Cindy listened to the mutterings of the people around here. The sentiments all sounded the same — that it had ended the way it had to end. She wondered if it was schadenfreude, that joy in watching the downfall of someone who had climbed high. The television showed a picture of Janine in a white surgical coat, blond hair perfect, body perfect. A miracle worker. A millionaire. A murderer.
Dan Erickson appeared on the screen, lecturing about justice applying to everyone, taking no pleasure in the tragedy.
Jay’s brother Clyde came next, expressing satisfaction with the verdict but reminding everyone that a conviction wouldn’t bring his brother back to life. Which was true. If Janine had done this thing, no matter her motive, no matter the circumstances, then she had to pay the price.
The reporters talked about the jury and their willingness to convict without the discovery of the murder weapon. They interviewed the foreman, a woman named Eleanor, who praised the eleven people who served with her and the careful job they’d done. She expressed sorrow for victim and killer alike, but she said the verdict was the only reasonable conclusion that anyone could draw from the facts as they were presented to them.
Cindy tried to imagine herself on that jury. Would she have voted to convict? And to her surprise, she realized: Yes.
She heard her phone ringing and slid it out of her purse. Jonny was calling. She assumed he’d been in the courtroom when the verdict was read, and now he wanted to mend fences with her. They’d argued about it for months. It wasn’t in her nature to accept that she was wrong and Jonny was right. He was a stubborn man, but he had a stubborn wife, too.
‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ she said as she answered the phone. ‘You win.’
Jonny simply said: ‘Where are you?’
‘What?’
‘Cindy, where are you?’
‘I’m at Miller Hill Mall. I’m watching the news about—’
‘Get out of there,’ he interrupted.
‘Why?’
‘Cindy, get out of there right now. I don’t want you in any public place.’
‘What is going on—’ she began, but then she stopped.
Her words hung in the air. So did the noise of the mall. The music overhead. The laughter. The television in the store window. She found herself staring at a pretty woman in her thirties who’d been shopping at Aéropostale. She clutched a big bag in her hand. She smiled, joking to a friend, mouth open as if she were singing a karaoke song. That was who she was at that moment, but a moment later, the bag fell from her hand. The light vanished from her eyes. She threw her arms in the air and staggered forward, and dots of red spattered over her body the way rocks made splashes in the lake.
The noise caught up to Cindy’s ears. Staccato explosions of gunfire rocked back and forth between the walls. Dust blew, tile shattered, and smoke clouded the air. Her fingers loosened; her phone fell.
The pretty woman near her slumped to the ground. So did another woman. Then an older man.
As they dropped, as the people scattered around her, she saw him coming.
Everyone screamed. Everyone ran.
33
Howard sat with Carol in his car across the street from the courthouse. A crowd lingered on the steps. Some of the jurors had stayed behind to answer media questions, but he didn’t want to be interviewed. If he started talking, he’d say the wrong thing. An hour had passed, and already he regretted what he’d done.
He’d said it the first time in the jury room: ‘Guilty.’
And then again in the courtroom: ‘Guilty.’
Janine had watched him as the judge polled the jurors. Her eyes burned him. It was as if she knew. He expected her to reach out a hand, to touch him with her cool fingers, to whisper: ‘Don’t betray me.’
But he had. He squeezed his eyes shut, said the word, and cast her away like all the others. He was weak. When he looked again, she hadn’t looked away. He thought he saw the tiniest of sad smiles on her face. Forgiveness.
‘You did the right thing, Howard.’
It was Carol talking.
He stared at his wife in the driver’s seat of his LeBaron. She’d picked him up in white sweatpants and a Dells T-shirt. She looked at him like a hero, and he realized she was proud of him. He’d just sent a woman to prison, and she thought it was the greatest thing he’d ever done.
‘I know it was hard,’ Carol went on. ‘If you want the truth, I wasn’t sure you could do it. You’re a softy at heart, Howard. I mean, that’s a good thing most of the time, but it takes guts to convict somebody of murder, even when you know darn well she’s guilty.’
‘Let’s just go home,’ he murmured.
She nodded at the reporters near the courthouse flagpole. ‘Don’t you want to go answer some questions? I know this was a big thing for you. You’ve earned a little fame for being part of it. I can wait here.’
‘No, I don’t want to talk to anybody.’
Carol started the engine. Then she turned it off and took his hand. ‘Hey, listen, I’m sorry. I know I’ve been a bitch lately. You were in a tough spot, and I wasn’t being supportive.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t care about that.’
‘Well, let me make it up to you. We’ve got the Dells coming up in a couple weeks. That’ll be fun. We can get Annie a pizza and rent her a movie one night, and you and me can fool around, huh? It’s been way too long.’
He summoned a smile. ‘Sure.’
‘Anyway, I’m glad this is over,’ Carol said. ‘No more Dr. Perfect. We can go back to living our lives. Just you, me, and Annie. It’s about time, right? I’m ready for things to be exactly the way they were.’
Howard didn’t answer, because that was his worst fear. He didn’t want to go back to his old life. He didn’t want to be normal again. He hated the idea of things being exactly the way they were.
‘Wow,’ Carol said.
‘What?’
She lowered the window. ‘Don’t you hear it? Listen to all those sirens. Something big’s going on.’
From her hiding place inside a leather goods store, Cindy could see bodies in the corridor of the mall, dead where they’d fallen. The tiled floor and columns bore wild streaks of blood. Smears. Handprints. She smelled the discharge that comes with death, mixing like spoiled roses with the sugary aroma of the food court and the leather jackets dangling in front of her. Just as incongruously, the overhead music continued to play happy pop songs. Britney Spears. ‘Oops!... I Did It Again’. The crowd noise that typically drowned out the music had emptied into a muffled chorus of people crying and praying.
Shopping bags spilled their contents onto the floor where they’d been dropped. Swimsuits. Strappy heels. Bottles of lotion. Stuffed animals. She saw cell phones, too, abandoned in the melee. One by one, they began to ring, forlornly, before going to voice mail. Word had spread instantaneously around the city.
Those who could reach exterior exits had escaped, but there were dozens more, like her, trapped in stores. At least ten people huddled near her, hiding behind clothes racks, their arms wrapped tightly around their knees, their faces buried in the crook of their legs. It was as if, by not looking up, they could make themselves invisible. As if the shark eyes of the gunman would pass over them. Or maybe they just couldn’t bear to see the end when it came.
She didn’t think five minutes had passed, but their imprisonment felt like hours.
He hunted them methodically from store to store. She couldn’t see him, but he wasn’t far. He fired and moved, fired and moved, fired and moved, like a soldier occupying a beachhead. Seconds of silence stretched out between assaults, giving her faint hope, but then a new hailstorm rained down not fifty feet away — gunfire, store windows shattering, victims screaming, individual bullets that could only be kill shots directed at those who had nowhere to run. And then his boots making new footfalls. Tap knock tap knock.