Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“You realize the casing is gone, right?” John asked. “It seems to have been lost when it was with the New Hampshire State Police.”

“Your lawyer told me.”

“So we’ll never know if that’s what occurred.”

“I don’t think that’s it, anyway.”

“Then what, pray tell, did happen?” He’d worked hard to keep the disgust out of his voice, but he knew after the words had escaped his lips that he’d failed.

“Well, my granddaughter has a set of blocks-”

“You have a granddaughter?”

“Two, my friend. I fell in love young. Real young. You have any?”

“No, and I’m years away. My daughter still has a week and a half left at ten and my son is an infant.”

“You got a lot to look forward to. Anyway, my granddaughter has some wooden blocks. You know the kind, you’ve seen them. Rectangles. Squares. Cylinders. She’s two and a half. And the blocks have a wooden tray with cutouts in which she can place them. They fit snug. Real snug. As the expression goes, you can’t put a square peg in a round hole. The square will only fit in the square opening and the cylinder will only fit in the cylindrical opening-like a cartridge in a chamber. They have been very-and I mean very-precisely milled. Now, imagine you slipped something as thin as a cardboard match into the cylindrical chamber for the cylindrical block. What do you think would happen?”

John suspected he knew the answer and he considered volunteering it: The block would get stuck. But he wasn’t sure where Ballard was going with this example and he felt sufficiently stupid already. And so he decided he would allow Tuttle the chance to embarrass himself for a change. Tuttle, however, remained silent, too.

“Well, then,” Ballard continued, “I’ll tell you. The block will get jammed in the chamber. It’ll be wedged in there so tight that you won’t be able to extract it without a mighty good tug. And all it takes to wedge it right in there is that little cardboard match. And if you think those blocks are carefully milled, well, just think how carefully a gun company manufactures the chamber inside its firearms. Think how exactly the right caliber cartridge fits inside. Now, I’ll bet you loaded and unloaded your gun beside your truck. You did, didn’t you? Think back: It’s last November, and you’re loading and unloading, loading and unloading. True?”

“More or less. But it was beside my car or my friend Howard Mansfield’s pickup. I don’t… own a truck,” he said, wondering why the hell it suddenly seemed unmanly not to own a truck.

“Okay. Now tell me: You ever drop your gun?”

He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Oh, yeah. That’s why they have safeties-for guys like me.”

“It ever fall over?”

“You mean…”

“You just leaned it up against your-let me guess-Audi or Volvo while getting your ammo box at the end of the day. Or the beginning. The bolt is open, and it tips.” He leaned his arm upright at the elbow on his chair and then swung it toward the ground like a pendulum.

“That happened, sure. I know the gun toppled over once when I leaned it against a tree while I was having lunch and another time when I was getting ready to start out in the morning. And, yes, I was leaning it against my… Volvo.”

“There you go.”

“But I don’t smoke and I certainly didn’t slip a match into the chamber.”

“No, but a little dirt got in. Three or four grains of sand. That’s all it takes.”

“Are you saying three or four grains of sand kept me from extracting the bullet?”

“Yup.”

“Have you ever seen that happen before?”

“Yup.”

John sat forward in his seat, and turned the chair so that he was angled away from the toe of Mac Ballard’s boot. “I wish we had that casing,” he said to Tuttle. “I really want that-especially if the lab doesn’t find anything wrong with the extractor.”

Tuttle steepled the fingers on his hands. “If what Mac is suggesting is a legitimate possibility, we can test it-and we will. We don’t need that missing casing. Besides, I’m not sure it matters.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not a defendant.”

“No, but I look like an idiot-a complete moron-if the extractor works and we can’t find the casing!”

“Calm down. If the extractor does work-and bear in mind, we still don’t know if it does-we’re still left with three possible reasons for your inability to remove the cartridge,” he said, and he listed them on his fingers. “It had a defective casing; the rim was damaged when you were loading and unloading it; some dirt got lodged in the chamber.”

“It’s number three,” Ballard said, and for the first time since he’d sat down he uncrossed his leg.

“Anyway, John, the fact the casing is gone actually gives you a bit of cover. We have three possible theories, if we ever need one. Okay?”

John felt his heart thrumming in his ears, and he imagined his blood pressure positively geysering. It seemed unfair that something as infinitesimal as a grain of sand might have cost his brother-in-law his arm and his family so much.

CHARLOTTE HAD EXPECTED the shrink to have a regular doctor’s office-like her orthodontist’s office, maybe, or the offices of the specialists her father had visited when they had first returned from New Hampshire. She’d expected a glut of magazines, most of them boring, that she would have to wade through until she found a People from her lifetime or a Vogue from the current season. Instead, there were magazines like Highlights-which she remembered from second and third grade-and Sports Illustrated for Kids and Teen People. There were books, too, some more dog-eared and pawed over than others. The Wind in the Willows. Stuart Little. A couple of Beverly Cleary paperbacks featuring Ramona. Moreover, the place was clearly an apartment-someone’s home, it looked like-with mahogany paneling on the walls and the kinds of furniture that Grandmother owned: lots of dark wood, and couches and chairs so plush it was like they belonged in a funhouse. The only difference was that the coffee table and end tables had long, deep scratch marks, which really didn’t surprise her since it was pretty clear that Dr. Warwick spent a lot of time with the Barbies and G.I. Joe playground crowd.

She’d never visited Aunt Sara’s office in Vermont, but she knew it was part of a group practice. In her mind she had always seen it as a regular physician’s workplace: chairs with bony armrests, beige walls, a receptionist behind a sliding glass window. Now she wondered if her aunt’s reception area felt more like a living room than a waiting room, too.

Actually, this place didn’t feel quite like a living room. Living rooms didn’t have a person who looked more like an au pair than a doctor’s receptionist sitting behind a delicate writing desk that seemed to belong in a museum. Charlotte guessed the young woman couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty, and she was writing something on the jazziest computer monitor she’d ever seen: It looked as thin as a plastic place mat.

Charlotte decided that she didn’t mind having to wait with a Teen People instead of a regular People (though she definitely preferred the more grown-up scoop in the normal edition), and she felt quite content. She was, after all, helping her dad with his lawsuit. Moreover, she really was no longer sure why she had fired Uncle John’s gun into the night. Maybe she would learn something. You never knew.

Her mom had picked her up right after second period and was sitting on the couch beside her, reading the short papers she’d had her English literature students write that week. She had a blue Sharpie pen in her hand-blue, she always said, because she feared students brought too much baggage to red-and was scribbling away madly on some poor kid’s assignment.