The Perfect Letter (13 page)

“What are you doing?” she screamed. “Why did you do that?”

“Powder burns,” Jake said. He took her by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet. “Listen to me, Leigh. I did it. We tell them it was me.”

“You're crazy—”

“No, listen to me. We say we came out here to check on the gelding, the one with the lame leg. We say we heard an intruder. A thief.
We went to get the gun just to warn him off. He wrestled me down to the floor and was choking me. I shot him to protect myself. We didn't know it was Dale until we turned on the lights. It will work, I swear.”

“I can't,” she sobbed. “It was me. It was me. They're going to arrest me, they're going to take me to prison. I might get the death penalty.”

“They won't. I won't let them.”

“I can't, I can't. I can't let you do that. I did it. I did it. It was me.” She was still screaming, nearly hysterical now. “I killed him. Oh my God, Jake, what have I done!”

“Listen.” He was bending down to look in her eyes, trying to calm her, but there was a weird energy in his voice, a sense of urgency she hadn't understood at the time. “Listen to me, Leigh. Leela, look at me.”

Her eyes snapped up.

“This is what you tell the police when they come: that we came out to the barn to check on the gelding with the lame leg. We saw a man, a horse thief. We went to get your grandfather's gun. The man fought with me. He had me down on the ground. I fired twice. We didn't know it was Dale until we turned the lights on. Leigh, repeat what I just said.”

“No, no, I can't let you do that.”

Jake's voice boomed:
“Repeat to me what I just said, Leigh.”
His fingers were so tight around her shoulders she nearly cried out.

Leigh felt like she was choking. The words were like ashes in her mouth. “We came to the barn to check on one of the horses. We heard an intruder and went to get the gun. We warned him. He lunged at you, and you fired, and then he had you down on the ground and was choking you. That's when you killed him. We didn't know it was Dale until we turned on the lights.”

“That's it. That's all you ever have to say.”

She was weeping now. “I can't. I can't do it. I can't lie.” She didn't know where it was coming from, this determination to take the blame
for something he hadn't done, but she couldn't think, she couldn't even see straight. She was thinking about Harvard, about having to tell the university she'd been arrested, about her grandfather coming to visit her in jail, about police and lawyers and judges. The electric chair sizzling her flesh. It was over; it was all over, except it hadn't even begun. “I won't let you do this.”

“You will. It was self-defense,” he said, lifting up her chin to look him in the eyes. “I can handle a couple of weeks in jail. What I can't handle is watching you get handcuffed and put in a squad car because I screwed up.”

“Jake—”

His face twisted in pain. “Don't argue with me, Leigh. If it wasn't for me, you could have gone to your grandfather and got Dale fired a long time ago. You wouldn't even have been out here tonight if it wasn't for me.”

“That's not true. I—”

Then someone was shouting, someone else was in the barn. “Jesus Christ!” said a voice.

Jake pulled her close as Ben Rhodes arrived on the scene, as her grandfather came running from the house. The arrival of other people in the barn made the situation seem very real all of a sudden.

“My God,” said her grandfather. “What the hell happened here? Leigh? Leigh, are you all right?”

She held on to Jake to steady herself. “I'm okay, Pop. I'm not hurt.”

Ben was kneeling down next to his friend. “Dale,” he said. “Dale, hey, buddy.”

“He's dead, Ben,” said her grandfather. “Nothing you can do for him now.” He looked from Leigh to Jake, who still had the gun in his hand. “You better put that gun down, Jake, and tell me what happened.”

Jake gingerly set the gun down on the floor of the barn.

“He didn't—” Leigh started, but Jake cut her off.

“He tried to kill me. I didn't have a choice.”

“Jacob,” said his father, “what the hell have you done? You shot Dale? You killed him?”

Gene shook his head, trying to keep things calm. “Threatening you how?”

Jake said, “I didn't know it was Dale. We came out here to check on the gelding, the one that's favoring his front leg. We saw someone coming out of one of the stalls with a horse, didn't we, Leigh? I went to get the gun, just to warn him off, of course. He came at me. He wrestled me down to the ground, got his hands around my neck. He said he was going to kill me, so I shot. Isn't that right, Leigh?”

Leigh didn't answer. She couldn't speak.

“That doesn't make sense. What were you arguing about? Why would Dale say he was going to kill you?”

Jake looked over at Leigh. She opened her mouth to protest, but the look in his eyes stopped her.
I'm doing this,
it said.
I'm doing this whether you want me to or not.
“He was angry.”

“Angry about what?”

“Jake,” said his dad in a warning tone.

Jake shook his head. “He came at me. I thought he had a knife, maybe. He would have killed me if I hadn't shot him first. He said so. He said he was going to kill me, didn't he, Leigh?”

“Jake—” she said.

“I shot him. He said he was going to kill me. You heard him, Leigh. You heard what he said. Tell them what he said.”

“Is this true, Leela?” her grandfather asked.

This was the moment. She could have, should have told the truth right then, but something stopped her. Jake was so certain, so calm, and she was so scared—scared of hurting her grandfather, of getting Ben fired, of going to prison. Maybe he was right. Maybe what he said would work. It was self-defense, wasn't it? Jake had the bruises on his
neck to prove it. If she told the truth there would be handcuffs and confessions and jail time. She'd lose Harvard, lose her future . . .

She looked up. Her grandfather's face was so stern, forbidding. The thought of telling him what had really happened, of explaining what Dale had said in the breeding barn, the thought of explaining how he'd put his hands on her, how he'd tried to blackmail her into sex just now—it was unbearable. Gene would have to know everything; she'd have to tell him about her and Jake, about them running away together. He'd never let her see Jake again.

Later she would know all that was an excuse. She did it because she was scared, and because Jake seemed so sure it was the right thing, the only thing.

Over her grandfather's shoulder she could make out Jake giving her a pleading look. She took a breath and said, “He said he was going to kill Jake. He was strangling him.”

“Why would he want to kill Jake?” Gene was getting angry now. “Someone had better tell me for real what the hell's going on here.”

Jake shook his head no. Gene stood up and said, “If you don't explain it to me, Leigh, you'll have to explain it to the cops.”

“Then I'll explain it to the cops.”

Ben stood up and fixed his son with a stony glare. Probably he already knew what was going to happen, how it was going to go: that the police would find the steroids; that Ben would lose his job; that Jake would go to prison. “You have no idea what you've done, Jacob. You have
no fucking clue
.”

Under the harsh lights of the barn, his face ashen, Leigh could hear her grandfather talking to the sheriff on his cell phone, and the reality of what was happening hit her hard. Dale's body lay on the floor of the barn, his blood pooling on the floor of the aisle, and she'd felt sick, she'd run out into the darkness to throw up in the bushes, retching over and over until her guts were empty.

“A man's been shot,” Gene Merrill was saying. “A man's dead at my place. You'd better send your people out right away.”

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.