The Bullet (29 page)

“Yes,” she said simply.

“Sadie Rawson's necklace. The sapphire. You took it?”

“It won't ever be found, if that's what you're asking.”

My mind flashed through the events of recent weeks, struggling to recalibrate. “What about—who broke into my house in Georgetown the other night, then? Who took the files from my surgeon's office?”

“I'm sure I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. But one can imagine that a professional might find ways to accomplish all sorts of things for the right price.”

A strange, almost comfortable silence settled between us. Two women who had done their worst to each other, sitting alone in our darkened bedrooms, thousands of miles apart.

At last sweet Betsy Sinclare cleared her throat. “I'm going to say good-bye now, Caroline. But let me leave you with this thought: You shot an innocent man and you're going to get away with it. Don't be stupid. Keep your mouth shut. Walk away.”

Fifty-eight

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2013

T
here is a café on the rue de Grenelle where you can sit and order a café crème and watch the patrons come and go. It's a humble establishment, not one of the famous Paris cafés. Sartre never held court here. Neither did Hemingway, nor Picasso. They preferred les Deux ­Magots, a few blocks farther east.

I've always favored the rue de Grenelle café for precisely this reason. It caters to the neighborhood, not to celebrities or tourists. Old men greet each other. A woman tears pieces of her morning croissant and feeds them to her dog. An elegant couple in their twenties, still dressed in shimmering evening clothes from the night before, sit smoking at a table on the sidewalk. He kisses her and she lifts her face to him and you see that she is tired yet achingly beautiful.

I sip my coffee and watch them. I despise coffee, never touch the stuff. A surprise to find myself craving it this morning. A surprise to find it tastes delicious, rich and nutty. You think you know yourself. You think you know whether you care for coffee, whether you care for cigarettes, whether you like to swear, whether you could kill a man. You think you know what you are capable of. Then one day you discover that, quite literally, you are not the person you thought you were.

Onto the café table before me I shake the bullet from its leather pouch. It rolls unevenly, coming to rest against the raised chrome rim.
Ethan Sinclare had not pulled the trigger; had perhaps never pulled a trigger in his life. I had imagined myself administering justice.
A pure, biblical justice.
An eye for an eye. In fact I have murdered a man who—if not exactly innocent—was not guilty either. The true killer is alive and well. She is at this moment ensconced in her Buckhead mansion, poised to live to a ripe old age surrounded by loving children and grandchildren. Anger bristles through me. Justice is not served. Old wrongs are not righted after all. My own action adds yet another notch to the groaning tally of wrongs, but does it cancel out the original act? My instinct is—no. The scales are not yet balanced. Laid before me then, a choice: Follow Betsy's advice and walk away? Or go back and finish what has been left undone? It is mine to decide when this story will end.

For now, I rise. Push back my chair and walk north to the river. Halfway across the Pont Royal, with the Louvre straight ahead and the Musée d'Orsay at my back, I stop. Pigeons flap lightly above my head, circling a bread crust abandoned on the paving stones. The walls of the bridge are low here, barely waist high. I lean forward over the jade water. Hold out my fist.

It takes only an instant for a bullet to split the air and steal a life. Only an instant to wreak such sorrow. The heart breaks and it cannot be mended, not to the shape that it once was.

Today, though, the bullet will drop like a harmless pebble. Like an acorn dropping from an oak. The water will swallow it with barely a ripple, or perhaps with no sound at all.

I stand beneath the vast, pale sky and I open my hand and let it fall.

Can't get enough Mary Louise Kelly? Check out her chilling debut,
Anonymous Sources
!

A young reporter must match wits with spies, assassins, and a terrorist sleeper cell targeting the very heart of American power after she is assigned to investigate the death of a powerful Washington insider's son.

Anonymous Sources

Acknowledgments

A
mong other things, this is a book about the bond between siblings.

C. J. Kelly taught me most of what I know about brothers. We are improbably close, considering we were born eight years apart and that we spent much of our childhood bickering over whom Mom and Dad love best (Ceej: just admit it already). My brother is hands down the person I would want beside me in a bar brawl. I couldn't be more proud of the family he is building with his beautiful wife, Jenn, and their son, Cache. Of my early readers, C. J. is the only one to write a comment that made me cry. In the margin of a scene where Caroline hollers at one of her brothers, he scribbled, “This rang so true. I love you.”

Our parents' first house was a fixer-upper on Eulalia Road in Atlanta. I have only happy memories of life there, but it was in that white-tiled kitchen that I imagined the murders of Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith unfolding. When I announced my plan to write a novel set in Atlanta, Mom and Dad got so excited that it became impossible to dedicate this book to anyone else. Mom volunteered to conduct stakeouts on Eulalia, and then—purely for research purposes—subjected herself to multiple rounds of margaritas and cowboy shrimp at Georgia Grille. As for Dad . . . let's just say he embraced the project with such enthusiasm that he is now the proud owner of a 1970s-era .38 Special.

My family in Scotland was no less supportive. Marie and James Boyle whisked our boys away to Edinburgh more than once, to allow me peace and quiet to write. My husband's brothers, Anthony and Martin, lent their names to Caroline's brothers. Dot Boyle and Hilary Wilson shared daily updates on their young daughters, which was incredibly useful in helping me imagine the inner world of a three-year-old Caroline Cashion.

Among my girlfriends, I owe special thanks this round to Sasha Foster, whose expertise in criminal justice shaped Beamer Beasley into a richer character. Kate Gellert made a point of buying a copy of my first book every single day,
for months
, in order to boost my bestseller rankings. Does it go without saying that she enjoys a special place in this author's heart? My heartfelt thanks to Kate and to the many other friends who mixed cocktails, addressed invitations, and offered toasts—­including Marilyn Baker, Nancy Taylor Bubes, Heather Florance, Heather Hanks, Maggie Hedges, Hannah Isles, Susie King, Val LoCascio, Colleen Markham, Leslie Maysak, Anne Mitchell, Lan Nguyen, Shannon Pryor, Becky Relic, Megan Rupp, Jonathan Samuels, Casey Seidenberg, Linda Willard, and Tammy Mank Wincup. You guys throw a mean book party.

In Italy, as my book deadline approached, my panic mounted, and I took to typing eighteen hours a day inside the garden shed erected in our living room (literally, a steel garden shed, painted lime green, in the middle of the living room—long story), dear friends Kerstin Jacot, Christina Petochi, and Charles and Christina Hellawell took over the mothering of my children. They delivered the boys to and from school, fed them meals, and I believe at one point were even putting out our trash.

My Florence book group kept me sane by dragging me away from my laptop to read everything from Hemingway to Russian political history. We have a reputation as a drinking club with a book problem, for reasons we can never quite remember the next morning. Certainly it has nothing to do with the leadership of Alison Gilligan and Diana Richman, who organize our ranks with grace and a ruthless efficiency from which military commanders might learn much.

My thanks to Bita Honarvar and Sandra Murray, for access to the
Journal-Constitution
archives. To Carolyn Atkinson of the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, who helped me plot how Caroline might go about tracing her inheritance. To Marc Vinciguerra, who corrected my Parisian slang. To Brian Martin, who not only let me steal his syllabus but who was alone among early readers of
The Bullet
in proposing a psychoanalytic reading of Will's masculinist judgment of Caroline's multiple
boules
. (Editors at the
New York Review of Books
, take note.)

Perhaps my greatest stroke of luck in the book-publishing process was meeting Victoria Skurnick, of the Levine-Greenberg-Rostan Literary Agency. She is a force of nature, and my advice to anyone who ever crosses paths with her is to shut up and do exactly what she says. Trust me: it saves a lot of time. Karen Kosztolnyik is the kind of editor that writers dream of. She managed both to love this book from the get-go, and to make it a million times better. My thanks to Karen, as well as to Louise Burke, Jen Bergstrom, Jean Anne Rose, and the entire team at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

I share my protagonist's weakness for the Euro look. Happily, my Euro husband favors Italian suits and Scotch over skinny jeans and cigarettes. Nick drove carpool and did grocery runs and learned to cook a formidable chicken curry, to give me time to write. He listened to me ramble about possible plot twists and then came up with some of the best plot twists himself. Peach, I could not do this, or anything else that I do, without you by my side.

Our son James spent much of last winter plopped beside me, penning his own first novel. He already possesses, at the age of ten, both a way with words and an appreciation for the challenges that fiction writers face. (“Mom,” he sighed one night, “it's a ton of work when you have to make up all the characters and all the action and the ending and
everything
, isn't it?”) Our younger son, Alexander, endured months of suspiciously early bedtimes, so that I could sneak away and continue writing into the night. In the morning he would cock one sleepy eye, wrap warm arms around my neck, and whisper, “Did you finish the chapter?” Yes, lovely boy, I finally did.

Also by Mary Louise Kelly

Anonymous Sources

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