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“Okay. Let’s talk about what happened that night.”
McIntosh, Virginia January 15, 2013 12:26 a.m.
A loud noise lifted her eyelids. It sounded like something large had fallen on the hardwood floor outside her room, and Alexandra’s freshly woken mind conjured an image of the grandfather clock, which had stood for the entirety of her life in the corner of the second-story hallway, tipping over and splintering against the floor. But something about the noise was curious. The sound had not come and gone. It lingered. That’s when her mind became fully alert and she understood what it was—the sound of a shotgun.
She knew the sound well from the mornings she spent pheasant hunting with her dad. He hadn’t yet allowed her to tag along on a deer hunt, but pheasants were a Saturday morning staple. Alexandra’s job had been to keep track of their dog. She used the whistle to call Zeke back if he wandered too far off in front of them, and she’d watch as he snaked through the tall reeds, listening for the crunching of the stalks to stop, indicating that Zeke had found a bird. That’s when she’d yell to her dad, “On point, Dad! On point.”
The wild flapping of wings would come next as Zeke flushed the pheasant from its hiding spot, and then she’d hear the sound of her father’s shotgun. It was always just a single round. She’d never, in all the years pheasant hunting with her dad, heard him fire twice at the same bird. He never missed. And that was how she recognized the noise that had woken her. Out in the cornfields, her father’s shotgun gave off a single blast, but then lingered. The report of the gun remained for a few seconds, as if it were a living thing, before it dissipated. Alexandra sat up in bed now as the remnants of the blast slowly faded. But then another came, and she knew something was terribly wrong.
Pushing the covers to the side, she jumped from bed and ran to her bedroom door. She placed her temple against the door frame and stared out into the hallway. Her vision was blurry without her glasses, but she dared not go back to the nightstand to retrieve them. Through the fuzziness she saw that the grandfather clock hadn’t fallen to the ground, as her groggy mind had first imagined. It stood where it always had, in the corner of the hallway. For the encapsulated moment when she peeked from her bedroom, her home was calm and quiet. The spindled railing that ran the length of the second story hallway overlooked the dark foyer below, and everything seemed normal. Then she saw Raymond emerge from his room and walk down the hallway, away from Alexandra and toward her parents’ bedroom. He, too, was blurry to her nearsighted eyes. And though she didn’t know it then, Alexandra would later be grateful the scene she was about to witness was unfocused and distorted. When Raymond reached their parents’ bedroom, he stopped and pushed the door open. A third gunshot blast reverberated through the house. The blast threw Raymond onto his back, where he lay and did not move.
Alexandra startled into action. Her knees shook as she pulled away from her door and ran to her bedroom window, pushed it open, and fumbled with the screen until it fell into the night and landed on the walkway below. She thought about jumping, but it was cold and dark and a long way down to where the screen lay on the ground. Then, for some inexplicable reason she again thought of the grandfather clock standing at the end of the hallway and just outside her bedroom door. When thinking back on that night, she had never been able to explain why the image of the clock came to her in that moment, or why she had imagined it was the clock that had fallen and made the original noise that woke her. All she knew was that she had to get to it.
She ran from the open window and into the hallway. Instinctually, she twisted the lock on the inside handle of her bedroom door before quietly closing it. It was a trick she had learned since turning seventeen—locking her bedroom door from the hallway. It was a way to fool her parents into thinking she was studying in her room when she really had snuck out to meet up with her friends.
With her bedroom door locked, Alexandra turned and ran to the place she always used to go during games of hide-and-seek when she was little. She slipped behind the grandfather clock, noticing that the hiding spot was much smaller than she remembered. The last time she’d taken refuge there was at least three years earlier and her charge toward adulthood had never been more apparent. Years earlier she had effortlessly crept behind the clock to hide from her brother. Now, she attempted to wedge herself there to save her life.
Just as she settled into the hiding spot, she heard footsteps on the hardwood floor. Alexandra did not dare peek around the edge of the clock to steal a glance down the hallway. She could see the spindles of the railing that overlooked the first-floor foyer and a sliver of hardwood that ran along it. She saw the shooter’s shadow as it emerged from her parents’ room, poured through the spindles of the railing, and disappeared over the edge. The shadow paused and Alexandra held her breath to stay as silent as possible. Finally, she heard footsteps again as the shooter hurried toward Alexandra’s bedroom and the grandfather clock that stood just a few feet from her bedroom door. Had she not acted quickly Alexandra would be in her room now, either lying in bed or still frozen and staring through the crack between the door and the frame. She wished she’d found the courage to jump from her bedroom window. There was a row of thick bushes that might have broken her fall. But if they hadn’t, her mind churned, then she would have injured herself and been unable to run away, stuck on the back walkway and staring up at the shooter as the barrel of the shotgun drifted out her open window and pointed down at her. At least here in her hiding place she had a chance. At least crammed behind the grandfather clock she might survive the night.
She heard the rattle of her bedroom door handle. Then, a cracking noise as the shooter kicked at the door. Once, and then again until the door burst open. Behind the grandfather clock, tucked as tightly as possible in the corner hallway, Alexandra squeezed her eyes closed. The pounding inside her chest caused her whole body to tremble. She didn’t dare move, and she tried not to breathe as she heard first knocking, and then the squeak of her closet door opening. A moment of silence followed before she heard the loud, thundering footsteps as the shooter raced across her bedroom to the open window. The whine of the window opening fully came next, followed by more footsteps as the shooter ran out of the bedroom and down the hallway, away from Alexandra’s hiding spot. The stomping continued down the stairs until she heard the front door open, and then the house grew eerily silent.
CHAPTER 6
District Courthouse Friday, September 27, 2013 10:32 a.m.
THE COURTROOM WAS SILENT, AND GARRETT ALLOWED IT TO REMAIN that way. Not just for effect this time, but to allow the gravity of what the jurors were hearing to settle in. A seventeen-year-old girl had taken refuge in an old hiding spot from her youth. The split-second decision had saved her life.
“Are you doing okay?” Garrett asked.
Alexandra nodded. “Yes.”
“I think I speak for everyone in this courtroom in telling you that it takes a lot of courage to retell this story.”
Garrett noticed several jurors nod in agreement.
“The shooter went to your room but couldn’t find you. What happened after the shooter ran out of your bedroom?”
“He ran down the hallway, away from where I was hiding. Then down the stairs. I stayed hidden behind the clock but peeked out to look over the railing. Our upstairs hallway overlooks the front foyer. I saw the front door open and the shooter run outside.”
“The shooter ran out of the house?”
“Yes.”
“It’s safe to say that the whole night is confusing for all of us in this courtroom to understand, yet in that moment you actually had a clear impression of what happened. You knew why the shooter ran out of the house, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I fooled him.”
“How so?”
“I opened my bedroom window because I was thinking of jumping, but I chickened out. It was too high. So I ran and hid behind the clock that’s just outside my bedroom. Before I did, though, I locked my bedroom door from the hallway.”
“From the hallway outside your room?”
“Yes. One of my friends showed me how to do it. You have to twist the handle first, then lock the door before you close it. It was a trick to make my parents think I was studying in my room when really I was out with my friends.”
Garrett smiled. “A trick that saved your life. But you weren’t trying to fool your parents that night, you were trying to fool the shooter.”
“Yeah. I thought that if I locked the door the shooter would think I was inside and might not look for me elsewhere. When the shooter went into my room, I guess he thought I had actually jumped out the window and ran away. When I saw the shooter run out the front door, I figured he was chasing after me or at least running to the back of my house to see if I was still there.”
