The Bullet

by Mary Louise Kelly

  Mom and I grinned at each other.

  “I’m going to call your father,” she said. “He’ll be thrilled.”

  I headed upstairs to change out of my pajamas. When I returned twenty minutes later, teeth brushed and hair twisted back in a bun, she was seated on my living-room sofa. Cheral’s photos were still spread across the coffee table. My mom had picked one up by the edges and was studying it intently, a strange look on her face.

  I thought I understood. Had Mom ever seen a photograph of Sadie Rawson? She must be upset. The resemblance to me was staggering.

  She waved the photo at me.

  “Mom—”

  “Darling,” she said. “I didn’t know you knew Ethan.”

  Forty

  * * *

  My mouth hung open. I thought my legs might buckle. I steadied myself on the arm of the sofa. “What are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t know you knew Ethan. Such a lovely man.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Of course. We’ve known Ethan and Betsy for years. We got to know each other at the ABA convention. Let’s see, the time it was in Dallas.” The ABA was the American Bar Association. “That must have been . . . goodness . . . sometime in the eighties. Twenty-five or thirty years ago. Ethan was seated next to me at the banquet. Which was a relief, I can tell you, because there are some exceptionally boring lawyers in this country, and I always seem to draw them as my dinner partner at these things.”

  I stared at her, my mouth still open.

  She seemed delighted that I was so interested. “Ethan was great fun, though. Knowledgeable about the theater. And tennis. He and Betsy would fly over to England for Wimbledon every year. Remember a few summers ago, when Dad and I had tickets for Centre Court? We talked about how fun it would be if we bumped into the Sinclares there. But the week before, your father insisted on going out jogging, even though it was raining—”

  “And he slipped and broke his ankle and you never let him forget it, I know, I know.”

  “Well, I just think he should have shown better sense. We had to cancel the whole trip. Nonrefundable flights to London.” She sniffed. “Anyway, we used to see the Sinclares every year at the convention. We still trade Christmas cards.”

  My parents must receive a hundred, maybe two hundred, holiday cards each December. They display them from tartan ribbons, tied in bows and trailing down from the spindles of the stairs in their front hall. My brothers and I race each other to read aloud the obnoxiously self-congratulatory family newsletters; we never bother to glance at the cards from Dad’s professional acquaintances.

  “You didn’t answer me. How do you know Ethan?” Mom was sensing that something was wrong.

  I raised my hand to shush her. “Hang on. This is important. When did you last see him?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “It’s been years. We stopped going to all those ABA events when Daddy retired. But . . . but Ethan called the house just last week.”

  “He what?”

  “Let me think. It was the day I had the girls with me.”

  The girls would be Hayley and Keira. Tony’s little girls. Mom counted backward on her fingers. “Last Monday. The twenty-first.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Caroline, he was just being friendly. Just saying hi. He talked about how he was thinking of following your father’s lead, maybe start easing into retirement himself. He asked about you kids.”

  I felt queasy. “Why? Has he ever met us?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But why do you have his picture?” She gestured at the coffee table. “And what’s he doing standing there with . . .” Her lip trembled. “I assume that’s her? Your birth mother?”

  “Mom. It’s okay.” I moved to wrap my arm around her. “What did you tell him? About me?”

  “Only that you’d grown up into a beautiful young woman,” she pleaded. “People ask after each other’s children, Caroline, it’s what parents do. All I said was how proud we are of you, and how well you’ve done teaching at Georgetown. And that . . . that you were going to take some time off. To have an operation.”

  I closed my eyes.

  That Monday was the day Madame Aubuchon had ordered me to take sabbatical for the rest of the semester. Wasn’t that the night that Will had slept over? I had already met Sinclare by then. But Leland Brett’s follow-up article, confirming my plans to get surgery, hadn’t run until the next day. Tuesday the twenty-second. That Monday it was not yet public knowledge whether the bullet was about to be extracted, or whether it would stay in my neck forever.

  Ethan Sinclare had been checking up on me.

  • • •

  “HE KNOWS MY parents, Beamer.” To hell with last names, with police protocol and professional distance. I was too upset. “Sinclare called my mom last week.”

  “Back up. What are you talking about? How could he call your mama—”

  “Not Sadie Rawson. Frannie. He knows the Cashions.”

  “What? You sure?” asked Beamer Beasley down the phone line from Atlanta.

  “My mother—my mother Frannie—just recognized him in a photo. She says he called their house last week. He asked about me, Beamer.”

  “All right, all right, hang on. Let me conference in Gerry. You can tell us both what happened.”

  It took ten minutes to recount my conversation with my mother. When I had finished, Beasley cleared his throat. “Sinclare and your daddy are both lawyers. Trial attorneys, roughly the same age, at the end of successful careers. I suppose it’s not shocking that their paths might have crossed.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Gerry Fleeman. “Makes sense that they would attend the same conventions.” I had liked the head of the Atlanta Police Department’s Cold Case Squad when he conducted my formal interview over the phone last week. He seemed smart, competent. Now, from six hundred miles away, he was getting on my nerves.

  “There must be, I don’t know, half a million litigators in the United States,” I snapped. “It’s not like they’re all buddies, hanging out and smoking cigars together at Ye Olde Litigators’ Club. And to my knowledge, none of the rest of them has been calling my mom in Washington, inquiring after my health. You don’t find that a strange coincidence?”

  “Let’s think this through calmly,” said Gerry. “You said your parents originally met Ethan Sinclare because he sat next to your mom at a dinner back in the 1980s. You’re not suggesting . . . what, that he engineered that, are you? As a way of getting to you?”

  “I’m suggesting you consider the possibility.”

  “Ms. Cashion, that would mean he’d been stalking you for the last thirty years,” scoffed Gerry. “Thirty years! If he means you harm, he’s certainly taken his time about it.”

  “Fine, not stalking me, but keeping tabs on me. Keeping tabs on whether I was healthy. Whether I had remembered anything.”

  “What, with an annual Christmas card swap? I’m sorry, I just don’t think—”

  “It does make a crazy kind of sense,” said Beasley, just when I thought I might scream. “Whoever the killer was, he would have wanted to know whether the sole surviving witness remembered anything. And he couldn’t just call and ask to speak to a little girl. He would have had to go through her adoptive parents.”

  “Precisely,” I said.

  “But I still don’t think Sinclare had anything to do with it,” said Beasley. “I also don’t think he had anything to do with the burglary of your house, Ms. Cashion.”

  “Okay. How come?”

  “Because he was at his cabin, out on Lake Burton. His wife says they were there together all last week. They’re still there. Sounds like she’s attempting to persuade him to spend less time at the office.”

  “Where’s Lake Burton?” I demanded. “When did you talk to her?”

  “North G
eorgia. Rabun County.” Beasley sighed. “You asked me to find out where Sinclare was last Wednesday. I can’t say I credit your suspicions about him, but I figured we owed you an answer. Also figured we owed him the courtesy of not hearing secondhand that we’re taking another look into the Smith murders. So I called his law firm yesterday. They gave me the phone number for the lake house.”

  “And he’s definitely there?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Betsy—that’s his wife—she said he’d walked out the door five minutes before I called. Out on his boat fishing all afternoon yesterday.”

  “Great bass fishing up at Burton,” Gerry chimed in. “Although getting a little cold for it now. Anyhow, if we’re done here—”

  “We’re not done here,” I said, irritated. “She could be lying about where he was last week.”

  “Possible,” said Beasley evenly. “But I had his secretary check his calendar. She agrees he was at the lake house last Wednesday and Thursday.”

  “Did she lay eyes on him there? Or is that just where he told her he—”

  Beasley cut in, “And we checked the flight lists into National, Dulles, and BWI. All three DC-area airports. Ethan Sinclare didn’t fly to Washington last week.”

  “Maybe he drove.”

  “Also,” added Gerry, “local police got the fingerprinting results from your house. And we already had Mr. Sinclare’s on file from way back. We compared them. No match.”

  “So the man owns a pair of gloves!” I exploded. “Look, please tell me that one of you is going to follow up. Press Ethan Sinclare on how he happens to know both my families—”

  “I thought we’d already agreed, he had good reason to attend the same Bar Association meetings as Thomas Cashion,” Gerry grumbled.

  “Absolutely,” I shot back. “But why didn’t he mention the connection when he met me for breakfast at the St. Regis? He acted as though he had no idea that the man who adopted me was a lawyer.”

  “I have to agree with her there,” said Beasley. “I thought of that, too.”

  “Thank you.” I relaxed a little in my chair. “Meanwhile, any news about the bullet? The lab’s had it four days now.”

  “We’ll keep hassling them,” said Gerry. “These things can take time.”

  After he signed off, Beasley stayed on the line. “Sorry about that. Gerry’s a good guy. Skepticism and mistrust are part of the job description.”

  “What about being a complete jerk? Does he throw that in for free?”

  Beasley chuckled. “And I take your point about Sinclare not acknowledging that he knows the Cashions. It’s odd. There must be an explanation, but I’ll be damned if I can think of it. Maybe I’ll drive up today, pay him a visit at his cabin. It’d do me good to get out of the city.”

  “Thank you. One more thing. His alibi. Back in ’79. Who was it?”

  • • •

  ON MY DOORSTEP stood a woman with flaming red hair. “Hey there. Hi. Sorry to disturb you,” she called through the door, waving a business card in front of her. I couldn’t read it through the narrow tunnel of my peephole. “Hello? Rhonda, from your office, said I would find you here.”

  Rhonda is the administrative assistant for the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown. Cautiously I cracked the door. “Yes?”

  “Thanks. Hi.” She trained a warm smile on me. “My name’s Alexandra James. I’m a journalist. Wait!” She jammed the toe of her boot in the door before I could slam it shut. “I know, last person you want to talk to, right?” The megawatt smile tipped up at me. “Just hear me out. Two minutes and I’ll go.”

  I studied her face more closely. She looked a few years younger than me, perhaps in her late twenties. She wasn’t beautiful, not exactly, but she was striking. Well dressed. I glanced down. Great legs. “I remember you. You write for that Boston paper, right? You broke the big terrorism story at the White House last year.”

  “Yeah.” She grinned. “Still recovering from that one. I got this for my troubles.” She lifted bangs off her forehead to reveal a thin, white scar.

  Alexandra James had been all over the news herself for a while. She had broken the mother of all stories, had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, as I recalled, but questions had been raised about her ethics. Whether she’d crossed red lines in dealing with sources. She was rumored to have slept with a British spy; I couldn’t remember the details.

  “I’m based here in Washington now. I read your story, about the bullet, and what happened to your family. Were you pleased with how the Journal-Constitution handled it?”

  I was caught off guard. “Er . . . Yes. More or less. Look, I really—”

  “Good. I thought the reporter was respectful, the way he wrote about the deaths of Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith. I did wonder, though . . . I mean, obviously, the AJC ’s an Atlanta operation, they’re going to want to play up the Atlanta story. But I did wish they had also interviewed your family here. The Cashions.”

  “Oh, we don’t want any more publicity.”

  “Can’t say I blame you. But it would be nice, you know? To hear from the family that you grew up with. They got . . . sidelined by the story, the way it was written. Left out. Kind of a shame, because if I read between the lines correctly, it sounds like you’re close. I’d love to see a story where you had the opportunity to thank them. Talk about how much they mean to you.”

  A shrewd pitch. She had zeroed in on the one angle I’d be happy to talk about all day.

  “Anyway.” The smile again. “I promised to shut up after two minutes. May I leave you my card? My cell number’s on it, in case you ever want to talk.” I accepted the ivory rectangle from her outstretched hand, intending to chuck it in the trash the second she left.

  “Oh!” She twirled around. “I almost forgot. Here. For your convalescence.”

  Alexandra James held up a white box tied with string. I recognized the elaborate, cursive P of the Pâtisserie Poupon logo.

  My eyes narrowed. “How did you . . . ?”

  “Like I said, I called the university before I walked over here. To check when they were expecting you back at work. I didn’t want to disturb you if you’d just been released from the hospital an hour ago or something.”

  “And Rhonda gave out my home address?” I would need to have a word with her.

  “No, no. I already had it. You’re in the phone book, you know. Rhonda didn’t tell me anything except that you’re on leave for the rest of the semester. And that if you weren’t at home, I might find you here.” She tapped the P logo on the pastry box. “I share your addiction, by the way. I’m a fiend for their lemon tart.”

  I bit back a smile. Say what you would about the woman’s journalistic ethics, she was clever. I carried the box through to my kitchen. Lifted the lid. Bacon quiche. Still warm.

  You are not supposed to accept food from strangers. That must be one of the earliest lessons that my mother—hell, probably both my mothers—had drummed into me. But they also taught me to trust my instincts. Right now mine were telling me that Alex James wanted to ­interview me, not poison me.

  I opened a drawer and pulled out a fork.

  • • •

  I HAD POWERED my way through two slices of quiche and was eyeing a third when the doorbell rang again.

  What now?

  It was a tiny skeleton. In plump hands it clutched a hollow, plastic pumpkin. “Trick or treat?”

  I had forgotten it was Halloween. Bizarre holiday. Dressing children up as witches and vampires, telling them stories about monsters and ghosts. As if real life didn’t pack enough nasty surprises.

  Forty-one

  * * *

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2013

  For many years, if you wanted to make a phone call in Atlanta, you were routed through the switchboards of Southern Bell.

  In the early days, the 1880s, the
only long-distance call you could place was from Atlanta to Decatur, six whole miles away. That would set you back fifteen cents for a five-minute chat. It was 1915 before the first transcontinental call, voices dancing from the East Coast to the West across thousands of miles of suspended copper wire; 1951 before you were allowed to dial long distance without the assistance of an operator; 1956 before the first transatlantic phone cable was laid. Southern Bell thrived through the changes, survived a dizzying number of mergers and spin-offs and splits, until the company name was finally retired in 1998.

  I mention all this by way of backdrop. Backdrop to what, for our purposes, is by far the most interesting date in Southern Bell’s corporate history: March 25, 1971. That’s when a Mr. Verlin Snow walked through the doors. He was hired as a senior vice president, poached from a Boston bank, forty-five years old. Technically he was brought in to oversee the completion of the transition to touch-tone phones. They’d been available to subscribers since the early sixties, but folks seemed slow to catch on. But Snow’s real talent was as a rainmaker. He possessed an exceptional knack for greasing political connections to increase profits. A columnist for the Atlanta Business Chronicle noted that most weekdays you could watch him in action at the Coach and Six, the Peachtree Street power-lunch spot favored by the city’s old guard. Verlin Snow stood out, the columnist added with a trace of suspicion, not only for his Yankee accent but for his puritanical habits. Snow conducted business stone-cold sober, in a town where men were disposed toward downing a second martini before the food arrived.

  Sometime in the late 1970s, though, he had gotten into trouble. He had hired a young lawyer by the name of Ethan Sinclare, a rising star in one of Atlanta’s white-shoe firms. I couldn’t tell quite what kind of trouble Snow was in. Beamer Beasley didn’t seem to know either, and whatever it was, Sinclare appeared to have earned his fee and succeeded at making it disappear. A Forbes magazine profile of Snow in 1981 (“The Man Who Killed Off the Rotary Phone”) alluded only to an extended leave of absence, taken at his summer home on Nantucket, from which Snow had returned to work energized and more bullish than ever.