Chapter 24
Nine Seconds
They walked out onto the pier together.
It was a long grey boardwalk on tall pilings, with a rail on either side and a few rusted fishing-rod holders bolted to it. At that hour it was empty. The bait shop at the foot of it had still not opened. A line of pelicans sat on the rail, huddled and unbothered, and did not move as they passed.
She walked a little behind him.
He did not look back. He walked with his hands at his sides and his head up, in his old canvas pants and his ball cap, like a man going to work. At the end of the pier there was a wide square platform with a bench and a bronze plaque for someone who had loved to fish. He stopped there. He stood at the rail and looked out.
The sun was clear of the water now. The whole Atlantic lay in front of them, flat and bright and enormous, the colour of a new coin. A shrimp boat was crawling along the horizon with its nets up like wings.
"I used to come here," said Caleb. "After my shift. When it got to be four, five in the morning, and I couldn't sleep. I'd sit on that bench. It's the only place I ever felt like there was enough air."
She said nothing.
"I'd like to say something. If that's all right."
"Say it."
"I'd like it to go in the record." He half turned. "You've got the phone. Is it recording?"
She hesitated. Then she took her own phone from her pocket, thumbed it on, and held it up between them.
"It is now."
"Good." He took off his cap. His hair was thin on top and the colour of dust. "My name is Caleb Thomas Moss. I was born in Calloway, Georgia, on the ninth of April, nineteen ninety-four. On the fourteenth of June, twenty nineteen, I was at the Pruitt lake house. I stood at the top of the stairs for eleven minutes while four men hurt Corinne Bellamy. I knew what was happening by the fifth minute. I didn't stop it."
His voice did not shake. She was astonished by that. It was the most level voice she had ever heard him use.
"I filmed it. That's the only thing I did. I didn't call anyone. I didn't tell anyone. I let her go to court by herself. I let her sit there for two years while they said she lied. And I'm saying it now, to anyone who ever hears this." He paused. "Corrie, I'm sorry. That's all. I know it's not anything. But I'm saying it."
He put the cap back on.
"That's the record."
She lowered the phone. She did not turn it off.
The wind came in off the water and lifted the ends of her hair. A gull wheeled over the platform, screaming, and went away.
"Is that all you want?" she said.
"One more thing."
"Say it."
"Don't let anybody call me a hero." He looked at her straight. "I know that's what some people will want. He saved her. He carried her out. I did. It's true. But I did it after. After the eleven minutes. And I need you to say both. I need it in the same sentence. I held the door, and I carried her out. Don't leave out the first part. Don't let it be a nice story."
"It's not a nice story."
"No."
"It's not either." Her own voice sounded strange to her, small and rough. "It's not one or the other. I thought it was. I thought, there's a good one and a bad one. A man who helped, and a man who didn't. And it's, it's you. It's the same hands."
"Yes."
"The same ones that held the door are the ones that picked me up."
"Yes."
"I can't," said Corinne, and stopped.
She did not know the end of the sentence. She stood with the phone in her left hand, and the right in her pocket, and the sun on her face, and she could not finish.
I can't hate you.
I can't forgive you.
I can't make you into one thing.
"I know," said Caleb gently. "That's why I'm asking you to."
She took the gun out of her coat.
She did it slowly. She wanted him to see. She wanted nothing in this to be a surprise to anyone, least of all to the man at the rail. It was the Taurus, the small, black, ugly thing she had carried in her bag for fourteen months. It lay across her palm like a stone.
He looked at it.
He did not flinch. His mouth moved, once, in a small private smile.
"Is that the one?"
"Which one?"
"That you used on Grant."
"Yes."
"I read about the boathouse." He nodded. "They said he'd been shot twice. They said he'd, he'd been on his knees."
"He asked me to tell his wife about the yellow roses."
"Did you?"
"I mailed it. In a note. It was a mistake."
"It was kind."
"It was stupid."
"Maybe both." He almost laughed. "That's the thing about you. You always did both. You were the kindest person I knew and the hardest. I thought, when we were seventeen, that you'd end up a judge. You had that look. Like you could read everything and forgive nothing."
"You were wrong."
"I was wrong about so much."
She raised the gun.
She held it in both hands, as she had been taught at the range in Anniston. She had to brace the left arm against her side, and it hurt, and the bandage had begun to spot through. She did not notice. She was looking at the middle of his chest, at a place just above the work shirt's second button.
It was twelve feet. It was nothing. A child could have done it.
He did not close his eyes.
"Corrie," he said.
"Don't."
"I want to ask you a favor."
"I said don't."
"It's a small one." He smiled, and his eyes were full. "When you do it, count."
She stared at him.
"Count to nine," said Caleb. "Out loud. Like you did with Owen. I want it to be nine seconds. I want to have them. I never said anything, in the nine. I never said a word. I thought, if I get them back, if somebody gives me them, I'd know what to say."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
"Then why?"
"Because it's the only thing," said Caleb, "that I still owe."
The pelicans lifted off the rail all together, with a soft clatter of wings, and swung out over the water in a long ragged line. She watched them go. She saw the shadow of them pass over his face.
She thought, I could stop.
It came into her mind with perfect calm. It was not temptation. It was only a fact, like the tide table. She could lower the gun. She could take the phone to Ames, and the other phone, and the ledger and the tapes, and everything she had and everything she had done. She could stand in a courtroom, and say, five men, and here is what they did, and here is what I did, and I am ready to be judged.
And Caleb would stand beside her, and say, I held the door.
And a jury would listen. It would take a year. Perhaps two. It would take the work of a hundred people, and the whole county would have to look.
That's what justice is, she thought. It's slow. It's other people. It's not me.
It's not a thing I'm able to give.
And she thought of the other thing, too, quietly, as a person thinks of a locked room at the back of a house.
I've already done four.
If I stop now, it's a pattern with a hole in it.
If I stop now, I'll have to stand up in a court and say, I killed Owen and Grant and Tee and Dale, and I didn't kill Caleb because he cried.
Would that be justice?
Would that be mercy?
Or would it just be a woman who ran out of nerve?
She did not know.
She would never know. That was the truth of it. It would stay with her, to the end of her life, a stone she could turn over and over and never see the bottom of. She would write it down, years later, in a cell, in the small flat capitals she had kept from law school: I do not know why I did what I did next. I know that I did it clear-eyed. I know that no one made me.
She lifted the gun an inch.
"Caleb," she said.
"Yes."
"Say the name."
"What name?"
"The one you'd have said. In the nine seconds. If you'd been able."
He looked at her.
For a moment she thought he was not going to answer. His mouth worked. His eyes went to the horizon, to the long bright line of the sea, and back to her.
"Corrie," he said. "I'd have said, it's Caleb. I'm at Old Mill Road. There's a girl."
"That's all?"
"Please hurry," said Caleb Moss. "That's all."
She began to count.
"One."
The sea made its long, slow, steady sound.
"Two."
He stood quite straight. He was not afraid. She saw that. He had gone through fear, five years ago, and come out the other side into a plain bare place where there was nothing left to be afraid of.
"Three."
He was looking at her face. She had the strangest feeling that he was memorizing it.
"Four."
Say please.
"Five."
Mama, she had said. In the truck. Under the green blanket.
"Six."
He carried me.
"Seven."
She thought of Ruth in the kitchen, and the smell of the cardigan, and the streetlight blinking in the window.
"Eight."
"Thank you," said Caleb. It was barely a breath.
"Nine."
The shot went out over the water, flat and small, and the sound went on and on across the bright sea until it was nothing.
She did not remember crossing the platform.
She was on her knees on the boards, and he was in her arms, and the gun was somewhere behind her, on the wood, where she had let it fall. Her bandage had come away. Her left arm was bleeding again and she did not care. She held his head against her shoulder and pressed her hand over the place on his chest, uselessly, as a person tries to put water back in a cup.
He was still breathing.
"Corrie," he said.
"I'm here."
"I'm. It's all right." His eyes were open. They were looking at the sky. "It doesn't, it doesn't hurt. I thought it would."
"Don't talk."
"It's very, it's so bright."
"I know."
"You were right to." He tried to smile. "I wanted you to know. I'm not, I'm glad it was you."
"Don't."
"It was always going to be you."
She was crying, hard, with her mouth open, like a child. She could not stop. She held him, and she rocked him a little, and she said, shh, shh, shh, as someone had once said it to her in a truck, in the dark, on a logging road, although she could not remember it and had never known.
"Tell Mom," said Caleb. His voice was fading. "Tell her. I was a good, I was a good bartender."
"I'll tell her."
"And the phone. Don't, don't let them, say I filmed it for."
"I won't. I won't. I'll say it. I'll say the whole thing."
"Both," he whispered.
"Both."
"The door. And the."
He did not finish.
She held him, in the morning light, on the end of the pier, with the pelicans circling out over the water and the shrimp boat crawling home. She held him until the breath went out of him, and then she held him longer. The gulls came down to the rail. The first fishermen came walking along the boards, in rubber boots, with their coolers, and saw, and stopped.
A woman screamed.
A man began to run.
She did not look up. She laid Caleb Moss down very gently on the planks, with his cap under his head, and folded his hands, and closed his eyes with two fingers, as Ruth had shown her once. She took the small grey phone from her pocket and set it on his chest.
Then she picked up her own phone, which had fallen beside the gun, and which was still, somehow, recording. She wiped the screen against her sleeve. It had a long crack across it now, from corner to corner.
She stopped the recording.
She sat back on her heels. Her hands were red to the wrist. Her coat was ruined. Somewhere behind her, a long way off, she could hear a siren, thin and high, coming across the causeway.
She dialled one number.
It rang once.
"Ames."
"It's Corinne."
A silence. A rustle, as of a man standing up.
"Where are you?"
"Tybee Island. The pier." She said it clearly. She said it as she had said a thousand times, in a thousand mock courtrooms, for the record. "I've shot a man. His name was Caleb Moss. He is dead. I did it on purpose. I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere. And I have a video that you're going to need to see."
"Ms. Bellamy."
"Come and get me, Agent Ames."
"Stay where you are."
"I'm not going to run."
"I know you're not." His voice was hoarse. "I'm already in the car."
She closed the phone.
She looked out at the sea.
It was very bright. It stretched all the way to the edge of the world, unlit by anything but the sun, and nothing in it moved but the long slow swell of the tide coming in. A single gull stood on the rail above her. It turned its head, and looked at her with one cold yellow eye.
Justice, she thought.
She waited for the other word to come.
It did not.
The siren grew louder.