Four Live Rounds (9 page)

Sue was crying. “That’s why you sold the
Lexus. Why you moved us to Eden Prairie. How’d you keep this from
me, Roger? How did you—”

“Live with myself? I don’t know. I still
don’t know.”

“Are you sure it’s him? That Donald’s the
father of the girl you hit?”

“This thing happened in early October. Almost
six years ago. In St. Paul.”

“But what if it’s just a horrible coin—”

“I still dream about the orange shoes and
blue shorts, Sue.”

“Oh God, baby.” She turned over and pulled
her husband down onto her chest, ran her fingernails across the
back of his neck. “What do you think he’s gonna try to do to
us?”

“I don’t know, but he didn’t come all this
way, follow us up into the middle of nowhere just to talk.”

“So we just leave? Right now?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get us back to the trailhead in the
dark?”

“I think so. If not, we’ll just hide
somewhere until morning. What’s important is getting out of this
tent and away from our camp as soon as possible.”

“But he must know where we live, Roger.” Sue
sat up, faced her husband. “He was able to find out we were coming
to North Carolina. What keeps him from doing this when we get back
to Minnesota? Or from turning you in?”

“I don’t think this is about bringing me to
justice in any legal sense of the word.”

“We can’t just run away, Roger.”

“Sure we can. And we will.”

“He might know where our girls live. Might
decide to go after them. We have no idea what he’s capable of.”

“So what are we supposed—”

“You wanna be free of this?”

“Of course.”

“Have it never come back to haunt you as long
as you live? Guarantee the safety of me and the girls? Your own
freedom?”

For a moment, there was no sound but the
weeds brushing against the exterior of the tent.

“Jesus, Sue. I don’t have that in me.”

“Well, you had it in you to leave a teenage
girl dying in the street. Now if that man came into this wilderness
to murder us, he probably went out of his way to make sure no one
knew he was coming here, which works out perfectly for us.”

He heard his wife moving in the darkness, the
separating teeth of a zipper.

The leather case dropped in his lap.

“You have to take the bullets out,” she
whispered. “Wipe them down so they don’t have our prints. You
probably won’t be able to find the shell casings in the dark.”

“Sue, I can’t.”

“You’re gonna make me handle this? Look, it
breaks my heart that that man lost his daughter, and it makes me
sick that it’s your fault, but I will not live the rest of my life
in fear, looking over my shoulder, calling Jennifer and Michelle
five times a day to make sure they’re okay. That morning, when you
drove away, you decided you weren’t gonna let a mistake you made
destroy our lives. Well, it’s too late to change course now.”

“I am telling you I can’t—”

“You don’t have a choice. This night’s been
coming ever since that October morning. You started this six years
ago. Now go finish it.”

He left Sue lying in the tall grass several
hundred feet down the mountainside and headed back up toward the
meadows of Beech Spring Gap carrying a flashlight he didn’t need
under the blazing wattage of the moon.

He reached the gap, moved past their tent and
along the trail that led to Shining Rock Mountain, the base of
which stood cloaked in thickets of rhododendron that bloomed pink
in the month of June.

On a walk that morning, a thousand years ago,
he’d noticed a piece of red tucked back among the glossy green
leaves, wondered now if that had been Donald’s tent, and how he
would find the man’s camp in the middle of the night.

He walked off the trail and crouched down in
the grass. Five yards ahead lay the edge of the rhododendron
thicket. Roger thought he recalled that piece of red a hundred feet
or so up the gentle slope, though he couldn’t be sure.

For a while, he lay on the ground, just
listening.

The grass swayed, blades banging dryly
against one another.

Rhododendron leaves scraped together.

Something scampered through the thicket.

This was his thirteenth summer coming to
Shining Rock, and he found that most of their time here had
vanished completely from memory—more impression than detail. But a
few of their trips remained clear, intact.

The first time they’d come and accidentally
discovered this place, the twins were only six years old, and
Michelle had lost her front teeth to this gap while she and
Jennifer wrestled and rolled in a meadow one sunny afternoon, cried
her heart out, afraid the tooth fairy wouldn’t pay for lost
teeth.

There had been the trip seven years ago where
he and Sue had to fake happy faces for the girls, crying at night
in their tent, while fifteen hundred miles away, in a laboratory in
Minneapolis, a biopsy cut from the underside of Sue’s left breast
was screened for a cancer that wasn’t there.

Three years back, he’d been anxiously
awaiting news on an advertising campaign he’d pitched, which if
chosen, might have netted him half a million dollars, remembered
trying not to dwell on the phone call he’d make once they left
these mountains, knowing if he got a yes, what that would mean for
his family. He’d pulled over once they reentered cell phone
coverage at an overlook outside of Asheville. Walked back toward
the car a moment later, eyes locked with Sue’s, shaking his
head.

But looking at the time they’d spent here as
a whole, forest instead of tree, it felt a lot like his life—so
many good times, some pain, and it had all raced by faster than he
could’ve imagined.

Roger crawled to the thicket’s edge and
started up the hill, the flashlight and the Glock shoved down the
back of his fleece pants.

After five minutes, he stopped to catch his
breath.

He thought he’d been making a horrible
racket, dead leaves crunching under his elbows as he wriggled
himself under the low branches of the rhododendron shrubs. But he
assured himself it wasn’t as much noise as he thought. To anyone
else, to Donald, it probably sounded like nothing more than the
after-hour scavenging of a raccoon.

Roger was breathing normally again and had
rolled over on his stomach to continue crawling when he spotted the
outline of a tent twenty yards uphill. The moon shone upon the rain
fly, and in the lunar light, he could only tell that it was dark in
color.

He pulled the gun out of his waistband.

His chest felt tight, and he had to take
several deep breaths to make the lightheadedness dissolve.

Then he was crawling again, though much
slower now, taking care to avoid patches of dead leaves and
low-clearance branches that might drag across his jacket.

The tent stood just ahead, a one-man A-frame.
He was still hidden in shadow, but another few feet and he’d emerge
from the cover of darkness, into the moonlit glade.

Roger lay beside the tent and held his
breath, listening for deep breathing indicative of Donald sleeping,
if in fact this was even the man’s tent. He didn’t know how long he
lay there. Two minutes. A quarter of an hour. Whichever the case,
it felt like ages elapsed, and he still hadn’t heard a sound from
inside.

Maybe Donald wasn’t in there. Maybe he’d
already found a spot to hide and watch their tent. Maybe he was a
silent sleeper. Maybe he’d heard Roger crawling toward him through
the rhododendron and was sitting up right—

“That you out there, Roger?”

Roger jumped up and scrambled back toward the
thicket.

He stopped at the edge of the glade, his gun
trained on the tent, trembling in his hand.

“Would you tell me something?” Donald asked.
“Was she alive right after you hit her? She was dead when the
paramedics arrived.”

Roger had to wet the roof of his mouth with
his tongue so he could speak.

“She was gone instantly,” he lied.

“You didn’t tell your wife, did you?”

“No.”

“She seemed surprised. Does she know you came
over here? Did you discuss it with her after I left? Tell her what
you’d done?”

“What were you going to do to us?”

“Not a thing.”

“I don’t believe that. How’d you find
me?”

“When the police gave up, I spent thousands
of dollars on a PI who located and investigated everyone who owned
a silver Lexus in the St. Paul area. I’ve had conversations like I
had with you and Sue tonight with a half dozen other people I
suspected, feeling them out, gauging their reactions.”

“You didn’t know for sure it was me?”

“Not until this moment, Roger. Not until you
crept up to my tent at one in the morning with what I imagine is
that Glock, registered to Sue. That pretty much convinces me.”

“Do you have a gun in there?”

“No.”

Roger glanced over his shoulder into the
thicket, then back toward the tent. There was a part of him dying
to just slink away.

“What do you want, Donald?”

“I already got it.”

“What?” Roger could hear Donald moving around
in the tent.

“The truth.”

“So that’s it? We just go our separate ways,
pretend this night never happened.”

“No, it happened. But it doesn’t have to end
like I suspect it will.”

“How does this end, Donald?”

“Are you asking if I’m going to turn you
in?”

“Are you?”

“What would you do? If I’d hit Jennifer or
Michelle, spread their brains all over the pavement?”

“Are you threat—”

“No, I’m asking you, father to father, if you
knew who the man was who’d killed your daughter, what would you
do?”

“I’d want to kill—”

“Not want. What would you do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“Beat you to death with my bare hands. That’s
what I want to do. Not what I will do.”

Roger stood up, took six steps toward the
tent.

Donald said, “Roger? Where are you?”

“Right here, Donald.”

“You’re closer.”

“Listen to me,” Roger said. “I want you to
know that I am so sorry. And I know it doesn’t do a goddamn thing
to bring Tabitha back, but it’s the truth. I was just so scared.
You understand?”

“Thank you, Roger.”

“For what?”

“Saying her name.”

Roger fired six times into the tent.

His ears ringing, gunshots still
reverberating off the mountains, he said, “Donald?”

There was no answer, only wet breathing.

He went to the tent door and unzipped it and
took out his flashlight and shined it inside.

Donald lay on his back, the only visible
wound a hole under his left eye, and the blood looked like oil
running out of it.

Roger moved the flashlight around, searching
for a gun in Donald’s hand, something to mitigate what he’d done,
but the only thing Donald clutched was a framed photograph of an
auburn-haired teenager with a braces smile.

Three days later, seated at the same table
they’d occupied a week before at the Grove Park Inn’s Sunset
Terrace, they watched the waiter place their entrees before them
and top off their wineglasses from a bottle of pinot noir.

The August night was cool, even here in the
city, like maybe summer would end after all.

Near the bar, a tuxedoed man was at a
Steinway playing Mozart, one of his beautiful concertos.

“How’s your filet?” Sue asked.

“It’s perfect. Yours?”

“I could eat this every day.”

Roger forced a smile and took a big sip of
wine.

They ate in silence.

After a while, Sue said, “Roger?”

“Yes, honey?”

“We did it right, yeah?”

It annoyed him that she would bring it up
over dinner, but he was well on his way toward inebriation, a nice
buffer swelling between himself and all that had come before.

“I don’t know how we could’ve been more
thorough,” he said.

“I keep thinking we should’ve moved his
car.”

“That would’ve been just another opportunity
for us to leave evidence. Skin cells, sweat, hair, fibers of our
clothing, prints. I thought it through, Sue.”

She reached across the table and took his
hand, the karat diamond he’d given her twenty-four years ago
sending out a thousand slivered facets of candlelight.

“Above all, it was for the girls. Their
safety,” she said.

“Yeah. For the girls.”

The scent of a good cigar swept past.

“You’ll be able to go on all right?” Sue
asked. “With what…what you had to do?”

Roger was cutting into his steak, and he kept
cutting, didn’t meet her eyes as he answered, “I’ve had practice,
right?”

It was early October when it occurred to one
of the forest rangers of the Pisgah district that the black Buick
Regal with a Minnesota license plate, parked near the restrooms of
the Big East Fork trailhead, had been there for a long damn time,
which was particularly strange considering no one had been reported
missing in the area.

Over several days, the sheriff of Haywood
County spoke briefly with two estranged, living relatives and an
ex-wife in Duluth, none of whom had been in contact with Donald
Kennington in over a year, all of whom said he’d been on the
downward spiral since his daughter’s death, that it had ruined him
in every way imaginable, that he’d probably gone up into the
mountains to die.

A deputy found it in the glove box—a
handwritten note folded between the vehicle’s owner’s manual and a
laminated map of Minnesota.

He read it aloud to the sheriff, the two of
them sitting in the front seat as raindrops splattered on a
windshield nearly pasted over with the violent red leaves of an oak
tree that overhung the parking lot.