Chapter 22
The Last Name on the List
She did not get far before the arm told her the truth.
She had driven six blocks with her right hand on the wheel and her left pressed against her ribs. At the stop sign on Pruitt Avenue, under a dead traffic light, she looked down. The dish towel was black. Blood had run down her sleeve and pooled in the fold of her coat. It had soaked through the seat.
She pulled into the lot behind the closed Piggly Wiggly and turned off the engine.
The silence rang. She sat in it and breathed.
Look at it, she told herself. Don't guess. Look.
She took off the coat. She cut the sleeve of her sweater with the little scissors from her bag, the ones she used for opening mail. The bullet had gone through the outside of the arm, below the shoulder. It had not hit the bone. She could see that much, by the dome light, with her teeth shut. There was a hole in the front and a worse one in the back, and a lot of red.
She thought of Ruth. Ruth had been a nurse's aide for six summers, before the nursing home closed. She used to say, pressure, baby. Pressure and time. Bleeding is mostly a question of how long you're willing to hold on.
She held on.
She folded the towel into a thick pad and pushed it hard against the back wound. She wound the belt of her coat around the arm and pulled it tight with her teeth. She did this twice. The second time she made a sound she did not recognize. Then she sat with her forehead against the steering wheel, and shook, and waited for the dark at the edges of her eyes to go back where it came from.
It took eleven minutes. She watched the dashboard clock.
When she could see again, she took out her phone.
It was still recording. She stopped it. She looked at the file. Six minutes, nine seconds. She did not play it. She copied it to the cloud, twice, to two different accounts, and emailed it to herself, and then, with her thumb hovering, she opened a new message and typed the name of the one person she trusted with it.
Marisol.
She wrote: Don't open the attachment. Keep it. If I don't call you by Monday noon, send it to Agent Terrence Ames at the GBI, and to Nate Feldman, and to the Journal. All of it. Don't ask why.
She sent it. She watched the small word Delivered appear.
Then she did the thing she had been putting off for four years.
She opened her blocked contacts.
There was only one name in the list.
She had blocked him on October 2, 2020, at 9:14 at night, in the kitchen on Dellwood, with her mother asleep upstairs. She remembered the exact feel of the button. She had pressed it with her thumb as if she were putting out a cigarette.
I have something.
No.
That had been the whole exchange. She had been twenty-five. She had been so certain.
Now she pressed Unblock, and the phone asked if she was sure, and she was not sure of anything. She typed with one hand, slowly.
It's Corinne.
She looked at it.
She deleted it. She typed:
I know you carried me.
She sent it before she could stop herself.
She sat in the dark lot behind the Piggly Wiggly and held the phone against her chest. A cat crossed the asphalt. A truck went by on the highway, far away, with a long tearing sound. She counted. At forty she stopped counting and just breathed.
At sixty-two seconds the phone buzzed.
Corrie.
Then, almost at once:
Where are you?
Then:
Are you hurt?
She stared at it. She had expected anger. She had expected silence, or a lawyer. She had not expected him to ask if she was hurt.
How do you know I'm hurt?
Because you're texting me at midnight. You'd never text me unless something was on fire.
Dale's dead.
The dots appeared. They vanished. They appeared again. They went on for a long time, and then the whole message came in at once.
Then I don't have long either. Are you coming to Savannah?
Yes.
Don't use the interstate. Take 301. Come to the Tybee Island pier. There's a bait shop that opens at five. Wait in the car. I'll find you.
How will I know it's you?
A pause.
I'll be the one with the box.
She read that line three times.
What box?
Box 411, wrote Caleb Moss. I never gave it up. I couldn't. I tried to give it to the lawyer in Atlanta and I couldn't make my hand open. I think I was waiting for you.
She drove through the night on Route 301.
It was the old road. It went through every small town the interstate had killed. She passed dark gas stations and shuttered fruit stands and churches with their lights off, and in every one, in the pale square of a window or the rim of a sign, she thought she saw something. A green blanket. A man's shape under a lamp. A hand on a door.
She knew what was happening. She was tired, and she had lost blood, and her mind was doing what minds do. It was looking for the pattern. It was laying the five men out in a row like cards, as she had laid them on the whiteboard in the old Hickory Run room, and it was asking the question it had been asking for four years.
Which one is the real one?
Grant had the idea. Dale gave the drug. Owen did what he did. Tee watched and said nothing. And Caleb.
Caleb.
She had never been able to say what Caleb had done.
It was strange. She had known him since they were seventeen. He had been her boyfriend for one year, then her ex for three, and he had been at the lake house that night with a drink in his hand and his shirt untucked. She remembered him laughing at something Owen said. She remembered him leaning against the fridge. After that, the evidence went blank.
For four years she had told herself it was because he was the weakest. He was the one who held the door. The elders had said so. The Lantern ledger had said so, in a neat blue hand: Door — C.M. She had taken it to mean what it seemed to mean. That he stood in the hall while the others went in.
But a door can hold two ways.
A man stands at it to keep people out, she thought. Or to keep them in.
She was thinking this, somewhere south of Statesboro, with the sky going from black to the colour of an old bruise, when she saw the patrol car.
It was parked at a crossroads. It sat with its lights off and its engine running, a black-and-white Crown Victoria with a county seal on the door. She did not know the county. She did not slow. She drove past at fifty-four miles an hour, with her bloody coat bundled on the passenger seat and her left arm held across her body, and watched it in the mirror.
It did not move.
She let out her breath.
It was nothing, she told herself. It's a cop sleeping off his shift.
Ten minutes later, her phone buzzed again.
She nearly drove off the road.
Ames.
She had stored him in her phone as A. She did not answer. She watched it ring out. Then it buzzed again, a text this time.
Ms. Bellamy. I'm at your house. Pickett's here. Your kitchen is a crime scene. I am not going to say anything on this line that I'd regret reading aloud in court. Call me. Please. I am asking you as someone who has spent three months trying to understand you.
Please.
She read it. She felt something move in her chest, something that was not guilt and was not fear. It was nearer to grief. He was a decent man. She had seen it in the way he put the sheet of paper into an evidence bag, as if it were something that could still feel.
She typed: Not yet.
She sent it. She turned off the phone.
Not yet, she thought. One more.
She had made herself a promise, in the Chevrolet, in the rain. She was not going to kill any more witnesses. And she had kept it, in a way. She had killed a man who came to kill her. But she knew, with the part of her mind that had always been a lawyer, that the record would not read that way. It would read: fourth victim. It would read: pattern. It would read: premeditation, because she had taped a gun to the underside of a table and a microphone beside it and turned out all the lights.
She had known what she was doing. She had wanted Dale to say it. She had wanted to hear him say that he took care of it, for the record. And he had.
Was that justice? Was it revenge?
She had asked that question for four years, and she was no nearer to an answer. She was beginning to think there might not be one. She was beginning to think the question was a door, too, and that she had been standing in it, holding it open, while everyone else walked through.
Tybee Island came up out of the marsh at ten to five.
The causeway was a long grey line across the water, with the light just beginning to rise behind the spartina grass. She crossed it slowly. There was a smell of salt and mud and rotted wood, and a low pale mist lay over the creeks. The island itself was still asleep. The beach houses stood on their stilts with their shutters closed. A single lighthouse stood against the sky, white and black, like a stick of peppermint candy.
The pier was at the end of the main street.
She parked beside the bait shop. It was shut. A neon sign in the window said LIVE SHRIMP in letters that were half burned out. There was one other car in the lot, a dented green pickup with a cracked windshield and a Savannah College of Art and Design sticker, parked nose-out near the water.
She turned off the engine and sat.
She did not see him at first. Then a figure detached itself from the shadow of the pier and began to walk across the sand toward her.
He was carrying a metal box about the size of a loaf of bread.
She got out of the car.
They stood twenty feet apart in the grey light, with the tide sucking quietly at the pilings.
He was thinner. That was her first thought, absurdly. The Caleb she remembered had been broad in the shoulder, a big loose-limbed boy with a sunburnt neck. This man was hollowed out. His hair had gone grey at the temples. He wore a work shirt and canvas pants and a ball cap pulled low, and his eyes, which had been brown and merry, were dark and enormous and sunk in their sockets like a monk's.
He looked at her.
He looked at the blood on her sleeve, and the belt around her arm, and the way she stood with her weight on one leg. His face did not change. It was only that something in it went very still.
"You didn't go to a hospital," he said.
"No."
"You're going to need one."
"I know."
"I can drive you."
"Not yet."
He nodded slowly. He took one step toward her, and stopped. His hands tightened on the box.
"I'm not going to touch you," he said. "I want you to know that. I'm not going to come any closer than you say. I know what, I know what I am to you."
"What are you?"
"I don't know." His voice cracked. "That's the truth. I've thought about it every day for five years, and I still don't know what word to use."
She said nothing.
He lifted the box a little, as if offering it. "I didn't come to ask you for anything. I came to give you this. And to tell you what I did. All of it. I'd like to tell you before anyone else. I'd like you to be the first."
"Why?"
"Because you're the one who was there."
She looked at him for a long moment.
She saw the boy at seventeen, in the high school parking lot, with a paper cup of sweet tea and a crooked grin. She saw the bartender, in the doorway of the bar on Calloway Square, with a dish towel on his shoulder. She saw the face in the Mercedes behind the lake house, white and wild, two minutes before the world broke.
Did you hold the door?
Did you carry me?
Which one is true?
"Caleb," she said.
"Yes."
"Dale told me tonight that you took me out of that house."
He closed his eyes.
"He said he'd known for five years."
"I figured he did." He gave a small broken laugh. "I figured that's why he never came after me hard. He wanted me to think I'd got away with it. He wanted me to carry it."
"Did you?"
"Corrie." He opened his eyes, and they were full of tears, and he did not wipe them. "I'm going to tell you something, and you can do what you want with it. You can shoot me. You can drive away. I'll understand either way. But I need you to hear it in order. From the beginning. The way you'd read it back."
She almost smiled. It hurt.
"I'm hurt, Caleb. I'm not going to stand here on a beach and listen to a story."
"Then sit in the truck. It's got heat. I've got coffee." He nodded at the pickup. "And a first-aid kit. I was an EMT for two years. I didn't tell anyone."
"You were an EMT."
"I wanted to do something that fixed people." He said it plainly. "It was the only thing I could think of. It didn't work. But I learned how to stop a bleed."
She stood on the sand with the dawn coming up behind him and her own blood drying in her sleeve.
She was very tired. She had killed four people. She was going to kill a fifth, and she knew it, as one knows the end of a road one has walked for a long time. She was going to do it with the gun in her coat, in the light of the morning, because it was the last name on the list, and because the plan was the only thing she had left that was entirely her own.
And yet.
A door can hold two ways.
"Show me the box," she said.
He crossed the sand. He stopped a yard from her. He set the metal box on the hood of her car, and stepped back, with his hands open and empty, like Pickett on Dellwood Street.
She looked at it.
It was grey, scratched, a bank's. FIRST CITIZENS. BOX 411. The key was taped to the lid with a strip of white tape, the kind a person uses to label things in a kitchen. On the tape, in a handwriting she had not seen in five years, someone had written two words.
FOR CORRIE.
She stood very still.
"You wrote that in 2019," said Caleb. "The week after. I wrote it the first night, and I've never taken it off."
She put out her good hand. She touched the tape. It was soft with age.
"What's in it?"
"A phone," said Caleb. "Mine. The old one. It has a video. I took it at twelve-fifty, in the upstairs hall, through the crack in the bedroom door. I took it because I didn't know what else to do. I took it because I was drunk, and scared, and a coward, and I thought, somebody has to have a record."
He drew a breath.
"I've watched it four hundred and eleven times," he said. "I counted. I think I'm the only one who has. And I'm going to tell you, Corrie, before you open that, I'm going to tell you what you'll see. You'll see me standing in the hall. And you'll see me not do anything. For eleven minutes."
The tide rose against the pilings. The sky went pink. A gull cried once, very high.
"And then," said Caleb Moss, "you'll see what I did after."