Chapter 3
The Kit
The examination room at Pruitt County Memorial was at the end of a corridor that had been painted, at some point in the last decade, a shade the hospital's brochure called Serenity. It had a bed with a paper sheet, a chair, a locked steel cabinet, and a poster about hand-washing. The nurse had put a lamp in the corner so the overhead lights could be off.
"My name is Denise Armitage," the nurse said. "I'm a forensic nurse. That means I've been trained to take care of you and to collect evidence at the same time, and I will tell you before I do anything exactly what I'm about to do and why. If you want me to stop, you say stop, and I stop. You can say it as many times as you want. Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Corinne.
"Do you want your mother in here?"
"No."
"Do you want her outside the door?"
Corinne thought about it. She was wearing a hospital gown over the torn dress, which she had not yet been allowed to take off, and a blanket the nurse had put round her shoulders without being asked. She still had the white sneakers on her lap, tied by the laces.
"Yes," she said. "Outside. She can hear that I'm okay, but she can't—" She did not finish.
"That's good," said Denise Armitage. "That's very good."
She was fifty-two, with grey-streaked hair in a short practical cut and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she had a way of explaining each step in a low unhurried voice, as if she were talking a horse into a trailer. She had done this, she said later, three hundred and eleven times. She had testified fourteen. She kept a small notebook in her scrub pocket and wrote in it with a green pen, and that notebook, which nobody asked to see for almost a year, would turn out to be the most carefully kept record in the whole case.
Pt. alert and oriented x3. Calm, flat affect. Speaks in complete sentences. Offers names unprompted. States "I have it written down." Forearm: blue ink, 4 names, 1 set of initials struck through.
Pt. asks twice what time it is. States she lost time. Requests a pen.
It took four hours.
She would remember it in fragments, afterwards, and the fragments would not be the ones she expected. Not the swabs, or the paper bags for her clothes, which the nurse labelled with time and date and her own initials and sealed with red tape. Not the photographs, which were taken with a ruler held next to each mark, and which she would see in a courtroom a year later, enlarged to the size of a window.
She would remember the cabinet.
It was a grey metal cabinet with a keyhole, in the corner, next to the sink. It had a magnet on the door in the shape of a strawberry. The magnet was holding up a small card, handwritten, that said Dr. Pham is on call until 8. She looked at the strawberry for most of the examination. She counted the strokes of the nurse's pen. She thought, at one point, with perfect clarity, that she had never in her life seen anything so specific. A strawberry. A doctor named Pham. The world went on being full of particulars.
And she would remember, with a small cold astonishment, that the whole time Denise Armitage had her hand on her shoulder, she had not once flinched.
I should have, she would think, later. Why didn't I flinch?
It was the kind of question she would ask for years. And the answer, when she finally found it, would be that the body keeps its own record, separate from the mind's, and that it does not always write what you expect.
"You're doing so well," said Denise.
"I'm not doing anything."
"That's the hardest thing there is." The nurse made a mark. "Can you tell me, in your own words, what you remember about last night? You don't have to say it in order. You don't have to say it all."
"I remember the party."
"Good."
"I remember a cup." Her voice did not change. "Somebody handed me a cup. I'd had one beer. It was my own beer, I opened it. Then there was a cup, and it was something with lime in it, and Owen said it was a seltzer, and I said I didn't want it, and he said it was only seltzer."
"Owen."
"Maddox. Owen Maddox."
"And then?"
"And then there's a light. A dock light, a yellow one. It was on and then it was off. And then I was somewhere else." She stopped. Her eyes were on the strawberry. "I know what happened. I don't remember all of it. I know what happened because I know what my body is telling me, and because there were voices. I can tell you whose."
The nurse's pen was perfectly still.
"Take your time," she said.
"There was Grant. Grant Pruitt. It's his house." She said it as if she were reading a menu. "There was Dale Sutter. I didn't know him, but they called him Dale, and Owen said, he's a deputy, he's cool, and afterwards I saw him. He was cleaning. There was Tee. Terrence Boyle. I know him from high school. He didn't—" She paused. "He was there."
"That's four."
"Yes."
"You said five names on your arm."
"I said four names on my arm."
"You said five people, in the truck. The driver told the triage nurse."
The strawberry on the cabinet seemed to Corinne to grow very slightly larger.
"There's a fifth," she said. "I haven't written him down."
"Why not?"
It was a long time before she answered. When she did, her voice had changed, for the first time since the milk truck: not louder, not softer, but lower, as if it had gone to look for something in a deeper room.
"Because I know him," she said. "Because I've known him for two years. Because he used to—" She put a hand to her mouth, an odd, slow, ordinary gesture, as if she were checking for a crumb. "Because if I say his name, then it's true. And I'd like to say it one more time before it's true."
"Say what?"
"Caleb."
Denise Armitage did not move.
"Caleb," said Corinne Bellamy, to a strawberry magnet, in an examination room painted Serenity. "Caleb Moss."
The detective arrived at nine.
He was waiting in the family lounge when Denise brought her down the corridor, in a pair of borrowed scrubs and a hospital cardigan, with her mother's arm around her waist. It was a small room with a vending machine and a plastic ficus. Ruth Bellamy had not let go of her daughter since the examination ended, and had not said a word, and had not been asked to. She kept her face turned very slightly away from the light, as people do when they have decided not to be seen to weep.
The detective rose.
He was a heavy, tired, ordinary man of about fifty, in a tan sport coat that had been dry-cleaned too many times and a tie with a very small stain on it. His hair was mostly gone. He had reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and in his mouth, tucked into the corner like a cigarette, was a toothpick.
"Ms. Bellamy," he said. "I'm Detective Lonnie Beck, Calloway Police. I'm very sorry to meet you like this."
"Cinnamon," said Corinne.
He blinked. "Ma'am?"
"The toothpick. It smells like cinnamon."
Something moved at the corner of his face. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it with some embarrassment. "My wife says it's a sign of weakness," he said. "I quit smoking nine years ago. This is what I've got."
It was the first time since the road that she had come close to smiling.
"Sit down," said Beck. "Please. Take whatever time you need. I'm going to ask you some questions, and I'm going to write down what you say, and then later today a person from the district attorney's office will want to hear it, too. But I want you to know something, first." He lowered himself into a chair with a grunt. "Nobody in this room is going to ask whether it happened."
Corinne looked at him for a long moment.
She had been a student of court procedure for two years. She knew exactly how rare it was for a man in his position to say something like that out loud on the first day, before anyone had checked anything. She knew what such a sentence cost, and she knew that it was a promise, and she knew that it would not be possible for him to keep.
But she did not say any of that.
She said, "Thank you," and sat down, and put her arm out on the table between them, with the sleeve pushed back.
"I wrote it down," she said. "I thought you'd want it."
On the inside of her forearm, in blue ballpoint, in neat block capitals, four names ran in a column. Under them was a fifth line, struck through, and next to it, in a different pressure, as if written by a different hand, the initials C. M.
Detective Beck took the toothpick out of his mouth, and set it carefully on a napkin.
"All right," he said, very gently. "Let's start with who you wrote first."
"G. Pruitt," said Corinne.
She saw him go still. It was a small thing. It was the stillness of a man who has lived in the same county for fifty years and knows exactly which names mean what.
"Grant Pruitt," he said. "Junior?"
"Yes."
"Okay," said Beck. He picked up his pen. "Okay."
She noticed that he had not written it down yet. She noticed that his hand had stopped for just a second, an inch above the paper, and that the second was long enough for her to count.
It was four.