Kyle stands up, and his metal chair knocks over behind him, and all at once Hurt is on his feet. “It’s gone,” Kyle says. “I’m not giving it back.”
“Did Bear Miller ever come on to you?” Hurt asks.
“Fuck no,” Kyle says, and spits, there in the room, onto the shined concrete floor.
“No more cursing,” Kateri says, and points for Kyle to sit back down. “And do not spit in here.” She looks to Hurt.
“Excuse us,” Hurt says to Kyle, who shifts in his chair, panicky.
“I have a kid on the way,” Kyle says again.
“Not a great time to make mistakes, then,” Hurt says, and they duck out into the hallway, where one long fluorescent light is half out and half blinking, leaving the corridor to look like the way into a haunted house.
Kateri swings her workbag onto her shoulder and then pats the outer pocket.
“Come have a cigarette with me,” she says to Hurt.
* * *
They stand outside the back door, facing the lot where the staff park, underneath a sickly yellow light. Beyond them, in the lights that hang over the cars, the tiniest snowflakes gather, fluttering around each other but not coming down. The wind has a bite. Kateri leans her back against the brick wall and watches Hurt as he takes his first drag in years.
It goes smoother than she expects, and he smiles a little. “You don’t forget,” he says. She shakes her head and thinks that not drinking will be easier if she can just have the crutch of a cigarette.
“It’s debatable,” Hurt says then, “that if they took Miller to Upstate instead of Mercy, he might have made it through surgery.”
He also tells her that lesser gunshots have killed people instantly.
Hurt shrugs. “He was unusually strong,” he says.
“So was Pearl Jenkins,” Kateri says.
“Strip search found deep wounds on Metzger,” Hurt says. “Poorly stitched and healing badly. Probably because he was afraid to report it.”
“There was definitely a struggle.”
“From blunt force,” he adds, “and stabbing.”
“All that blood,” Kateri says.
“He came to attack her,” Hurt says, “and she kicked his ass.”
* * *
The following morning, Meghan Miller arrives, shining like a girl from a magazine, Kateri thinks, in her cashmere sweater. She seems neither distraught nor surprised. Hurt takes her to the room where they interrogated Shannon, which seems rural and shabby and run-down all around Meghan. She barely sits in the flowered chair, her slim bottom just perched at the edge of the cushion.
“I’m sorry to inform you of your husband’s death,” Hurt says. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Meghan nods, her jaw tight, her lips straight.
“If you’re ready to speak with us,” Kateri says, “we’re hoping you can shed some light on the situation.”
“It’s fine,” Meghan says. She shakes her hair back and lifts her chin. “I knew Bear wanted the property in the woods,” she says. “It’s a huge piece of land; he was going to make millions off of it. I didn’t know he had plotted to kill someone over it,” she says. “We’re not exactly in touch,” she adds.
“You’re not aware of any connection between Bear and Pearl Jenkins?” Kateri asks.
“Not other than the land,” Meghan answers.
“What about Shannon Jenkins?” Hurt asks.
“Is that who he is?” Meghan asks, and then offers a dry, bitter laugh. “Of course,” she says.
“Why of course?” Kateri asks.
“It’s just like him,” Meghan says, and shrugs one delicate shoulder. “He can’t just have what he wants. He knows he can have anything. He can buy anything,” she says. “He’s got to make someone else pay, though,” she says. “It’s never a straight shot with Bear.”
Kateri watches Hurt write something down in a slanted, practiced cursive.
“Where is he?” Meghan asks.
“Released on bail,” Kateri says.
Meghan rolls her eyes. “He didn’t do anything,” she says.
“Do you know that?” Hurt asks her.
“No,” Meghan says. “I don’t have to. I know what Bear’s capable of. I saw that look in that kid’s eye the second I met him. He fucks you into submission and he keeps you there with money and trinkets and cars,” Meghan says. “Except that poor kid probably actually had feelings for him.”
The room goes quiet, and Kateri can hear the tick of the wall clock, Hurt’s breathing.
Meghan closes her eyes, then, and covers her mouth with her hand, on which she still wears a large, elaborate wedding ring. Kateri sees a sheet of tears slip from under Meghan’s eyelashes and wash down her face.
“Mrs. Miller,” Kateri says, and tries to offer her a box of Kleenex in support, but Meghan swats her away.
“Don’t Mrs. Miller me and pretend you have any idea what this is like,” Meghan says. She straightens up and swings back her hair. Kateri has backed onto the desk, farther away.
“Are we done here?” Meghan says to Hurt. “I have to pick up my daughter. I have to make arrangements for her father’s funeral.” Her voice is gravel and harsh, the sound of the cry still lodged in her throat.
Hurt presses his lips so that they disappear. “Yeah,” he says.
* * *
It’s Hurt who walks her out and Kateri who stays several feet behind, pretending to pay attention to a file in her hands. When Meghan leaves, Hurt comes back and stands close to Kateri, not touching.
“It was him,” he says.
She just looks at him. It was him in so many ways, she thinks.
“At your house,” he adds.
“Yeah,” she mutters.
“He was trying to subdue you. If not by seduction,” Hurt says, “then by force.”
“Apparently,” Kateri says. She feels far away and empty.
“But he got neither one,” Hurt says.
The memory of it, so recent, rattles her core, turns her insides to a running motor, rumbling. She thinks of his face in hers, his snarl. The roll of his foot on the candle and the tumble of his body down the stairs.
“How’d you get rid of him?” Hurt asks.
“I pushed him down the stairs,” she says.
Hurt smiles and looks her in the eye. “Yeah you did,” he says.
* * *
The stranger doesn’t last the night. It’s Kateri who goes in early the next morning, after she has taken the girl back to her own apartment, nestled her on the couch with Shannon. She lets herself into the cell wing before five in the morning, when the light is just a lavender glow coming over the tops of the trees.
She finds him curled on his side like a shell. Brittle, intricate, empty.
She sits for a moment on the steel bed and puts her hand to his cool face. She feels for a pulse, but knows without searching. He is still. It may have been an hour or more. His face, pale and bluish.
His knees are tight, his arms close to his chest, and his hands folded under his cheek.
She tries to pray, but her mind is empty, white, quiet. She studies his face instead, the dark fringe of lashes, his soft mouth gone tight and rigid in death.
He had nothing to lose.
THIRTY-ONE: SHANNON
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3
When they hand me back my possessions in jail, they’re in a plastic bag marked INMATE PROPERTY. The keys to Bear’s house and the Land Rover are in there. I have my learner’s permit from when I turned sixteen, already expired, half a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and ten dollars.
Kateri walks me to the front door and out onto the sidewalk, where it’s bright and cold. They keep Birdie for a few more questions with a caseworker and a child psychologist.
“Where am I supposed to go?” I ask. My own house was a crime scene, and now Bear’s is as well.
“Shit,” Kateri mutters.
They wouldn’t let me see Baby Jane. I only knew he was in the same li
ne of cells I had been in. The same metal bed. The same cold walls.
Kateri holds up her finger for me to wait and then steps down the hall to another office, where she leans in. When she comes back, she hands me her house key. “Cemetery Road,” she says.
* * *
She apologized this afternoon. When she told me, she said it generically: “Bear has been shot.” Passive. The first thing I asked her was, how? And then, by who? And then, why?
She told me in her office, where I had my regular clothes back on. She had Hurt wait outside her door.
I felt my head fill up with cotton, muffling other sounds. I thought of him struggling, writhing in pain, and I could barely picture it. He seemed so strong, so invincible. My feet and hands went cold and numb.
“You did it?” I asked her.
“I did it,” she said. “I am so very sorry to tell you.”
“Did he …” I started.
“He grabbed my gun,” she said. “It’s what I was trained to do.” Then, “Your mother has identified her attacker as Kyle Metzger.”
“Fuck Kyle Metzger,” I said. It was nearly a howl. “Why?” I said. “Did she owe him money?”
Kateri holds up her hand, asking me to wait. “He’d been hired,” Kateri said. “By Bear.”
“Fuck,” I said. “Did you shoot Kyle?”
“No. Kyle is in custody.”
It was all I could do to stand up and walk out of there. Outside her door, Hurt was standing with his hands behind him, looking at his feet.
“Did you know?” she asked me at the door.
I shook my head. She just blinked, like she believed me.
I leave there on foot with my plastic bag of things and Kateri’s key. The justice center sits on the edge of town, and I walk toward town, through the center of the village and past the Hub and then up Cemetery Road, maybe five or seven miles altogether. The village square and the storefronts have been decorated for Halloween, the town filled with skeletons and tombstones. Part of the park is made up like a fake graveyard, with hands coming up out of the dirt. A straw body in a stuffed flannel shirt lies on the lawn of the bed-and-breakfast, its head in a chair beside it. Rubber bats hang from the trees.
But I’m the one who feels like a monster. Like at any moment the villagers might come after me with torches.
* * *
I wake up with Birdie in The Nest. I’m curled on my side on Kateri’s couch, and Birdie is sitting in the triangle of my bent legs, happily watching TV, singing, playing with a stuffed bear. My body jolts, and then when I notice her, I settle. I reach for her arm and wrap my hand around it. She pushes my hand away like everything is normal.
I sit up but keep the blanket over my lap, and outside the sky is heavy and dark with coming snow. Birdie leaps off the couch and runs into the kitchen, where Kateri is bringing me a cup of coffee.
“What time is it?” I ask her. She looks different off duty. Relaxed. Her hair is down, her clothes are normal. She looks young and at ease with Birdie’s energy.
“It’s three,” Kateri says, “on Saturday.”
“Wow,” I say.
“You slept hard,” she says. “It’s good. I’m sure you needed it. There are some things you need to know,” she says, sitting across from me. “When you’re ready.”
“I’m ready,” I say, and sip the coffee, aware that I’m probably not ready. I rub my eyes and ruffle my hair. I think I would love a long hot shower, but all I can think of is the white glass shower at Bear’s, and all at once it comes back to me that he’s gone, that he’s dead, and I almost spill the coffee, doubling over.
I feel Birdie get up, nervous, and I hear Kateri take her into the kitchen, get her a juice box, murmur something to her. She lets me sob for a minute, and then I sit up, empty. Everything feels unreal.
“I’m sorry,” she says to me. Birdie has gone off to play in the bedroom, the door closed most of the way.
“I’m so stupid,” I say.
“You’re not,” Kateri says. She pushes a box of tissues at me, and I dab my eyes, blow my nose. My heart feels like a crater in my chest.
“Kerpak is standing by the offer on your property,” she tells me.
It takes me a minute to reconcile what she’s saying. Kerpak Industries. Bear’s mother’s company. “I didn’t know there was an offer,” I say.
“Bear had written an offer,” she says. “Before.”
I hold up my hand. I don’t want her to say it. “Is it enough to pay off the taxes?”
“It’s two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Kateri says.
My throat tightens.
“Why couldn’t he have just done that?” I say. My voice breaks, and I feel like I’m swallowing rocks. What are you going to do when we go to Europe? How could he have been faking all of it?
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Kateri says. “Some people,” she starts.
“Don’t,” I say, and shake my head. “Don’t try to explain him.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “There is also,” she continues, “money for you in the estate of Michael Jane.”
“Baby Jane?” I say, and she nods.
“I don’t know how much,” she says, “but he made it known to me that you are his sole benefactor.”
I don’t ask. I hear the word estate and I know. But I already knew it inside, that part of the empty well in my gut is that he is gone and my body felt it. In fact, that may be what I have been feeling all along. His fading, his absence.
Kateri pours me more coffee, and I hear Birdie start on “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” with commentary from the stuffed bear in a different voice. It’s hard not to smile. She seems so resilient now, I think, and I hope she maintains it.
“The court has granted you temporary custody of your sister,” Kateri says.
“Temporary,” I say.
“They’ll reevaluate. There’s no reason for them to revoke it,” she says. “But they have to state it as temporary.”
“Okay,” I say.
“And your mother has offered a full, signed confession,” she says.
“She tried to kill me,” I say. “In the house fire, when I was a kid.”
Kateri nods.
“All this time I thought it was my dad, and he didn’t even do it,” I say. “It was her.”
It feels like ash in my mouth.
* * *
Later, I sit on the floor with my back against the couch where Birdie curls up and sleeps, her hair a wild mess and her thumb tight in her mouth. I had started to doze, my head back on the soft cushion, the TV on low, but I felt something near me, a hand on my shoulder. I checked on her, but she was in a ball at the other end, and the hand I’d felt was bigger, warmer, something protective, and there were lips, near my ear.
Get up.
I heard the voice, and then it was gone.
The light is bright outside, and I can hear the loud scrape of snowplows moving along Cemetery Road. I turn the TV to a local channel.
And I lean back on the couch, my shoulders cocooned in a white down comforter, watching the radar of a line of snow moving across the Great Lakes, into the North Country, over to Vermont. A dappled line of white and pink. Twelve, eighteen, twenty-four inches of snow.
Outside, it has started, the sky a swirl of white, the grass blanketed, the roads deep and slick. I hear her stir behind me, her mouth sucking like the baby she still is but her body warm and safe and whole. Both of us, whole. By morning, everything will be covered in white, everything hidden under a deep layer of cold, hard sparkle, everything dormant, everything erased, what is buried waiting to rise again. Clean.
ALSO AVAILABLE BY JENNIFER PASHLEY
The Scamp
The Conjurer
States
Author Biography
Jennifer Pashley is the award-winning author of two short story collections, States, and The Conjurer, and a novel, The Scamp. Her stories have appeared widely in journals like Mississippi Rev
iew, PANK, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and she has been awarded the Red Hen Prize for Fiction, the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction, and the Carve Magazine Esoteric Award for LGBT Fiction.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Pashley
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-442-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-443-4
Cover design by Nicole Lecht
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
34 West 27th St., 10th Floor
New York, NY 10001
First Edition: September 2020
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