The Bullet Read online

  Sure enough, the chain dropped and the door swung open.

  Inside, the scrawny, nervous-looking woman introduced herself as Nan Dorminy. She loved the house, she told me. Great morning light. She’d bought it nine years ago, when her husband left her. He was a good man, she insisted, misinterpreting my startled look. I shouldn’t think otherwise. He just needed his space.

  I nodded politely. Were Southerners always this forthcoming around strangers? “Men can be like that,” I offered, hoping this was an appropriate response.

  Apparently it was, because Nan Dorminy clasped her hands together as though a point of disagreement had been settled. Now then, she asked, when exactly had I lived here, and what could she help me with?

  “Thirty-four years ago,” I told her.

  “Oh, I’ve no idea who was living here then.”

  “My parents were the Smiths. Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith.” I watched for a sign that she recognized the name. Surely it would have been notorious for a while in this neighborhood.

  But she shook her head.

  I tried again. “They were—it’s a terrible story. But they died in this house, I think. They were killed. Back in the seventies.”

  Her chin jerked up. “Oh. Oh, yes. Old Mrs. Carter told me something about that. Years ago, when I moved in. There was a whole nice family that died. A little girl, too. But the property’s changed hands several times since then.”

  “No, that’s just it. The little girl was me. I was—I was injured, when they died. But I survived. I moved away.”

  “Good heavens.” Her hand fluttered to her heart.

  We stood without speaking for a moment.

  Then I asked, “This Mrs. Carter you mentioned. Is she a neighbor? Did it sound like she knew my parents?”

  “She might have. But I’m afraid she’s dead now, too. She passed away last summer. Or was it two summers ago? Her niece got the house.” Mrs. Dorminy frowned. “I can’t think of anyone on Eulalia who goes back that far. Thirty-four years. A long time.”

  She agreed to show me around, in case anything jogged my memory. But she was right. Thirty-four years is a long time. The house had been renovated. She pointed proudly to where previous owners had blown out the back to build an eat-in kitchen, and how she herself had knocked two bedrooms together to make space for a master bath. The old pantry had been converted to a laundry room. None of the internal walls were where they used to be.

  There was only one moment, when I asked what lay behind a door off the main hallway.

  “Oh, that’s just the attic,” she sniffed. “Hot as Hades up there in the summertime.” She opened the door to reveal a dark staircase leading up. The steps were worn wood, stacked with paint cans piled three and four high. An assortment of dried-out paintbrushes and mixing pans clogged the remaining surfaces. She appeared to use the staircase as shelving, storage for tools for half-forgotten home-improvement projects. But something about the slant of the stairs, and the sharp smell of dust and unfinished wood, tugged at me. I closed my eyes and breathed in. Something flickered. It felt as if there should be a light switch, on the left, not a modern flip switch, but the old-fashioned kind, a metal chain you have to yank. When I peered into the dim opening, there it was.

  But Mrs. Dorminy was already pulling me back. “It’s been cleared out up there, if that’s what you’re wondering,” she said, not unkindly. “It’s only my old clothes up there now. I’m not the kind of person who would move into a house filled with other people’s things.”

  She shut the door and the moment passed.

  Afterward I sat in the rental car, staring at the elm tree. It was still just a tree. Just bark and branches, no epiphanies hiding there. Faulkner’s famous line came to me: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. William Faulkner would know. Southern writers feel the weight of the past more heavily, capture it more precisely, than those from anywhere else. Not even Proust, not even Joyce, can touch them.

  In this case, though, Faulkner had missed the mark.

  The past was past. Whatever love or laughter or fear or sorrow I had known in that house remained lost to me. The girl who had once climbed those attic stairs was a ghost, nothing but a ghost.

  Eleven

  * * *

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2013

  My appointment at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was both productive and painful.

  I had reasoned that the newspaper might be a source of names. The coverage back in 1979 must have quoted people who knew the Smiths, friends of the family and that type of thing. I had the vague sense that if I could find someone who had once looked my parents in the eyes, who could share a few old stories about them, it would provide me some sense of closure. If that failed, at least the archives might contain details that would help fill in my sketchy understanding of how—not to mention why—my birth parents had died.

  But as I’ve mentioned, the paper’s website only went back to 1990. So yesterday, after leaving Eulalia Road, I had called the main number. The newspaper proved impenetrable in that hostile way unique to bureaucracies that are allegedly eager to interact with their readers and community. I was disconnected twice and transferred to voice mail more times than I can count, before I finally found myself speaking to one Jessica Yeo.

  Initially, she was also unhelpful. Any request for articles from the 1970s would take some time, Jessica informed me. The best thing would be to e-mail my specific query to [email protected]. Someone would get back to me. Given my recent attempt to navigate the switchboard, I doubted that. I tried to clarify that my query involved a private matter that might better be explained in person. She sounded even less interested. All kinds of kooks must call the newsroom, claiming hot news tips they needed to pass on in person.

  “Look,” I said finally, when I sensed she was about to hang up on me, “I’m only in town for a day or two. If it matters, I’m calling from Georgetown University. I’m on faculty there and—”

  “You’re faculty at Georgetown?”

  “Yes. It’s Professor Caroline Cashion.”

  Ah, the old professorial passe-partout. It worked like a charm. She sighed and allowed that she might have a few minutes if I could swing by the next day, first thing.

  So this morning at nine I had pulled up outside the black, glass box of a building that housed the Journal-Constitution. Surprisingly, the newspaper was not downtown, but in the suburbs, set deep in one of those bland office-park mazes that are ubiquitous these days across America. Only one small, easy-to-miss sign identified the headquarters of Atlanta’s venerable newspaper. For a moment I wondered whether I’d come to a satellite office, perhaps where the printing presses or the sales team resided, rather than the news hub. I checked the address: Perimeter Center Parkway. This was definitely it.

  When she appeared in the lobby, Jessica Yeo also looked nothing like I’d expected. I had expected the newspaper librarian to look more . . . well, more like a librarian. Sensible shoes, reading glasses hanging from a neck chain, maybe a prairie skirt. But Jessica Yeo might have just stepped out of a boho coffee shop in Berkeley. She was young and wore a floaty, flowered hippie dress utterly ill-suited to the autumn weather outside. This was accessorized by blue nail polish, nose and eyebrow piercings, and a wild cloud of frizzy, dark hair.

  From the way she eyed me, I guessed I didn’t fit her image of an academic, either. I was wearing a black, leather dress over leggings and stiletto boots. The black matched my mood, the boots lent me confidence, and again—if there was such a thing as an appropriate wardrobe for this project, I was damned if I could figure it out. We sized each other up and shook hands, then she led me across the lobby.

  She was not in fact a librarian but a research assistant for the news department. This meant helping reporters check facts, find sources, and track down phone numbers. She walked fast, her cowboy boots clacking over the tiled flo
or, explaining over her shoulder that she only had a few minutes. Things would get busy after the 9:30 a.m. editorial meeting. At the end of a hallway she waved her ID badge at a scanner, and a door clicked open. We stepped into an ugly, beige room stacked floor to ceiling with newspapers and mismatched filing cabinets.

  “The archives room. Such as it is,” said Jessica. “So, what dates are we talking?”

  “Fall of 1979. October or November, I think. The names to search for would be Boone Smith and his wife, Sadie Rawson.”

  “Mmm. Smith is too common a name. There’ll be a zillion stories. But we might get somewhere with Boone and—what was the other name? Rawson?”

  “That’s right. Sadie Rawson.”

  “And it’s just one article you’re trying to find?”

  “I don’t know, actually. I’m hoping there might be several. They might be spread out over a few weeks.”

  She sighed and turned toward a shelf stuffed with large, navy, clothbound books. Near the far end were two labeled 1979. The spines were held together by Scotch tape.

  “Our incredibly high-tech index,” she sniffed, yanking out a swivel chair with caster wheels and plopping down. “Theoretically, everybody mentioned in the newspaper should be in here. Theoretically, mind you.” She began flipping through yellowed pages. They looked as though they’d been produced on a typewriter; the letters had faded to reddish brown.

  Jessica was right. There were a zillion entries for Smith. But toward the bottom of the list, under Smith, Sadie Rawson and Boone, there was a date. Actually, four dates, along with notations of which pages and sections the articles had run in. The first had appeared on November 7, 1979.

  “Bingo!” crowed Jessica. “All righty then, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  She began riffling through drawers, pulling out boxes of microfilm. Then she dug the scuffed cowboy boots into the carpet and rolled herself, still seated, across the room. She stopped in front of an enormous machine that must have represented cutting-edge technology around the time that story was written in 1979. Jessica kicked one boot absentmindedly against a metal cabinet as she threaded the film and began to fast-forward. Minutes passed. You could practically hear the machine groan with the effort of dredging up names that had lain forgotten for so long.

  At last the correct edition came into focus. The story bore a simple headline: “Buckhead Couple Shot, Killed.” She zoomed in, and we began to read.

  ATLANTA—A Delta Airlines pilot and his wife were shot and killed Tuesday afternoon in their Buckhead home, and authorities said they were searching for clues as to why the couple may have been attacked.

  Boone and Sadie Rawson Smith, both 26, were shot sometime after 3 p.m., Atlanta police said.

  “This may have been a robbery that escalated into a shooting,” said Lt. Steve Meadows, commander of the Atlanta Police Department’s homicide unit. “We’re working all angles right now.”

  Investigators had made no arrests as of Tuesday night, Meadows said. He urged the public to come forward with tips about the shooting on Eulalia Road, just south of Peachtree Road in northeast Atlanta.

  Jessica bit her lip. “You said you needed this for personal reasons. Did you know them?”

  I had a hard lump in my throat. “They were my parents.”

  She jerked around in her chair and stared at me in horror. “Your parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus Christ. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, obviously, it’s not okay. But I was really young. I don’t remember it.” I coughed. “I grew up somewhere else and only just found out about all this, to be honest. Long, strange story.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Anyway.” I avoided her gaze. “Anyway, I wanted to see what had been written about them. Could you print me a copy of that?”

  “Sure.”

  “And check for the other articles?”

  She found all four of the stories that mentioned my birth parents. The next day, November 8, 1979, a follow-up story had appeared. It divulged no new details on the police investigation. But the reporter had done some digging and learned that the Smiths had been college sweethearts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and had been the parents of a three-year-old daughter. No mention of her name, or what had happened to her. What had happened to me.

  The third story had run the following Monday, November 12. The day of the funeral. Several neighbors and family friends were quoted. But it was the photograph that made me gasp. A grainy but large photo, showing a young couple, arms around each other’s waists, standing beside a backyard barbecue grill. The man had tongs in one hand and a grin on his face. He looked pleasant. I did not recognize him. But her. God, her. I felt the dizzying sensation of looking into a trick mirror. The kind you find in the dressing rooms of discount stores that reflect you either ten pounds lighter or ten pounds heavier than your true self and distort your features just enough that you appear both recognizably yourself and disconcertingly foreign.

  Or perhaps that is too cryptic a description. The simple fact is, she looked just like me. Her hair was different—darker than mine, and sculpted into Charlie’s Angels wings, which would have been the rage back then. She might have been a few inches shorter, too, although it was hard to tell. The eyes, though. The lips, the smile. Identical. The curves, too, on display in a tube top and bell-bottom jeans. You could show this photo to any of my friends today, and at first glance their only questions would be why I was dressed for a seventies theme party, and who was the guy beside me flipping burgers.

  I reached up and touched the screen. “I’ve never seen them before,” I whispered.

  “She looks like you. Or I guess, you look like her. You really do.”

  I began to cry. Quietly at first and then great, wrenching sobs. I had perhaps not believed it until that moment. There is a difference between knowing something in your mind and knowing it in your heart. I had by now seen my original birth certificate, and the MRI and the X-ray. But they had not packed the visceral punch of staring at a face nearly identical to my own. My mother. My flesh and blood, undeniable, her eyes smiling up at me for the first time in more than thirty years.

  • • •

  JESSICA HUSTLED ME into a conference room down the hall and brought coffee. It was scalding and carried the saccharine whiff of artificial sweetener, but I drank it anyway. I blew my nose on a paper napkin.

  “You okay now?”

  “Yes. Sorry. I didn’t intend to start blubbering.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I wasn’t prepared for that photo.”

  “How could you be? How could anyone? I can’t imagine.”

  Jessica patted my leg and told me to sit tight for a minute. When she reappeared, she was carrying several printed sheets of paper. The archived articles.

  “There was only one more.” She handed them to me. “From a few days after the funeral. Odds and ends about the investigation, how a suspect had been questioned and released. They don’t give his name. And there’s a little more about you. They don’t give your name, either. It just talks about how the daughter was injured in the shooting, and how she was still recovering.”

  I flipped through the stack.

  “Maybe read them later?” she asked gently. She had been gracious, but clearly she needed to get back to work.

  “Sure. It’s just—it’s not much, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I know they weren’t famous or rich or anything. But four short articles? That doesn’t seem like much. Wouldn’t this have been a pretty sensational crime? A handsome couple and their cute toddler, shot in cold blood in their own home? In a nice neighborhood? I’m surprised there wasn’t more coverage.”

  Jessica considered this. “Bear in mind the police would have wanted to keep a lid on how much information they ga
ve out. Anything that gets in the paper can tip off the perpetrator. That’s always the way. Reporters tend to know a lot more than they’re allowed to print. And look at the date.” She tapped a blue fingernail against the top printout. “Nineteen seventy-nine. They were dealing with, like, two dozen murders a month back then. Atlanta was the murder capital of the country.”

  “Really?” I had no idea.

  “Oh, yeah. You must remember the Atlanta child murders. The bodies of children kept turning up in the woods, then in the river. Awful stuff. We did a big anniversary feature reminding people about it, right after I started working here. When was that?” She counted on her fingers. “Four years ago. Right. And the story was pegged to the thirtieth anniversary. So there you go! Nineteen seventy-nine.”

  She looked pleased with herself for figuring this out. “We dug up some unbelievable archive photos to run with that story. Totally gruesome. But it does help answer your question. The cops were probably overwhelmed. They would have had a massive backlog of cases, and the child murders were making national headlines. Investigators would have been focused on the kids. Maybe your parents got a little lost in the shuffle.”

  “Maybe.” I thought about this. “You think the reporters covering crime might have been overwhelmed, too? That would explain why there aren’t many stories.”

  “I guess. Who was it that covered your parents?” She reached for the articles. “Huh! Funny I didn’t notice. I don’t know her.” She pointed at the byline on the first story, someone named Janice Fleming. “But this one. Leland Brett. He’s one of our managing editors.”

  “What, you mean still?”

  “He’s worked here forever. Leland’s probably upstairs on the sixth floor right now.”