Charlie walked around the Memory Chapel with a glass of wine in her hand. Only her father would specify that alcohol be served at his funeral. There was hard liquor at the bar, but at noon, it was too early for most, which was the first problem with Rusty’s speedy funeral plans. The second problem was one that Sam had spotted early on: the sightseers, the hypocrites.
Charlie felt bad for painting some of her former friends with this same brush. She couldn’t blame them for choosing Ben over her. She would have chosen Ben, too. In a week or a month or maybe next year, their silent presence, their kind nods and smiles, would mean something, but right now, all she could concentrate on was the assholes.
The townsfolk who had reviled Rusty for his liberal do-gooder ways were out in force. Judy Willard, who had called Rusty a murderer for representing an abortion facility. Abner Coleman, who had called him a bastard for representing a murderer. Whit Fieldman, who had called him a traitor for representing a bastard. The list could go on, but Charlie was too disgusted to go through it.
The worst offender was Ken Coin. The pustulant cocksucker stood at the center of a group of minions from the district attorney’s office. Kaylee Collins was front and center. The young woman who was probably cheating with Charlie’s husband didn’t seem to get that she might not be wanted here. Then again, the entire legal community was treating this as a social occasion. Coin was obviously telling a story about Rusty, some kind of courtroom antic her father had pulled. Charlie watched Kaylee throw back her head and laugh. She tossed her long, blonde hair out of her eyes. She did that intimate thing that women do where they reach out and touch a man’s arm in a way that only the man’s wife could tell was inappropriate.
Charlie drank her wine, wishing it was acid she could throw in the woman’s face.
Her phone started to ring. She walked toward an empty corner, answering it right before voicemail picked up.
“It’s me,” Mason Huckabee said.
Charlie turned her back to the room, guilt manifesting itself in shame. “I told you not to call me.”
“I’m sorry. I had to talk to you.”
“No, you didn’t,” she told him. “Listen to me very carefully: What happened between us was the worst mistake of my life. I love my husband. I am not interested in you. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want anything to do with you, and if you call me again, I will slap you with a restraining order and make sure the state board of education knows that you’ve got a record against you for harassing a woman. Is that what you want?”
“No. Christ. Dial it back, okay? Please?” He sounded desperate. “Charlotte, I need to talk to you face to face. This is really important. Bigger than both of us. Bigger than what we did.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she assured him. “The biggest thing in my life is my relationship with my husband, and I am not going to let you get in the way of that.”
“Charlotte, if you could—”
Charlie ended the call before he could spread any more of his bullshit.
She dropped her phone back into her purse. She neatened her hair. She finished her glass of wine. She got another from the bar. Half of it was gone before she felt the shaking stop. Thank God Mason had only called on the phone. If he’d come to the funeral, if the town had seen them together, if Ben had seen them, Charlie would have melted into a pool of self-disgust and hate.
“Charlotte.” Newton Palmer, another shiftless lawyer in a room full of them, gave her a practiced look of condolence. “How are you doing?”
Charlie finished her wine to drown out the curses. Newton was one of those prototypical old white men who ran most of the small towns in America. Ben had once said that all they had to do was wait for racist, sexist old bastards like Newton to die. What he hadn’t realized was that they kept making new ones.
Newton said, “I saw your father at a Rotary breakfast last week. Virile as ever, but he said the most humorous thing.”
“That’s Dad. Humorous.” Charlie pretended to listen to the man’s stupid Rotary story as she looked for her sister.
Sam was trapped, too, by Mrs. Duncan, her eighth-grade English teacher. Sam was nodding and smiling, but Charlie could not imagine her sister having much patience for idle conversation. Sam’s sense of otherness was more pronounced in the crowd. Not because of her disabilities, but because she was clearly not of this place, or maybe not even of this time. The dark glasses. The regal tilt to her head. The way Sam dressed did not exactly help her blend in, even at a funeral. She was dressed in all black, but the wrong black. The kind of black that was only available to the one percent. Standing next to her ancient teacher, Sam looked like a silk bag of money by the proverbial sow’s ear.
“It’s like watching your mother.” Lenore was wearing a tight black dress and heels that were higher than Charlie’s. She smiled at Newton. “Mr. Palmer.”
Newton blanched. “Charlotte, if you’ll excuse me.”
Lenore ignored him, so Charlie did, too. She pressed her shoulder into Lenore’s as they both watched Sam. Mrs. Duncan was still talking her ear off.
Lenore said, “Harriet wanted so badly to connect with people, but she never quite solved the equation.”
“She connected with Dad.”
“Your father was an aberration. They were two singular people who functioned best when they were together.”
Charlie leaned closer into her arm. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I couldn’t resist taunting these hateful bastards one last time. Listen—” Lenore took a deep breath, as if preparing herself for something difficult. “I think I’m going to retire to Florida. Be among my people—bitter old white women living on fixed incomes.”
Charlie smoothed together her lips. She couldn’t cry again. She couldn’t make Lenore feel guilty for doing what she needed to do.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Lenore wrapped her arm around Charlie’s waist. She put her mouth to Charlie’s ear. “I am never going to leave you. I’m just going to be somewhere else. And you can come visit me. I’ll make a special bedroom for you, with pictures of horses on the walls, and kittens and possums.”
Charlie laughed.
Lenore said, “It’s time for me to move on. I’ve fought the good fight long enough.”
“Dad loved you.”
“Of course he did. And I love you.” Lenore kissed the side of her head. “Speaking of love.”
Ben was making his way through the crowd. He held up his hands as he darted around an old man who looked like he had a story to tell. Ben said a few hellos to people he knew, constantly moving forward, easily detaching himself from hangers-on. People always smiled when they saw Ben. Charlie felt herself smiling, too.
“Hey.” He smoothed down his tie. “Is this a girls-only thing?”
Lenore said, “I was just about to antagonize your boss.” She kissed Charlie again before sidling over to Ken Coin.
The district attorney’s group broke away, but Lenore trapped Coin like a cheetah with a baby warthog.
Charlie told Ben, “Lenore’s going to retire to Florida.”
He did not seem surprised. “Not much left for her with your dad gone.”
“Just me.” Charlie couldn’t think about Lenore leaving. It hurt too much. She asked Ben, “Did you pick out Dad’s suit?”
“That was all Rusty.” He said, “Hold out your hand.”
Charlie held out her hand.
He reached into his coat pocket. He pulled out a red ball. He placed it in her palm. “You’re welcome.”
Charlie looked down at the red clown nose and smiled.
Ben said, “Come outside.”
“Why?”
Ben waited, patient as ever.
Charlie put down the glass of wine. She tucked the clown nose into her purse as she followed him outside. The first thing she noticed was the thick smog of cigarette smoke. The second thing she noticed was that she was surrounded by cons. Their ill-fitting suits could not hide the prison tattoos and lean muscle that came from hours of pumping iron in the yard. There were dozens of men and women, maybe as many as fifty.
These were Rusty’s real mourners—smoking outside, like the bad kids behind the gym at school.
“Charlotte.” One of the men seized her hand. “I wanna tell you how much your daddy meant to me. Helped me get my kid back.”
Charlie felt herself smile as she shook the man’s rough hand.
“Helped me find a job,” another man said. His front teeth were rotted, but the fine comb marks in his oily hair showed that he had made an effort for Rusty.
“He was all right.” A woman flicked a cigarette toward the overflowing ashtray by the door. “Made my dickhead ex-husband pay child support.”
“Come on,” another guy said, likely the dickhead ex-husband.
Ben winked at Charlie before going back inside. An assistant district attorney wasn’t popular with this crowd.
Charlie shook more hands. She tried not to cough from all of the smoke. She listened to stories about Rusty helping people when no one else seemed inclined to do so. She wanted to go back inside and get Sam, because her sister would want to hear what these people had to say about their complicated, irascible father. Or maybe Sam wouldn’t want to. Maybe she would need to. Sam had always been so starkly drawn to black and white. The gray areas, the ones that Rusty seemed to thrive in, had always mystified her.
Charlie laughed to herself. The paradox was not lost on her that after unburdening to Sam her deepest, darkest sins, Charlie felt that the most important thing Sam could take back home with her was the knowledge that their father had been a good man.
“Charlotte?” Jimmy Jack Little blended in well with the cons. He had more tattoos than most of them, including a sleeve that he’d gotten during a prison stint for bank robbery. His black fedora put him in another place and time. He seemed perpetually angry, like it was to his utter disappointment that he was not one of the good guys being corrupted by a bad doll in a 1940s noir novel.
“Thanks for coming.” Charlie hugged his neck, something she had never done before and probably would never do again. “Dad would’ve been happy you were here.”
“Yeah. Well.” He seemed overcome by the physical contact. He took his time lighting his cigarette, restoring his sense of macho toughery. “Sorry about the old shit. I expected him to go down in a blaze of bullets.”
“I’m glad he didn’t,” Charlie said, because her father had been stabbed two days ago. Being shot to death was too close a possibility for her to joke about.
“This Adam Humphrey punk.” Jimmy Jack picked some tobacco off his lip. “Not sure I got a bead on him. Could be he was buttering her biscuit, but kids today, girls and boys, they can be friends without the boom-chicka-wow-wow.” He shrugged away the inexplicableness the way he would shrug off self-driving cars and Tivo. “Now, Frank Alexander, him I know from a couple years back. Guy had a DUI that Rusty helped disappear.”
“Dad worked with the Alexander family?” Charlie realized her voice was too loud. She whispered, “What happened?”
“Pay-as-you-go as far as ol’ Russ was concerned. Nothing unusual about their interaction. What happened was, Frank was burping his worm in the wrong mole hole. Got a little sauced with the gal at the no-tell motel, then came home to the wifey stinking of another chick’s perfume. Or tried to go home. Cops slapped him with a DUI Less Safe.”
Charlie knew this meant Frank Alexander’s breathalyzer had been below the legal limit, but he was still charged with the DUI because the officer deemed his driving was impaired.
She asked, “The girlfriend, was she a student?”
“A real estate agent, a lot older than the wife, which doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, because why? I mean, she’s got money, sure, but chicks ain’t classics, like cars. You want the soap at the end of your rope to be fresh, am I right?”
Charlie did not want to open up a discussion on the finer points of cheating. “So, what happened to Frank Alexander?”
“He did some community service, went to DUI school. The judge rolled the charge off his record so he could keep his teaching license. I’ve got some sources saying that the real problems were back home. Wife wasn’t too happy about the old girlfriend. I mean, shit, why go older?”
Charlie asked, “Was there talk of divorce?”
Jimmy Jack shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t have a choice. DUIs are a rich man’s game. The legal bills. The cash money for the drunk classes. The fines. The fees. You know that shit sets you back eight, nine grand easy.”
Charlie knew that was a lot of money for anybody, but the Alexanders were both schoolteachers with a young child. She doubted they had that kind of cash lying around.
Jimmy Jack said, “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like realizing you’re gonna be eating ramen noodles for the rest of your life.”
“Or maybe they love each other and they wanted to work it out because they had a kid?”
“That’s real pretty talk coming from you, doll.” He’d smoked his cigarette down to the filter. He tossed it into a planter by the door. “Guess it don’t matter now. Rusty’s not gonna pay me to track down this shit from the grave.”
“Whoever takes over the case will need someone on the ground.”
He winced, as if the thought caused him injury. “Dunno if I got it in me to work for a lawyer who’s not your dad. Present company excluded. But shit, lawyers don’t pay their bills and they just basically suck as human beings.”
Charlie did not disagree.
He winked at her. “All right, dolly, go back to listening to these dirtbags. Those dickholes inside didn’t know your dad. Not good enough to hold a cup of his piss if you ask me.”
Charlie smiled. “Thank you.”
Jimmy Jack clicked his tongue as he gave her a wink. Charlie watched him work his way through the crowd. He slapped a few backs, did a few fist bumps as he made his way toward the doors and, presumably, the open bar. He tipped his fedora to the woman who had gotten her kids back. She put her hand on her hip, and Charlie got the impression that neither of them were going to be alone tonight.
A car horn beeped.
They all looked out at the parking lot.
Ben was behind the wheel of his truck. Sam sat beside him.
The last time a boy had beeped a car horn at Charlie, Rusty had put her on restriction for crawling out her bedroom window in the middle of the night.
Ben beeped the horn again. He waved Charlie over.
She made her excuses to the group, though she assumed that many of them had at one point in their lives run toward a truck idling in a parking lot.
Sam got out, her hand resting on the open door. Charlie could hear the truck’s muffler belching from thirty feet away. Ben’s Datsun was twenty years old, the only thing they could afford after the canceled trip to Colorado. They had sold his SUV for the loan pay-off. A week later, the buyer was not amenable to selling it back to them. Rusty and Lenore had offered to let them keep the loaned money, but Charlie couldn’t bring herself to do it. The clinic in Colorado had refunded the wire within days. The problem was the other bills: the flight and hotel cancellations, surcharges on their credit cards for cash advances, then the post-miscarriage hospital bills, surgical bills, specialist bills, anesthesiology bills, radiology bills, doctors’ bills, pharmacy bills and a ton of co-pays and an avalanche of no-pays. At the time, the debt was so crushing that they’d been lucky they could afford to pay cash for the piece-of-shit truck.
They had spent an entire weekend scraping the giant Confederate flag decal off the back window.
Sam said, “Ben offered to help me escape. I couldn’t take being in that crowd for much longer.”
“Me, either,” Charlie said, though she would rather congregate with known felons than suffer through what she assumed was Sam’s lame attempt at matchmaking.
Charlie had an awkward moment over the gearshift, which jutted out of the hump in the floor. She started to hike up her dress to straddle it, but Ben had made it clear the other night that he did not want his knob between her legs.
“You okay?” Ben asked.
“Sure.” Charlie ended up sitting sidesaddle, knees clenched together, legs at an angle, like Bonnie Blue Butler before the fall.
The door groaned on rusty hinges as Sam pulled it shut. “A spray lubricant would alleviate that noise.”
Ben said, “I tried some WD-40.”
“That’s a solvent, not a lubricant.” She told Charlie, “I thought we could spend some time together at the farmhouse.”
Charlie did a double take. She could not imagine why her sister would want to spend two seconds at that detestable place. The night before Sam had left for Stanford, she had made a not completely unfunny joke about the most efficient way to burn it to the ground.
Ben shifted the gear into drive. He made a tight U-turn around a cluster of parked cars. BMWs. Audis. Mercedes. Charlie hoped none of Rusty’s mourners boosted them.
“Shit,” Ben muttered.
Two police cars were parked on the median by the exit. Charlie recognized Jonah Vickery, Greg Brenner, and most of the other cops from the middle school. They were waiting to do the funeral escort, leaning against their cruisers, smoking cigarettes.
They recognized Charlie, too.
Jonah made circles with his fingers and put them to his eyes. The rest of the gang joined in, laughing like hyenas as they made raccoon eyes in honor of Charlie’s bruises.
“Fuckers.” Ben grabbed the handle and rolled down the window.
“Babe,” Charlie said, alarmed.
He leaned out the window, fist raised. “Motherfuckers.”
“Ben!” Charlie tried to pull him back in. He was almost yelling. What the hell had gotten into her passive husband? “Ben, what are—”
“Go fuck yourselves.” Ben flipped them the bird with both hands. “Assholes.”
The cops were no longer laughing. They stared Ben down as the truck pulled out onto the highway.
“Are you crazy?” Charlie demanded. She was supposed to be the unhinged one. “They could beat your ass.”
“Let them.”
“Let them kill you?” Charlie asked. “Jesus, Ben. They’re dangerous. Like sharks. With switchblades.”
Sam said, “Surely not switchblades? They’re illegal.”
Charlie felt a strangled groan die in her throat.
Ben rolled the window back up. “I’m so sick of this fucking place.” He wrenched the gearshift into third, then pushed it into fourth as he sped up the highway.
Charlie stared at the empty road ahead.
He had never been sick of this place before.
“Well.” Sam cleared her throat. “I love living in New York. The culture. The arts. The restaurants.”
“I couldn’t live up north,” Ben said, as if entertaining the thought. “Maybe Atlanta.”
Sam said, “I’m sure the public defender’s office would be happy to have you.”
Charlie glared at her sister, mouthing a “What the fuck?”
Sam shrugged, her expression unreadable.
Ben loosened his tie. He unbuttoned his collar. “I’ve done my time for the greater good. I want to join the dark side.”
Charlie could almost feel her mind boggling. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Ben said. “I’m tired of being a poor civil servant. I want to make some money. I want to own a boat.”
Charlie pressed together her lips, the same as she had done when Lenore told her she was moving to Florida. Ben was generally easy-going about most things, but Charlie had learned that his mind, once made up, was not likely to change. He had clearly made up his mind about changing careers. Maybe he had made up his mind about leaving. There was something different about him. He seemed relaxed, almost giddy, like a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
Charlie assumed that the burden was her.
Sam offered, “We have some Atlanta firms we work with in cases of criminal litigation. I could certainly write some letters of recommendation.”
Charlie glared at her sister again.
“Thanks. I’ll let you know after I do some research.” Ben unknotted his tie. The material made a thwip sound as he pulled it through his collar. He tossed it behind the seat. “Kelly confessed on the hospital tape.”
“Jesus!” Charlie’s voice was high enough to break glass. “Ben, you can’t tell us that.”
“You’ve still got spousal privilege and her—” He laughed. “God, Sam, you scared the shit out of Coin. I could practically hear the crap coming out of his ass when you started to parry with the judge.”
Charlie grabbed his arm. “What is wrong with you? You could get fired for—”
“I resigned last night.”
Charlie let her hand drop.
Sam asked Ben, “The video—”
“Shit,” Charlie whispered.
Sam said, “What do you think? Is she guilty?”
“Without a doubt, she’s guilty. Forensics backs it up. She tested positive for gunpowder residue on her hand, the sleeve of her shirt, and around her shirt collar and right breast, exactly where you’d expect to find it.” Ben chewed at the tip of his tongue. At least part of him still knew what he was doing was ethically wrong. “I don’t like the way they got her to admit it. I don’t like the way they do a lot of things.”
Sam said, “Kelly can be talked into anything.”
Ben nodded. “They didn’t Mirandize her. Even if they did, who knows if she understands what a right to remain silent is.”
“I think she’s pregnant.”
Charlie’s head whipped around. “Why do you think that?”
Sam shook her head. She was talking to Ben. “Do you know what happened to the gun?”
“No.” Ben asked, “Do you?”
“I do,” Sam said. “Did Kelly say if she knew the victims?”
Ben provided, “She knew that Lucy Alexander was Frank Alexander’s daughter, but I think that information came after the fact.”
“About the Alexanders,” Charlie jumped in. “Jimmy Jack told me that Frank got caught cheating on his wife a few years ago. He was pulled over for a DUI and the story came out.”
“Ah,” Sam said. “So, he’s done it before. Was it a student?”
“No, a real estate agent. Wealthy, but older, which is apparently the wrong way to do it.” Charlie added, “Dad represented Frank for the DUI. Jimmy Jack said it was routine.”
“It was,” Ben said. “Coin already looked into it. His focus is on the fact that Kelly had Frank for algebra. Frank was going to fail her. You heard the theory yesterday. Coin thinks a girl who has the IQ of a turnip is so worried and ashamed about failing algebra that she took a gun to school and killed two people. The wrong school, by the way.”
“That’s an interesting point,” Sam said. “Why was Kelly at the middle school?”
“Judith Pinkman was tutoring her for some kind of English proficiency test.”
“Ah,” Sam repeated, as if pieces were finally clicking into place.
Ben added, “But Judith said she wasn’t supposed to meet Kelly that week. She had no idea Kelly was even in the hall until she heard the gunshots.”
Sam asked, “What else did Judith tell you?”
“Not much more. She was really upset. I mean, that sounds like an obvious thing because her husband was dead and then there was the stuff that happened with Lucy and probably seeing Charlie—” Ben glanced at Charlie, then back at the road. “Judith was really shaken. They had to sedate her just to get her into the ambulance. I guess that’s when it hit her, like, the second she walked out of the building. She became hysterical, but like in the real sense of the word. Just completely overcome with grief.”
“Where was Judith when the shooting started?”
Ben said, “In her room. She heard the gun go off. She was supposed to lock the door and hide in the corner at the back of her classroom, but she ran out into the hallway because she knew the first bell was about to ring and she wanted to warn the kids not to come. I mean, if she could do it without being shot. She wasn’t thinking about her own safety, she said.” He looked at Charlie again. “There was a lot of that going around.”
Sam told him, “Boats are very expensive to maintain.”
“I’m not looking for a yacht.”
“There’s insurance, docking fees, taxes.”
Charlie could not listen to her estranged sister talk to her estranged husband about boats. She stared blankly at the road. She tried to work out what had just happened. Ben resigning—that was something she couldn’t deal with right now. She concentrated instead on the conversation with Sam. Ben had prattled on like a jailhouse snitch. Sam had been more circumspect. Kelly pregnant. The gun missing. Charlie had been at the school when the shooting occurred, she had been a witness to part of what played out, but she was more in the dark than either of them.
Ben leaned over to look at Sam. “You should take over the Wilson case.”
Sam laughed. “I couldn’t afford the pay cut.”
He slowed down for a tractor on the road. The farmer was taking up both lanes. His combine was down. Ben beeped the horn twice and the man edged over enough for him to pass on the median.
Ben and Sam resumed their idle boat chatter. Charlie found herself going back to Sam’s questions, trying to see where they led. Sam had always been faster at solving puzzles. Faster at most things, to be honest. She was certainly better in the courtroom. Charlie had been in awe yesterday, and she had also called it right the first time. Sam had looked like the quintessential Victorian Dracula, from her stylish clothes to her air of entitlement, to the way she had unhinged her jaw and swallowed Ken Coin like a plump rat.
Sam asked, “How many bullets were fired?”
Charlie waited for Ben to answer, but then she realized Sam was talking to her. “Four? Five? Six? I don’t know. I’m a really bad witness.”
Ben said, “There’s five on the tape. One in—”
“The wall, three in Pinkman, one in Lucy.” She leaned back over to look at Ben. “How about near Mrs. Pinkman’s room? Anything near her door?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted. “The case is only two days old. They’re still doing the forensics. But there’s another witness. He said that he counted six shots, total. He’s been in combat. He’s pretty reliable.”
Mason Huckabee.
Charlie looked down at her hands.
“What about the audio?”
“There’s a really shaky cell phone call from the front office, but that was made after the shooting stopped. The audio you want came from an open mic on the cop in the hallway. That’s where Coin got the thing about ‘the baby.’” Ben added, “None of the gunshots were captured. We—at least I—don’t have the coroner’s report. There could be one more bullet inside the bodies.”
Sam said, “I think I want to look at that video again.”
“I can’t access it. I was kind of frank in my resignation letter,” Ben said. “I’m pretty sure I won’t get a referral.”
Charlie wanted to crawl under the covers in her bed and go to sleep. They had a mortgage. They had a car payment. Health insurance premiums. Car insurance. Property taxes. All the bills from three years ago.
“I’ll be your referral.” Sam had her hand deep in her purse, a leather bag that would likely pay for all of their bills. She pulled out Ben’s Enterprise USB. “Does Dad have a computer?”
“He’s got a great TV,” Ben said. They had bought Rusty the same model that they had at home. This had been four years ago, before Colorado. Before the boat.
Ben slowed the truck. They were at the HP, but he didn’t turn into the driveway. Blood had stained the red clay an oily black. This was where her father had fallen the night he’d walked to the end of the driveway to get the mail.
Ben said, “They think the uncle stabbed Rusty.”
“Faber?” Sam asked.
“Rick Fahey.” Charlie remembered Lucy Alexander’s uncle from the press conference. “Why do they think it’s him?”
Ben shook his head. “I’m way out of the loop on that one. I heard some gossip at the office, then Kaylee was complaining about getting called out late the night Rusty was stabbed.”
“So they needed someone to talk to a possible suspect,” Charlie said, pretending that the way he’d casually dropped the name of the woman Charlie thought he was cheating with hadn’t driven a knife into her own gut. “I think Dad saw whoever did it.”
“I do, too,” Sam said. “He spun a yarn to me about how there is value in forgiveness.”
“Can you imagine,” Charlie said. “If Dad had lived, he probably would’ve offered to represent Fahey.”
No one laughed because they all knew that it was possible.
Ben put the gear in first. He made the turn into the driveway, driving slowly to avoid the ruts.
The farmhouse came into view, paint chipping, wood rotting, windows crooked, but not otherwise altered since the Culpeppers had knocked on the kitchen door twenty-eight years ago.
Charlie felt Sam shift in her seat. She was steeling herself, strengthening her resolve. Charlie wanted to say something that would bring her comfort, but all she could do was hold onto Sam’s hand.
Sam asked, “Why no security bars and gates here? The office is a fortress.”
“Dad said that lightning doesn’t strike twice.” Charlie felt the lump come back into her throat. She knew that the over-abundant security at the office was for her sake, not Rusty’s. Of the handful of times she had been to the HP over the years, she had inevitably stayed out in her car, laying on her horn for Rusty to come out because she did not want to go inside. Maybe if she had visited more, her father would have taken better measures to keep the place secure.
Ben said, “I can’t believe I was here last weekend, talking to him on the porch.”
Charlie longed to lean against him, to put her head on his shoulder.
“Brace yourselves,” Ben said. The wheels bounced into a pothole, then hit a deep rut, before smoothing out. He started to pull to the parking pad by the barn.
“Go to the front door,” Charlie said. She did not want to go through the kitchen.
“‘Goat fucker,’” Sam said, reading the graffiti. “The suspect knew him.”
Charlie laughed.
Sam did not. “I never thought I would come back here.”
“You don’t have to.” Charlie offered, “I could go inside and look for the photo.”
The set to Sam’s jaw said she was determined. “I want us to find it together.”
Ben looped the truck around to the front porch. The grass was mostly weeds. A kid from down the street was supposed to keep it mowed, but Charlie was ankle-deep in dandelions when she stepped out of the truck.
Sam held her hand again. They had not touched each other this much when they were children.
Except for that day.
Sam said, “I remember that I was sad about losing the red-brick house, but I also remember that it was a good day.” She turned to Charlie. “Do you remember that?”
Charlie nodded. Gamma had wafted in and out of irritations, but everything had felt like it was starting to smooth out. “This could have been our home.”
Ben said, “That’s all kids want, right? To have a safe place to live.” He seemed to remember himself. “I mean, safe before or—”
“It’s all right,” Charlie told him.
Ben tossed his suit jacket back into the truck. He grabbed his laptop from behind the seat. “I’ll go inside and work on the TV.”
Sam placed the USB drive in his hands. She told him, “Make sure I get that back so I can have it destroyed.”
Ben gave her a salute.
Charlie watched him bolt up the stairs. He reached above the edge of the door frame for the key and let himself in.
Even from the yard, Charlie could smell the familiar odor of Rusty’s unfiltered Camels.
Sam looked up at the farmhouse. “Still higgledy-piggledy.”
“I guess we’ll sell it.”
“Did Dad buy it?”
“The bachelor farmer was a bit of a peeping Tom. And a foot fetishist. And he stole a lot of lingerie.” Charlie laughed at Sam’s expression. “He had a lot of legal bills when he died. The family deeded the house to Rusty.”
Sam asked, “Why didn’t Dad sell it years ago and rebuild the red-brick house?”
Charlie knew why. There had been a lot of bills from Sam’s recovery. The doctors, the hospitals, the therapists, the rehab. Charlie was familiar with the crushing weight of an unexpected illness. Not much time or energy was left for rebuilding anything.
She told Sam, “I think it was mostly inertia. You know Rusty wasn’t one for change.”
“You can have the house. I mean—not that you asked, but I don’t need the money. I just want Mom’s photo. Or a copy of it. Of course I’ll make one for you. Or for me. You can have the original if—”
“We’ll figure it out.” Charlie tried to smile. Sam was never rattled, but she was clearly rattled now. “I can do this for you, you know.”
“Let’s go.” Sam nodded toward the house.
Charlie helped her up the stairs, though Sam did not ask. Ben had left the door open. She could hear him opening more windows to help air the place out.
They would be better off sealing it, like Chernobyl.
The bulk of Charlie’s inheritance filled the front room. Old newspapers. Magazines. Copies of the Georgia Law Review dating back to the 1990s. File boxes from old cases. A prosthetic leg Rusty had taken as payment from a drunk everyone knew as Skip.
“The boxes,” Sam said, because some of Gamma’s thrift store finds had never been unpacked. She peeled back the dry tape on a cardboard box marked EVERYTHING $1 EA and took a purple Church Lady shirt off the top.
Ben watched from behind the TV set. He said, “There’s another box in the den. You could probably make a fortune from that stuff on eBay.” He looked at Charlie. “No Star Trek. Just Star Wars.”
Charlie couldn’t believe she had managed to disappoint her husband even as far back as when she was thirteen. “Gamma picked everything out, not me.”
His head ducked behind the set. He was trying to hook up the components that Rusty had unplugged, claiming all of the blinking lights were going to give him seizures.
Sam said, “Okay, I think I’m ready.”
Charlie did not know what she was ready for until she saw Sam looking into the long hallway that ran down the length of the house. The back door with its opaque window was at the far end. The kitchen was at the top. This was where Daniel Culpepper had stood when he had watched Gamma leave the bathroom.
Charlie could still remember her own trek down the hallway in search of the toilet, the way she had screamed “Fudge” for her mother’s benefit.
There were five doors, none of them laid out in any way that made sense. One door led to the creepy basement. One led to the chiffarobe. Another led to the pantry. Yet another led to the bathroom. One of the middle doors inexplicably led to the tiny downstairs bedroom where the bachelor farmer had died.
Rusty had turned this room into his office.
Sam went first. From behind, she seemed impervious. Her back was straight. Her head was held high. Even the slight hesitation in her gait was gone. Her only tell was that she kept her fingers touching the wall as if she needed to make sure she had access to something steady.
“The back door.” Sam pointed toward the door. The frosted glass was cracked. Rusty had attempted to repair it with yellow masking tape. “You have no idea how many times I’ve woken up over the years dreaming about running out that door instead of walking into the kitchen.”
Charlie said nothing, though she’d had the same kinds of dreams herself.
“All right.” Sam wrapped her hand around the doorknob to Rusty’s office. She opened her mouth and inhaled deeply, like a swimmer about to put her head under water.
The door opened.
More of the same, but draped with the clinging odor of stale nicotine. The papers, the boxes, the walls, even the air had a yellow tint. Charlie tried to open one of the windows but paint had sealed it shut. She realized that her wrist felt sprained from banging on her father’s casket. She was not having a good day with inanimate objects.
“I don’t see it,” Sam said, anxious. She was at Rusty’s desk. She pushed some papers around, stacked others together. “It’s not here.” She looked at the walls, but they were adorned with drawings from Charlie’s school projects. Only Rusty would tape on his wall an eighth grader’s rendering of the anatomy of a dung beetle.
“There’s this one,” Charlie said, spotting the flimsy black metal frame that had held the photo for almost fifty years. “Shit, Dad.” Rusty had let the sun bleach out their mother’s face. Only the dark holes of her eyes and mouth were evident under the black mop of her hair.
“It’s ruined.” Sam sounded devastated.
Charlie felt sick with guilt. “I should’ve taken this from him a long time ago and had it preserved, or whatever you’re supposed to do. I’m so sorry, Sam.”
Sam shook her head. She dropped the picture back on the file. “That’s not the photo he meant. Remember, he said there was a different one that he kept from us.” She started moving around papers again, checking behind manuscript boxes and bound depositions. She seemed distressed. The picture was obviously important on its own, but this was also one of the last things that Rusty had spoken to Sam about.
Charlie took off her shoes so she didn’t catch the heels on something and break her neck. The next year of her life was going to be wasted going through all of this shit. She might as well start now.
She hefted away some boxes from a shaky folding table. A row of unaccompanied red checkers spilled onto the floor. They managed to hit a pristine piece of bare hardwood. The sound was like jacks scattering.
She asked Sam, “Do you think he’d keep it in his filing cabinets?”
Sam looked wary. There were five wooden filing cabinets, all with heavy bar locks on them. “Can we find the keys in this mess?”
“He probably had them on him when they took him to the hospital.”
“Which means they’re in evidence.”
“And we don’t know anyone at the DA’s office who could help us because my husband apparently told them all to fuck off.” She thought of Kaylee Collins, and silently added, Maybe not all of them.
She asked Sam, “Dad was sure that you and I have never seen this picture before?”
“I told you this already. He said that he kept it to himself. That it captured the moment that he and Gamma fell in love.”
Charlie felt the poignancy of her father’s remark. His language had always been so annoyingly baroque that she had sometimes lost sight of the meaning. “He did love her,” she told Sam.
“I know,” she said. “I let myself forget that he lost her, too.”
Charlie looked out the window. She had cried enough to last the rest of her life.
Sam said, “I can’t leave without finding it.”
“He could’ve been making it up,” Charlie said. “You know how he loved to spin stories.”
“He wouldn’t lie about this.”
Charlie kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t so sure about that.
Ben asked, “Did you check the safe?” He was standing in the hall with a bunch of colored cables looped over his shoulders.
Charlie rubbed her eyes. “When did Dad get a safe?”
“When he figured out that you and Sam were reading everything he brought home.” He pushed away a pile of boxes with his foot, revealing a floor safe that came up to the middle of his thigh. “Do you know the combination?”
“I didn’t know he had a safe,” Charlie reminded him. “Why would I know the combination?”
Sam knelt down. She studied the dial. “It would be a set of numbers that are relevant to Dad.”
“What’s the price on a carton of Camels?”
“I’ve got an idea.” Sam spun the dial a few times. She stopped at the number two, then turned back to the number eight, then back to seventy-six.
Charlie’s birthday.
Sam tried the handle.
The safe did not open.
Charlie said, “Try your birthday.”
Sam spun the dial again, stopping at the correct numbers. She pulled on the handle. “Nope.”
“Gamma’s birthday,” Ben suggested.
Sam entered the numbers. No luck. She shook her head, as if she had figured out the obvious. “Rusty’s birthday.”
She worked the dial quickly, entering Rusty’s date of birth.
She tried the handle.
Again, nothing.
Sam looked at Ben. “Your birthday’s next.”
Charlie said, “Try 3-16-89.”
The day the Culpeppers had shown up at the kitchen door.
Sam let out a slow breath. She turned back around. She spun the dial right, then left, then right again. She rested her fingers on the handle. She looked up at Charlie. She tried the handle.
The safe opened.
Charlie knelt down behind Sam. The safe was packed tight, just like everything else in Rusty’s life. At first, all she smelled was musty old papers, but then there was something else, almost like a woman’s perfume.
Sam whispered, “I think that’s Mama’s soap.”
“Rose Petal Delight,” Charlie recalled. Gamma bought it at the drug store. Her only vanity.
“I think it’s coming from these.” Sam had to use both hands to extricate a stack of envelopes wedged against the top.
They were tied with a red ribbon.
Sam smelled the letters. She closed her eyes like a cat purring in the sun. Her smile was beatific. “It’s her.”
Charlie smelled the envelopes, too. She nodded. The scent was faint, but it was Gamma’s.
“Look.” Sam pointed to the address, which was made out to Rusty, care of the University of Georgia. “This is her handwriting.” Sam ran her fingers over the perfect, Palmer Method print of their mother. “The postmark is from Batavia, Illinois. That’s where Fermilab is. These must be love letters.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “Yeah, you maybe don’t want to read those.”
“Whyever not?”
“Because they were really in love.”
Sam was beaming. “But, that’s wonderful.”
“Is it?” Ben’s voice went up to a register he probably hadn’t used since puberty. “I mean, do you really wanna read a pack of scented letters your dad kept tied with a red string that are from way back when he and your mom just met and were probably—” He fucked his fingers into his open fist. “Think about it. Your dad could be a real horn dog.”
Charlie felt queasy.
Sam said, “Let’s put aside that decision for the moment.” She placed the letters on top of the safe. She wedged her hand back inside and slid out a postcard.
Sam showed Charlie the aerial photo of the Johnson Space Center.
Gamma had worked with NASA before going to Fermilab.
Sam turned over the card. Again, their mother’s neat handwriting was unmistakable.
Charlie read aloud the message to Rusty, “‘If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.’ —Dr. Seuss.”
Sam gave Charlie a meaningful look, as if their mother was offering marital advice from the grave.
Charlie said, “Obviously, she was trying to communicate with Dad on his level.”
“Obviously.” Sam was smiling the same way she had on Christmas mornings. She had always opened presents so maddeningly slow, commenting on the wrapping paper, the amount of tape used, the size and shape of the box while Charlie tore through her gifts like a Chihuahua on methamphetamine.
Sam said, “We need to go through all of this very carefully.” She made herself more comfortable on the floor. “I hope that we’ll find the photo today, but if not, or I guess either way, do you mind if I take all of this back to New York? Some of it is very precious. I can catalog everything and—”
“It’s fine,” Charlie said, because she knew that Gamma and Sam had always spoken in their own, impenetrable language.
And also that she would never make a catalog.
“I’ll bring them back,” Sam promised. “You can meet me in Atlanta, or I can come up here.”
Charlie nodded. She liked the idea of seeing her sister again.
“I can’t believe Daddy kept this.” Sam was holding one of her track and field ribbons. “He must have had it in his office. Otherwise, it would’ve burned in the fire. And—oh my goodness.” She had found a pile of old school assignments. “Your paper on transcendentalism. Charlie, do you remember Gamma got into a two-hour argument with your teacher? She was so livid that he’d marginalized Louisa May Alcott. Oh—and look, my old report card. He was supposed to sign it.”
Ben whistled for Charlie’s attention. He was holding up a blank sheet of paper. “Your dad kept my drawing of a rabbit in a snowstorm.”
Charlie grinned.
“Oh, wait.” He took a pen off the desk and drew a black dot in the center of the page. “It’s a polar bear’s asshole.”
She laughed, and then she wanted to cry because she missed his humor so much.
“Charlie,” Sam said, delighted. “I think we hit the jackpot. Do you remember Mother’s notebooks?” She was reaching into the safe again. This time, she brought out a large, leather-bound journal. She opened the cover.
Instead of diary pages filled with equations, there were blank checks.
Charlie looked over Sam’s shoulder again. Spiral bound. Three rows to a sheet, torn stubs where older checks had been written. The account was drawn on Bank of America, but she did not recognize the company name. “Pikeville Holding Fund.”
Sam paged through the check stubs, but the usual information—the date, the amount, and the person to whom the check was made payable—were blank. She asked Charlie, “Why would Dad have a business checking account for a holding company?”
“His escrow account is under Rusty Quinn, esquire,” Charlie said. Most litigators had non-interest-bearing holding accounts in which settlement funds were deposited. The lawyer took his cut, then paid out the rest to the client. “But this doesn’t make sense. Lenore does all of Dad’s bookkeeping. She took over when he forgot to pay his electric bill and the power was cut off.”
Ben rifled through a pile of unopened mail on Rusty’s desk. He found an envelope and held it up. “Bank of America.”
“Open it,” Charlie said.
Ben extracted the one-page statement. “Holy crap. Over three hundred grand.”
“Dad never had a client who got that kind of payout.”
Ben said, “There’s only one withdrawal last month, check number zero-three-four-zero for two thousand dollars.”
Sam said. “Normally the first check number in an account starts with triple-zero one.” She asked, “On what day was the last check written?”
“It doesn’t say, but it was cashed four weeks ago.”
“The second Friday of every month.”
“What?” Charlie looked down at the checkbook. “Did you find something?”
Sam shook her head. She closed the leather cover.
Ben said, “Not to go all Scooby-Doo and the Gang, but do you want to try the pencil trick? Rub the lead over the blank checks that were underneath the ones he wrote? Rusty was quite the bearer-downer when he had a pen in his hand.”
“That’s brilliant, babe.” Charlie stood to look for a pencil on the desk.
“We’ll need to get official copies,” Sam said. “A pencil rubbing won’t tell us anything.”
“It’ll tell us who he wrote the checks to.”
Sam held the journal to her chest. “I have several accounts with Bank of America. I can call them tomorrow and ask for copies. We’ll need to get Dad’s death certificate. Charlie, are you sure he didn’t have a will? We really should look for it. A lot of older people draw up wills, but they don’t tell their children.”
Charlie froze. She felt sweat break out on the back of her neck. A car was making its way toward the house. The familiar bump when the front wheel hit the pothole. The crunching of rubber against packed red clay.
Sam said, “That’s probably Stanislav, my driver. I told him to meet me here.” She looked at the clock on Rusty’s desk. “He made good time. I should find a box to put all of this in.”
Charlie said, “Ben—”
“I’ll go.” Ben walked down the hallway.
Charlie stood in the hall, tracking his progress to the kitchen. He looked out the window. His hand encircled the doorknob. Her heart did a weird trembly thing inside of her chest. She did not want Ben in the kitchen. She did not want him to open the door.
Ben opened the door.
Mason Huckabee stood on the side porch. He looked up at Ben, surprised. He was wearing a black suit with a blue tie and a camouflage ball cap.
Ben did not speak to the man. He turned around. He walked back down the hall.
Charlie felt sick. She ran to meet Ben. She blocked his way, her hands touching either side of the wall. “I’m sorry.”
Ben tried to go around.
Charlie held firm. “Ben, I didn’t ask him here. I don’t want him here.”
Ben wasn’t going to push her out of his way. He stared at her. He chewed the tip of his tongue.
“I’ll get rid of him. I’ve been trying to get rid of him.”
Sam called from the office, “Ben, can you help me pack this stuff?”
Charlie knew that Ben was too much of a gentleman to tell her no.
She reluctantly let him pass. She ran toward the kitchen, practically galloping down the hallway.
Mason waved to her, because he had a clear line of sight to the back of the house. He had the sense not to smile as she got closer. He said, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to be fucking sorry,” Charlie whispered, her voice hoarse. “I wasn’t bullshitting you about that restraining order. It’ll take me two minutes to blow up your entire fucking life.”
“I know that,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I just want to talk to you and your sister.”
Charlie ignored the desperation in his tone. “I don’t care what you want. You need to leave.”
Sam said, “Charlie, let him in.”
Charlie turned around. Sam stood in the hallway. She was touching the wall with her fingers again. “In here,” she told Mason, then walked into the living room before Charlie could tell her no.
Mason stepped into the kitchen without being invited. He stood inside the doorway. He took off his ball cap. He worked it between his hands. He looked around the room, clearly unimpressed. Rusty had not changed anything since the day they had moved in. The rickety chairs, the chipped table. The only thing missing was the air conditioner that had been in the window. There had been no way to get the pieces of Gamma out of the fan.
“This way.” Charlie scanned the empty hallway for Ben. The door to Rusty’s office was closed. Ben’s truck hadn’t left. He had not opened the back door. He must be in Rusty’s office wondering why his wife was such a whore.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Mason said.
Charlie spun around. “I know who you are.”
Mason looked alarmed.
“I didn’t know when I met you, clearly, but then my sister told me about your sister, and—” She struggled to find the right words. “I’m very sorry for what happened to her. And to you and your family. But what you and I did, that was a one-time mistake, a huge mistake. I’m in love with my husband.”
“You said that before. I understand. I respect that.” Mason nodded to Sam. She had made a space to sit on a straight-back chair. The footage from the school security camera was paused on the TV set beside her. Ben had figured out how to make it work.
Mason stared at the massive screen. “Who’s going to be Kelly’s lawyer now?”
Sam said, “We’ll find someone from Atlanta.”
“I can pay,” he said. “My family has money. My parents do. Did. They had a trucking company.”
Charlie remembered the signs from her childhood. “Huckabee Hauling.”
“Yeah.” He looked at the paused footage again. “Is that from the other day?”
Charlie did not want to open the conversation. “Why are you here?”
“It’s just—” He cut himself off. Instead of offering an explanation for his continued, unwanted presence, he said, “Kelly tried to kill herself. That shows remorse. I read about it on the Internet, that remorse matters in death penalty cases. So you could use that during her trial to make the jury give her life, or maybe life with a chance of parole. They know that, right?”
“Who knows that?” Sam asked.
“The police. The prosecutor. You guys.”
Charlie told him, “They’ll say it was a cry for help. She gave up the gun. She didn’t pull the trigger.”
“She did,” he said. “Three times.”
“What?” Sam stood up from the chair.
Charlie said, “You can’t lie about this. People were there.”
“I’m not lying. She put the gun to her chest. You were twenty feet away. You had to see it, or at least hear it.” He told Sam, “Kelly pressed the muzzle to her chest, and she pulled the trigger three times.”
Charlie had absolutely no recollection of any of this.
“I heard the clicks,” he said. “I bet Judith Pinkman did, too. I’m not making this up. She really tried to kill herself.”
Sam asked, “Then why didn’t you just take away the gun?”
“I didn’t know if she’d reloaded. I’m a Marine. You always assume a weapon is hot unless you can clearly visualize the empty chamber.”
“Reloaded,” Sam repeated, giving weight to the word. “When the shooting began, how many shots did you hear?”
“Six,” he said. “One, then there was a pause, then there were three real quick in a row, then there was a shorter pause, then another shot, then a quick pause, then another shot.” He shrugged. “Six.”
Sam sat back down. She reached into her purse. “You’re sure about that?”
“If you’ve been in close-quarters combat as many times as I have, you learn really fast to count the bullets.”
She had her notepad in her lap. “And Kelly’s revolver holds six shots?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Charlie asked, “Was it empty when you took it?”
Mason glanced nervously at Sam.
She said, “Now would be a good time to explain why you stuck it down the back of your pants.”
“Instinct.” He shrugged, as if committing a felony was inconsequential. “The cop wouldn’t take it, so I just stowed it, temporarily, like you said, in the waist of my pants. And then none of the cops asked me about it, or searched me for it, and then I was out the door and in my truck before I realized it was still there.”
Sam did not poke holes in the thin story. Instead, she asked, “What did you do with the gun?”
“I took it apart and dropped it around the lake. The deepest parts.”
Again, she let him off the hook. “Is it possible to tell whether a gun is loaded just by looking at it?”
“No,” Mason said. “I mean, a nine-mill, the slide will go back, but you can pop the catch and—”
Charlie interrupted, “With a revolver, once the bullets are fired, the shells stay in the cylinder.”
“They do,” Mason confirmed. “All six of them were left in the cylinder, so she hadn’t reloaded.”
Charlie said, “Which means that she knew the gun was empty when she clicked the trigger three times.”
“You don’t know that,” Mason insisted. “Kelly probably thought—”
“Verify the sequence for me, please.” Sam slid the pen out of her notepad. She started writing as she spoke. “One shot, long pause, three quick shots, then a short pause, then another shot, then another short pause, then another shot. Right?”
Mason nodded.
She said, “There was another shot fired after Lucy Alexander was hit in the neck.”
“Into the floor,” Mason said. “I mean, that’s what I’m assuming.”
Sam arched her brow.
He explained, “I saw a bullet hole in the floor, right around here.” He pointed to the right side of the screen. “It wouldn’t be on the video because of the camera angle. It’s closer to the door. More like where Kelly ended up when they cuffed her.”
Charlie asked, “What did the hole look like?”
“The tile was chipped away, but there was no stippling, so it was probably fired from a distance of at least two, three feet. It was oval, too. Like a tear drop, so it was shot down and at an angle.” He held out his hand, finger and thumb in the shape of a weapon. “So, at her waist, maybe? She’s shorter than I am, but the angle wasn’t that steep. You’d have to string it.” Mason shrugged. “I’m not really an expert. I took a class as part of my continuing ed during my service.”
Sam said, “She didn’t want to kill Judith Pinkman, so she shot the last bullet into the floor.”
Mason shrugged again. “Maybe. But she knew the Pinkmans from way back, and that didn’t keep her from killing Doug.”
“She knew them?” Sam asked.
“Kelly was the water girl for the football team. That’s when those rumors started about her and one of the players. I’m not one hundred percent on what happened, but Kelly missed a couple’a three weeks of school and the kid left town, so—” He shrugged off the rest, but he must have been talking about the rumors that had spurred half the school to denigrate Kelly Wilson in her own yearbook.
Sam clarified, “Douglas Pinkman was the coach of the football team, so he would know Kelly Wilson from her stint as a water girl.”
“Right. She did two seasons, I think, along with another girl from the special ed group. The county office sent down this edict that we were supposed to integrate the special kids into more extracurricular programs: marching band, cheerleading, basketball, football. It was a good idea. I think it really helped some of them. Obviously not Kelly, but—”
“Thank you.” Sam went back to her notes. She turned the pages slowly, making notations with her pen. She hadn’t dismissed Mason so much as found something more interesting.
Mason looked at Charlie for some kind of explanation.
Charlie could shrug, too. “What did you want to talk to us about?”
“Yeah.” He worked his hat between his hands. “Do you mind if I use your bathroom first?”
She couldn’t believe he was dragging this out. “It’s back down the hall.”
He nodded before leaving, like they were in an English drawing room.
Charlie turned to Sam, who was still focused on her notes. “Why are you talking to him? We need to get him out of here.”
“Can you look at this and tell me what you see?” Sam pointed to the right side of the screen. “I don’t trust my eyes. Does this shadow look odd to you?”
Charlie heard Mason open the door to the bathroom, then close it. Thank God he hadn’t accidentally found Rusty’s office.
Charlie told Sam, “Please help me get rid of him.”
“I will,” Sam said. “Just look at the video.”
Charlie stood in front of the giant set. She studied the paused footage. She could see that the camera was angled down, only capturing half of the hallway. The famous blind spot that Mason had told her about. The overhead lights were on, but a weird shadow came from the right-hand side of the hallway. Narrow, long, almost like a spider’s leg.
“Wait,” Charlie said, but not because of the video. “How did he know where the bathroom is?”
“What?”
“He just walked right to it and opened the door.” Charlie felt a prickling sensation in her spine. “No one guesses the right door, Sam. There are five of them, and none of them make any sense. You know that. It’s pretty much a joke that no one can figure them out.” Charlie’s heart started throbbing at the base of her throat. “Do you think Mason knew Dad? That he’s been here before? Like a lot of times before, so he knows where the bathroom is without being told?”
Sam opened her mouth. She closed it.
“You know something,” Charlie guessed. “Did Dad tell you—”
“Charlie, sit down. I don’t know anything for certain at the moment, but I’m trying to work it out.”
Sam’s calmness made her anxious. “Why do you want me to sit down?”
“Because you’re hovering over me like a military drone.”
“You couldn’t say something delicate, like a hummingbird?”
“Hummingbirds are quite vicious, actually.”
“Chuck!” Ben yelled.
Charlie felt her heart lurch. She had never heard him scream so loudly before.
“Chuck!” Ben yelled again.
His footsteps pounded up the hall. He overshot the living room. He doubled back, frantic.
“Are you okay?” Ben looked over his shoulder, up and down the hall. “Where is he?”
Charlie said, “Ben, what—”
“Where the fuck is he!” Ben screamed so loudly that she put her hands to her ears. “Mason!” He slammed his fist into the wall. “Mason Huckabee!”
The bathroom door creaked open.
“You fucker!” Ben screamed, storming back down the hall.
Charlie ran after him. She skidded to a stop as Ben tackled Mason to the floor.
Ben’s fists started to swing. Mason held up his arms, covering his face. Charlie was filled with horror as she watched her husband beat another man.
“Ben!” She had to do something. “Ben—stop!”
Sam grabbed Charlie by the waist, holding her back.
“I have to—” Charlie stopped. She didn’t know what to do. Mason would kill Ben. He was a trained soldier. “Sam, we have to—”
“He’s not fighting back,” Sam said, almost as if she was narrating a documentary. “Look, Charlie. He’s not fighting back.”
She was right. Mason lay on the floor, his hands covering his face, as he absorbed every blow to his head, his neck, his chest.
“You coward!” Ben screamed. “Show me your fucking face!”
Mason took away his hands.
Ben landed a solid blow across Mason’s jaw. Charlie heard teeth crack. Blood spewed from Mason’s mouth. He lay there, hands out to the side, and took the beating.
Ben did not let up. He punched him again, then again, then again.
“No,” Charlie whispered.
Blood spattered the wall.
Mason’s eyebrow opened against the edge of Ben’s wedding band.
His lip was split.
The skin of his cheek was rent.
Mason still just lay there, taking it.
Ben hit him again.
Again.
“I’m sorry,” Mason said, slurring the word. “I’m sorry.”
“You fucking—” Ben reared back his elbow, his whole body twisting, then slammed his fist into Mason’s jaw.
Charlie watched the skin on Mason’s cheek ripple like the wake behind a boat. She heard a sharp crack, a bat hitting a ball. Mason’s head whipped to the side.
His eyelids fluttered.
Blood dribbled from his mouth, his nose.
He blinked again, but he did not move. His gaze stayed on the wall. Blood dripped down the dusty baseboard and pooled onto the hardwood floor.
Ben sat back on his heels. He was panting from exertion.
“I’m sorry,” Mason said. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck your sorry.” Ben spat in his face. He fell to the side, his shoulder hitting the wall. His hands dropped to his sides. Blood dripped from his knuckles. He wasn’t screaming anymore. He was crying. “You—” he tried again, his voice breaking. “You let him rape my wife.”