Circled

by Anne McAneny

  The sheriff tried to yank the wheel left, but Quail—

  Thump.

  That was it.

  Such a small, anticlimactic sound.

  The sheriff’s car, which he’d managed to swerve the slightest bit left out of sheer determination, had gently tapped the left pedal of Macy’s bike as he whizzed by.

  I, along with everyone else in the audience, careened down the road, trapped inside the vehicle, unable to see the outcome of the actions I now felt responsible for. The sickness, regret, and sorrow encompassing me were so beyond anything I’d ever experienced that I couldn’t begin to process them. And I surely couldn’t imagine the effect they’d had on young Hoop Whitaker.

  I squirmed and wriggled and twisted, trying desperately to glance out the back window of the car to see what had happened to Macy, but when I finally succeeded, I was met with utter darkness. The scene had ended. As horribly and irrevocably as it possibly could have.

  “No!” I screamed, and it was only then that I realized I couldn’t even hear my own voice. Because the entire audience was shrieking in horror.

  Chapter 53

  The Thump

  Hoop heard no skid. No screams. Only the terrible thump. He whipped his head around just in time to see Macy floating through the air in a perfect arc, graceful as a ballerina performing the finale of a lifetime.

  That was when Hoop became a believer in miracles. Midair, Macy’s back bowed itself as if clearing a high bar, her head leading the way, her body following with gazelle-like fluidity. Her hair swept toward the ground, the ends of the strands at the same altitude as the toes of her sneakers. In that upside-down pose, her golden locks resembled extended angel wings taking their passenger for a gleeful ride. Macy’s face shimmered, and for a frozen instant, her eyes found Hoop’s.

  Hoop’s eyes exuded a lifetime of love as time stood still. He wrapped Macy in that love, protectively, knowing it had to last for eternity, knowing it was his final chance to convey the depth of his commitment. Part of him left his own earthly body to cradle his true love, body and soul, to soften the blow of her landing. The two became one before her body touched the ground, a feather drifting downward, settling gently. And in that moment, when a spiritual bond managed to exceed the limits of human dimension, Hoop and Macy exchanged vows. He knew she felt it, and she knew he would never let her down.

  Back in his body, the moment having passed, Hoop let his mind absorb the horror of Macy’s corpse staring blankly at the swamp. An icy darkness incapacitated him. He remained immobile except for the tremors overtaking his core, silent except for the rattling of his teeth. His eyes shaded over, his vision nothing but pinholes. And as his mind became the fullest emptiness imaginable, he didn’t fight it. He let Hoop Whitaker die.

  Chapter 54

  Rafe spared the audience the moment of impact, the crushing defeat of a small girl against a four-thousand pound automobile. Something told me that Rafe knew exactly what had happened at that moment, but that he’d refused to compromise its purity. He would keep it to himself, hidden away, as it always had been.

  The scene changed so abruptly, I felt punched in the heart. No soft orchestra strings to ease us out, no moment to mourn in silence. With unforgiving brutality, we were whiplashed to a new visual: the greedy four standing over Macy’s contorted body—vultures over road kill—and we were the fifth party, compelled to bear witness once again.

  The casual stance of the Lucky Four meant we were entering the scene after they’d overcome their initial shock. Rafe would allow no sympathy to be generated for them in this abysmal scenario, no moment where we felt their pain as they shed their tears or pounded the pavement with revulsion. He’d also chosen to skip their assured desecration of Macy’s body when they touched it to confirm her death. All of that was stripped from our experience. We would see only the cold, calculating aftermath.

  “No, Richie!” the sheriff shouted. “Absolutely not!”

  “You don’t have a choice in this, Strike. You just killed a girl.”

  The blunt assessment seemed to jar the sheriff more than any opponent’s clout to the head ever had. “But it was an accident,” he said.

  The words sounded weak, pathetic.

  “Besides,” Quail said with a barren voice, “it wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t chasing her down to steal her lottery ticket.”

  The sheriff wheeled on the bigger man with a raised but hesitant fist. “You conniving, greedy son of a bitch. This was all your idea! Your ultimatum! I never—”

  The twisted evil of Quail’s expression knew no bounds. “Do you think any of us are going to stay quiet when the judge asks us why we were in your car? Why you were pursuing this girl—with your siren on?”

  Mrs. Elbee crossed her arms and sighed, kneading her own skin in place of the bread. “You were after her ticket, Sheriff,” she said. “And you were driving.”

  “She’s already dead,” Adeline DeVore said. “And if we tell the truth now, we might go to jail—and that is not in my plan.” She’d adapted quickly to the harsh groupthink, but at least she stared down at Macy with a forlorn expression when she spoke.

  I glanced at the real Adeline DeVore in front of me. I couldn’t see her but could hear her erratic breathing and somehow knew that she was lost to this world for now.

  “No one here is going to tell the truth,” Quail said. “Let’s get that straight right now. From this moment on, we’re in this together. For the rest of our lives. Way I see it, we’re either complicit in a murder—or we’re complicit in winning a lottery. Your choice, folks.”

  The sheriff looked like he’d taken a left hook to the face and was still trying to unscramble his brains. His words came slowly. “You people disgust me.” Nobody paid him much attention.

  “How do you propose we explain the body, Richie?” Mrs. Elbee said, gesturing offhandedly to Macy.

  “By telling the truth!” the sheriff yelled. “This idea was crazy and wrong from the start. We can’t layer lies on top of it.”

  Quail shook his head and rolled his eyes at the sheriff before squatting down and reaching his fat fingers into Macy’s front pocket. Only two of them fit as he fished around in the small space. A collective gasp filled the tent as Quail’s intimate violation of Macy repulsed the audience.

  “Y’all do what you want,” he said, yanking the ticket from Macy’s pocket and holding it up triumphantly. “But I’m signing the back of this ticket. You can join me or not. But if a single one of you calls me out on it, I’ll turn on all y’all—and you ain’t felt nothing till you’ve felt the wrath of Richie Quail.”

  “But how can we possibly get away with it?” Mrs. Elbee said.

  Her voice faded as the scene’s point of view shifted, rotating toward Macy’s bike. It had landed in the middle of the road, presumably having flown up and over the car while her body had drifted in the other direction.

  The sound of whirring tires filled the tent, and the scene, still rotating, now showed another car coming down the road: an old, mint-green Cadillac, big and lumbering, fronted by a rusty, dented fender.

  Mrs. Elbee had just gotten her answer.

  The scene closed in on the Caddy’s windshield and Avis Whitaker’s face became visible behind the wheel. A few faint bars of rock ’n roll rang out, followed by static and then sad country music. It filled the air, playing through the car’s speakers. Too late, Avis’s merry face looked up from the radio dial. He spotted the bike in the middle of the road, his expression shifting to panic. He veered and slammed on the brakes but still managed to catch a good chunk of the bike. He tried to correct, but to no avail. The car had been traveling too fast and was now compromised by the hunk of metal entwined in its undercarriage.

  Avis’s eyes suddenly alighted upon four folks he knew well, all standing over the collapsed body of the beautiful girl his son loved. The look of horror and utter sorrow on his face would remain his final expression for eternity as his car thudded with sickening impa
ct into the big oak tree. We all felt the jolt, our heads practically smashing into the wheel, the effect multiplied by the knowledge of Avis’s fate.

  What took longer to sink in were the implications, as an established reality of twelve years was ripped from our minds. A complete erasure of the blue circle whose hue we had always accepted. This new truth shattered the ease with which we’d blamed the town drunk, and the carelessness with which we’d written checks to charitable causes.

  “No,” I whispered. “No.” I gripped the arms of my chair, nearly pulling them from their screws. What was I supposed to do with this cyclone of emotions? I was melting and shrinking one second, enraged and erupting the next. I wanted to pass out—no—more—I wanted to grab the world by the scruff of its miserable neck and shake it until it behaved. I felt the dire need to exit by force any world that would let such events transpire.

  And then, I was yanked back. Along with everyone else.

  I felt exhaustion, frustration, and astonishment, as if someone were smearing their emotions directly on my soul. We the audience became one again as the power of our grief superseded all. Our communal horror and sadness could have taken on the force of flying bullets. We had become a lynch mob.

  Another time shift on stage. The sheriff was driving away from the dual tragedies, no doubt planning to drop off the others and circle back as the hero. Suddenly, there was Hoop—young and vibrant—rushing up from the banks of the swamp. He’d been there all along, a witness to the basest of human behaviors, including the framing of his father. No one could ever have been more alone than Hoop Whitaker at that moment. The people in charge—the adults—had abandoned the scene, leaving a crumpled girl on the ground and a hissing car projecting from a tree like a stubborn root.

  Hoop ran to Macy. He leaned down, touched her face, and stroked her hair. Then, very gently, he lowered his face to hers and kissed her lips. “I love you, Macy.”

  No one wanted to intrude on the moment, but it marched on, relentlessly battering all of us.

  The scene closed in on Hoop. His eyes, his carriage, and the set of his features showed a hardened expression, bereft of all innocence and optimism. In its place: resolve. Cold. Calculating. Unwavering.

  He gritted his teeth, assumed a defiant, frightening air, and reached into Macy’s back left pocket. He pulled out a receipt.

  Chapter 55

  We transformed into a simple audience gathered in a tent, but life would never be simple again. Rafe stood on stage, his hair its natural color, his eyes their astonishing blue, and his brows real. He must have dyed his hair back this afternoon and been sporting a wig for the first half of the show. Despite the passage of time and an elephant kick to the nose, there was no way to miss that the man on the stage was the boy we’d just seen on the edge of the swamp.

  In his hand, he held the receipt for Macy’s lottery ticket purchase.

  Murmurs of, Oh my God, it’s him, and, I thought he was dead, filled the air.

  “The winning lottery numbers,” Rafe said, reading from the receipt. “Four, one.” He tapped the receipt and then flicked a finger skyward. It caused a three-foot-tall, vaporous, red image of the digits to appear in the air above his head. “Macy’s birthday,” he said simply, by way of explanation.

  “Three, thirty-one,” he continued. Tap and flick. The numbers materialized above him and I felt as sick as I ever had. “Melanie LeGrange’s birthday.” He repeated the performance for Darrell LeGrange’s birthday. “And eight,” he said as the number 8 appeared overhead. “Macy’s favorite number.” The digit rotated itself ninety degrees. “And the symbol for infinity.”

  He stepped to the side and waved his hand triumphantly at the smoky numbers, their meaning penetrating the crowd.

  “Boyd wrote each person’s lottery numbers on their receipts. Hire handwriting experts, as I did. They will confirm the writing on this receipt as Boyd Sexton’s. Still”—he waved the receipt dismissively in the air—“circumstantial evidence only—a mere coincidence—with nothing but my word to back it up.” He gestured to Richie Quail in the front row. “Could have been Mr. Quail’s receipt. Could have been the sheriff’s.” He glanced at the receipt again and spoke his next words with tremendous skepticism. “Especially if they were also buying aspirin and a birthday card that day.” His tone made obvious how ridiculous the odds were.

  Rafe made the receipt disappear by tossing it in the air. It transformed into an origami bird and flew away over the audience’s head, chirping. I suspected it was a hologram. Then he gestured with a flourish to his right. “What you’re about to see, however, is not circumstantial at all.”

  A car engine rumbled to life. The tent filled with the smell of exhaust, and the sheriff’s old black-and-white roared onto the stage, driven by a small, elderly man with oil-slicked hair, and huge, reptilian eyes. He jammed the car to a stop and exited both car and stage with a showman’s flair. One of the original Galasso or Forenza brothers, no doubt.

  A beam of light zeroed in on the corner of the car’s front bumper, next to which a 3-D image of Macy’s bike suddenly appeared, the pedal in direct contact with the car.

  “Cars have been hitting cyclists since 1896,” Rafe said with pizazz, “when a motor vehicle collided with and killed a cyclist in New York City. Today, experts specialize in accident reconstruction. There are even forensic bike savants who become one with the damaged bike. They use it as a snapshot in time and analyze each scrape, dent, and ding to reconstruct the truth.” He pointed to the car’s bumper and feigned a shocked expression. “But Sheriff Ryker’s car was never analyzed. Why would it have been when my father’s car screamed, ‘Over here! I did it!’?” Rafe crossed the stage, his hand to his chin as if pondering. “Sadly, my dad’s Cadillac was telling the truth. It did indeed strike Macy’s bicycle, as you saw, dragging it untold yards along Old Pleasant Road to an abrupt and untimely end.” He spun to the audience and scanned the many awed faces, lights sweeping out in such a way that they seemed to emanate from his eyes, until he found Sherilyn in the fifth row.

  “When you analyze this car, Ms. Lewis,” he said, “which I’ll be donating to your forensics lab, you will find all the evidence you need. This car has not been touched since Sheriff Ryker inexplicably put it up for auction a month after the accident. My uncles made the winning bid, because they, like I, did not appreciate my father taking the burden of Macy’s death to his grave.”

  A loud but muffled sound erupted from the back of the tent. The lights went up and the audience turned around to see Chad standing behind a wheelchair that held the weakened form of Strike Ryker. I couldn’t believe it; the man had been near death a few hours ago. His pallor was no longer that of a dying man but of a person flushed with shame.

  “He insisted we come,” Chad said quietly, detesting this moment in the spotlight. “Said he’d rather die than hide from the truth any longer.”

  If Strike could have stood and taken his licks on the chin, I believe he would have. But it was all he could do to keep his head raised. His tears fell slowly, one by one, as if he’d only been allotted a few dozen to last a lifetime. “Hoop?” he said in a scratchy voice. “Is it really you?”

  Rafe narrowed his eyes, his anger fresh and raw. “Spare me what follows, Sheriff. I don’t care how much good you did with your winnings. I don’t care about the medical bills. I don’t even care that it was all an accident. What I do care about is that you lied and stole and betrayed everything you stood for, everything this town believed about you. You sold your soul—and nearly destroyed mine.”

  The sheriff gestured to Chad to push him farther forward.

  “If Avis had regained consciousness,” the sheriff said when halfway down the aisle, “I never would have let him take the blame.” His feeble voice floated along the tent’s perfectly engineered acoustic channels and travelled to each person’s ears, as if he were whispering just to them, begging for mercy.

  “But he didn’t regain consciousness,” Rafe said.
“As the hospital files now being sent to Deputy Ryker will show, he died—stone cold sober, by the way—because he hit a bike that never should have been there in the first place.”

  The sheriff’s head sunk low and everyone could hear that he was losing his battle for composure.

  “I didn’t—”

  “End the farce, Sheriff! You’re only sorry you got caught.” Rafe leaped off the stage and approached the cowering man. It seemed unduly cruel. “Would you like to share with the good people of Beulah what else you’ve done over the years to cover your crime? How you allowed Boyd’s drug operation to go undetected so he wouldn’t turn you in? How you looked the other way every time Richie Quail and Adeline DeVore bent the rules or received a complaint against them? How you poured compromise into every decision you’ve made since Macy’s death, until you became nothing but a shell of the person you once were? I must ask, Sheriff, was it worth it? Or would it have been better to fight a clean fight?”

  “None of it was worth it!” Strike said in what surely passed for a shout in his mind. “None of it!”

  “And shall we put the final nail in the coffin?” Rafe spun away from the sheriff and spoke in a quiet voice as he walked back to the stage. “Shall we tell the good citizens of Beulah your true intention when you went to retrieve Boyd Sexton from his tree hideaway? When you were presumably there to return him to federal authorities?”

  The sheriff sucked in a gulp of air and looked genuinely frightened. He trembled enough to make the wheelchair judder, as if the hand of justice had reached out and shaken his stained soul. “No, no, it’s not true. I changed my mind.”

  I recalled what I’d witnessed in the minutes before Old Bastard took Boyd for that final swim. The sheriff had already drawn his gun—his personal gun. Boyd had run like his life depended on it. And what was it Boyd had yelled out? I ain’t saying nothing. There’s nothing to worry about. He’d been reassuring the sheriff because the sheriff didn’t want Boyd to talk to the authorities any more than Quail did. You made a deal with those government men, Boyd. You promised them a conversation.