she cried. "I stole the joint from her bag at the bonfire that night. At first I didn't tell you because I didn't want to get Gwen in trouble. But then, when I saw what you and FERAL were doing, I didn't tell you because I was afraid if I did you couldn't sue the gun company and hold your press conference. And that seemed so important! And after I'd ruined your life by shooting you, I had to make sure I didn't wreck anything else. I had to! But, please, don't get a divorce now because of this! Please! I am so sorry for everything, and I've tried to hold it together, but, no, no, not this too, not this, don't make me have to live with this, too! I couldn't handle it, really, I couldn't! Please, no! Please--no!" and her voice rose into an almost classically tragic ululation--the widows of all those ancient Greek sailors--before trailing off into nothing but those wrenching, pathetic sobs. Gently Catherine rubbed her child's back, her hands making slow, tender circles. She looked across the floor and Spencer raised his eyebrows and shook his head. Then he, too, scooted over the damp tile to them, wincing once when he must have moved his shoulder too quickly, and there the three of them--and their dog--held each other as if they were the most fragile objects in the apartment.

  Which, Catherine decided suddenly, they were.

  Chapter Thirty-Two.

  Paige liked this conference room. She liked it a lot, and not simply because it was massive. It sat on a corner of the twenty-ninth floor, high enough that the east-facing windows offered an ashy view of the East River and the dusky, saddle brown warehouses, industrial waste, and municipal detritus that stretched toward the sunrise--and, indeed, the sun was rising now--on the water's far bank. There were panels in the walls behind which sat a wireless Panasonic projector, a Polycom view station for teleconferencing, a prohibitively expensive Toshiba DVD player, a forty-two-inch Sanyo plasma display screen, and an Advantage Electrol matte white panel that descended from the ceiling and offered a perfectly square field for presentations that was a dauntingly impressive eight by eight feet. The firm rarely used these high-tech toys, but everyone enjoyed knowing they were there. Especially the litigation group. And tomorrow, after she announced the lawsuit--lambasting Adirondack for profiteering at the expense of safety--and turned the press conference over to Dominique, they were going to use a good many of these audiovisual baubles. There would be images of motherless fawn, eviscerated deer, and Spencer McCullough's shoulder, including some of the photographs she'd had taken in New Hampshire the Tuesday after the shooting. They'd swamp the group with all manner of statistics about deer hunting that would convey the sheer size and brutality of the slaughter, the numbers of humans and dogs that were killed and wounded every year, the figures that supported their contention that buck-only laws actually resulted in wildlife overpopulation.

  The reporters and the women and men with their cameras and bright lights would enter the room from the two main doors near the reception area. When they were settled, she and Spencer and Dominique would enter from the lone door that faced west and opened onto a corridor that led to the suites where the partners toiled. Already in her mind she could hear the humming in the conference room, a buzzing not unlike the burble of conversation you hear in a crowded restaurant or a courtroom before the judge has entered. The mammoth cherry conference table--its veneer always so polished that one time Paige had actually used the reflection it offered to refresh her lipstick--would be gone, as would be the smaller side tables. The sixteen leather swivel chairs with their comfortable armrests would be carted away, too, slid together like shopping carts into smaller meeting rooms at the far end of the firm. They would be replaced by forty folding chairs laid out in four neat rows of ten, and another eighteen along the walls. She was confident that most, if not all, of those seats would be taken and behind them there would be television cameras. In her head she saw three, and one of them was from a cable news network.

  And in addition to the newspaper reporters and the curious magazine journalists, there would be a good number of FERAL's allies. People from organizations with all manner of interesting acronyms, including representatives from PETA and PAWS and IDA, as well as the leaders of antihunting organizations, including the Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting (CASH) and People Opposed to Deer Slaughter (PODS). It would be glorious, absolutely glorious.

  She was pulled from her reverie by the trill of the receptionist's voice on the speakerphone. Keenan Barrett had arrived for their eight thirty meeting.

  BY QUARTER TO NINE the two of them had finished their coffee and were settled comfortably in her office. Spencer was supposed to join them, but he hadn't arrived yet. And while they most certainly would not have started without him before the accident--he wouldn't have stood for such a thing, he would have lit into them both like an acetylene torch if they had--they figured these days they might as well go ahead. This postshooting Spencer was noticeably more serene than the old model. And so they dialed their mountain man in Pennsylvania, Dan Grampbell, and began their scheduled conference call. The subject was basic, and Paige had e-mailed Grampbell on Friday to inform him precisely what they wanted to discuss: Why, in his opinion, had John Seton been unable to extract a cartridge from the chamber of a rifle the ballistics lab insisted worked perfectly?

  "Ah, yes, the Adirondack with the reluctant round," he said, once they had dispatched with the social pleasantries.

  "Have you had a chance to give some thought to the question?"

  "A bit," he said, "but without examining the weapon myself I can only speculate."

  "That's precisely what we're interested in: your speculation," Keenan said.

  "Well, it was probably the ammunition. That's what I would surmise if the lab can't find a flaw in the gun. That is, after all, your only other variable. And so either the cartridge was defective to begin with--a factory defect, maybe--or somehow Mr. Seton damaged it. Damaged the rim. Either way, the extractor couldn't grasp it to remove it from the chamber."

  "How would someone have damaged the rim of a bullet?" Paige asked, sitting forward in her chair.

  "That's a tough one. For obvious reasons, they don't damage easily. But I have seen cases where loading and unloading the same round over and over eventually dents the rim. The extractor is biting into the tiny lip on the casing multiple times, and--on rare occasions--ultimately breaks it down. Imagine stripping the head of a screw. It's not unlike that. What did the lab say about the cartridge?"

  "They didn't say anything."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. I don't know anything about guns, Dan," she said, trying to keep her voice light. "That's why we have you."

  "Well, I'd give them a call. Ring them right up!"

  DAN GRAMPBELL was replaced on the speakerphone in her office by Myles McAndrew, the engineer in Maryland who had examined John Seton's rifle and written the report.

  "We didn't look at the casing because it was gone when we received the firearm," McAndrew said. "We presumed the owner or the state police in--where was the accident, Vermont?"

  "New Hampshire."

  "That's right, New Hampshire. T
hank you. We just assumed that someone in New Hampshire had removed the casing before your paralegal brought the rifle to us." The man sounded a bit like a public radio newscaster: His voice was calm and even and assured. Unflappable.

  "Why would someone do that?"

  "Remove the casing? I would only be hypothesizing."

  "Please, Mr. McAndrew," Keenan said, jumping in. "We seem to be surrounded by people whose opinions we prize enough to pay handsomely for them, yet who seem, at the moment, constitutionally unwilling to offer them. So, please: Hypothesize. Is a spent casing dangerous?"

  "No. Of course not."

  "But someone removed it?"

  "The rifle was empty when it arrived here in Maryland."

  "Could it have fallen out accidentally?" Paige asked.

  "Not easily it couldn't," McAndrew said. "The bolt would have to be open--which, as you know, in theory should automatically eject a casing that remains in the chamber. This time, apparently, that didn't happen. But the bolt has to be open. That's the first thing. Then, perhaps, if the firearm were cracked solidly against something, it's conceivable the tremor might dislodge it. But that's a lot of accident to happen to one gun and one casing."

  "What are you implying?" Keenan asked.

  "I'm not implying anything. I am, per your request, Mr. Barrett, offering my opinion because you prize it and are paying the lab what you consider a handsome fee. Remember? My suggestion is that you call the owner. Or the state police. Maybe they can tell you where the casing went."

  She watched as Keenan drew long blue lines with his fountain pen on the pad before him. He was pressing so hard that she could see the nib was slicing through the top sheet of paper.

  IT TOOK TIME to find the right people at the state police, but by midmorning she had spoken with a trooper who could review the Seton paperwork at the firearms locker at the barracks, as well as Sergeant Ned Howland.

  And, still, there was no Spencer McCullough. He'd actually called while they'd been on the phone with McAndrew and left a message on her voice mail--both she and Keenan thought he'd sounded a tad less somnambulant than usual--saying that he was running late and would have to pass on their meeting. He said he would probably just go straight to his office and catch up with Keenan there.

  Howland finally called her back from a cell phone on the road a little before ten thirty, his clipped voice disappearing briefly at first into the black hole that seemed to suck in so many syllables of cell phone conversations in New England. Still, she could hear enough of Howland's replies to her questions to understand clearly that he was corroborating exactly what that other trooper at the barracks had told them: There had been no casing in John Seton's gun. Howland said that until he learned the rifle had had a live round jammed in the chamber, he'd simply presumed the casing had been ejected. When he first picked the rifle up off the ground near the trunk of an apple tree at the end of the old woman's driveway, he thought the bolt had been open.

  But he wasn't absolutely positive about that.

  He was, however, confident that the chamber was empty.

  "So, no one at the state police removed the casing?" Keenan inquired.

  "Mr. Barrett, you're a lawyer. I shouldn't have to lecture you about the collection of evidence. When I confiscated the weapon there was the chance this would become a criminal investigation. I therefore tried to preserve the weapon in the condition I found it."

  "Thank you," Keenan said, not exactly contrite but humbled slightly.

  "You're welcome. Forgive me, sir, but I wish someone in this case--you or Mr. Seton's lawyer--knew the first thing about guns. I wish Mr. Seton had known the first thing about guns. I hate to be glib when a man has been so badly injured, but the truth of this matter is that all of your questions combine to make for one great argument for serious gun control."

  "Tell me," Keenan said. "You said you found the weapon by an apple tree."

  "That's right."

  "But in the drawing I saw of the accident scene--the reconstruction, if you will, that showed where the players were that night--when the child fired the weapon, she was closer to the driveway itself than to those apple trees."

  "That's correct."

  "Why weren't the locations where the rifle was discharged and where you found it the same?"

  "The girl's mother wanted the firearm as far from the child as possible after the shooting. It was a gun, she'd just seen firsthand its ability to inflict monumental damage, and she didn't want the girl anywhere near the thing anymore."

  "So she moved it?"

  "I believe that's what she told me that night. I could check my notes. But I believe she said she tossed it."

  "And then you recovered it?"

  "Yes."

  "Then where did the casing go?" Paige asked.

  "If this were a criminal investigation, we would have begun our search on the property. Near where the child discharged the firearm and then where we found the rifle."

  "But you didn't . . ."

  "Ma'am?"

  "You didn't search the property . . ."

  "No. The state's attorney chose not to press charges. It was pretty clear it was an accident."

  "A horrible one," she said simply, and breathed in deeply through her nose. In somewhere between twenty-six and twenty-seven hours, she was going to have to say something. No one in that press conference was going to ask about the missing casing: There was no reason to believe they would even be aware it was gone. But someone was bound to ask why John Seton had left his rifle loaded, and that would demand they have an explanation for his inability to extract the cartridge.

  "Yes," Howland agreed. "A horrible one."

  "I guess we should try to find the casing," she mumbled, though she knew also that this wasn't going to happen--at least not in the next twenty-six hours. And even if, by some unprecedented miracle, the casing did turn up that afternoon, it couldn't be analyzed in time for the press conference. She wondered briefly if they should postpone the event, but these things had a momentum of their own. They had been working toward tomorrow since well before Spencer had returned to work. The lawsuit was just about ready to be filed: Sections of it were being proofread in a room down the hall that very moment.

  But the casing could still affect it. Their contention was that the rifle was inherently unsafe because a round remained in the chamber when you emptied the magazine, and there was no mechanism on the barrel to warn a person that the gun was still loaded. Perhaps if they had the casing and could show that the rim was damaged, then they could sue the ammunition manufacturer as well.

  "Thank you, Sergeant Howland," Keenan was saying. "We appreciate your getting back to us."

  She thanked the trooper, too, but her mind already was elsewhere. She was trying to imagine what she would say tomorrow when someone asked her why that dimwit in Vermont--though the reporter would not frame the question quite that way--had been unable to pop out the cartridge that remained in the rifle.

  Chapter Thirty-Three.

  "In college," Spencer was saying, "I never thought I would be a bald, angry man when I hit middle age."

  "No one does," John answered, and he guessed it was the truth. Certainly he'd never presumed that he would hit forty with a receding hairline and eyeglasses.

  On the other hand, he wasn't angry. Not like Spencer, anyway. Lately he'd been pretty damn pissed at his brother-in-law, but that irritation had been triggered by a fairly precise set of circumstances.

  It was Monday morning, not quite nine thirty, and the two of them were sitting in his mother's living room with its sweeping views across Park, Madison, and Fifth, and into Olmstead's vast commons--these days a series of baseball diamonds, skating rinks, and paths for exercisers on their in-line skates and air-cushioned Nikes. His mother's dog had lumbered over to Spencer, sniffed out Tanya's scent, and--satisfied--was sitting now with his snout draped on the man's lap. Nan was somewhere on the other side of the apartment, in that long series of rooms that looked sout
h on the spires of midtown Manhattan, and Catherine and Charlotte were at Brearley.

  "I mean, why didn't someone tell me I had so much rage?" Spencer said.

  He shrugged. "We did. We tried, anyway."

  "And I wasn't listening?"

  John considered agreeing that, yes, this was precisely the problem: Spencer didn't listen to anyone, because he was right about everything. At least he believed that he was. But his brother-in-law already was so abashed that John saw no reason to make him feel any worse. "We are who we are," he said simply. "And you have your strengths." He watched the light through the gauzy curtains accentuate a flying buttress of dust.

  "But listening is not among them."

  "Guess not."

  The dog rolled over onto his back, imploring Spencer to stroke his tummy. His brother-in-law reached down awkwardly to pet the animal with his left arm, grimacing slightly at the effort.