The Perfect Letter Read online

  “Chloe, I love him.”

  Chloe fixed her with a level look. “Do you really?”

  “I do. He’s a good man. He’s maybe the best man I’ve ever known. That isn’t settling.”

  “I know you,” Chloe said. “You’re trying to talk yourself into it. Because if you were that certain, you would have said yes right away and meant it.”

  Leigh sighed. There was no point arguing with Chloe. Something, after all, was holding her back. Just what, though, she wasn’t sure.

  Chloe took a sip of her beer and said, “Is he okay and all, you coming home for a week?”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “I’ve seen the way he looks at you,” Chloe said. She squeezed a lime into her beer and then stuffed it down into the neck of the bottle. “I’ve seen him holding your chair out, offering you his arm.”

  “So he’s a gentleman,” Leigh said. “I like that about him.”

  “He treats you like a kid. Like you’re made of glass or something.”

  “He’s not as uptight as you think.”

  Chloe grinned.

  “Really. He thought it was a great idea, me coming to the conference. Drove me to the airport, even.”

  “Sure, sure, he’s always been supportive of your career.”

  “Chloe, don’t start.”

  “I don’t think I ever told you what he said to me at dinner the last time I came to visit you. It was at that restaurant you like, the one with the glass Buddhas. You had gone to the bathroom, and he leaned over and whispered to me, real softlike, ‘Was Leigh’s grandfather a good man? Was he . . . gentle with Leigh?” Chloe broke into a crazy laugh. “I almost died. Could you imagine anyone thinking Gene Merrill was some kind of child abuser?”

  Leigh put down her fork. “Jesus. What did you say?”

  “I told him Gene used to whip you with a willow switch. Said he made you cut it yourself and bring it to him whenever you’d done something bad. Said he did it over your clothes, so you wouldn’t have any incriminating marks.”

  “Chloe!”

  Her friend grinned. “Kidding! I told him he was being an elitist New York prick, and that not everyone in Texas beats their children.”

  “Chloe! You didn’t!”

  “No, I didn’t either. But I thought about it.” That was Chloe’s way: she had to make at least one joke, and sometimes two, before she could get around to being serious. “I said your granddad was the most gracious old gentleman I ever met, and you adored him. What do you think I said?” She took a sip of her beer. “I know Joseph’s just looking out for you.”

  “Yes, he is. He is just looking out for me.” She picked up her fork again and cut herself another bite. “He thinks there’s a reason I haven’t been home in ten years. Some kind of secret I’ve been keeping from him.”

  Chloe rubbed a hand over her hair, a gesture she made whenever she was trying to be tactful, but it always gave her away. The bell over the door rang, and a couple of hipster boys in low-slung jeans came in, bringing the heat with them. Chloe said, “Isn’t there?”

  “No,” said Leigh. “I mean, it’s not a secret.”

  “So you told him what happened with Jake?”

  Leigh swallowed hard, took a sip of her margarita, and said, “I haven’t lied to him. Everyone knows what happened. It was in all the papers, on the news. If Joseph wants to look me up, anything from my past, it’s all there for him to find out. I’m not hiding anything. He maybe hasn’t asked the right questions yet.”

  “And denial is a river in Egypt.”

  Leigh took another gulp of her drink, then licked a bit of salt from her lips, which suddenly felt too dry, too tight. “Really, I’m sick of thinking about it all, Chloe. It was all such a long time ago anyway. I’ve moved on, like Jake said we should. I’d rather forget it.”

  Chloe pointed at Leigh with her beer bottle and said, “Well, you better get ready to remember, babe, because there’s something you need to know.”

  Leigh took another bite. “What’s that?”

  “Jake’s back in town.”

  Two

  Leigh must have told the story dozens of times to the police, the lawyers, the jury, the press, her grandfather, her friends. A man had died: Dale Tucker, one of the horse trainers who worked on her grandfather’s farm. It happened in the barn late one night when she and Jake had gone out to check on a sick horse. They met after dark and slipped into the barn quietly. They left the lights off. Later they would tell the police they didn’t want to alarm Leigh’s grandfather or the gelding, a skittish creature under the best of circumstances, while they checked to see if he was still favoring his injured leg.

  After midnight, after it became clear the gelding was doing all right under the circumstances, they heard a sound in one of the stalls farther down the barn, a sound of shuffling footsteps and a stall door sliding open. In the dark they couldn’t see him clearly, but they knew someone was sneaking out with a horse on a lead. The man was a horse thief, they thought—had to be. No one should have been there at that hour. Jake went to get her grandfather’s .357 revolver, the one Gene always kept locked up in the tack room. They warned the intruder to stay where he was, that they were going to call the police. Instead the man lunged for Jake and tried to wrestle the gun away from him. Jake shot once and missed. The intruder had Jake down on the ground, his hands around his throat. Jake didn’t hesitate: he fired her grandfather’s revolver one more time, hitting the intruder full in the chest, killing him instantly.

  By the time they realized it was one of the horse trainers, by the time they realized the man was unarmed, it was too late. A misunderstanding, everyone said. Could have happened to anyone.

  But still a man was dead, and still someone would have to pay. At the trial Jake had pleaded self-defense, but his lawyer had not been able to convince the jury. Jake had been sentenced to ten years all told. A lifetime, it felt like then, and still did, sometimes. Jake had told her to forget about him, to go to Harvard and move on with her life. And in most ways, she had.

  Except that wasn’t the real story, not even close. She’d tried to tell the real story once, but no one had believed her. Not the prosecutors or the police. Not her grandfather or even Chloe. She’d tried to tell the truth, and instead everyone had believed the lie.

  It was an understatement when she told Chloe she was sick of thinking about it. For a decade she’d been replaying the events of that night in her head over and over late at night, on the subway, at work, wondering what if? What if we hadn’t gone to the barn? What if there had been no gun? What would have happened then?

  So much had been spoiled by that one night—her family, her friendships. Everything she used to plan for, everything she used to think she wanted. It was all changed, all damaged by that single rash act, the pulling of a trigger, and even now, sitting in the bar with Chloe, she could close her eyes and hear the shot, hear the gurgling noise the man made as he died, his lungs filling up with blood. She could see the shock in his face, the shock of knowing he was dying. She’d been hearing the noise in her head all these years.

  Now Chloe was saying Jake’s sentence was up. He’d served all of his ten years, no time off for good behavior. It was the talk of the town, apparently—people around Burnside couldn’t believe he was out, that he’d come back to the scene of the crime. That he dared to show his face in town.

  Jake was out, he’d been released. And he hadn’t let her know.

  Now Leigh realized she was holding her breath. She let it out slowly, looking for the exits, mapping a route for escape. But there wasn’t one, not this time. She’d come back of her own accord, and now she was going to have to deal with the problem instead of running away.

  She said, “How do you know he’s back?”

  “He knocked over a liquor store. How do you think?” Chloe polished off the last of her beer and set the bottle back on the table. “I saw him. He was eating supper at Dot’s one night when I drove by. He was si
tting in the window, drinking a beer, eating some chili, regular as you please.”

  Leigh was starting to feel a little sick. She could picture the spot, in a little wooden A-frame building near the highway, picture Jake as he was in high school, tanned and dark-haired, lean as a greyhound, picture herself sitting across from him drinking a root-beer float. The part of her that was still eighteen wanted to weep. “When?”

  “About three days ago. Went home to Burnside to see my ma, and there he was, big as life. His hair’s shorter and he looked a little bigger, like he’s put on twenty pounds of muscle, but it was the same Jake, all right.”

  Leigh resisted the urge to order a shot of tequila and asked, “Was he alone?”

  Chloe smirked. “Do you think he’s been out meeting girls? The man’s been in prison.”

  “For ten years. That’s right.” She had a picture of him in her mind: the faded brown Stetson he’d always worn, wrapped with a rattlesnake band, the tattoo of a bat on the back on his left triceps, barely visible under the sleeve of a clean white T-shirt. A girl—someone young and pretty, someone local—sitting across from him.

  “Ten years is a long time.”

  Some of Chloe’s pink hair fell into her eyes, and she pushed it back with one rough motion. “I didn’t see him with anyone, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone. Seriously, he’s been in prison since he was twenty. He’s trying to get back on his feet. Girls are probably the last thing on his mind.”

  “Or the first.”

  “Jesus, what’s with you? Are you mad that he didn’t call to tell you he was getting out or something? I thought you’d be happy.”

  “I am. I am happy.”

  Chloe cut her eyes at Leigh sideways, like she was judging a horse show. Leigh knew that look. “No, you’re not. You’re pissed off.”

  “I’m not. He shouldn’t have been in prison in the first place. It was all a big mistake. A misunderstanding.”

  “A man died, Leigh.”

  “Yes, a man who should have known better than to sneak around my grandfather’s barn in the middle of the night. Don’t tell me you feel sorry for Dale Tucker now.”

  “I don’t. But I don’t think he deserved to die either.”

  Leigh sighed. “Me neither. But it was a mistake. Just a stupid accident.” She rubbed her temples; she was starting to get a headache. In a few minutes it would be full-blown, and she’d be ill, unable to see straight. She didn’t know if she was angrier at Jake for not telling her he was getting out or at Chloe for waiting until Leigh was actually in Texas before springing the news on her. But it was too late—she was stuck, committed to the conference and the trip. She couldn’t leave without embarrassing herself and causing a scandal. And if there was one thing Leigh Merrill was good at, it was avoiding a scandal. It was her greatest talent.

  The music changed over to James Taylor, singing “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” and Leigh nearly groaned. Not now. She sat back in her chair and stared down at the half-eaten food on the table. “I always figured that when it was time for Jake to get out, I’d be the first person he called. I never thought he’d just show up back in town without a word to me.”

  “You think he’s going to be angry about Joseph? Is that it?”

  “No. I mean—maybe. But there’s more to it than that.”

  “You’re thinking he blames you. That if you hadn’t gone to the barn that night, none of it would have happened.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  Chloe was watching her carefully. “Have you really been beating yourself up over it all this time? Leigh, you’re not the one who went to get the gun. You’re not the one who pulled the trigger.”

  Leigh pushed away the rest of her food. Suddenly she was a kid again, scared of everything, on the verge of losing control. She was standing at the edge of her grandfather’s grave, watching the old man’s coffin lowering into the ground—her only real family, her last tie to home—and feeling like she might pitch forward and follow him down and down, into the darkness. Like every tie she’d ever felt to the world had been cut, leaving her alone and drifting on a wide black sea. She hated that feeling. It had taken her years of running to get away from it, but here it was again, cold and smothering as a wet blanket. She shivered.

  “All those years, and Jake would never agree to let me visit him in prison,” Leigh said. “I wanted to, you know. I wrote to him a bunch of times when he first went away, but he never answered my letters. He couldn’t bear to see me.”

  “He didn’t want you to see him, you mean. He didn’t want you to think of him as a criminal. He wanted you to remember him the way he was before any of it happened.”

  “He never answered me. Not even once, Chloe. I wrote him for four years straight, and he never answered me—not a letter, not a postcard, nothing. What was I supposed to think about that?”

  “That Jake’s always been a stubborn ass. Not much more to it than that, really.”

  Leigh felt tears starting in her eyes, the shame she’d always felt over what happened threatening to overwhelm her. “He hates me. I’m sure of it.”

  Chloe reached across the table and squeezed Leigh’s hand. “None of it was your fault, Leigh. Jake knows that. End of story.”

  Except it wasn’t the end of the story. The truth was something Jake said they should keep, always, between the two of them. Even Leigh’s grandfather had never known the whole of what had happened that night in the barn. So many times Leigh had wanted to blurt out the truth to Chloe, to her friends in New York, even to Joseph. But she couldn’t. She was too ashamed. How could she admit the truth to them now, after all this time?

  The silence stretched out between them, long and thin and airless. Chloe was looking her full in the face now, all joking aside, and Leigh squirmed under the full weight of her best friend’s gaze, her total and completely serious attention. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” Chloe asked. She sat back in her chair and blew out a long, low breath. “Well, let’s hear it, then.”

  Leigh flagged down the waitress and ordered them both a couple of fingers of bourbon on the rocks.

  “Damn,” Chloe said moments later, watching the waitress put down their drinks. “That bad, huh?”

  “Yes,” Leigh said. She gulped the bourbon as fast as she could. It burned pleasantly going down, spreading through her throat and into her belly, but it couldn’t get rid of the cold pit of fear that lived at the bottom of her. That always lived at the bottom of her. “I can’t right now. I have to get ready for my talk tomorrow. I still have some notes to jot down. Maybe soon. But not today, Chloe, okay?”

  Chloe looked at Leigh sideways, as if she’d never seen her friend before, as if she were seeing everything new. “All right,” she said, rubbing her hand over her hair again, the tactful gesture, “but only because I love you. Otherwise I’d strangle it out of you right now.”

  “I know. Can you drop me off at the conference? All I can manage right now is a hot bath. I just need to be alone for a little while. A little rest. We can go out again later, have a real night out if you want one.”

  “Of course I want one,” Chloe said. “But this discussion isn’t over.”

  “I would be surprised if it were.”

  The Austin Writers’ Conference was located on a vineyard just outside the city limits, a stunning old Texas estate in the Hill Country dotted with tiny stone guest cottages, a dining pavilion, and an enormous stone-and-timber mansion that would serve for the next week as the conference center. As the guest of honor, Leigh had a little cottage to herself on a hillside with the view of the valley below, the miles of green vineyards and rolling hills. A cozy place with a single room dominated by a large canopy bed, a fieldstone fireplace, and a river-stone bathroom, it was too large for Leigh, but she’d nearly cried at the beauty of the view, at her first taste of home in a decade. The hills were purple with bluebonnets, and as she’d stood at the window watching the sunse
t turn pink and gold, she couldn’t remember why on earth she’d ever thought to leave.

  Now, standing under the running water of the shower, Leigh kept her eyes closed and focused on those lovely childhood memories, breathing in and out as her skin burned red and nearly raw. The trepidation she’d felt for the past month—ever since she committed to the conference, to coming home to Texas—had exploded into full-bore anxiety. If she stayed in the shower as long as possible—if she didn’t turn off the water and dry off—she wouldn’t have to deal with any of the emotions waiting for her on the other side of the shower curtain, any of the dread, the longing, the loneliness. The guilt.

  Jake was back. Jake had been released from prison, and he hadn’t told her he was coming home. It was clear now that he really didn’t want to see her. It had all changed between them, even though she’d promised, she’d sworn to him, that it wouldn’t. I’ll wait for you, she’d said that day in court, when the guards were getting ready to take him away. It will all be like it was before. I swear.

  Don’t wait. Move on with your life, Leigh, he’d whispered to her. Forget about me. I’m no good for you.

  She hadn’t meant to move on. She’d tried to wait. She’d tried to forgive him when he didn’t write to her, because God knows he had reasons to be angry. But ten years was a long time to be on your own, in strange cities, far from home, and Leigh was only human, after all.

  They would both have changed. He might not even recognize her now—they could pass each other on the street, maybe, and never even know it. She’d been foolish to think they could pick up where they left off after he got out, as if nothing had happened. Ten years did a lot of damage to a person. And what Jake had suffered in prison, Leigh couldn’t imagine. Prison was nothing you could dismiss with a wave of your hand. Whatever Jake did or didn’t feel toward her, whatever he blamed her for, he had every right to be angry.

  The water turned lukewarm, then cool, then cold, but Leigh stayed under the tap until she started to shiver, sliding down the wall to the floor of the tub. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t do it, not after everything. She wanted to go back to New York so badly she could taste it in her mouth—the air full of exhaust and damp, the smell of Chinese food and hot-dog vendors. New York was her hideout, her haven, her fortress of solitude. And she couldn’t get to it for a whole week. Maybe she’d made a terrible mistake not accepting Joseph’s proposal. She should have said, Yes, of course I’ll marry you, Joseph, of course I love you, I want to make a life with you. That’s what any sane person would have done.