Chapter 18
Agent Ames Reads a Sheet of Paper
The Pruitt County Sheriff's Office announced on Saturday morning that it was investigating the death of Grant Pruitt Jr. as a "tragic shooting," and by Saturday afternoon the Governor of Georgia had asked the Bureau to take it over.
It was the first time in thirty years the Governor had made such a request on a Saturday. His chief of staff would explain, to a reporter from the Atlanta paper, that the matter involved the son of a prominent supporter of the administration, and that the Governor was personally distressed. He did not mention the forty thousand dollars. He did not need to. Everybody who read the story understood that the State of Georgia, which had declined for four years to look closely at the lake house, had been moved at last to take an interest in it by the single circumstance that one of the men who owned it was dead.
Special Agent Terrence Ames stood in the kitchen of the Pruitt house on Sunday morning, in a rumpled brown suit, with a cup of coffee he had not been offered, and thought about that with a great deal of bitterness.
"Sir," said Special Agent Dana Prescott. "The scene."
"I'm coming."
She was thirty-three and quick, with a tight braid and a notebook, and she had been his partner for eight months. She was the best young agent he had ever trained, and she did not know yet that she was going to be unhappy for the rest of her career. He liked her. He did not intend to tell her so.
They walked down the lawn.
It was a clean scene.
That was the first thing he noticed, and it was the thing he kept coming back to, in the weeks afterward, as one worries a loose tooth. The boathouse was spotless. There was a body on the floor, propped against the cradle of a wooden boat, and a pool of dried blood, but there was no disorder. No broken glass. No overturned chair. A lamp stood on a trestle, switched off. A heater glowed in a corner. A sander lay on the boards where it had been put down, with its cord neatly looped.
"He wasn't fighting," said Prescott.
"No."
"Single shot to the chest. Close range. I'd say four, five feet. The medical examiner's coming at ten." She pointed with her pen. "No casing."
"None?"
"We've searched the floor. Whoever it was picked it up."
"A revolver."
"Possibly. Or a person who thinks."
He did not answer. He crouched, with a grunt, beside the dead man. Grant Pruitt Jr. looked about eighteen. He had a boy's face, long-lashed and round-cheeked, and his eyes were closed, and his hands lay open on his thighs. His expression was one of faint attentive patience. He looked like a man who has been asked to wait.
He sat down, Ames thought. He sat down and leaned back and let it happen.
"Wife?" he said.
"Upstairs. Under sedation. Her mother's with her. She's seven months."
"God."
"There's a thing." Prescott hesitated. "She said, when she found him, she said he went down every night. To check the boat. She said he always brought her a rose. A yellow one. From the garden. She said, there's a rose in the glass, on the nightstand, it was there when I woke up. She said she thought he'd come back up."
"He didn't come up."
"No. She says the flower's from last night. It's a day old. She says it's, I don't know. She keeps saying it. She says it's the last one."
He looked at the dead man's hands.
"Check the garden," he said.
"Sir?"
"Humour me."
The garden was a long walled strip of ground behind the house, with a gravel path, a trellis, and six rose beds. Most were bare, cut back for the winter. In the last, at the southwest corner, in the shelter of the wall, a row of bushes had been left standing, ragged and leafless, with the black stubs of last year's hips.
There were no yellow roses.
"He bought them," said Ames, aloud.
"What?"
"He bought them, in a shop. They're not from here. There's nothing in bloom." He stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets. "He's been telling her for eight months they came from the garden. And she's been believing it. And he's been going to a florist every day, and lying, and it's the thing a man does when he's trying to give something and can't."
"That's, it's sweet."
"It's the saddest thing I've heard all week." He turned. "Find the florist."
Corinne had gone to work on Monday.
She had done it because it was the thing she knew how to do. She put on the grey cardigan, and drove the Camry to the call center, and sat in her cubicle, and took her headset, and said Thank you for calling, how can I help you today? to a woman in Valdosta who was furious about a bill. She did it without mistake. She did it for eight hours. Troy came by at ten, and at two, and told her she was doing great.
On Tuesday, she mailed the note.
She had not planned it. That was the thing she would tell herself afterwards, with a sort of dull astonishment, as a person reviews a hand she has played badly. She had made a promise, in a dark boathouse, to a dying man, and she was her mother's daughter, and could not leave a thing undone. She had sat at the kitchen table on Monday night, with the lamp on, and thought: Lauren.
She had thought about Lauren Pruitt, née Whitfield, twenty-eight, seven months pregnant, a girl who wrote about marriage in a voice of such guileless trust that Corinne had found it hard to read. She had thought: she'll think they were from the garden.
She'll think it all her life.
It had seemed a small thing. It had seemed, in the long quiet of that night, like the only decent act she had left. She had taken a pen, and a clean sheet of paper, and begun to write.
She had written four drafts. Each was worse than the last. They had all, she saw, been addressed to the wrong person. They were letters to a ghost. They explained. They apologized. They said things like I want you to know that he was kind to me at the end, which was not true, and he asked me to tell you, which was.
In the end she had written one line.
He bought the yellow roses from the florist on Pine Street. Every night. He wanted you to know.
She had read it. She had crossed out wanted. She had written asked.
He asked you to know.
It was not quite grammatical. It was not signed. She had folded it, and found an envelope in the drawer, and then, because it was the only paper she had, because the printer was out of ink and the pad of notepaper had been used for a grocery list, she had reached for the yellow pad in her bag, the one with EXHIBIT LOG printed across the top, and torn off a sheet.
She had not thought. She would be unable to forgive herself for that.
It was a sheet of yellow legal paper with a printed heading, EXHIBIT LOG, and under it, in smaller letters, PIEDMONT STATE MOCK TRIAL PROGRAM. She had written the sentence on one of the numbered lines, in ballpoint, in her small flat capitals. She had folded it in half, then in quarters, and put it in a plain white envelope. She had addressed it by hand to Mrs. Lauren Pruitt, Pruitt Lake House, Lake Alder Road, Calloway.
She had put no return address.
She had driven to Macon, to a post office in a shopping center, and dropped it in a blue box in the dark.
It was, in its way, the kindest thing she had done in four years.
It was also, as Terrence Ames would say, a beautiful mistake.
The note arrived on Thursday.
Lauren Pruitt's mother opened it, as she opened all the mail now, standing at the kitchen counter with a letter knife and a cup of tea. She read it twice. She did not understand it. She took it upstairs, to a bedroom with the curtains drawn, and sat on the edge of the bed, and read it aloud.
He bought the yellow roses from the florist on Pine Street. Every night. He asked you to know.
Lauren, who had been lying on her side with her face to the wall, did not move.
"Honey?"
"Read it again."
Her mother did.
There was a long silence. The room smelled of lavender and sickness. On the nightstand, in a water glass, a yellow rose had begun to brown at the edges, its petals curled and papery, like old skin.
"Who sent it?" said Lauren.
"It doesn't say."
"Is there a, what's on the envelope?"
"Nothing. There's no return."
"Give it to me."
She took it. She held the sheet of paper in both hands, and read the printed heading at the top, and looked at the small flat capitals underneath. She looked at it for a long time.
"It's like a receipt," she said.
"Maybe it's from the florist."
"No." Lauren's voice was very quiet. "It's from somebody who was there." She laid it on the quilt. She smoothed it flat with the flat of her hand. "Mama. Call the man."
"Which man?"
"The one from the Bureau," said Lauren Pruitt. "The one who asked me about the roses. Call him now."
He took the call at his desk in Decatur, on a grey Friday afternoon, with his shoes off and a sandwich going stale at his elbow.
He drove down himself. He took Prescott. They sat in Lauren Pruitt's bedroom, on two ladder-back chairs that had been brought up from the dining room, and he held the sheet of paper in a gloved hand, up to the light of the window, and looked at it with an expression that Prescott, who had never seen it before, would later describe to a colleague as the look of a man listening to a piece of music he has heard before.
"May I take this?" he said.
"Please."
"I'll want to examine the envelope. And the postmark."
"Macon," said Lauren. "My mother checked."
"Thank you." He turned the sheet over. He was silent. He was an unhurried man, with a minister's voice, and a way of listening, but now he was more than silent. He was perfectly still. "Mrs. Pruitt. Do you know what this is?"
"No."
"It's a form." He held it so that she could see. "Look at the heading. Exhibit Log. And under it, Piedmont State Mock Trial Program. It's what the students use when they practise in a pretend courtroom. They log their exhibits on it, line by line. You can't buy it in a shop. The college prints it for its own people."
"I don't understand."
"It's not a thing you'd have in your house." His voice was very gentle. "And whoever wrote this, whoever sat down and put these words on this paper, was either on that program or knew somebody who was."
Prescott, beside him, had gone very still.
"A law student," said Lauren.
"Yes."
"Why would a law student, why would somebody want to tell me about the roses?"
"I don't know."
"Who would know about the roses?"
"Someone who talked to him," said Ames, "in the last hour of his life."
It was said so softly that nobody in the room could have said it was an accusation. It was only a fact. It lay on the quilt between them, in the afternoon light, with the faint sad perfume of lavender.
Lauren Pruitt put her hand on her belly.
"He wasn't a bad man," she said. "I want to say that. I know what everyone thinks. I read the papers. But he was good to me. He was good to everyone. He, I could always tell when something was wrong, with him, and I never, I didn't know how to ask." She looked up. Her eyes were swollen and clear. "Whoever did this. Whoever it was. They told me about the roses. They didn't have to."
"No."
"Does that mean something?"
"I think," said Terrence Ames, "that it means a great deal."
He sat in his car for a long time that evening, in the drive of the Pruitt house, with the engine off.
It was dark. The lights were on in the upper windows. A porch lamp burned yellow in the fog. He had the sheet of exhibit-log paper in an evidence envelope on the seat beside him, and he did not look at it. He was looking, instead, through the windshield, at the long dim lawn running down to the lake, and the white shape of the boathouse, and he was thinking about a girl in a plain navy dress, in an office on Panthersville Road, who had said, in a clear flat voice, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
He had thought, at the time: She's going to be a lawyer.
He had read it in the file. It was one of the first things she had told Detective Beck. Pre-law student at Piedmont State. Law school in the fall. He had noted it, and filed it, and thought nothing of it. He was a man who noted things.
A lawyer, he thought now. Or a girl who meant to be one.
He did not say the name.
He sat for a very long time, and in the cold, in the thin yellow light of the porch lamp, he did the thing he had done on four earlier occasions in twenty-eight years, which was to ask himself whether he was sure.
Not yet.
I'm not sure. I'm only suspicious.
And she has been wronged.
He took out his phone. He did not call Prescott. He did not call his director. He scrolled, slowly, to a number he had not used in three years, and pressed it, and held the phone to his ear.
It was answered on the fourth ring.
"Beck," said a thick, sleepy, suspicious voice.
"Lonnie. It's Terry Ames."
"Do you know what time it is?"
"I know."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to tell me," said Special Agent Ames, "whether you've ever known a girl in the mock-trial program at Piedmont State."
There was a long silence on the line. He heard a chair creak. A television was turned off. And then, when the voice came again, it was entirely awake, and had gone very slow, as a man's voice does when he is picking his way across ice.
"Why?"
"Because somebody sent a note."
"Oh, God," said Lonnie Beck.
"Is that a yes?"
"Terry." The old detective's voice cracked. "Terry, don't. Please. Don't make me say it."
"I'm not asking you to say it."
"Then what are you asking?"
"I'm asking," said Ames, "whether it's possible."
"Anything's possible."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got." He heard Beck breathe, a long, shuddering exhalation. "Do you want to know what I think? I think that if it is, if it's what you think it is, then every one of us who ever sat in that room and said, we believe you, and didn't do a damn thing about it, every single one of us is responsible."
"I know."
"It's not an excuse."
"I'm not offering one."
"Then you know what you've got to do."
"Yes."
"And you're going to do it."
"I'm a state employee," said Terrence Ames, gently. "It's the only thing I'm any good at."
He rang off. He sat in the dark. He looked at the lights in the windows of the house, and the long lawn, and the lake, and he felt, for the first time in twenty-eight years, entirely alone.
She's going to be one of the five, he thought. She's going to be the sixth.
No.
She's going to be the one that I put away.
It was the cruellest sentence he had ever composed, and he did not know yet which half of it frightened him more.
At nine o'clock the next morning, a Saturday, an unmarked car pulled up on Dellwood Street, and a tall man in a brown suit got out, and stood on the pavement, looking up at a one-story rented house with a carport and a front yard the size of a tablecloth.
The streetlight on the corner was still on. It had not yet gone out. In the thin grey morning, it was a hard white glare in a daylit street, steady and shadowless and perfectly regular, like an eye.
Terrence Ames looked at it for a long moment.
Then he straightened his tie, and walked up the path, and knocked.
The door opened on the chain. A pale face looked out. It was a young face, thin and watchful, with large grey eyes and cropped dark hair, in a grey cardigan, with a coffee cup in one hand. It did not look surprised.
"Agent Ames," said Corinne.
"Ms. Bellamy." He smiled. It was a kind, apologetic, fatherly smile. "I wonder if I might have a few minutes of your time."
"Of course."
"I'd be so grateful."
She unhooked the chain. She stood aside. And as he stepped into the narrow hall, with its smell of toast and floor wax, he saw, on the kitchen table at the far end, in the light from the window, a stack of casebooks, and on top of them a yellow legal pad with EXHIBIT LOG printed across its first page.
He did not look at it for more than half a second.
"What a lovely home," he said.
"Thank you," said Corinne Bellamy. "Would you like some coffee?"
"I'd love some."
She went into the kitchen. He followed. And behind him, in the hall, in the quiet, the old clock in the front room that her father had always meant to repair gave a small, uneven, stumbling tick, and stopped.