Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  Haley is life.

  He drove past the gas station four or five times in frustration. The girls had wandered since the phone call, he guessed, so he stopped the car just down the road, got out, and stood in the night air. It was cooler than he’d expected and smelled of damp earth. It was a few moments before he heard a girl laughing. He followed it off the road and into the woods. Haley was lying on the ground and holding her hands up at the sky, flicking and stretching them. “Haley, where’s Kennedy?”

  “I haven’t seen her in like five years.”

  “She just phoned.”

  “She left after she asked me if I loved Berk and I said I love everyone. I love her. I love you. Why can’t we love anyone we want to? Let’s go into the woods. I want to show you something.”

  Her hazel eyes were totally dark, the pupils dilated.

  “Get up. You’re high, aren’t you?” Gerry took Haley by the hands and dragged her upright. “Do not ever tell my daughter about what happened. Her future is everything and you’re not going to fucking ruin it.”

  It had only been a moment in his car—he’d been five-o’clock drunk after a meeting with the men at Macaulay’s firm and had offered to drive her home. They’d pulled into these woods, like teenagers, which of course she was—but now he could see he would lose it all. Everything he’d built would fall away, and in the end, Macaulay and the other men would be his judges. He could already hear them laughing, as they had on the course.

  “Don’t you love me anymore, Daddy?”

  Gerry pushed the small girl against a tree trunk. Her head snapped back with a crack against the hard surface. She stumbled and then she touched the back of her head. Her fingers came back bloody.

  “This is the mark of Cain now. Everyone is going to know.”

  What he heard was not a girl’s shame but the threat that she would tell.

  * * *

  —

  Gerry did not remember if he cried while dragging Haley’s body to the creek, but he knew he had to get her away from the crime scene. The creek would wash evidence of him away, the lawyer part of Gerry argued. He remembered the boots—just like Kennedy’s and Carter’s, piled up beside the door—when his sticky hands let her feet fall with a splash into the water.

  As he stumbled out under a streetlight to his car, he saw blood had gotten on his clothes. He thought he could erase her, be done with the mistake, but instead it was everywhere. He was afraid to go home, so he drove straight to his office, where he had a clean suit. Getting out of the car, he saw a blood smear had transferred from his pants to the upholstery, so he decided to leave the Acura in the office lot. He could drive the Cadillac until he had time to clean it.

  He rinsed his hands in the men’s room, then cleaned the letter opener. On the bathroom counter, his pager began to vibrate as loud as a siren. Gerry turned off the taps and stared at the buzzing device. He leaned over to see the illuminated screen: Longwood Hospital. They found her already, he thought. She can’t still be alive? When he picked up the pager, it showed a text: Family emergency, please contact, followed by a number. He was back in his office before he understood it was his own family, not hers, contacting him.

  He took the letter opener and rammed it in the back of his desk drawer. An office would be a separate search warrant. Absolutely, Gerry thought. He snatched up the clothes he’d worn earlier and balled them into a bag. When he arrived at the hospital he would lob them into a dumpster in the back parking lot before going inside to find Carter and Laine. In the moment he was proud of himself for thinking of such a good place to dispose of them. No one would notice bloody clothes at a hospital.

  After the police started questioning Kennedy, he thought there was no way charges would be brought against her. But as both sides dug in, Gerry sat silent and did math that was secret to him. This family needs me. Without me it falls apart. Kennedy, if she pleads to manslaughter, that’s what? Five years. She doesn’t remember anything from that night. She could still go to college.

  * * *

  —

  Gerry was already winded when he found the tree. He sat down on a fallen log and stared at the initials while trying to catch his breath. As bright as that July Fourth night was, he had not seen them.

  The woods were colder, damper at this time of year than he’d expected. Although it was four o’clock, the sun was white and fogged. He stared at the tree, the rough heart hacked into the surface.

  H.K. + G.W.

  A statement. His girls were always trying to make statements—politically, aesthetically, their fashion, their food choices at the dinner table. But they’d never carved them into wood. How long did that take, and did her hand cramp or develop blisters? It had taken her longer to do this, he knew, than what had transpired between them. She would have told, he assured himself, and he’d have lost everything. She was still telling now.

  Gerry stood up and slipped on the work gloves and safety glasses the hardware clerk had thrown in for free. As Gerry approached the tree, he realized how big it was. He supposed you were meant to take a tree like this down with multiple cuts, but like hell he was going to climb it and slice off the branches. That would take all day and require more serious gear.

  Which way did a tree fall? Gerry left the path and squished toward the trunk in his overshoes. The tupelo looked like it leaned slightly, so he’d make the wedge on that side. He pulled the ripcord and his chest muscles screamed. The cord snapped back and the engine went quiet. He pulled the cord again, this time watching how far he extended his arm. The machine came to life. Gerry looked up at the tree and then down at the trunk. He made his first cut through the bark. It spat chips and the blade seemed to go in. After a few inches of cutting the vibrations made his hands numb and the saw stopped. It was at too steep an angle. Gerry wrenched it out, then looked at the tree again.

  All this for four letters. He then realized he could just take off the bark and a bit of the tree around the scratched-in heart. He yanked the chain saw on again and he put his feet down in the earth for balance before raising the teeth up to the bark, turning the tool upright. He would peel it like skin off a carrot. The saw skittered across the bark and began to chew out the letters. Still, time had deepened Haley’s four-letter story into the tree. He had just brought the blade back against it when he saw the girl, moving through the woods, a gold-yellow blouse that seemed to float.

  Chapter 46

  Even though Kennedy’s heart felt like it was pummeling the inside of her chest, she eased Nathan Doyle’s beat-up Trans Am along Silver Creek Lane, following the posted speed limit, no matter that the car stood out in the neighborhood like a scout from an invading army. A cast-iron pot leaf swung from the rearview mirror.

  To her relief, the driveway was empty.

  Kennedy disabled the alarm to the house. She glanced around, then, without stopping to take off her boots, took the stairs two at a time. Her hand went to the drawer and her fingers slipped under the wool of old sweaters. They closed over the small disc and its velvet cord and she was downstairs in a moment, the yin-yang necklace clutched tightly in her hand. She could imagine this piece on camera, among the photos the Crime After Crime crew had filmed. It was the most personal part of Haley she had; it had lain at the base of her throat all that spring.

  Back in the Trans Am, Kennedy wove around Stonemeadow and eventually came to Smoke Line. Here the speed limit increased. The large trees of the woods flashed past her, and the rearview ornament rocked on its chain. Then Kennedy slowed, in spite of the posted speed of fifty. Up ahead was Gerry’s BMW, parked beside the ditch. She scanned the nearly leafless woods and spotted him just as he edged between a row of trees. He was lugging a chain saw. Kennedy snapped on her blinker and gradually pulled over, parking her boyfriend’s car behind her father’s on the soft shoulder.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she whispered under her breath. She got out of
the vehicle and closed the door gently. She didn’t head in immediately, unsure if her curiosity mattered as much as her safety.

  After a few minutes she followed the sound of the buzzing.

  She stopped when she saw Gerry. He was hacking, vertically, at the tree, like someone with no understanding of physics, like someone crazed. Strips of bark were raining down. Wood chips and sawdust fogged the air all around him. She was pretty sure a chain saw wasn’t meant to be turned in that direction, as if it were a sword.

  She was at the edge of a clearing, off to his right by thirty or forty yards. For a second she couldn’t breathe. She knew where they were. The creek was off to the left, by a half mile.

  She recalled walking through that clearing the morning after the trip, calling for Berk and Haley—the herbaceous scent of wildflowers and dewed grass seemed like a bright color to Kennedy, Buchnera americana, or the bluehearts that the suburb had been named for, purplish and waving—before she found her finally, unmoving and emptied. She’d known her friend was dead when she approached her, Kennedy supposed. She just hadn’t wanted her to be.

  Kennedy must have made a sound, because her father turned his head then suddenly. The chain saw continued its furious drone, metal teeth fighting the tree.

  Kennedy froze, felt her breath hitch.

  Gerry locked eyes with her but didn’t seem to recognize her.

  Tentatively, she took a step toward him and her dad twisted, looking not at his task but at her. She heard more than saw the chain saw skitter across the surface, that change in sound. His forearms jerked with the force of it and then the blade jumped—landed at his throat.

  “Dad!” Kennedy yelled, and ran toward him. He was already on the ground, the machine sputtering nearby against the dirt and then into silence.

  Kennedy heard him gasping as if there was no air, only blood. Gerry looked up at her, her hands pressing to the wound to hold it closed.

  “Please, don’t,” he said, the words hardly audible, as if he thought she was there to kill him, or possibly, Kennedy considered later, as if he didn’t want to be saved.

  December 20, 2008

  I’m afraid I saved his life out of habit. Carter and I were always saving Gerry, like wives did for monstrous husbands in the gothic novels we used to read. But a softer side of me wants to believe it was because there was a part of him that needed to live to see what he’d done. That’s why I’m now sitting in his hospital room, to be here for when he wakes and finds out what’s left of him.

  My creative writing instructor at Heron Valley, Christina, used to say, “There are many truths. Which one do you choose?” She would cock her head, the tight, dark bun she always wore on top of her crown, seeming to point only out the window, never toward an answer.

  I choose this: I helped him even though I hate him.

  He is unconscious in bed, his head held somewhat lopsided above the red gash closed by a dozen staples on his neck. Two heart attacks and a chain saw couldn’t kill him though. I don’t know how he will do against facts and truth. When his eyes open and he sees me, legs curled up and under my jacket, I suppose he’ll try to speak and I’ll have to tell him, Don’t even try. You have no voice left. He might start to sit up and then realize his hand and leg are cuffed to the bed’s railing.

  * * *

  —

  What does forgiveness mean when you’re faced with someone whose crimes are as hideous as Gerry’s? We always thought of ourselves as being worldly and tough, but we were just little girls; I can see that so easily now.

  Asleep, his expression seems soft, medicated. That will fade.

  There are many things I want to say to him when he wakes. I want to be his narrator and tell him what the next years of his life will be like. I know what it involves.

  The state will bury him with multiple charges; the worst will be murder in the first degree and others will rhyme with blatutory tape. Possibly his friend Jim Stone will come out of retirement and act as his lawyer to see him through the bail hearing. But it won’t matter. Gerry will sit in the courtroom dissociated from his surroundings, his wound permanently tilting his head one way. The state will threaten him with the death penalty—and brag that they’ll get it—but Gerry won’t plea.

  He might have given up on me, but he’s never given up on avoiding responsibility—and he’ll continue to do that. He could throw me away for fifteen years because it was the idea of the Wynns, not the Wynns ourselves, that he loved. I understand that, and maybe even as kids we knew it. We were rebelling, not against things but toward something real, like love and truth.

  In spite of his best efforts, bail will be denied. Privilege has limits.

  The media will swarm and ask Carter and me to speak. Carter will brush past them, no comment. But I’ll stop, turn, and say one thing and one thing only: I inherited my father’s sins. It’s time to give them back.

  Kennedy Wynn

  Longwood Hospital

  Chapter 47

  Dee let Everett tell Marly before they handed the test results over to the police. His mother wouldn’t have believed it otherwise, that Gerry Wynn had been arrested. Everett decided to let Ted find out on the evening news.

  As Everett told her the story, trying to remember terms like mitochondrial and Y chromosome, Marly continued to flit around her kitchen, putting together a Sunday roast. “Kennedy didn’t do it!” he finally shouted.

  Marly set the roasting pan down, faced him, and said, “Well, at least a Wynn still did it.”

  He decided to wait a bit before telling her about Carter and him.

  * * *

  —

  In the car outside his mother’s house Carter had refused to get out. “It’s the only way,” Everett reasoned. “She has to see us together. Some things can’t be denied.”

  Carter was shaking as Everett took her by the hand. They walked to the front door. He knew that even on her antidepressants, she still had these little moments of panic, where the world felt too threatening to her. The person she had been supposed to rely on the most, her parent, had betrayed her—and Everett knew exactly how that felt. So when she cried, or became nervous, he just held her, as closely as he could and for as long as the situation allowed. He hadn’t spoken to Ted in months and didn’t intend to.

  Everett nodded, and she raised her finger and pushed the doorbell. He watched as Carter touched her hair, a nervous girl about to meet the parents for the first time—even if it had been years of acquaintance.

  “Why you ringing your own bell?” Marly shouted from inside. He had called ahead and she expected him, and someone he wanted her to meet. He’d said, “You know her already,” but he hadn’t said who, and Marly had guessed a couple names of Longwood girls.

  When she saw it was one of the Wynn twins standing beside her son, and his fingers feathering hers, she glared.

  “Ma, this is Carter. She’s my girlfriend.” Everett put on a half smile and leaned in to embrace Marly. He could feel the fear in her small frame, but she clutched him back for just a moment in a way that said her anger would fade.

  When he pulled back he could see fifteen years of hate and obsession flickering on fast-forward and reverse. But there was no final explosion. No tape snapping. After a moment Marly said, “I suppose you should come in.”

  It wasn’t the most pleasant afternoon any of them had ever spent, but Everett told himself it would get easier in time. Maybe.

  Chapter 48

  Carter paid to light a candle in memory. Under the long rows of columns and the vaulted ceiling of Notre Dame, she shed silent tears. The high stained-glass colors blurred. When she looked over at Everett, she saw him still staring up at the ceiling, gawking.

  He lit his candle, but neither of them said, “For Haley.” They didn’t need to. They watched the soft flicker and placed their candles in the row of others. As she and Everett moved reluctantly
away, making room for other tourists, their two lights for Haley became anonymous, but Carter knew they would always burn.

  They walked along the gray Seine afterward, the February day overcast, and Everett kissed her gently as the rain began to fall.

  Everett had wanted Italy, but it was only a vague romantic notion that drew him to that idea. Carter had chosen Paris, and he had given in easily. She and Haley had learned about the French Revolution in history, pushing their desks together to work on projects. Carter had been involved in French Club and promised Everett she could remember enough of the language to navigate the city.

  Everett had asked to visit Jim Morrison’s grave, and Carter had tried not to roll her eyes. He was his sister’s brother, after all.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the hotel, Carter showered to take the chill of the rain off. When she got out, Everett was sitting on the bed, staring intently at his laptop screen.

  “What is it?” she said. She knew the episode of Crime After Crime had been supposed to air while they were away, and she’d timed their trip so they’d be out of the country. They had seen the preview before they left. It included voiceover, and a clip of Haley’s yin-yang necklace swinging from an anonymous man’s hand, an actress a bit too old to be a teen Kennedy wearing a velvet dress and Docs and walking slowly through Blueheart Woods.

  “Dee just sent me a link where we can watch it online,” Everett said, that vertical line dividing his forehead as she knew it only did when he was tense.

  Carter stared at the image of her childhood home on Everett’s laptop. He opened the image to full-screen mode. The house in Blueheart Woods, with its circular drive, its multiple peaks, the “suicide doors,” as she and Kennedy had called them, being as they opened onto not quite a balcony, in the upstairs front bedroom. The lettering onscreen floated over the grass: July 4, 1993. Blueheart Woods, VA. The grass was ratty, though, and you could tell the footage had been taken in the wrong season.