Strangers at the Feast (33 page)

Fine
. Her stomach churned at the word, and the giddiness of her thoughts subsided. She did not believe everything was fine. Beyond the wooden door, something was happening, something frightful. Never had she seen such fear on Gavin’s face. Eleanor tried to remain motionless, but the more she tried to still her limbs, the more her bones rattled the cage of her body. As she tightened her grip on her legs, blood rushed painfully to her face.

An explosion of thumping broke the silence. Like horses galloping through the house. She heard a distant whimper, screams. Eleanor scrambled back from the door, toppling a bucket. Her stomach leapt and fell as she lurched forward and vomited; acidic
bits of turkey and cranberry caught in her throat, burned her nose.

Her chest was heaving, her eyes watering. She carefully lifted the bucket and placed it over her head; it smelled of bleach. She pressed her handkerchief to her mouth to stifle her moans.

She did not, not, not want to imagine what was going on out there. She would think of anything else. She began to alphabetize the dishes they had served that day: applesauce, carrots, cranberries… What else? She forgot.

Her breaths echoed noisily against the steamy bucket. Her kerchief was drenched with saliva.

She thought of her garden, of what she would plant in the spring: marigolds, gladiolas, petunias, impatiens. She remembered how, as a child, Ginny would follow her through the garden, how together they would pluck herbs for dinner. Standing over the stove, Eleanor would watch through the window as Ginny slipped on her thick, quilted gardening gloves and inspected the flower beds. Before she tucked Ginny in at night, they would smell each other’s fingertips and name the scents: mint, basil, rosemary.

More screams—sounds that seemed to stretch interminably, sounds with an almost inhuman pitch and decibel. Eleanor scurried to the back of the pantry and shoved her hands beneath the bucket to plug her ears. The muted shrieks seemed to last forever, and then she heard a dry pop. In the silence that followed she knew what it was—a gunshot.

She was too stunned to move, too frightened to call out.

But her children were out there; she had to do something, but what? She felt a tightening, as if something were being carved out of her.

They are fine. They are fine.

A vision came—the bodies of her children, her grandchildren, her husband splayed out helplessly in the dining room. She remembered what each one was wearing: Ginny in her cardigan, Douglas in his blue dress shirt and tie, her husband in his gray wool sweater.

Then Eleanor recalled the sight of her mother when she died, her small bones draped with a hospital sheet. She remembered her baby sister in death, how blue her lips had been, how her fingers wouldn’t move when Eleanor clasped them. The cold stillness of death.

Eleanor held the bucket over her head and lay on her side. She would never come out. She would never see her family dead. Better to die in that closet alone.

In the dark silence, Eleanor closed her eyes, and tried to sleep.

GINNY

Beside the towering china cabinet, Ginny examined her daughter. The purple dress she had bought Priya earlier that week, which hung from her dresser knob just that morning, was sticky with blood. Ginny didn’t understand what happened but she knew she had to block the veins, seal off arteries. Tourniquet—that was the word.

Ginny ripped a strip from her tank top; she gently pushed up Priya’s sleeve and pivoted her arm to see where to stanch the bleeding. But her skin was barely scratched. Priya pulled back her arm and shook her head.

“Where are you hurt, sweetie?”

She’d let something terrible happen. And after all those CPR and emergency-child-care classes, she hadn’t the foggiest idea what to do with a bleeding child except call an ambulance. Which she hadn’t.

Desperation frustrated her attempts to find the wound. Somewhere at the fringes of her perception was a quiet whirl of people dashing, whispering, hiding. She yanked at Priya’s collar, lifted the hem of the dress. Ginny couldn’t see a single gash. And once again, Priya shook her head.

“I’m gonna walk right out of here.” The deep voice of a stranger came from the next room. “I’m not afraid.”

Ginny let go of the dress and hugged Priya close, burying her face in the warm valley of her daughter’s neck. A sharp odor bit into her
nostrils and made her eyes momentarily water—something chemical, like paint. The dress was drenched in red paint.

Ginny nearly let out a laugh of relief. Except now she heard the footsteps. Then the cacophonous collision of bone and brass. The scurry of shoes scraping the floor. Someone tore past her, and she squeezed Priya painfully close. A sound like the air being torn open, like the first burst of thunder in a silent sky, made her think,
Please God, please God. Please.

DETECTIVE BILL O’SHEA

The dispatcher told him they had a breaking and entering, with violent assault. Later, when the 911 recording was played repeatedly on television and radio, O’Shea would hear it over a dozen times.

There’s been a break-in. In our house.

Are the intruders in the house now?

We used our gun.

Do you need an ambulance, ma’am?

It was a home invasion.

Is anyone injured? Do you need an ambulance?

No.

Are you in a safe place?

Just come.

Denise Olson had called. Cool as ice.

As O’Shea pulled into the long driveway and radioed in his arrival, he slowed down to take in the grandeur of the house. At the far end of a blackened yard, it sat like a lone cruise ship on a dark sea, yellow light pouring from every window. As he stepped out of the car, staring up at the dormers and gables, he almost missed the indigo smear against the grass. He pulled his weapon, stepped slowly toward a figure in a hooded gray sweatshirt, hugging the ground. He could see at least one bullet hole, in the left shoulder. The body lay flat and crooked, like a cartoon image of a man run over. On its way down, a body taking bullets broke bones and pulled tendons; when it finally settled, it always looked
wrong
.
Arms and wrists lay at odd angles. With his flashlight beam, O’Shea lit the head, thrown back in profile as though howling, bleeding through panty hose where the nose had cracked against the lawn. He checked for a pulse. The boy’s hands were empty.

By the time he rang the doorbell, O’Shea’s mind was racing with questions.
There’s been a break-in.

A silver-haired man opened the door. He was neatly dressed, his face oddly expressionless. He stepped aside, letting O’Shea enter a vast white foyer, and with a nod indicated a second body on the floor.

This body lay neatly on its back, arms and legs held straight, the face turned to one side like a sunbather’s. At a glance, O’Shea calculated the DOA had five rounds in him. But his face was bare, and young. During his twenty years on the force, O’Shea had brought in some of the roughest West Side kids. He knew the car thieves and the crackheads. He couldn’t always make the charges stick, but he knew who was making the trouble. He’d never seen this boy before, and he didn’t look the type. His clothes, from what O’Shea could make out, were conservative. He wore shoes, not flashy sneakers. His hair was cut short and his hands were empty.

“Are there weapons?” O’Shea asked. The man with the silver hair nodded, this time toward a side table where the gun was laid out—Jesus—on a doily. A Glock semiautomatic. O’Shea slipped on a pair of gloves and checked the magazine—a ten-round clip. It was empty, standard with self-defense. People often pulled the trigger long after the bullets were used. But in general, only one or two bullets find their way into a target. Somehow, almost every bullet in that pistol made its way into the two bodies.

“This licensed?” O’Shea asked.

“To me.” The man spoke softly; he had the good looks of a weatherman. “I’m Douglas Olson, this is my…” He wiped sweat from his brow with his shirt cuff, smearing blood across his forehead; the buttons of his shirt had been torn.

“Have a seat, Mr. Olson.”

O’Shea couldn’t figure it. Intruders were career criminals and rarely entered a house teeming with five wide-awake adults; if they did, they came seriously armed. The only weapons the perpetrators had were a couple of knives in their pockets. But they didn’t seem to be burglars either. No diamond necklaces dangled from their pockets, no pillowcases stuffed with candlesticks were slung over their shoulders. On the entryway floor sat a duffel bag full of spray-paint cans.

O’Shea pulled a can of red spray paint from the duffel and shook it—empty. He looked around the white floor, the dark-wood walls, the wide stairway curving toward the second floor, but didn’t see a trace of paint anywhere. Except on a young Indian girl, lurking in the next room.

“Did they spray these
at
you?” he asked the girl. She shook her head.

O’Shea headed into the massive living room, where the rest of the family had converged. They were circling two leather sectionals, sitting, then bolting up, in what looked like a high-speed game of musical chairs. Their motions were erratic, jerky—adrenaline could stay in the system ten hours. In the past, at crime scenes, O’Shea often got lucky, adrenaline loosening not only tears but also tongues; the right woman could sob out every detail of a crime in a few minutes. But the whole clan had gone stone-cold. Even the children.

The grandmother, Eleanor Olson, crouched on the carpet, taking apart a dollhouse, wiping each piece on her pants before putting it into a cardboard box. “Ma’am, we need to leave everything,” O’Shea said. “Until forensics gets here.”

Intent on wiping the dollhouse chimney clean, she seemed not to hear him.

“Ellie.” Her husband crossed the room and stilled her arms.

She looked up, startled. Damp brown hair clung to her makeup-free face. “It’s so god-awfully hot in here,” she said, fanning the bosom of a low-cut purple sweater, too tight for a woman her age.
She set the chimney in the box and her eyes roved anxiously toward the foyer.

“Is he still there?” she whispered.

Gavin Olson looked at O’Shea in what would be the first of their silent understandings.

“All right, everyone,” said O’Shea. “Captain Briggs is sending backup. Right now I’m gonna get you away from this mess, get the kids away from this. We’ll go to the station where we can talk.”

GAVIN

Gavin stood in the archway, blood pumping, listening to the footsteps. His body felt boneless, like a mass of swollen muscle. He felt taut, fierce. He felt as he had forty years earlier, fingertips on the track, lunging at the start of a race.

He thought of Eleanor alone in the pantry. At least he had gotten her to safety. His daughter, across the room, was hiding behind the china cabinet. He could see her red hair, which struck him as it never had before—it made her seem horribly vulnerable.

Across from him stood his son; they locked eyes and in a flash Douglas pivoted into the foyer. Bodies wrestled, fell. Gavin’s vision blurred, then returned. He was a six-foot-two current of electricity, the candlestick a part of him. He saw his son pinned on the ground; he struck out.

DETECTIVE BILL O’SHEA

The family stepped out into the night, filing quietly past the body on the lawn. The front walkway lights cast a soft, strangely peaceful glow over the corpse. O’Shea noticed that the adults angled their heads to examine what could be seen of the boy’s face. O’Shea, unable to comprehend how a civilian could hit a moving target, remarked, “That’s some aim.”

Only the sounds of shoes crunching along the white pebble path answered him, until finally, Gavin Olson announced, “Army. Nam. I’m the shooter.”

O’Shea had heard of his type—some cops called them
Rice Krispies,
because one day, they went
snap crackle pop
and whipped out a gun as if they had never left the jungle. They thought the checkout boy at the Stop & Shop was Vietcong. The exhaust from a station wagon smelled like napalm. Without family, unable to hold down jobs, these vets crowded shelters and soup kitchens. But Gavin Olson had children and grandchildren; he looked like a man who had held it together. If a burglar hadn’t come at him, thought O’Shea, he’d probably have gone on quietly.

The Vietnam vets had gotten a raw deal; most people preferred to forget they’d been sent halfway across the world to do the country’s fighting before Americans changed their minds. O’Shea’s father had fought in Korea. His father was probably a decade older than Gavin Olson, but O’Shea could imagine him, roused from sleep, unloading a gun into two intruders. The army didn’t train you to subdue the
enemy, it trained you to kill. Maybe Gavin Olson had crossed legal lines, but these things happened in the thick of fear. O’Shea was certain the race issue would wag everyone’s tail and didn’t want to see a good man get the raw end of someone’s political agenda.

At the squad car, he gestured Gavin Olson into the back. “Why don’t you ride with me.”

They pulled onto the darkened road, followed by two other cars, and O’Shea radioed his movements into Briggs.

“So when we get to the station, I’m going to have to ask you a lot of questions,” O’Shea said, “but right now you shouldn’t speak. I’ll just fill the time here a little, make the ride go faster. I was watching this show last night, a History Channel thing, about how in the United States we’ve got a thing called the Castle Doctrine. You know about that?”

Gavin Olson shook his head.

O’Shea continued: “It goes back a few hundred years, right back to the time of the Constitution, actually. It says a man can use force to defend his home… but only in certain circumstances.” O’Shea stared at the dark road ahead and readjusted his clammy palms on the steering wheel. His first year on the force, at age twenty-five, he’d swiped a hundred-dollar bill from a table at a Greek diner where he’d responded to a stabbing; afterward, he felt so anxious he returned it to an evidence envelope. He’d certainly never coached a statement, and wasn’t sure he had the stomach for it. But he’d never before come across a scene where he knew that the victims, if they were sloppy with their words, might be charged as criminals. Overcome by the shock of violation, victims rarely imagined they could end up in trouble, at least not until it was too late. There was a short window of time to help do the right thing.