Chapter 17
The Boathouse
The gun came from a man in Anniston, Alabama, who sold it out of the trunk of a Buick at a flea market on a Sunday morning for four hundred and ten dollars, cash, with no questions and a plastic bag.
She did not enjoy buying it.
That mattered to her, and she did not know why. She had thought it would be easier to feel nothing. She drove two hours across the state line in the Camry, with the windows up, and a flat brown envelope on the seat beside her, and she felt, all the way down Highway 78, the small steady pulse of her own heartbeat, and the tick of the turn signal, and the unreasonable, ordinary, trivial discomfort of a woman who has not eaten breakfast.
The man was fifty, bald, courteous. He wore a Braves cap. His wife sat in a lawn chair beside the Buick, selling jars of pickled okra. He looked at her, and at the envelope, and said, "First time?" and she said, "Yes," and he nodded and said, "Well, you'll be all right," as if she were buying a used lawnmower.
He showed her how it worked.
It took four minutes. He did it in the lee of the car, with his back to the lane, in a quiet, practical, almost fatherly voice, and she watched his hands and said nothing. At the end he put it in a paper bag with a roll of paper towels, and handed it over, and said: "Don't tell nobody where you got it."
"I won't."
"I mean it. Not even a boyfriend."
"I don't have one."
"Good." He grinned, and the grin was surprisingly kind. "Hold it with both hands, honey. That's the main thing."
She drove home. She put it under the mattress, with the notebook. She did not take it out for two weeks.
Grant Pruitt Jr. had changed since September.
She knew, because she watched. It was the only thing she did that winter, in the hours between work and sleep, at the kitchen table, with a laptop and a cup of coffee she did not drink. She did it through his wife's Instagram, which was public, and his father's company's Facebook page, and a local-news site that ran a column called Calloway Society, in which a woman named Mrs. Dorothy Teague wrote with breathless approval about the activities of the county's leading families.
There was a photograph of Grant at a Rotary dinner in November. He was smiling. His face was thinner, and there were shadows under the eyes, and the smile had a faint fixed look, like a dancer's at the end of a long performance. There was a photograph of him at a Christmas gala, with his arm round his wife. She was pregnant. He had one hand on her belly and was looking at the camera with an expression that Corinne examined for a long time.
It was not guilt. She had been looking for guilt. It was fear.
He knows it's coming, she thought. Not from me. From the dark. From the way a man knows a storm is on the way before the sky has changed.
He had hired a security firm in October. He had put a camera on his father's dock. He had installed a gate at the lake house, with a keypad, and a pair of motion lights that came on whenever a deer crossed the lawn. He no longer went anywhere alone. At a charity luncheon in December, according to Mrs. Teague, he had been accompanied by a tall quiet gentleman in a dark suit who seemed to be a member of the family.
She noted all of it. She noted the gaps.
The gaps were the thing she had learned. A man could hire all the security in Georgia, and it would not matter, because the security was on him, in the gate, in the camera, in the tall quiet gentleman. It did not follow him into the places where he went to be himself.
And there was one place. It was a very small one. It was the boathouse.
She had seen it in the wedding photographs.
It was a low, shingled building at the foot of the Pruitt lawn, thirty yards from the dock, painted white, with a green roof and a pair of broad double doors that opened on the water. It had been there since the nineteen-fifties. In the photographs, the doors stood open, and inside, on the whitewashed boards, in the gold light of a late-April afternoon, a row of Chinese lanterns had been hung from the beams.
A lantern, she thought.
She had not, in the end, been able to stop looking.
He went there every night. She knew this from Lauren's posts, which were, God help them both, so earnest and so open. She wrote about the little rituals of marriage. She wrote that G. goes down to the boathouse every night around ten to check on the boat, and I leave the porch light on for him, and when he comes up he always brings me a flower from the garden. She had posted a picture of it: a single yellow rose in a water glass, on a nightstand, with the caption this guy.
Every night.
Around ten.
She did not need to read it twice.
She went on the twelfth of January, a Friday.
It was bitterly cold. The sky was clear, with a half-moon high over the lake, and a hard white frost lay on the grass. She had come by the logging road again, and left the car at the turnout. She wore black jeans, a black coat, a knit cap. In her pocket, in a Ziploc bag, was a pair of leather gloves. In her inside pocket, under the coat, wrapped in a dishcloth, was the gun.
It was heavier than she had expected.
She had thought about leaving it in the car. She had thought about it for an hour, in the turnout, with the engine off, and her hands on the wheel. She had thought about a girl in a gray T-shirt at a kitchen table, practising on a dead machine. She had thought about her mother, who had held her in the middle of the courthouse steps and said nothing.
She had thought: I can still go home.
She had understood that it was a lie. She was not going home. She had not been going home since a day in March when a florist's card sank in a barrel of rainwater, and the person who stood in the turnout with a gun wrapped in a dishcloth was only the last of a series of people, each of whom had made a very small decision, and none of whom she could, now, look back and name.
She got out of the car.
She walked the three miles through the pines. The cold bit at her face. Her breath smoked. The frost crunched under her feet, and she could not help it, so she stepped on the roots, and the moss, and the soft needle-bed beneath the oaks. She came out on the rise above the lake at twenty to ten. Below her, at the foot of the long white lawn, the boathouse sat with its doors closed and a thread of yellow light under the sill.
She went down.
The door at the side was not locked.
It was a plain wooden door, with a latch, in the shadow of the eaves. She stood outside it for a moment, listening. From within she could hear a sound she could not at first identify: a low, even, rhythmic scrape, like a man sanding a piece of wood.
She lifted the latch.
It was warm inside. A small electric heater glowed in a corner. The air was thick with the smell of varnish and old rope and cold lake water. Along the left wall, on a wooden cradle, sat a long mahogany runabout, with its brass fittings polished, and a ring of Chinese lanterns, unlit, hung from the beams. In the centre of the floor was a trestle, and a sander, and a lamp.
Grant Pruitt Jr. was kneeling by the boat, in a flannel shirt and jeans, with a cloth in his hand.
He had not heard her. He was bent over, working at something on the hull with a slow, careful, tender stroke, as a man works at a thing that cannot be hurried. His hair was uncombed. He was humming. It was a hymn. She knew it. It was Abide With Me.
She stood in the doorway.
Fast falls the eventide, he hummed.
She had thought she would feel something. She waited for it. She waited, in the warmth, in the smell of varnish, for a surge of hatred, for rage, for the old hot blind rush that had carried her so many nights to this place. It did not come. What came instead was a very small, very clear sense of the strangeness of the whole thing. A man humming a hymn. A woman in a doorway with a gun. A wooden boat.
This is what it is, she thought. It's an ordinary room.
"Grant," she said.
He went rigid.
He did not turn at once. He stayed where he was, on his knees by the hull, with the cloth in his hand, and she saw the line of his shoulders go tight under the flannel. Then, very slowly, he lifted his head. He put down the cloth. He rose, in stages, like an old man, and turned.
He was thinner. His face had a sort of fragile, polished, hollow look, like a china cup. His eyes found hers. And she saw, with a small shock, that he was not surprised.
"I wondered," said Grant Pruitt, "when."
They stood a long moment without speaking.
He looked at her face. He looked at her coat. His eyes dropped, once, to the place where her hand rested against her chest, under the cloth, and came up again. He did not move. He stood with his arms at his sides and his back to the boat, and the light of the lamp fell sideways across his cheekbone.
"You're going to kill me," he said.
"Yes."
"Is it because of Owen?"
"No."
"I thought it might be." He nodded. He did it slowly, as a man nods when he has been told the answer to a riddle that he had already guessed. "He called me. That night. Around eleven. He said Dale had told him to go to the dock. He was drunk. I said, Don't, and he hung up." He looked at the floor. "I went to bed. I thought, he'll be fine. He's always fine."
"He wasn't."
"No."
"I was there."
"I know."
"You know?"
"I've known since the funeral." He lifted his eyes. They were a pale, clear, ghostly grey, and perfectly steady. "You looked at the casket. I watched you. You looked at his father. I thought, she's doing the thing I did. The thing where you look at the family. I did it in the hospital, when my mother was dying. You look at the people who are left, and you think, what have I done."
She stared at him.
"I'm not going to run," he said. "I've thought about it. I could have called Dale. I could have told my father. I could have had the gate, the cameras. I've got nine men on retainer. I could be in a safe room in Atlanta by midnight." He spread his hands, in a small helpless gesture. "I find I don't want to."
"Why?"
"Because I'm tired." It came out simply. "I've been tired for four years. I wake at three every morning. I haven't had a night's sleep since June of 2019. I look at my wife, and I look at what she's carrying, and I think, he'll grow up in my house. And I can't."
"You think I'll let you off because you're tired."
"No." He actually smiled. It was an awful, gentle, rueful smile. "I think you'll let yourself off. Because I've stopped fighting. It's an easier thing to do to a man who isn't resisting. I've read about it. It's called, I don't remember. Compliance."
"Don't."
"I'm not mocking you."
"Then stop talking."
"I can't." He took a step. She had not known she'd raised her hand. The gun was out, in the light of the lamp, black and plain and shaking very slightly, at the end of her arm. It was pointed at his chest. He looked at it, and did not seem to see it. "I've got to say it. I need to say it to somebody. It's been in me for four and a half years, and I can't say it to my wife, and I can't say it to my priest, and I can't say it to my father, because he knows. He's always known. So I'd rather say it to you."
"I don't want to hear it."
"I know." His voice was gentle. "I'd like to anyway."
She stood there. She was aware of the heater ticking in the corner, and the lap of water against the slip. She was aware of a small bright pain in her wrist, where the gun's weight pulled at the tendon. She thought, I should end it. I should do it now. I should not listen. And she heard, from somewhere very far down, the small clear voice that she had heard on the dock, a girl's voice, saying quietly:
Let him.
"Say it," she said.
It was not a confession.
She would try to explain that, afterwards, to a priest, and a jury, and a warden. It was not what the movies show, a villain on his knees, naming his crimes. It was something stranger and smaller. It was a man in a flannel shirt, in a boathouse, with a cloth in one hand, talking, in a low flat voice, as he might have talked to a counsellor.
"It started with a bet," said Grant. "I think. I don't know. Dale had a thing he did, every summer, with the, with the young guys. At the lake house. The summer before college. It was a tradition. There'd been something like it in my father's day. They called it the Lantern."
"The Lantern."
"It's the club's, it's what they call, it's a, there's a book. In the safe at the lodge. It's a ledger. My father's, no, his father's, started in the fifties. It's names. Dates. Every, it's a list of the guests." He swallowed. "Every time. Every summer. A girl, a young woman, from out of the county, usually. Someone nobody would, who wouldn't be believed. They'd bring her to the lake. There'd be a party. And the, the young men, the club's sons, they'd, it was, I was told it was a rite. A thing you did, to be in. My father did it. His friends did. Hoyt Brannock. Wendell Haines. They all, they all did."
She said nothing.
"And afterwards," said Grant, "somebody took care of it. That's what the book was. It was a record of what was taken care of. Who was paid. Which deputy. Which judge. It's a, it's a system. It runs itself." His voice shook. "I didn't know that. When I was twenty-nine. I swear it. I thought it was just us. I thought it was a, a stupid thing, a game. And then it was, and you were, and you were looking at me, and I thought, oh God."
"How many?"
"What?"
"How many girls."
"I don't know. Forty. Fifty. Over sixty years." He wiped his face. "You're number, you were, I counted. The book has a number. Next to each name. You're one hundred and eleven."
She heard the sound of it.
It was a small sound. It was a kind of soft expulsion of breath, like a person being struck in the stomach. It took her a moment to realize that she had made it.
One hundred and eleven.
"I'm sorry," said Grant Pruitt. "I'm so sorry. I know that's, I know it's nothing. But I am."
"You're not."
"I'm trying to be."
"You had a wedding here."
"I know."
"You got married. In this room. With lanterns."
"I did." His eyes closed. "I did that because I thought, if I made it a place of, if I made something good happen in it, then it would, it would stop being. I thought I could fix it. That's the stupidest thing I've ever done."
"Yes."
"I can't undo it."
"No."
"Nobody can."
She was crying. She had not known. It was running silently down her face, in the warmth, in the light of the lamp, and her hand was trembling so that the barrel wavered, and she could not stop it.
"Why didn't you say?" she whispered. "In the courtroom. Why didn't you stand up?"
"Because my father was in the gallery."
"That's all?"
"That's all." He opened his eyes. "That's the whole of it. It's not a, there's no reason. He was sitting there, with his hands on his knees, and he looked at me, and I couldn't. It's a, you wouldn't understand. You've got a mother who, you had a mother. He's the only person who's ever loved me, and he's the one who, he's the system. And I couldn't."
"I had a mother."
"I know."
"She died."
"I know. I sent the flowers."
It came out before he could stop it. He heard what he had said. She saw the colour leave his face, all at once, like water out of a basin.
"No," he said. "Oh God. That wasn't me. That was Dad's secretary. I swear. I didn't know till, she said it was a, a standard card. I didn't—"
"The lantern was on the card."
"It's the company's. It's the logo. She didn't think."
"She thought."
"Corinne—"
"She thought, Grant. She thought it would be, it would be polite." She was shaking all over now. "That's what you are. All of you. You're so polite. You send a card. You send a card. You send flowers to the funeral of a woman whose daughter you—and you put the lantern—and nobody, nobody in this whole county ever once thought to ask, is this the thing a person does?"
"No."
"Then why did you do it?"
"I don't know," said Grant Pruitt. "I think because we didn't know how to stop."
She stood quite still.
The lamp hissed. The heater ticked. Beyond the walls, the lake moved against the piles with a small steady lapping, like breath.
"There's one more thing," said Grant.
"No."
"I think you should know." He was looking at her now with an expression she could not read. It was almost tender. "About Caleb."
She said nothing.
"He came in the room. At one point. Early. He saw what, Owen was, and he, he flew at him. He had his hands round Owen's neck. He was screaming. I've never seen anyone look like that. He said, Get off her. He said it over and over. And Dale came in and pulled him off. Hit him. Took him out, to the kitchen, and I heard, I heard the sound. And I thought, that's it. He'll tell."
"He didn't."
"No. He didn't." Grant looked down at his hands. "He came back."
"What?"
"About twenty minutes later. He came back. He came to the door of the room, and he stood there, and he, he looked at you. And he looked at us. And then he came in."
"No."
"I'm telling you what happened."
"No. No."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I thought you should, you said you wanted it all, you said—"
She shot him.
She did not decide to. It was the thing her hand did, the way a hand pulls back from a stove. There was a flat hard crack that filled the building and rang off the lake, and a flash, and the smell of burnt powder. She saw him take a half-step back. She saw him put a hand to his chest, in a small, puzzled, almost courteous gesture, as if to check that his shirt was buttoned. She saw him look down.
He sat down.
He did it very carefully. He lowered himself to the boards by the hull, with his legs out in front of him, like a boy at a picnic, and leaned back against the cradle of the runabout. His face was very white. He looked up at her.
"Oh," said Grant Pruitt Jr. "That's, I didn't think it'd be so, that's quiet."
"Grant."
"It's all right." He smiled. A small trickle of something dark ran from the corner of his mouth. "It's what I, I said. I'm tired."
"Grant, I—"
"Will you do something for me?"
She could not speak.
"Will you tell Lauren," he said, very softly, "that I picked the yellow ones. For her. I know she thinks I, she thinks it's the garden. But I bought them. From the florist on Pine. Every night. I don't want her to think they were from the garden."
"I'll tell her."
"Thank you."
"Grant."
"It's all right," he said. He closed his eyes. "It was a good boat."
She did not stay.
She stood for what seemed a very long time, in the warm, close, varnish-smelling room, with the gun hanging in her hand, and watched the man on the floor stop breathing. It took about four minutes. She counted. She did not count the way she usually did, with the numbers in her head. She counted by watching, by the rise and fall of the flannel shirt, until it did not rise.
Then she knelt, and did the things she had told herself she would do. She wiped the door. She picked up the spent shell, which had rolled under the trestle, and put it in her pocket. She stood a moment with her hand on the lamp.
Then she turned it off.
The boathouse went dark. The heater glowed orange in the corner like a small red eye. In the long black shape of the runabout, in the light that came through the doors from the moon, she could see the polished brass, and the bright ring of the lanterns overhead, which had been lit once, for a wedding, and which hung now in the cold like a row of paper moons.
She went out. She closed the door. And she walked up the long white lawn in the frost, under the stars, to the black line of the trees, and did not look back.
At the edge of the pines she stopped. She was breathing very hard. She put one hand against a trunk, and bent over, and was sick in the leaves.
Afterwards she straightened. She wiped her mouth. She stood with her forehead against the rough bark, with her eyes shut.
One hundred and eleven, she thought.
I'm one hundred and eleven.
She understood, then, that what she had been told in the boathouse was not an excuse. It was a sentence. It was the largest thing she would ever be given. It was the reason the case had failed, and the reason the men had walked, and the reason the door had never opened. It was the book. It was sixty years of it. There were a hundred and ten other women who had stood, in their time, on some other road at dawn, and been told they were mistaken.
I'm not the first.
I'm not the only.
I'm the one who found out.
It was a terrible thing to feel, the weight of it. It came down on her all at once, in the dark, in the cold, like a door falling shut. And with it, behind it, rising slowly out of some deep place she had not known she had, came a thing she had been waiting four and a half years to feel.
It was not rage.
It was purpose.
She did not know that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She did not know that she would remember this night, in a concrete cell, in the years to come, as the point at which she stopped being a person to whom things had been done, and became a person who did them.
She only knew that it was very cold, and she had a long way to walk.
And that somewhere out there, in a bar in Savannah, a man she had once loved was pouring a drink.