The Perfect Letter Read online

  When the sheriff’s deputy arrived, Jake told the story he’d concocted about the gelding and the intruder and the two shots in the dark. Leigh had listened in a kind of stupor, her thoughts thick and slow as honey. When she thought about it later, she realized she had probably been in shock. She’d killed a man. She, Leigh Merrill, had committed a murder, and to protect her Jake had decided to tell the authorities it was him.

  As he was speaking, telling the story they would both tell so many times, to police, to prosecutors, to a jury, she thought, It’s all a lie. She was ready to blurt it out, to tell the truth, but whenever she caught Jake’s eye she could see that he was determined, that he thought this way was best. That he loved her enough to sacrifice himself for her.

  A couple of hours later, as Leigh watched the two officers put Jake in the back of the squad car, she thought, That could have been me. That should be me in there right now. And God help her, she was glad, in that moment, that it wasn’t her heading off to jail.

  Some detectives came, searched the barn, Ben’s house, the vehicles. In the glove compartment of Jake’s truck they found eight vials of illegal steroids and horse-sized syringes. The detectives showed these to Gene and Leigh, to Ben. “Here’s what they were fighting over,” said the detective. “Must have been doing it for years. We’re going to have to call the feds. Transporting illegal drugs over state lines is a federal offense, you know. That boy’s going to need a good lawyer, that’s all I can say right now.”

  “That’s not possible,” Leigh said, looking at the syringes like they were snakes. She wouldn’t believe it. Jake wouldn’t dope her grandfather’s horses. Jake wouldn’t be involved in anything illegal. He couldn’t be.

  Could he?

  Gene shook his head angrily. “I knew something was going on. I knew it.” He turned on Ben. “That colt today—you’ve been running the animals too hard and using the steroids to cover it up.”

  Ben’s faced closed up. “You knew. You knew the whole time. How else could we get the best from these rotten nags of yours?”

  “You’re off the farm,” Gene said, wagging his finger at Ben. “Tonight.”

  “Just a second, now. My boy—”

  “Your boy’s done enough damage for one lifetime. I want you gone by morning, Ben. Leave quietly or I get the sheriff involved.”

  “You think this is best, Gene? You think this will be the end of it?”

  “It better be.”

  Ben stormed off, and the sheriff drove Jake to the station, the blue and white lights of the cruiser fading into the darkness. Her grandfather had put his arms around her, but she shrugged him off. The old man was partly to blame, too, and Leigh felt all the anger in her settle, finally, on him. If he hadn’t forbidden Leigh and Jake to see each other, none of this would have happened. She made herself stand still and not embrace him in return. Her whole body felt like it was made of glass, like it would shatter if she moved.

  “I told you that boy was no good. Now you’re seeing why, Leigh.”

  “Not one more word, Pop,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself, feeling like she might come completely apart if she didn’t hold herself together right then. “Now’s not the time for I-told-you-so’s.”

  When they returned home she’d gone back into the house and locked herself in her room, not coming out, not speaking to anyone, even Chloe, who called and called the next day when she heard the news. She didn’t answer when her grandfather knocked to ask if she wanted breakfast, if she was feeling all right. He was trying to make it up to her, but Leigh was determined to punish him.

  She spoke to no one, not until the police came to the house to take her statement. To all their questions, she gave the answer that Jake had demanded of her: They’d gone to the barn to see about the injured horse. They’d heard a noise, thought there was a horse thief in the barn. She hadn’t seen the man, hadn’t known who it was at first. They argued. Jake got her grandfather’s .357 Magnum. The man lunged, and Jake had shot once and missed. Then the man got him down on the ground, choking him. The man said he was going to kill him, kill Jake, and to stop him from choking him, Jake shot him once in the chest.

  “So when did you realize that the man in the barn was Mr. Tucker?”

  “When the lights went on. Until then I didn’t know.”

  “Did he ever say Jake’s name? Did he ever identify himself to you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The detective wrote something in his notebook. Leigh had the feeling she’d said something wrong, somehow, that she’d messed up, but she couldn’t think how.

  “Very well, Miss Merrill. We’ll be in touch.”

  Afterward, standing on the front porch in her bare feet and watching the detectives pull away from the house, she thought, It will be all right. A good lawyer can get Jake off by claiming self-defense. He’ll be out soon with time served.

  That was the hope she clung to—that it would blow over, it would be written off as an accident, a simple misunderstanding.

  How wrong she’d been.

  That last summer—when she should have been looking forward to starting college and planning her move to Boston, her life with Jake—was nothing but a blur of noise and worry. Leigh spent long hours at the sheriff’s station, the county prosecutor’s office, telling the same story over and over, and each time she got the feeling she wasn’t giving them the answer they wanted, that she was missing something. She saw them giving each other looks: they didn’t believe her. Jake was in trouble, and the more often Leigh told the story of what happened in the barn, the more certain she was that somehow she was doing him more harm than good.

  Ben Rhodes left the farm, but it wasn’t an amicable parting of the ways. He came to see Gene one last time before he cleared out, asking for six months’ severance pay, which Gene refused to give him. Leigh watched the whole thing from a corner of the foyer, half hidden in the shadows.

  “You think this is an early retirement?” the old man had asked when Ben laid out his demand. “You’re lucky I’m just firing you and not taking you to court. Get off my property before I have you thrown off.”

  “I think you should reconsider,” said Ben. There was a threat in his voice that Leigh didn’t quite understand. “I think it would be better for both of us, and our kids, if you reconsidered. Don’t be stupid, Gene. Think of it as a donation to the future safety of your family.”

  “Like hell,” said Gene. “I won’t give you another dime, Ben. You or your boy. Get your ass off my property.” Ben’s jaw clenched. “You come after my family, and you’ll have me to deal with.”

  Ben stormed off, spinning the tires of his truck, but for the next few weeks, Leigh sometimes still saw him stalking around the sidewalks of Burnside—scowling over a beer at Dot’s, glaring at her when she drove her grandfather’s truck down Main Street. She kept expecting him to turn up on her grandfather’s front porch once more, but he never did, and after a while she and Gene forgot his threat. They chalked it up to the actions of a desperate man, and that was all.

  Leigh was supposed to head off to Harvard in September, but she decided to defer her enrollment until after the trial. Instead she spent her eighteenth year at home, helping her grandfather, who seemed to have grown very old very quickly. Gene was having more trouble getting around the farm, and often spent whole days in the house, brooding. Maybe Leigh should have asked him what was troubling him, but she had too many of her own worries to brood on, and for that year they circled each other warily, like two shipwrecked passengers sharing the same lifeboat.

  With Ben and Dale and Jake all gone, they were short-handed around the farm, so Leigh’s mother’s brother, Gene Jr.—whom everyone called Sonny—started coming down more on the weekends, bringing his wife, Becky, and their two boys to help out around the place. They were helpful and treated Leigh with the utmost kindness, but Wolf’s Head was not the same without Gene’s sturdy presence in the barns and on the tracks, and the business suffered a b
it. Leigh couldn’t bring herself to go to the barn, the scene of her crime as well as an aching reminder of Jake’s absence. She huddled in the house, spending whole days in her pajamas, not speaking to anyone. Her aunt Becky’s attempts at cheering her up by taking her into town for lunch and shopping only made her wish her mother were alive so she might have someone she felt she could confide in.

  Jake’s case was assigned to the public defender, a harried but determined kid of twenty-nine barely out of law school. The lawyer said there was nothing to be done about the drug charge and declared that Jake should plead guilty, take his four years, and be glad it wasn’t worse. But the lawyer seemed to think Jake had a good case on the murder charge and urged him to plead not guilty to the charge of murder by reason of self-defense. Let a jury hear the trial, he’d said, and determine Jake’s guilt or innocence.

  The trial wasn’t set to begin until the following September, just after Leigh was supposed to have started her sophomore year at Harvard. They’d all had to testify at the trial—Ben, Gene, and Leigh. And Jake, of course. When he admitted the truth about the steroids. When he admitted the truth about everything except who’d been holding the gun when it went off.

  He’d never written. He’d never called. He never came to the visitors’ room at the Burnside County Jail when she visited. She was starting to be afraid that he blamed her, and rightly so. She had no idea what was happening to him in there, how he was suffering. Anyone would start to doubt they were doing the right thing when they were sitting in a jail cell day after day. Anyone would start to have regrets, surely.

  Leigh didn’t see Jake again until the day the trial started. Settled in the back of the courtroom, her eyes raw with lack of sleep, she had watched the bailiffs bring Jake in, looking very young and scared in his gray suit. He looked thinner and even more tired than she did, and at first she wasn’t even certain he was aware that she was in the room—he came in with his head held high on his neck, his jaw muscles clenched, eyes forward. He sat down at the defendant’s table with his hands folded in front of him. Leigh kept willing him to turn around, turn around, Jake. Look at me, Jake. Look at me.

  His father, sitting just behind him, leaned forward to say something, and that was the moment Jake finally turned around and caught Leigh’s eye. She opened her mouth to say something, but he shook his head no. What did that mean? Was he angry, did he blame her? He must blame her. She watched every twitch of his shoulders and nod of his head, but she could no longer read his body language. Could a year apart have really changed him so much?

  On the way out of the courtroom on the day of his testimony, he finally gave her a small smile, his eyes holding hers for just a moment longer than necessary. It gave her a momentary hope, but when she went to the jail the next day to see him, he still wouldn’t speak to her, and afterward he still wouldn’t write.

  Talk to me, Jake, she wrote him. Why won’t you talk to me?

  The trial dragged on for weeks. The thrust of the prosecutor’s argument seemed to be that Jake had murdered Dale Tucker over the steroids—that he was trying to keep them for himself, to sell, which was just the most ridiculous thing Leigh had ever heard. There were arguments over the timing of the two shots, over the angle at which the bullet entered Dale’s body, every bit of evidence seeming to point to the idea that Jake was lying, and at every moment Leigh wanted to stand up and scream, It was me! Jake didn’t do anything! It was all me!

  Her guilt and misery were so acute that most days all she did was sit in the back of the courtroom and weep, silently, her grandfather trying to comfort her by patting her hand or her arm. She could see the eyes of the prosecutor on her from time to time, catching a glimpse of her from the front of the courtroom.

  By the time it was her turn on the witness stand, she knew it was no longer in her to lie. She couldn’t even look Jake in the eye; he was nothing but a smudge of gray at the edge of her vision, looking, in his pressed suit and blue tie, like a kid playing dress-up with his dad’s wardrobe. When she passed him on her way to the witness stand, she saw him sit up a little straighter, try to catch her eye, but she walked across the courtroom with her head down and took her seat, not looking at him. Let him see how he likes it, she thought.

  On the witness stand she sat with her hands in her lap, wringing the fabric of her skirt. Her testimony was mostly a blur. She remembered the prosecutor only as a flash of discolored teeth and an oily voice, her own feelings somewhere between resignation and terror. She had to get through this. For Jake. For their future together.

  “Now, you originally told the police you went to the barn that night to check on a lame horse, but that isn’t really true, is it?” the prosecutor asked, staring through her. Jake had already admitted the truth about his involvement in doping the horses and been sentenced to four years on that charge. She couldn’t hide behind a fictional intruder any longer.

  “That’s right. There was no lame horse.”

  “So what did happen?”

  “I wanted to talk to Jake. We’d had a fight before he left, and I wanted to make up with him. I was looking to apologize.” This was the first real truth that Leigh had uttered since her grandfather had arrived the night of the shooting. A rush of relief flooded her body, and she knew that soon she was going to have to tell the whole truth. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself otherwise.

  “What did you fight about?”

  “I didn’t like him running errands for his father and Dale. I said I didn’t like the people they sent Jake to see. I didn’t trust them.”

  “What didn’t you trust about the people Dale Tucker sent Jake to see?”

  “I thought they were shady. The meetings were always happening in bars or behind someone’s truck, always at night, always hours and hours away. It didn’t seem right to me.”

  “Tell us about that particular night in the barn. Why didn’t you turn on the lights when you first came inside?”

  “I knew my grandfather would be angry if he caught me out at such an hour, especially with Jake. I didn’t want anyone to know I was there.”

  “So was this a regular occurrence, then? You and Jake sneaking around in the dark?”

  Leigh blushed, heat spreading across her face as Gene looked out from the gallery.

  “Yes. Jake and I often met up in the barn.”

  “What did you witness inside the barn?”

  “I heard Jake and Dale arguing. I couldn’t see them clearly.”

  “What were they arguing about?”

  “Something Dale wanted from Jake. I didn’t know what it was they were talking about, but Dale was angry. He threatened to go to my grandfather and tell him that Jake and I were still seeing each other unless he got what he wanted.”

  “And did Jake give him what he wanted?”

  “No. So Dale choked him. He got Jake down on the ground and was choking him with a lead line.”

  “You said you couldn’t see them clearly. How did you know who was who?”

  “I could hear Jake choking. Dale was still talking.”

  “What did Dale say to Jake?”

  “He said, ‘I will fucking kill you.’”

  The prosecutor stopped a moment as the courtroom burst out in whispers. “And what happened next? When did Mr. Tucker realize you were in the barn also?”

  “I spoke to him. I told him to take his hands off Jake.”

  “And did he?”

  “Yes. He let Jake go and started walking toward me.”

  “Did Mr. Tucker say anything as he was walking toward you?”

  “He tried to blackmail me. He said if I had sex with him he would keep his mouth shut about me and Jake.”

  “He wasn’t threatening you?”

  “I just told you he was threatening me.”

  “I meant physically threatening.”

  “I took it as a physical threat, yes. From Dale any threat was physical.” Leigh was angry now, remembering the feeling of Dale’s hand on her breast, the wa
y he always pushed up so close to her. Her face went hot. The courtroom was utterly silent except for the sound of the blood rushing in Leigh’s ears.

  “But he had no weapon? You saw no knife, no gun?”

  She answered quietly, “No.”

  “But Jake has testified that this was the moment he went to get the gun from the tack room. If Dale didn’t have a weapon, why would Jake go fetch your grandfather’s gun?”

  Leigh was looking down at her hands. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep this up. The story Jake had already told on the stand wasn’t true; Leigh was already holding the gun when Dale started walking toward her. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? The gun had been in her hands. Her hands, and not Jake’s at all.

  “Miss Merrill, if Jake was no longer in any danger—if, as you say, Mr. Tucker’s attention was on you at the moment—why would Jake need a gun? You could have walked away at that point. Why wouldn’t you simply tell Dale Tucker you weren’t going to have sex with him and let that be the end of it?”

  “Dale was making terrible threats. He wouldn’t shut up.” She was coming very close to her breaking point now. They were circling the heart of the lie, and she was starting to think only the truth would get Jake, and herself, out of this mess.

  “But now was the time you and Jake could have walked away safely, isn’t that true? Mr. Tucker was unarmed. Neither of you was in any imminent physical danger any longer. Isn’t that true?”

  Leigh remembered the sound of the gun going off. The flash. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Instead Jake executed an unarmed man. He went and got your grandfather’s .357 Magnum from the tack room, and he shot Dale Tucker once in the chest. He shot him over five thousand dollars’ worth of steroids.”

  So this was the gist of the prosecutor’s argument: that Jake had lied when he said Dale’s murder was self-defense. That he was covering something up. And the prosecutor was right about that much: Jake was covering something up. But the prosecutor was wrong about what it was.

  Leigh hadn’t been able to look at Jake, hadn’t been able to make herself keep up the lie any longer. The real truth was like an explosion in her chest, and when it would come out, finally, it would blow her to bits.