Sam sat across from Lenore at a booth in the otherwise empty diner. She slowly dipped her tea sachet into the hot water the waitress had brought to the table. She could feel Lenore watching her, but she did not know what to say.
“It’ll be faster if I drive you to the hospital,” Lenore offered.
Sam shook her head. She would wait for the taxi. “You don’t have to stay with me.”
Lenore held her coffee cup between her hands. Her nails were neatly trimmed and clear polished. She wore a single ring on her right index finger. She saw Sam looking and said, “Your mother gave me this.”
Sam thought the ring looked like something her mother would wear—unusual, not particularly pretty, but striking in its own way. Sam asked, “Tell me about her.”
Lenore held up her hand and studied the ring. “Lana, my sister, worked at Fermilab with her. They weren’t in the same department, or even on the same level, but single gals weren’t allowed to live on their own back then, so they were assigned housing together at the university. That was the only way my mother would let Lana work there, so long as she was kept away from the sex-mad male scientists.”
Sam waited for her to continue.
“Lana brought Harriet home over Christmas break, and I ignored her at first, but then there was a night when I couldn’t sleep, and I walked out into the backyard for some air, and there she was.” Lenore raised her eyebrows. “She was looking up at the stars. Physics was her calling, but astronomy was her passion.”
Sam felt sad that she had never known this about her mother.
“We talked all night. It was very rare for me to find someone who was that interesting. We sort of fell into dating, but there was never anything …” She shrugged off the details. “We were together for a little over a year, though it was a long-distance relationship. I was in law school with Rusty. Why that didn’t work out is another story. But one summer, I took your father up to Chicago with me, and he swept her off her feet.” She shrugged. “I bowed out. We were always more friends than lovers.”
“But she was constantly mad at you,” Sam said. “I could hear it in her voice.”
“I kept her husband out late drinking and smoking instead of spending time with his family.” Lenore shrugged again. “She always wanted a conventional life.”
Sam could not imagine her mother wanting any such thing. “She was far from conventional.”
“People always want what they can’t have,” Lenore said. “Harry never quite fit in, even at Fermi. She was too peculiar. She lacked the social graces. I suppose now they’d say she was somewhere on the spectrum, but back then, she was just considered too smart, too accomplished, too odd. Especially for a woman.”
“So what was a normal life for her?”
“Marriage. A social construct. You girls. She was never so happy as when she had you. Watching your brain develop. Studying your reactions to new stimuli. She kept pages and pages of journals.”
“You make me sound like a science project.”
“Your mother loved projects,” Lenore said. “Charlie was so different, though. So creative. So spontaneous. Harriet adored her; she adored you both, but she never understood anything about Charlie.”
“Something we share.” Sam drank her tea. The milk tasted off. She put down the mug. “Why don’t you like me?”
“You hurt Charlie.”
“Charlie seems quite capable of hurting herself.”
Lenore reached into her purse and found the USB drive that Ben had given her. “I want you to take this.”
Sam backed away, as if the thing posed a physical threat.
“Toss it somewhere in Atlanta.” Lenore slid the Starship across the table. “Do it for Ben. You know what kind of trouble he could get into.”
Sam did not know what to do but throw the thing into her own purse. She could not take the drive on the plane back to New York. She would have to find someone in the Atlanta office to destroy it.
Lenore said, “You can talk to me about the case, you know. Coin will never call me to the stand. I’d blow up any jury dressed like this.”
Sam knew that she was right, just as she knew that the truth was wrong.
Lenore said, “The bullets are bothering me. The wild shot in the wall doesn’t make sense. Kelly was able to hit Pinkman three times: once in the chest, twice in the head. That’s either a lucky break or a damn good shot.”
“Lucy.” Sam touched the side of her neck. “That wasn’t square on.”
“No, but listen. You don’t get to be a woman like me in Pikeville without making sure you know how to handle a gun. I couldn’t hit those targets at the range, and that’s with no pressure, no lives on the line. We’re talking an eighteen-year-old girl standing in the hallway waiting for the bell to ring. Her adrenaline must have been through the roof. Either she’s the coldest killer this town has ever run across or something else is going on.”
“What could be the something else?”
“I have no idea.”
Sam thought about Kelly’s pregnancy. Adam Humphrey. The yearbook. These were pieces to a puzzle that she would likely never see come together.
She told Lenore, “I’ve never broken confidence before.”
Lenore shrugged, as if it was nothing.
Sam felt guilty for even contemplating the breach, even more so because she was not confiding in her sister. Still, she finally admitted, “Kelly might be pregnant.”
Lenore drank her coffee and said nothing.
“She mentioned Adam Humphrey when we spoke. I think he might be the father. Or Frank Alexander.” Sam added, “Apparently, this is Kelly’s second pregnancy. There was an earlier one in middle school that, according to gossip, was terminated. Charlie knows about that one. She doesn’t know that Kelly might be pregnant now.”
Lenore put down her cup. “Coin will say that it’s Frank Alexander’s, and Kelly murdered Lucy out of spite or jealousy.”
“There’s a simple test that will prove paternity.”
“Rusty can make them wait until the kid is born. Undue burden. Those tests don’t come without risk.” She asked, “Do you think that Adam Humphrey or Frank Alexander talked Kelly into bringing a gun to school for some unknown reason? Or do you think she did it on her own?”
“The only thing I’m certain of is that Kelly Wilson is the last person we can rely on for the truth.” Sam pressed her fingers into her temple, trying to smooth away some of the tension. “I’ve seen videos of false confessions before—in law school, on television, in documentaries. The West Memphis Three, Brendan Dassey, Chuck Erickson. We’ve all seen them, or read about them, but when you’re sitting across from a person who is so suggestible, so eager to please, that they will literally follow you down any road—not even a winding road—it’s quite unbelievable.”
Sam tried to think back on her conversation with Kelly, to analyze it, to understand exactly what had happened. “I suppose it’s some sort of confirmation bias that comes into play. You keep telling yourself that it’s not possible for someone to be so slow, that they must be playing a trick on you, but the fact is, they don’t have the mental acuity to fool you. They’re too low functioning for that level of subterfuge, and if they were so high functioning that they were capable of deceiving you, then they wouldn’t be stupid enough to implicate themselves in the first place.” Sam realized that she was nattering on like Charlie. She tried to be more succinct. “I talked Kelly Wilson into saying that she witnessed Charlie slapping Judith Pinkman across the face.”
“Good Christ.” Lenore’s hand covered her heart. She was likely offering up a prayer of thanks that a video proving otherwise was in their possession.
“It was so easy to get her to say it,” Sam admitted. “I knew that she was tired, she was feeling sick, she was confused and scared and lonely. And in less than five minutes, I talked her into not only repeating what I’d said, but validating it, even making up fresh details, like that the slap was so loud that she could hear it down the hall; all in support of the lie I’d fed her.” Sam shook her head, because she still could not believe it. “I’ve always known that I live in a different type of world from most people, but Kelly is at the bottom of the pile. I don’t mean that to be cruel, or arrogant. It’s simply a matter of fact. There’s a reason girls like that get lost.”
“You mean led astray?” Lenore suggested.
Sam shook her head again, unwilling to attach herself to any one theory.
“I already put Jimmy Jack on the Humphrey boy. He’s probably got him tracked down by now.”
“Lucy Alexander’s father can’t be entirely ruled out,” Sam reminded her. “Just because we don’t want Ken Coin to be right, that doesn’t make it so.”
“If anybody can get to the bottom of why this happened, it’s Jimmy Jack.”
Sam wondered if the net would be cast wide enough to include Mason Huckabee, but she knew better than to bring up her sister’s lover to Lenore. Instead, she said, “Figuring out Kelly’s motive won’t bring back the victims.”
“No, but it could keep a third victim off death row.”
Sam pursed her lips. She was not wholly convinced that Kelly Wilson had been a victim. Low functioning or not, she had taken a gun to school and pulled the trigger enough times to brutally murder two innocent people. Sam felt fortunate that the girl’s fate did not rest on her shoulders. There was a reason that juries were supposed to be impartial. Then again, the likelihood that an impartial jury would be found within one hundred miles of Pikeville was so remote as to be absurd.
“Your taxi will be here soon.” Lenore looked for the waitress, holding up her hand for attention.
Sam turned around. The woman was sitting at the counter. “Excuse me?”
The waitress pushed herself up from the counter and returned to their table with visible reluctance. She sighed before asking Sam, “What?”
Sam looked at Lenore, who shook her head. “I’m ready to pay the bill.”
The woman slapped the check down on the table. She picked up Lenore’s mug between her thumb and index finger as if she was scared of contaminants.
Sam waited for the awful woman to leave. She asked Lenore, “Why do you live here? In this backward place?”
“It’s my home. And there are still some good people here who believe in live-and-let-live.” Lenore added, “Besides, New York lost the moral high ground during the last presidential election.”
Sam gave a rueful laugh.
“I’m going to go check on Charlie.” Lenore took a dollar bill out of her wallet, but Sam waved her off.
“Thank you,” Sam said, though she could only guess at what Lenore had done for her family. Sam had always been so wrapped up in the agony of her own recovery that she had not given much consideration to what life had been like for Rusty and Charlie. Lenore had obviously filled some of the void left by Gamma.
Sam heard the bell over the door clatter as Lenore left. The waitress made a nasty remark to the cook. Sam considered correcting her, cutting her in two with a sharp comment, but she lacked the energy to fight any more battles today.
She went to the bathroom. She stood at the sink and performed a perfunctory wash as she dreamed of the shower at the Four Seasons back in Atlanta. Sixteen hours had passed since Sam had left New York. She’d spent almost twice as many hours awake. Her head had the dull ache of a rotting tooth. Her body was uncooperative. She looked at her tired, ragged face in the mirror and saw her mother’s bitter disappointment.
Sam was giving up on Charlie.
There was no other option. Charlie would not speak to her, would not open her locked office door that Sam had knocked on repeatedly. This was not like the last time when Charlie had fled in the middle of the night, fearing for her safety. This was Sam begging, apologizing—for what, she did not know—only to be met with Charlie’s stark silence. Finally, unhappily, Sam felt herself relent to what she should have known all along.
Charlie did not need her.
Sam used some toilet paper to wipe her eyes. She did not know if she was crying from the uselessness of her journey or from exhaustion. Twenty years ago, the loss of her sister had felt like a mutual agreement. Sam had exploded. Charlie had exploded back. There was a fight, an actual, drag-down fight, and they had both agreed in the end to walk away.
This latest break came more like a theft. Sam had grasped something good, something that felt true, in her hands, and Charlie had wrenched it away.
Was it because of Zachariah Culpepper?
Sam had the letters in her purse. Some of them, at least, because there were many, many more back at Rusty’s. Sam had stood behind his desk opening envelope after envelope. They all held the same type of single, folded notebook paper, and had the same three words written on them with such a heavy hand that the pencil had embossed the paper:
YOU OWE ME.
One line, mailed hundreds of times, once a month to Rusty’s office.
Sam’s phone chirped.
She scrambled to find it in her purse. Not Charlie. Not Ben. There was a text message from the taxi company. The driver was outside.
Sam patted her eyes dry. She ran her fingers through her hair. She went back to the booth. She left a one-dollar bill on the table. She rolled her suitcase out to the waiting taxi. The man jumped out to help her load it into the trunk. Sam took her place in the back seat. She stared out the window as the man drove her through downtown Pikeville.
Stanislav was going to meet her at the hospital. Sam was reluctant to see her father, but she had a responsibility to Rusty, to Kelly Wilson, to turn over her notes, to share her thoughts and suspicions.
Lenore was right about the bullets. Kelly had shown remarkable firing accuracy in the hallway. She had managed to hit both Douglas Pinkman and Lucy Alexander from a considerable distance.
So why hadn’t Kelly been able to shoot Judith Pinkman when the woman came out of her room?
More mysteries for Rusty to solve.
Sam rolled down the window in the taxi. She looked up at the stars dotting the sky. There was so much light pollution in New York that Sam had forgotten what the night-time was supposed to look like. The moon was little more than a sliver of blue light. She took off her glasses. She felt the fresh air on her face. She let her eyelids close. She thought of Gamma looking at the stars. Had that magnificent, brilliant woman really craved a conventional life?
A housewife. A mother. A husband to take care of her; a vow to take care of him.
Sam’s enduring memory of her mother was one of Gamma always searching. For knowledge. For information. For solutions. Sam remembered one of the many, anonymous days she had come home from school to find Gamma working on a project. Charlie was at a friend’s. They were still living in the red-brick house. Sam had opened the back door. She dropped her bag on the kitchen floor. She kicked off her shoes. Gamma turned around. She had a marker in her hand. She had been writing on the large window that overlooked the backyard. Equations, Sam could see, though their meaning was elusive.
“I’m trying to figure out why my cake fell,” Gamma had explained. “That’s the problem with life, Sam. If you’re not rising, you’re falling.”
The taxi bumped Sam awake.
For a panicked second, she was unsure of her surroundings.
Sam put on her glasses. Almost half an hour had passed. They were already in Bridge Gap. Four- and five-story office buildings sprouted up above cafés. Signs advertised concerts in the park and family picnics. They passed the movie theater where Mary-Lynne Huckabee had gone with her friends and ended up being raped in the bathroom.
Such violent men in this county.
Sam put her hand over her purse. The letters inside gave off a palpable heat.
YOU OWE ME.
Did Sam care what Zachariah Culpepper felt he was owed? Almost three decades ago, Rusty had argued for the man’s life to be spared. If anything, Zachariah owed Rusty. And Sam. And Charlie. And Ben, if it came to that.
Sam unlocked her phone.
She pulled up a new email and typed in Ben’s address. Her fingers could not decide on a combination of letters to press for the subject line. Charlie’s name? A request for advice? An apology that she had not been able to fix what was broken?
That Charlie was broken was the only fact Sam saw with any clarity. Her sister had wanted Sam to come home for something. So that Sam would push Charlie into admitting something, giving away something, telling the truth about something that was bothering her. There was no other reason for the constant provocation, the lashing out, the pushing away.
Sam was familiar with the tactics. She had been so volatile after getting shot, infuriated by the weakness of her body, livid that her brain was not working as it had before, that there was not one person who was spared her temper. The steroids and antidepressants and anticonvulsants the doctors had prescribed only inflamed her emotions. Sam had felt furious most of the time, and the only thing that had made the anger lessen was to direct it outward.
Charlie and Rusty were the two targets she hit the hardest.
After rehab, the six months that Sam had lived at the farmhouse had been hell for everyone. Sam was never satisfied. She was always complaining. She had tortured Charlie, made her feel as if nothing she did was right. When anyone suggested therapy for her moods, Sam had screamed like a banshee, insisting that she was fine, that she was recovering, that she was not fucking angry—she was just tired, she was just annoyed, she just needed space, time, a chance to be alone, to get away, to recover her sense of self.
Finally, Rusty had allowed Sam to take the GED so that she could gain early acceptance to Stanford. It wasn’t until Sam was at school, 2,500 miles away, that she had realized that her anger was not a creature solely confined to the farmhouse.
You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.
Sam was angry at Rusty for bringing the Culpeppers into their lives. She was angry at Charlie for opening the kitchen door. She was angry at Gamma for grabbing the shotgun. She was angry at herself for not listening to her gut when she stood in the bathroom, gripping the ball-peen hammer in her hand, and walked toward the kitchen instead of running out the back door.
She was angry. She was angry. She was so God damn, fucking angry.
Yet, Sam was thirty-one years old before she gave herself permission to say the words aloud. The blow-up with Charlie had opened the scab, and Anton, in his very deliberate way, had been the only reason that the wound had finally begun to heal.
Sam was at his apartment. New Year’s Eve. On television, they watched the ball drop in Times Square. They were drinking champagne, or at least Sam was pretending to.
Anton had said, “It’s bad luck if you don’t take a sip.”
Sam had laughed it off, because by that point, bad luck had followed her for more than half her life. Then she had admitted to him something that she had never before confessed to anyone else. “I worry all the time that I’ll drink something, or take something, or move the wrong way, and it will cause a seizure, or a stroke, and break what’s left of my mind.”
Anton had not offered platitudes about the mysteries of life or advice on how to fix the problem. Instead, he had said, “Many people must have told you that you are lucky to be alive. I think you would have been lucky had you not been shot in the first place.”
Sam had cried for almost a full hour.
Everyone constantly, incessantly, told her that she had been lucky to survive the shooting. No one had ever acknowledged that she had a right to be angry about how she must survive.
“Ma’am?” The taxi driver flipped up the turn signal. He pointed to the white sign up ahead.
The Dickerson County Hospital. Rusty would be in his room watching the news, likely trying to catch a glimpse of himself. He would know about Sam’s courtroom performance. She felt her butterflies return, then chastised herself for caring about anything to do with Rusty.
Sam was only here to turn over her notes. She would say goodbye to her father, probably the last time she would ever say goodbye in person, then head back to Atlanta where, tomorrow morning, she would wake up with her real life restored like Dorothy back in Kansas.
The driver stopped underneath the concrete canopy. He pulled Sam’s suitcase from the trunk. He lifted up the handle. Sam was rolling the case toward the entrance when she smelled cigarette smoke.
“‘Oh, I am fortune’s fool,’” Rusty bellowed. He was in a wheelchair, right elbow on the armrest, cigarette in his hand. Two IV bags were attached to a pole on the back of the chair. His catheter bag hung down like a chatelaine. He had stationed himself beneath a sign warning smokers to maintain a perimeter of one hundred feet from the door. He was twenty feet away, if that.
Sam said, “Those things are going to kill you.”
Rusty smiled. “It’s a balmy night. I’m talking to one of my beautiful daughters. I’ve got a fresh pack of smokes. All I need is a glass of bourbon and I’d die a happy man.”
Sam waved away the smoke. “It’s not so balmy with that smell.”
He laughed, then started coughing.
Sam rolled her suitcase to the concrete bench by his chair. The reporters were gone, probably on to the next mass shooting. She sat on the far end of the bench, upwind from the smoke.
Rusty said, “I heard there was some rain-making at the arraignment.”
Sam shrugged one shoulder. She had picked up the bad habit from Charlie.
“‘Was the baby killed?’” He made his voice quiver with drama. “‘Was the baby killed?’”
“Dad, a child was murdered.”
“I know, darling. Believe me, I know.” He took one last hit off his cigarette before stubbing it out on the bottom of his slipper. He dropped the butt into the pocket of his robe. “A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial. And Ken’s come right out the gate with a damn good story.”
Sam quelled the urge to be her father’s cheerleader, to tell him he could come up with the better story and save the day.
Rusty asked, “What’d you think of her?”
“Kelly?” Sam considered her answer. “I’m not sure. She could be smarter than we think. She could be lower functioning than any of us wants to believe. You can lead her anywhere, Dad. Anywhere.”
“I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.” Rusty looked over his shoulder, checking to make sure they were alone. “I heard about the abortion.”
Sam pictured her sister back in her office, calling Rusty to tattle. “You spoke to Charlie.”
“Nope.” Rusty leaned on his elbow, hand up, fingers spread, as if the cigarette were still there. “Jimmy Jack, that’s my investigator, came up with it yesterday afternoon. We found some evidence from Kelly’s middle-school days that pointed to something bad going on. Just rumors, you know. Kelly shows up plump one week, then she takes a vacation and comes back skinny. I confirmed the abortion with her mother last night. She was still real torn up about it. The baby daddy was a kid on the football team, long since left town. He paid for the abortion, or his family did. The mama took her down to Atlanta. Almost lost her job from taking the time off.”
Sam said, “Kelly could be pregnant again.”
Rusty’s eyebrows went up.
“She’s been throwing up the same time of day, every day. She’s missed school. She’s got a bump in her belly.”
“She’s started wearing dark clothes lately. The mama said she has no idea why.”
Sam realized an obvious point she hadn’t yet mentioned to Rusty. “Mason Huckabee has a connection to Kelly.”
“He does.”
Sam waited for more, but Rusty just gazed out into the parking lot.
She told him, “Lenore already has your investigator on this, but there’s a boy named Adam Humphrey that Kelly has a crush on. You could also look at Frank Alexander, Lucy’s father.” She tried again, “Or Mason Huckabee.”
Rusty scratched his cheek. For the second time, he ignored the man’s name. “Her being pregnant—that’s not good.”
“It could help your case.”
“It could, but she’s still an eighteen-year-old girl with a baby in her belly and a lifetime of prison ahead of her.” He added, “If she’s lucky.”
“I thought she was your unicorn.”
“Do you know how many innocent people are in prison?”
“I’d rather not know.” Sam asked, “Why do you think she’s innocent? What else have you learned?”
“I have learned nothing, in general or in specific. It’s this—” he pointed to his gut. “The knife just missed my intuition. It is still intact. It still tells me that there is more to this than meets the eye.”
“My eyes have seen quite a lot,” Sam said. “Did Lenore tell you that she managed to get her hands on the security footage?”
“I also heard that you and your sister almost resorted to fisticuffs in my office.” Rusty covered his heart with his hands. “May the circle be unbroken.”
Sam didn’t want to make light of this. “Dad, what’s wrong with her?”
Rusty stared out at the parking lot. Bright lights glared against the parked cars. “‘There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.’”
Sam was certain Charlie would recognize the quote. “I’ve never understood your relationship with her. You two talk all the time, but you never say anything of substance.” Sam imagined two roosters circling each other in the barnyard. “I guess that’s why she was always your favorite.”
“You were both my favorite.”
Sam didn’t buy it. Charlie had always been the good daughter, the one who laughed at his jokes, the one who challenged his opinions, the one who had stayed.
Rusty said, “A father’s job is to love each of his daughters in the way they need to be loved.”
Sam laughed out loud at the silly platitude. “How did you never win father of the year?”
Rusty chuckled along with her. “The one disappointment in my life is that I have never received one of those father of the year coffee mugs.” He reached into the pocket of his robe. He found his pack of cigarettes. “Did Charlotte tell you about her personal involvement with Mason?”
“Are we finally going to talk about that?”
“In our own roundabout way.”
Sam said, “I told her about Mason. She had no idea who he was.”
Rusty took his time lighting the cigarette. He coughed out a few puffs of smoke. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “I could never again represent a rapist after that day.”
Sam was surprised by the revelation. “You’ve always said that everyone deserves a chance.”
“They do, but I don’t have to be the one who gives it to them.” Rusty coughed out more smoke. “When I looked at the photos of that girl, Mary-Lynne was her name, I realized something about rape that I had never understood before.” He rolled his cigarette between his fingers. He looked at the parking lot, not Sam.
He said, “What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it’s worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.” He waved his hand in the air. “Or not, in some cases.”
“Sounds a lot like being shot in the head.”
Rusty coughed as smoke caught in his throat.
He said, “Charlotte has always been a pack animal. She doesn’t need to be the leader, but she needs to be in a group. Ben was her group.”
“Why did she cheat on him?”
“It’s not my place to tell you about your sister.”
Sam could not keep talking in circles, though she knew that Rusty could gladly spin around all night. She pulled her notes from her purse. “I’ve got some other things you should follow up on. Kelly doesn’t seem to know the victims. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.” Sam knew it made things worse from her perspective. She had never become indifferent to the randomness of violence. “You’re going to want to nail down the sequence and number of bullets fired. There seems to be some confusion.”
Rusty talked through the list. “Pregnancy: question mark. Paternity: big question mark. Video: we got one, thanks to you-know-who, but we’ll see if that ol’ snake Mr. Coin follows the judge’s order.” He thumped the paper with his finger. “Yes, why indeed was Kelly at the middle school? Victims random.” He looked at Sam. “You’re sure she didn’t know them?”
Sam shook her head. “I asked and she said no, but it’s worth a follow-up.”
“Follow-ups are my favorite things.” He looked at the last line on the list. “Judith Pinkman. I saw her on the news earlier. Quite the conversion with this ‘turn the other cheek’ line.” He folded the list back in two and put it in his pocket. “When Zachariah Culpepper was on trial, she wanted to flip the switch herself. This was back when they still electrocuted people. Remember everybody who committed a crime before May of 2000 was grandfathered in.”
Sam had read about the methods of execution during law school. She had found the process barbaric until she imagined Zachariah Culpepper pissing himself the same way Charlie had as he awaited the first delivery of 1,800 volts.
Rusty said, “She wanted Gamma’s murderer to be executed and she wants her husband’s murderer to be spared.”
Sam shrugged. “People mellow when they get older. Some people.”
“I will take that as a compliment,” Rusty said. “As to Judith Pinkman, I would say: ‘It is better to be sometimes right than at all times wrong.’”
Sam decided now was as good a time as any to drop Charlie’s problem back into Rusty’s lap. “Kelly told me that Mason Huckabee put the murder weapon down the back of his pants. I’m assuming he walked it out of the building. You need to figure out why he took such a huge risk.”
Rusty did not respond. He smoked his cigarette. He stared out into the parking lot.
“Dad,” Sam said. “He took the murder weapon from the scene. He’s either involved somehow or he’s an idiot.”
“I told you stupid breaks your heart.”
“You came to that conclusion pretty quickly.”
“Did I?”
Sam was not going to volley back his riddles. Rusty obviously knew something that he was not sharing. “You’ll have to turn Mason in for the gun. Other than Judith Pinkman, he’s probably Coin’s strongest witness.”
“I’ll find another way.”
Sam shook her head. “Excuse me?”
“I’ll find another way to neutralize Mason Huckabee. No need to put a man in jail for making a stupid mistake.”
“We’d have to let half of them out if that was the standard.” Sam rubbed her eyes. She was too drained for this conversation. “Is this guilt on your part? Some sort of penance? I don’t know if giving Mason a pass makes you a hypocrite or soft-hearted, because you’re clearly trying to protect Charlie at the expense of your client.”
“Probably both,” Rusty admitted. “Samantha, I will tell you something very important: there is value in forgiveness.”
Sam thought about the letters in her purse. She was not sure she wanted to know why her mother’s murderer, the man who had tried to rape her sister, who had stood by while Sam was shot in the head, was reaching out to Rusty. In truth, Sam was afraid that her father had forgiven him, and that she could never forgive Rusty for having given Zachariah Culpepper’s conscience a reprieve.
Rusty asked, “Have you ever been to an execution?”
“Why on earth would I attend an execution?”
Rusty stubbed out his cigarette. He slipped it into his pocket. He held out his arm to Sam. “Feel my pulse.” He saw her expression. “Humor your old man before you get back on a plane home.”
Sam pressed her fingers to the inside of his bony wrist. At first, she felt nothing but the thick line of his flexor carpi radialis. She moved her fingers around, then located the steady tap-tap-tap of blood pulsing through his veins.
She said, “Got it.”
“When a person is executed,” Rusty began. “You sit in the viewing area, and there’s the family down front and a pastor and a reporter and then on the other side, there’s you, the person who couldn’t stop any of this from happening.” Rusty put his hand over Sam’s. His skin was rough and dry. She realized that this was the first time she had touched her father in almost thirty years.
He continued, “They pull back the drape, and there he is, this human being, this living, breathing creature. Is he a monster? Perhaps he has done monstrous deeds. But now, he is strapped down in a bed. His arms and legs, his head, are pinned so that he cannot make eye contact with any one person. He’s staring up at the ceiling, where the tiles have been painted with white clouds and a blue sky. Cartoonish in nature, likely done by another inmate. This is the last thing this condemned man will ever see.”
Rusty pressed her fingers closer against his wrist. His heart rate had accelerated.
“So what you notice is that his chest is pumping as he tries to control his breath. And that’s when you feel it.” He tapped the top of her fingers. “Dum-dum. Dum-dum. You feel your own blood pumping through your body. You feel your own breath swishing in and out of your lungs.”
Without thinking, Sam had let her breathing match her father’s.
“Then they ask him for his last words, and he says something about forgiveness, or hoping his death brings the family peace, or that he is innocent, but his voice is shaking, because he knows this is it. The red phone on the wall will not ring. He will never see his mother again. He will never hold his child. This is it. His death is nigh.”
Sam pressed together her lips. She could not tell if her own heartbeat was matching the cadence of Rusty’s or if she had let herself again get wrapped up in his words.
He said, “The warden nods the go-ahead. There’s two men in the room. They each press separate buttons to deliver the drug cocktail. This is so no one knows for sure who killed him.” Rusty was silent for a few seconds, as if he was watching the buttons being pressed. “You get a taste in your mouth, like a chemical, like you can taste the thing that’s about to kill him. He tenses, and then slowly, surely, his muscles start to let go until he is completely, utterly without movement. And that’s when you start to feel it, this sensation of tiredness, as if the drug is going into your own veins. And your head starts to nod. You’re almost relieved, because you’ve been so tense the whole time, during the waiting time, and now it’s finally seconds from being over.” Rusty paused again. “Your heart slows. You feel your breaths start to taper off.”
Sam waited for the rest.
Rusty said nothing.
She asked, “And then?”
“And then it’s over.” He patted her hand. “That’s it. They shut the curtains. You leave the room. You get in your car. You go home. You have a drink. You brush your teeth. You go to bed, and you stare at the ceiling for the rest of your life the same way that condemned man stared at the ceiling tiles over his head.” He held tight to Sam’s hand. “This is what Zachariah Culpepper thinks about every second of his life, and he’ll keep thinking about it every day until he’s wheeled into that room and they open that curtain.”
Sam pulled away from him. The skin of her hand felt tight, as if she’d been singed. “Lenore told you that we found the letters.”
“I never was able to keep you girls out of my files.” He gripped the arms of his wheelchair. He looked into the distance. “He’s being punished. I know you wanted him to suffer. He is suffering. There is no need to pursue anything to do with that man. You need to go back to New York and forget about him. Live your life. That’s how you get your revenge.”
Sam shook her head. She should have seen this coming. She was infuriated with herself for always letting Rusty hide in her blind spot.
He said, “If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your sister.”
“I’ve tried to help my sister. She doesn’t want it.”
Rusty grabbed her arm. “Listen to me, baby. You need to hear this, because it’s important.” He waited until she looked at him. “If you get Charlotte stirred up about Zachariah Culpepper right now, she will never, ever come back from the bad place that she’s in.”
“What does Zachariah think that you owe him?”
Rusty let her go. He sat back in his chair. “To borrow from Churchill, it is a riddle wrapped in a canard.”
“A canard is an unfounded rumor or fable.”
“Also, a winglike projection on an airplane. Or, in the French, duck.”
“Rusty,” Sam said. “He mails these letters to you, the same letter with the same message, the second Friday of every month.”
“Is that so?”
“You know it’s so,” Sam said. “It’s the same day you always call me.”
“I am glad to know you look forward to my phone calls.”
Sam shook her head. They both knew those were not her words. “Dad, why does he send you that same letter? What do you owe him?”
“I owe him nothing. On my life.” Rusty held up his right hand as if he was swearing on a Bible. “The police know about the letters. It’s just something he does. The miserable fuck has got an awful lot of time on his hands. It’s easy to keep to a regular schedule.”
“So there’s nothing behind the letters? He’s just an inmate on death row who feels you owe him something?”
“Men in that position often feel they are owed something.”
“Please don’t tell me there is value in forgiving him.”
“There is value in forgetting him,” Rusty clarified. “I have forgotten him so that I can move on with my life. My mind has rendered his existence immaterial; however, I will never forgive him for taking away my soulmate.”
Sam was tempted to roll her eyes.
“I loved your mother more than anything else on this earth. Every day with her was the best day of my life, even if we were screaming at each other at the top of our lungs.”
Sam remembered the screaming if not the adulation. “I’ve never understood what she saw in you.”
“A man who did not want to wear her underwear.”
Sam laughed, then felt bad for laughing.
“Lenny introduced us. Did you know that?” Rusty did not wait for a response. “He dragged me up north to meet this gal he was kind of dating, and the minute I saw her, I thought a God damn boulder had fallen out of the sky and conked me on the head. I simply could not take my eyes off of her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Legs that went on for miles. Lovely curve of her hip.” He grinned at Sam. “And of course, lest you think your daddy was a total poonhound, there was the enigma of her mind. My Lord, she knew things. Just blew me away with the breadth and depth of her knowledge. I had never in my life met a woman like that. She was like a cat.” He pointed his finger at Sam. “Anyone ever say that about you?”
“I can’t say that they have.”
“Dogs are stupid,” Rusty said. “This is a known fact. But a cat—you have to earn a cat’s respect every single day of your life. You lose it and—” He snapped his fingers. “That’s what your mama was to me. She was my cat. She kept my compass pointing true north.”
“Your metaphors are mixing.”
“Cats sailed with the Vikings.”
“To kill rats. Not to navigate the ship,” Sam said. “Mama hated what you did.”
“She hated the inherent risks in what I did. She hated the hours, without a doubt. But she understood that I needed to do it, and she always respected people who made themselves useful.”
Sam heard Gamma’s own voice in his words.
Rusty said, “City of Portland v. Henry Alameda.”
Sam felt a jolt of shock.
Her first case.
Rusty said, “I sat in the back with my teeth shining so bright I could’ve shown a cat how to sail a ship away from the rocky shore.”
“But, Dad—”
“You were a natural, my girl. Just a damn fine prosecutor. Totally in charge of the courtroom. Never been more proud.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“I just wanted to check on you, see if you’d found your place.” Rusty shook another cigarette out of his pack. “Clinton Cable Corp. v. Stanley Mercantile Limited.” He winked at her, as if it was nothing to recite the first patent complaint she had argued completely on her own. “That’s your place, Samantha. You have found your way to be useful in this world, and you are undoubtedly the best in the game.” He tossed the cigarette into his mouth. “I cannot say that I would’ve chosen that particular direction to point your remarkable brain, but you are truly in your element when you are discussing the tensile strength of a reinforced cable.” He leaned over. He pointed his finger at her chest. “Gamma would have been proud.”
Sam felt unwelcome tears in her eyes. She tried to conjure the image of the courtroom, to make herself turn around, to see her father sitting in the back row, but the memory would not come. “I never knew you were there.”
“No, you did not. I wanted to see you. You didn’t want to see me.” He held up his hand to spare her the trouble of making an excuse. “It is a father’s job to love his daughter in the way that she needs to be loved.”
Instead of joking this time, Sam wiped away tears.
He said, “There’s a picture of Gamma in my office that I want you to have.”
Sam was surprised. Rusty had no way of knowing that she had spent part of her day thinking about the photo.
He said, “The picture is one you haven’t seen before. I’m sorry about that. I always thought I would show it to you girls eventually.”
“Charlie hasn’t seen it?”
Rusty shook his head. “She has not.”
Sam felt a strange lightness in her chest that he was telling her something that Charlie did not know about.
“Now.” Rusty took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth. “When this photo was taken, Gamma was standing in a field. There was a weather tower in the distance. Not metal like the one at the farmhouse. It was wooden, an old, rickety thing. And your Gamma was looking at it when Lenny pulled out his camera. She was wearing these shorts.” Rusty grinned. “My God, the time I spent with those legs …” He gave a low, disconcerting grumble. “Now, the picture you know about, that was taken the same day. We had a picnic spread out on the grass. I called her name, and she looked back at me with her eyebrow up, because I had said something devastatingly intelligent.”
Sam smiled despite herself.
“But there’s a second picture. My private photo. Gamma’s facing the camera, but her head is turned slightly to the side because she’s looking at me, and I am looking at her, and when Lenny and I got back home and we got the roll of film back from the Fotomat, I took one look at it, and I said, ‘That’s the moment when we fell in love.’”
Sam loved the story too much for it to be true. “Did Gamma agree with you?”
“My beautiful daughter.” Rusty reached out. He cupped Samantha’s chin in his hand. “I say without any guile that my interpretation of this critical moment was the only time in our lives that your mother and I were in complete agreement.”
Sam blinked back more tears. “I’d like to see it.”
“I will put it in the mail as soon as I am able.” Rusty coughed into his hand. “And I will continue calling you, if you don’t mind.”
Sam nodded. She could not imagine her life in New York without his messages.
Rusty coughed again, a deep sound rattling in his lungs that did not stop him from trying to light his cigarette.
She said, “You know coughing is a sign of congestive heart failure.”
He coughed some more. “It is also a sign of thirst.”
Sam took the hint. She left her suitcase beside the bench and walked back into the hospital. The gift shop was by the front door. Sam found a bottle of water in the cooler. She waited in line behind an older woman who was intent on paying her bill with all the loose change from the bottom of her purse.
Sam drew in a breath and let it go. She could see Rusty outside. He was leaning on his right elbow again. The lit cigarette was held between his fingers.
The woman in front of Sam was scraping around for pennies. She made small talk with the cashier about her sick friend whom she was visiting upstairs.
Sam glanced around. The drive back to Atlanta would be another two hours. She should probably find something else to eat since she had been too upset to order anything at the diner. She was looking for a Kind Bar when she spotted a display of mugs in the back of the store. MOTHER OF THE YEAR. BEST FRIEND IN THE WORLD. STEPDAD OF THE YEAR. WORLD’S BEST DAD.
Sam picked up the BEST DAD mug. She rolled it in her hand.
She stood on her tiptoes so that she could see Rusty.
He was still leaning in his chair. Smoke curled up around his head. She put the mug back and chose the STEPDAD one because Rusty would think it was funny.
The penny counter was gone from the checkout. Sam found her credit card in her purse. She waited for the chip reader to process the charge.
The cashier said, “Visiting your stepdad?”
Sam nodded, because no normal person would find humor in the explanation.
“I hope he’s better soon.” The cashier ripped off the receipt and handed it to Sam.
She walked back through the lobby. The hospital doors slid open. Rusty was still by the bench. Sam held up the mug. “Look what I got.”
Rusty did not turn to look.
Sam asked, “Dad?”
Rusty wasn’t just leaning in his chair. He was listing to the side. His hand had dropped down. His lit cigarette had fallen to the ground.
Sam stepped closer. She looked into her father’s face.
Rusty’s lips were parted. His eyes stared blankly into the bright lights of the parking lot. His skin looked waxy, almost white.
Sam put her fingers to his wrist. To his neck. She pressed her ear to his chest.
She closed her eyes. She listened. She waited. She prayed.
Sam pulled herself away.
She sat down on the bench.
Her eyes blurred with tears.
Her father was gone.