"Getting shot does wonders for one's priorities--that and being crippled. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, but it seems to have worked in my case."
He sat forward in the heavy chair in which, years earlier, he would watch his father flip quickly through Advertising Age and the Wall Street Journal. "Can I ask you something? And this is none of my business, so feel free to take the Fifth. But are you and my sister going to seek counseling? Or will you two crazy kids try to figure out your next steps on your own?"
"Counseling."
"Good."
"But she's not leaving and we're not separating. I've gotten a stay of execution."
"I'm relieved."
"Me, too. I think we both are. And Charlotte. Charlotte might talk a tough game, but it's all bravado. Inside she's a cupcake."
John wasn't sure if he could ever envision his niece as a cupcake, but he also wasn't about to disabuse the girl's father of this notion.
"Anyway," Spencer went on, "that's not the only reason I'm here." He pulled himself away from the dog, wincing as he sunk back into the couch. The animal looked up at him with wide eyes that, alas, reminded John of a deer's. "Given my morning, I'm glad you stuck around."
"Honestly, Spencer, I really don't know why I'm going to the press conference. At one point I'd had some vague idea that I could defend myself. But I gave that notion up. Yesterday I just decided I had to be there to . . . to see it. It was all very spontaneous."
"Look, don't say another word: I'm canceling the press conference."
"Are you serious?" He wasn't sure whether he heard mere incredulity or giddiness in his voice. He supposed there was a little of both.
"Yup. I haven't told anyone but Catherine yet. I tried Dominique at her home before leaving, but I missed her. She'll be disappointed, of course, but--"
"Disappointed? Catwoman? She'll be furious!"
"She's not a bad person, John. She simply sees things in black and white. Once she knows that I'm doing this because of my family--when I tell her about Charlotte this morning--she'll understand." He raised his eyebrows. "I'm actually supposed to be at Paige's office right now. Paige and Keenan are talking to our gun experts about why you couldn't get the bullet out of your rifle. I need to break the news to Paige later when she's alone."
"Your ballistics lab has had the gun since mid-August! How can they not know what the problem is?"
"They couldn't find anything wrong with the rifle. You knew that, didn't you?"
"No!"
"Paige didn't tell your lawyer?"
"No, but in all fairness there's no reason she would have. I'm not her client. I'm sure she would have gotten around to it eventually," he said, working consciously to answer Spencer's question, because if he didn't--if he focused only on the reality that his worst fears about the gun were coming true--he thought he would faint. He heard a tiny ringing in his ears, and his vision was growing slightly fuzzy.
"You okay?" Spencer was asking, the voice sounding almost as if it were on the other side of a large wall of ice.
He nodded, put his head between his legs, and breathed slowly and carefully.
"I'll get you some water," Spencer said.
Still he said nothing. He heard his crippled brother-in-law rising from the couch, and then walking--the click of the dog's toenails on the tile in the hall an indication that he was being followed--to the other side of the apartment for a glass.
WHILE SPENCER was getting him water, John forced himself to concentrate on what this news about the gun meant. He saw a couple of ways Adirondack might respond. They might argue the lawsuit was so completely frivolous--so monumentally groundless--that it should be dismissed. At the same time, they might point out that Spencer should be suing his brother-in-law in Vermont. The guy who left a loaded rifle in the trunk of his car.
Or they might see this as a trifling nuisance to be disposed of quickly. They would convince Paige Sutherland that it would be impossible to wrest a sizable chunk of change from them in court because she would be unable to contend the gun was defective. It was thus in her client's best interest to accept a token payment and go away.
It was not, of course, in Paige Sutherland's best interest to acquiesce to a token payment. Not by a long shot. She might care as deeply about the rights of animals as Spencer or Keenan or Dominique, but there was also a big pile of money on Adirondack's side of the table, and her goal was to convince them to slide it over to her.
Besides, Spencer didn't want a token payment. Actually, John wasn't sure that he wanted any payment. Oh, he understood the damages could be enormous, but for Spencer this nightmare had never been about the money. It had been about animals and hunting and violence.
He looked up when he saw Spencer returning with his water. He took a sip and wished he felt better than he did. Spencer sat down and watched him.
If only they had the casing, he thought, and it had a definitive ding or dent. A rim that was defective.
"I wish we had the casing," he murmured simply. He half-emptied the water in his glass and placed it down on one of the coasters he remembered from his childhood. It had an artist's rendering of the Mayflower on it. "I might look a little less foolish. And your lawsuit might be more viable."
"John, it's fine. Let it go."
"No, it's not fine. With the gun working perfectly, this lawsuit--"
"There isn't going to be a lawsuit."
"What?"
Spencer pushed himself to the edge of the couch, and John saw a glimpse of the intensity that once ran through his brother-in-law like river water in March.
"There's something you need to know. Something Catherine and I just found out this morning."
His mind was still centered on Adirondack; he couldn't imagine what Spencer was about to tell him.
"Go on."
"Charlotte was stoned when she shot me."
"Stoned? What are you talking about?"
"Charlotte had been smoking dope that night and she'd had a beer. A whole beer. She'd stolen a joint from some older kid's bag at the bonfire the teenagers were having, and she and Willow--yes, little Willow--were wasted. Maybe not falling-down-drunk wasted, but somewhere between careless and unthinking. You've been there, John. Me, too. God, we've been there together."
"Not at ten years old," he said. "Not at twelve, even!"
"If it makes you feel any better, your daughter has been trying to get mine to come clean for almost two months," Spencer said, shaking his head slightly, before continuing with details John understood he was only half-hearing. Something about two beers, a bottle for each girl, and a joint that, according to Charlotte, was as thick and round as a crayon.
The image of his daughter, her tiny legs in her shorts, passing a joint to her cousin on a summer night in New Hampshire disgusted him. He wasn't angry with her--the child was ten, for God's sake, still a week shy of eleven--but he was furious with himself. How had it come to this? he thought, and then he decided he knew. He knew.
Here was one more thing for which he could feel guilt and remorse, one more reason to kick himself in the ass. Unlike the weapon he'd left loaded for eight long months, however, this was a gaffe he could fix. He and Sara both. He didn't know whether it was before Patrick was born or after, he didn't know whether shipping their girl off to her grandmother's in the summer was a mere symptom or a part of the cause, but he was confident now that at some point he and his wife had managed to lose sight of their daughter.
"Who knows what she was thinking when she shot me," Spencer concluded. "All I can say is that it's evident she wasn't thinking real clearly."
"Oh, you can say more," John said. "Me, too."
Spencer began to use his left fingers to toy with the ones on his right, and John had the sense that this wasn't an unconscious mannerism. He wondered if his brother-in-law was supposed to do this to keep the blood circulating. Spencer then offered the smallest of smiles: Resignation. Capitulation. Fatigue. "Anyway," he said, "this little bit of informa
tion sealed the deal in my mind. There can't be a lawsuit. Not now. I doubt we could win if this information were known, and we certainly can't try to bury it and proceed. I'm going to tell Paige this morning."
"Are you going to mention the marijuana?"
"Yes. And I'll explain that I don't want my daughter and my brother-in-law to become public spectacles--Catherine's concern all along. I'll tell her how Catherine almost left me this morning."
A few minutes ago, John thought, he had been speculating on how little interest Paige would have in a token payment. But dropping the lawsuit completely? He hadn't even contemplated that. He started to estimate how many billable hours she might have amassed but quickly turned off the calculator in his head. He didn't want to know. Besides, she was bound by a fiduciary duty to follow her clients' instructions. If Spencer McCullough wanted the suit dropped, then dropped it would be.
"She won't be happy," he told Spencer simply.
"No, but she has a good heart. Really, she does. She'll understand that I'm doing this for my family."
He was surprised: He hadn't realized that Paige Sutherland had a heart, much less one a person might argue was good.
"Anyway," Spencer continued. "I thought you should know."
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for telling me about . . . everything."
The dog was returning now, and--as he did always when Spencer was present--the animal went directly to him.
"You're welcome. And John?"
"Yes?"
"I forgive you. Really and truly: I forgive you."
John thanked him for this, too: for pardoning him, for letting him off a hook that by all rights could have left him dangling for life. Then he climbed from his chair and went to the dog at his brother-in-law's feet and stroked the animal, trying to see nothing more than the gray that dappled the old animal's snout and feel nothing other than the luxuriant softness of his mane.
Chapter Thirty-Four.
This was bad news. Unutterably bad news.
Nevertheless, Dominique had learned that sometimes with bad news it was best to do nothing. Now was one of those moments. Spencer had left to tell Paige his decision, and she was alone in her office with her erotically charged paintings of tropical birds, and for a moment she pushed her chair away from her desk and simply tried to sit quietly. So: Spencer was calling off the press conference. And dropping the lawsuit.
She sipped her tea, the mug grasped tightly in both her hands, and allowed the warm porcelain rim to rest a long moment against her lower lip. She guessed the main reason she was doing nothing was because there was absolutely nothing she could do. It was over. There would be no surprise broadside on the hunting industry, at least not this week. Or this month. Or, barring some unforeseen accident or tragedy in the hunting season, this year.
One of the things she had learned from Spencer's injury was that it helped to have a human casualty to point out the horrors that hunting inflicted on animals. Spencer had put a human face on a bullet wound. On what it felt like to be mistaken for a deer and then shot.
In theory, it didn't require so very much imagination to understand that sort of pain, now did it? As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country, an uncompromising extremist without any patience. Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.
The press conference would have been a real eye-opener.
Still, the story would get out. Maybe not with the orgiastic fanfare she once had contemplated. But already the word was traveling among their friends in the animal rights community that Spencer McCullough had been shot. The story had been on the street ever since Spencer had returned to work in the middle of the month and begun to return people's calls. We are a litigious society, she thought with bemusement, and there is little we like more than a good courtroom drama.
And Charlotte, apparently, was a wondrous little drama queen. She would have been sensational. Nevertheless, Dominique had to admit that she was relieved for the girl. She was disappointed for her group and the animals they represented, but she was sincerely happy for the girl.
She stood up, stretched, and went to try to cheer up Spencer's young minions--an admittedly uncharacteristic gesture, but one that she told herself she had to consider more frequently--reassuring them that although this press conference was off, there would be others.
There would always, alas, be others.
THAT AFTERNOON Adirondack's lawyer had sounded predictably mulish when he'd first taken Paige's call, presuming--with cause, Paige readily admitted to herself--that she was phoning to torment him with still more conjecture about how a jury would respond to the presence of a traumatized thirteen-year-old girl on a witness stand.
But once he understood why she was actually calling, she could hear in his voice the way his eyes must have widened and how he couldn't wait to finish their conversation--as if this good news might evaporate if he stayed on the line a second longer than necessary, or feared he might say the wrong thing and somehow cause this great gift to be taken back. He wanted to tell his boss. And his boss's boss. And anyone in the manufacturing headquarters of the Adirondack Rifle Company who would listen.
Perhaps he would take credit for this change of heart on the part of Spencer McCullough and his counsel. Perhaps he would concoct a reason why Spencer McCullough and his animal rights nutballs had decided suddenly to slink silently into the night.
She really didn't care.
She felt sunken, deflated, a little sick with sadness. It wasn't just about the money, though lately whenever she had pondered the money that might have been theirs, she had had to breathe in slowly and deeply through her nose to calm herself, as if she were a . . . a hunter. A hunter about to squeeze a trigger. Now, the money that seemed once to demand nothing but patience and journeyman competence had vanished. Vanished completely.
And, yes, she felt bad for Keenan and Randy and Dominique.
But mostly the sorrow that tugged at her now was the result of those claws and paws and hooves, all abused, that surrounded her. That surrounded them all.
So tomorrow it wouldn't be deer. It might be dolphins or whales, elephants--the ones who were shot in the wild or the ones who were beaten in the circus--or mink. It might be the hogs who were driven up the chutes to be clubbed to their death. It might be cattle. It might be the monkeys with their wondrous brains--gray matter perhaps fully conscious of the fact that the virus these humans had injected into their blood was slowly killing them--or the rabbits blinded by cosmetic companies. It might be the whole arks of creatures we were either endangering with our gluttony for trophies or breeding for no other reason than our insatiable desire for meat.
The litany was endless.
So what if it wasn't the deer's turn? It was inevitable their day would come. Somewhere out there was another John Seton. Good God, the woods were full of them.
Suddenly, her eyes were watering and she was unable to blink back her tears.
CHARLOTTE GUESSED instantly that the person leaning against the lockers twenty or twenty-five yards down the corridor was a reporter. She was her mother's age but Charlotte knew that she wasn't a teacher and nothing about her signaled parent. She was wearing khaki pants and a windbreaker, and she had an attache strapped over her shoulder. Her hair was the color of honey and it fell to her shoulders.
Given the kind of day that she'd had--a day that had begun ten hours ago with her parents trying to separate and then (much to her own astonishment) her fessing up to the marijuana--Charlotte briefly considered turning tail and running back into the auditorium,
where a couple of kids from rehearsal and her drama teacher were still hanging out. She was supposed to meet her mom in her mom's classroom, but this woman was a roadblock between the two of them.
Before she could do anything, however, before she could either retreat or plow ahead, the woman saw her. The reporter, assuming that was indeed what she was, offered a small wave and then started to march down the hall toward her.
She stood up a little taller, not that she believed that her height--such as it was--was going to help her much now, and waited.
"I'll bet you're Charlotte McCullough. My name is Lorelea. Lorelea Roberts." She stuck out her hand, and Charlotte took it. "I'm with the Times. I'm a writer."