Predictably, Rusty’s old Mercedes was not parked in the lot when Lenore pulled into her space behind the building. Charlie had watched her father leave the hospital live on television. He had been half an hour from the office, roughly the same distance away as the Wilson house, so he must have taken a detour.
Lenore told Ava, “Rusty’s on his way,” a lie she told multiple clients multiple times a day.
Ava didn’t seem interested in Rusty’s whereabouts. Her mouth gaped open as the security gate rolled closed behind them. The enclosed space, with its array of security lights and cameras, metal bars on the windows and twelve-foot-high razor-wired perimeter fence, looked like the staging area inside a SuperMax prison.
Over the years, Rusty had continued to receive death threats because he continued to represent outlaw bikers, drug gangs, and child killers. Add to the list the union organizations, undocumented workers and abortion clinics, and he had managed to piss off almost everyone in the state. Charlie’s private theory was that most of the death threats came courtesy of the Culpeppers. Only a fraction came from the fine, upstanding citizens who believed Rusty Quinn served at the right hand of Satan.
There was no telling what they would do when word spread that Rusty was representing a school shooter.
Lenore parked her Mazda beside Charlie’s Subaru. She turned around and looked at Ava Wilson. “I’ll show you a place where you can freshen yourself.”
“Do you got a TV?” Ava asked.
Charlie said, “Maybe it’s best not to—”
“I wanna watch.”
Charlie couldn’t deny a grown woman TV privileges. She got out of the car and opened the door for Ava. The mother didn’t move at first. She stared at the back of the seat in front of her, hands resting on her knees.
Ava said, “This is real, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It is.”
The woman turned slowly. Her legs looked like two twigs underneath the pajama pants. Her skin was so pale as to be almost transparent in the harsh daylight.
Lenore shut the driver’s side door quietly, but the look on her face said she wanted to slam it off the car. She had been pissed off at Charlie from the moment she’d spotted her in the front bedroom of the Wilson house. But for Ava Wilson, she would’ve taken off Charlie’s head and thrown it out the window on the drive back.
Lenore mumbled, “This isn’t finished.”
“Super!” Charlie smiled brightly, because why not pour more fuel onto the fire? There was nothing Lenore could say about Charlie’s foolish actions that Charlie had not already said to herself. If there was one thing she excelled at, it was being her own inner mean girl.
She handed Ava Wilson the plastic bag of clothes so she could look for her keys.
“I’ve got it.” Lenore unlocked the steel security screen and accordioned it back. The heavy metal door required a code and another key to engage the bar lock that went straight across the inside of the door and bolted into either side of the steel jamb. Lenore had to put some muscle into turning the latch. There was a deep cha-chunk before she could open the door.
Ava asked, “Y’all keep money in here or something?”
Charlie shivered at the question. She let Lenore and Ava enter first.
The familiar odor of cigarettes managed to make its way into Charlie’s broken nose. She had banned Rusty from smoking in the building, but the order had come thirty years too late. He brought the stink in with him like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comics. No matter how many times she cleaned or painted the walls or even replaced the carpet, the odor lingered.
“This way.” Lenore gave Charlie another sharp look before escorting Ava to the reception area, a depressingly dark room with a metal roller shade that blocked the view to the street.
Charlie headed toward her office. Her first priority was to call her father and tell him to get his ass down here. Ava Wilson shouldn’t be relegated to sitting on their lumpy couch, getting all of her information about her daughter from cable news.
Just in case, Charlie took the long way by Rusty’s office to make sure he hadn’t parked in the front. The white paint on his door had bled yellow from nicotine. Stains radiated into the Sheetrock and clouded the ceiling. Even the knob had a film around it. She pulled down the sleeve of her shirt to cover her hand and made sure the door was locked.
He wasn’t there.
Charlie let out a long breath as she walked toward her office. She had purposefully staked her claim on the opposite side of the building, which in its previous life had housed the back offices of a chain of stationery supply stores. The architecture of the one-story structure was similar in higgledy-pigglediness to the farmhouse. She shared the reception area with her father, but her practice was completely separate from his. Other lawyers came and went, renting space by the month. UGA, Georgia State, Morehouse and Emory sporadically sent interns who needed desks and phones. Rusty’s investigator, Jimmy Jack Little, had set up shop in a former supply closet. As far as Charlie could tell, Jimmy Jack used it to store his files, possibly hoping that the police would think twice before raiding an office inside a building filled with lawyers.
The carpet was thicker, the décor nicer, on Charlie’s side. Rusty had hung a sign over her door that read “Dewey, Pleadem & Howe,” a joke on the fact that she kept most of her clients out of the courtroom. Charlie didn’t mind arguing a case, but the majority of her clients were too poor to afford a trial, and too familiar with the Pikeville judges to waste their time fighting the system.
Rusty, on the other hand, would argue a parking ticket in front of the United States Supreme Court if they’d let him get that far.
Charlie searched her purse for her office keys. The bag slipped off her shoulder. The mouth gaped open. Kelly Wilson’s yearbook had a cartoon General Lee on the front because the school mascot was the Rebel.
Defense counsel who possesses a physical item under circumstances implicating a client in criminal conduct should disclose the location of or should deliver that item to law enforcement authorities.
It wasn’t lost on Charlie that she had lectured Huck about concealing evidence while she had Kelly Wilson’s yearbook tucked under her arm.
Though, arguably, Charlie was caught in the legal equivalent of Schrödinger’s Cat. She wouldn’t know if there was evidence inside the yearbook until she opened the yearbook. She looked for her keys again. The easiest thing to do was to dump the book onto Rusty’s desk and let him deal with it.
“Let’s go.” Lenore was back, and clearly ready to say her piece.
Charlie indicated the bathroom across the hall. She couldn’t do this on a full bladder.
Lenore followed her inside and shut the door. “Half of me wonders if it’s even worth laying into you, because you’re too dumb to know how stupid you are.”
“Please listen to that half.”
Lenore jabbed her finger at Charlie. “Don’t give me your smart mouth.”
A cornucopia of smartass responses filled her head, but Charlie held back. She unbuttoned her jeans and sat on the toilet. Lenore had bathed Charlie when she was too grief-stricken to take care of herself. She could watch her pee.
“You never think, Charlotte. You just do.” Lenore paced the tight room.
“You’re right,” Charlie said. “And I know you’re right, just like I know you can’t make me feel any worse than I already do.”
“You’re not getting out of it that easy.”
“Does this look easy?” Charlie held her arms out wide to show off the damage. “I got caught up in a war zone this morning. I antagonized a cop into making this happen.” She indicated her face. “I humiliated my husband. Again. I fucked a guy who is either a martyr, a pedophile or a psychopath. I broke down in front of you. And you don’t even want to know what I was doing when the SWAT team came in. I mean, seriously, you do not want to know because you need plausible deniability.”
Lenore’s nostrils flared. “I saw their guns pointed at your chest, Charlotte. Six men, all with their rifles up, all a trigger’s width from murdering you while I stood outside wringing my hands like a helpless old woman.”
Charlie realized that Lenore wasn’t angry. She was frightened.
“What on earth were you thinking?” Lenore demanded. “Why would you risk your life like that? What was so important?”
“Nothing was that important.” Charlie’s shame was amplified by the sight of the tears rolling down Lenore’s face. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. Any of it. I’m an idiot and a fool.”
“You sure as hell are.” Lenore grabbed the toilet paper and rolled out enough to blow her nose.
“Please yell at me,” Charlie begged. “I can’t take it when you’re upset.”
Lenore looked away, and Charlie wanted to disappear into a pool of self-hate. How many times had she had this same discussion with Ben? The time at the grocery store that Charlie had shoved a man who’d slapped his wife. The time she’d almost got clipped by a car trying to help a stranded motorist. Antagonizing the Culpeppers when she saw them downtown. Going to the Holler during the middle of the night. Spending her days defending sleazy meth heads and violent felons. Ben claimed that Charlie would sprint head-first into a buzz saw if given the right set of circumstances.
Lenore said, “We can’t both cry.”
“I’m not crying,” Charlie lied.
Lenore handed her the toilet-paper roll. “Why do you think the guy’s a psychopath?”
“I can’t tell you.” Charlie buttoned her jeans, then went to the sink to wash her hands.
“Do I need to worry about you going back to before?”
Charlie didn’t want to think about before. “There’s a blind spot in the security cameras.”
“Did Ben tell you that?”
“You know Ben and I don’t talk about cases.” Charlie cleaned under her arms with a wet paper towel. “The psychopath has my phone. I need to get it turned off and replaced with a new one. I missed two hearings today.”
“The courthouse locked down the minute news broke about the shooting.”
Charlie remembered this was procedure. There had been a false alarm once before. Like Ava Wilson, she was having a hard time believing that any of this was real.
Lenore said, “There’s two sandwiches in a Tupperware bowl on your desk. I’ll go to the phone store for you if you eat them.”
“Deal,” Charlie agreed. “Listen, I’m sorry about today. I’ll try to be better.”
Lenore rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
Charlie waited until the door was closed to finish her whore’s bath. She studied her face in the mirror as she cleaned herself. She was looking worse by the hour. There were two bruises, one under each eye, that made her look like a domestic violence victim. The bridge of her nose was dark red and had a bump on top of the other bump from the last time her nose had been broken.
She told her reflection, “You’re going to stop being an idiot.”
Her reflection looked as dubious as Lenore.
Charlie went back to her office. She dumped her purse on the floor to find her keys. Then she had to figure out how to shove everything back in. Then she realized that Lenore had already unlocked the door because Lenore was always two steps ahead of her. Charlie dropped her purse on the couch beside the door. She turned on the lights. Her desk. Her computer. Her chair. It felt good to be among familiar things. The office wasn’t her home, but she spent more time here, especially since Ben had moved out, so it was the next best thing.
She crammed down one of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Lenore had left on the desk. She skimmed her inbox on the computer and answered the emails asking if she was okay. Charlie should’ve listened to her voicemail, called her clients, and checked with the court to see when her hearings would be rescheduled, but she was too jittery to concentrate.
Huck had all but admitted to taking the murder weapon from the scene.
Why?
Actually, the better question was how?
A revolver was not a small thing, and considering it was the murder weapon, the police would have been searching for it almost immediately. How did Huck sneak it out of the building? In his pants? Did he slip it into an unwitting paramedic’s bag? Charlie supposed the Pikeville police had given Huck a wide berth. You didn’t frisk an innocent civilian you’d accidentally shot. Huck had also erased the video that Charlie had taken, proving he was firmly on their side—inasmuch as Mr. Huckleberry believed in sides.
But agents Delia Wofford and Louis Avery had no such loyalty to Mr. Huckabee. No wonder they had drilled him for four hours while the bullet wound in his arm slowly seeped. They probably suspected he’d taken the weapon, just like they suspected the local cops were idiots for letting him walk out the door without doing a thorough search.
Lying to an FBI agent carried up to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. Add on top of that the destruction of evidence, lying to hinder an investigation and the possibility of Huck being charged as an accomplice after the fact to double homicide, and he would never work in a school, or probably anywhere else, ever again.
All of which made things tricky for Charlie. Unless she wanted to destroy the man’s life, she would need to find a way to tell her father about the gun without implicating Huck. She knew what Rusty would do if he smelled blood. Huck was the kind of handsome, clean-cut do-gooder that juries ate up with a spoon. His war record, his benevolent choice of profession, wouldn’t matter if he testified from the stand in an orange prison jumpsuit.
She looked at the clock over the couch: 2:16 PM.
This day was like a fucking never-ending sphere.
Charlie opened a new Word document on her computer. She should type out everything she remembered and give it to Rusty. He had likely heard Kelly Wilson’s story by now. Charlie could at least tell him what the prosecution had heard.
Her hands hovered over the keyboard, but she didn’t type. She watched the blinking cursor. She didn’t know where to start. Obviously, from the beginning, but the beginning was the hard part.
Charlie’s daily routine was normally set in granite. She got up at five. She fed the various animals. She went for a run. She showered. She ate breakfast. She went to work. She went home. With Ben gone, her nights were filled with reading case files, watching mindless TV, and clock-watching for a non-demeaning time to go to bed.
Today hadn’t been like that, and Rusty would need to know the reason why.
The least Charlie could do was find out Huck’s first name.
She opened the browser on her computer. She searched for “Pikeville Middle School faculty.”
The little rainbow wheel started spinning. Eventually, the screen showed the message: WEBSITE NOT RESPONDING.
She tried to get around the landing page, typing in different departments, teachers’ names, even the school newspaper. They all brought back the same message. The Pikeville Department of Education servers didn’t have the capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of curiosity-seekers trying to access their website.
She clicked open a fresh search page. She typed “Huckabee Pikeville.”
“Crap,” Charlie mumbled. Google had asked, Do you mean huckleberry?
The first site listed was a wiki entry saying that the huckleberry was the state fruit of Idaho. Then there were several stories about school boards trying to ban Huckleberry Finn. At the bottom of the page was an Urban Dictionary entry that claimed “I’m your huckleberry” was nineteenth-century slang for “I’m your man.”
Charlie tapped her finger on the mouse. She should look at CNN or MSNBC or even Fox, but she couldn’t bring herself to type in the news sites. An entire hour had passed without the slideshow coming back into her head. She didn’t want to invite the flood of bad memories.
Besides, this was Rusty’s case. Charlie was likely going to be called as a witness for the prosecution. She would corroborate Huck’s story, but that would only give the jury a small piece of the puzzle.
If anyone knew more, it was Mrs. Pinkman. Her room was directly across from where Kelly had most likely stood when she began shooting. Judith Pinkman would’ve been first on the scene. She would have found her husband dead. Lucy dying.
“Please, help us!”
Charlie could still hear the woman’s screams echoing in her ears. The four shots had already been fired. Huck had dragged Charlie behind the filing cabinet. He was calling the police when she heard two more shots.
Charlie was astonished by the sudden vividness of the memory.
Six gunshots. Six bullets in the revolver.
Otherwise Judith Pinkman would’ve been shot in the face when she opened the door to her classroom.
Charlie looked up at the ceiling. The thought had teased out an old image that she did not want to see.
She had to get out of this office.
She picked up the plastic bowl with the second PB&J and went to find Ava Wilson. Charlie knew that Lenore had already offered Ava food—she had that typically southern impulse to feed everyone she met—just as Charlie was sure Ava was too stressed out to eat, but she didn’t want the woman to be alone for too long.
In the reception area, Charlie found a familiar scene: Ava Wilson on the couch in front of the television, the sound up too loud.
She asked Ava, “Would you like my other sandwich?”
Ava did not answer. Charlie was about to repeat the question when she realized that Ava’s eyes were closed. Her lips were slightly parted, a soft whistle passing between a gap where one of her teeth was missing.
Charlie didn’t wake her. Stress had a way of shutting down your body when it couldn’t take any more. If Ava Wilson had a moment’s peace today, this would be it.
The remote control was on the coffee table. Charlie never asked why it was always sticky. Most of the buttons didn’t work. The others got stuck. The power button was unresponsive. The mute had evaporated—there was an open rectangle where the button had been. She went to the set to see if there was another way to turn it off.
On screen, the news was in that lull period where there was no real information to report, so they’d brought on a panel of pundits and psychiatrists to speculate what might have happened, what Kelly possibly had been thinking, why she could have done the things that she did.
“And there is precedent,” a pretty blonde said. “If you remember the Boomtown Rats song from—”
Charlie was about to yank the cord out of the wall when the main anchor interrupted the shrink. “We’ve got breaking news. I’ll send you live to a press conference going on now in Pikeville, Georgia.”
The image changed again, this time to a podium set up in a familiar-looking space. The lunchroom at the police station. They had cleared the tables away and stuck a blue flag with a City of Pikeville logo on the wall.
A chubby man wearing pleated tan Dockers and a white button-down shirt stood behind the podium. He looked to his left, and the camera panned to Ken Coin, who seemed irritated when he waved for the man to go ahead.
Coin had clearly wanted to take the stage first.
The man moved the microphone down, then up, then down again. He leaned over, his lips too close, and said, “I’m Rick Fahey. I’m Lucy Alex—” his voice caught. “Lucy Alexander’s uncle.” He used the back of his hand to wipe away tears. His face was red. His lips were too pink. “The family has asked me—oh.” Fahey took a folded piece of notebook paper out of his back pocket. His hands were shaking so hard that the paper fluttered as if from a sudden wind. Finally, Fahey flattened the page down on the podium and said, “The family asked me to read this statement.”
Charlie looked back at Ava. She continued to sleep.
Fahey read, “‘Lucy was a beautiful child. She was creative. She loved to sing and play with her dog, Shaggy. She was in Ms. Dillard’s Bible class at Mountain Baptist, where she loved reading the gospels. She spent summers at her grandparents’ farm down in Ellijay, where she helped them pick a-apples …’” He took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and patted the sweat and tears from his round face. “‘The family has put its trust in God to help us through this trying time. We ask for the thoughts and prayers of the community. Also, we would like to express our support for the Pikeville Police Department and the Dickerson County district attorney’s office—Mr. Ken Coin—to do everything they can to quickly bring justice to Lucy’s murd—’” His voice caught again. “‘Murderer.’” He looked up at the reporters. “That’s what Kelly Wilson is. A cold-blooded murderer.”
Fahey turned to Ken Coin. The two exchanged a solemn nod of a promise that had likely been made.
Fahey continued, “The family would like to ask in the meantime that the media and others respect our privacy. No funeral arrangements have been made yet.’” His focus moved off into the distance, past the throng of microphones, past the cameras. Was he thinking about Lucy’s funeral, how her parents would have to choose a child-size casket to bury their daughter in?
She had been so small. Charlie could remember how delicate the girl’s hand had felt when she gripped it inside her own.
“Mr. Fahey?” one of the reporters asked. “Could you tell us—”
“Thank you.” Fahey left the podium. Ken Coin gave him a firm pat on the arm as they passed each other.
Charlie watched her husband’s boss grip the sides of the podium like he was about to sodomize it. “I’m Ken Coin, the district attorney for the county,” he told the crowd. “I’m here to answer your questions about the prosecution of this vile murder. Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. We will claim an eye for an eye in this egregious—”
Charlie unplugged the television. She turned to make sure that Ava hadn’t woken up. The woman was in the same position, still wearing her pajamas. The bag of clothes was on the floor at her feet. Charlie was trying to remember if they had a blanket somewhere when the back door banged open and slammed closed.
Only Rusty entered the building making that much racket.
Fortunately, the sounds had not awakened Ava. She only shifted on the couch, her head lolling to the side.
Charlie left the sandwich on the coffee table before she went back to find her father.
“Charlotte?” Rusty boomed. She heard his office door pop open. The knob had already dug a hole in the wall. He never passed up an opportunity to make noise. “Charlotte?”
“I’m here, Daddy.” She stopped outside the doorway. His office was so cluttered there was nowhere inside to stand. “Ava Wilson’s in reception.”
“Good girl.” He didn’t look up from the papers in his hands. Rusty was a jittery half-tasker, never fully concentrating on one thing at a time. Even now, he was tapping his foot, reading, spontaneously humming, and carrying on something like a conversation. “How’s she doing?”
“Not great. She dozed off a little while ago.” Charlie talked to the top of his head. He was seventy-four years old and his hair was still a thick salt and pepper that he kept too long on the sides. “You need to go slow with her. I’m not sure how much she’s following.”
“Noted.” He made a note on the papers. Rusty’s bony fingers held a pen the same way he held a cigarette. Anyone who talked to him on the phone expected him to look like a cross between Colonel Sanders and Foghorn Leghorn. He was not. Rusty Quinn was a tall, rangy beanpole of a man, but not in the same way as Ben, because Charlie would’ve thrown herself off the mountain before she married someone like her father.
Other than their height and an inability to throw out old underwear, the two men in her life were nothing alike. Ben was a dependable but sporty minivan. Rusty was an industrial-sized bulldozer. Despite two heart attacks and a double bypass, he gladly continued to indulge his vices: Bourbon. Fried chicken. Unfiltered Camels. Screaming arguments. Ben was drawn to thoughtful discussions, IPA and artisanal cheeses.
Actually, Charlie realized that there was a new similarity between the two: today, both men were having a hard time looking at Charlie.
She asked, “What’s she like?”
“The girl?” Rusty dashed off another note, humming as if the pen had some sort of rhythm. “Slip of a thing. Coin must be shittin’ his pants. Jury’s gonna fall in love with her.”
“Lucy Alexander’s family might have something to say about that.”
“I am girded for battle.”
Charlie stubbed her toe on the carpet. There was nothing he couldn’t turn into a contest. “You could try to do a deal with Ken, take the death penalty off the table.”
“Bah,” he answered, because they both knew Ken wouldn’t deal. “I think we got a unicorn here.”
Charlie’s head snapped up. A unicorn was their word for an innocent client; a rare, mythical creature few had ever seen. She said, “You can’t be serious.”
“’Course I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be serious?”
“I was there, Daddy.” She wanted to shake him. “I was right in the middle of it.”
“Ben caught me up to speed on what happened.” He coughed into the crook of his arm. “Sounds like you had a real rough time of it.”
“That is a magnificent understatement.”
“I am renowned for my subtlety.” Charlie watched him shuffle the papers. The humming resumed. She counted to thirty before he finally looked at her over his reading glasses. He was blissfully silent for almost another ten seconds, then a smile cracked open his mouth. “Those are some real shiners, tough girl. You look like a bandito.”
“I was elbowed in the face.”
“I already told Coin to get his checkbook at the ready.”
“I didn’t file a complaint.”
He kept smiling. “Good idea, baby. Hold your fire till this settles down. Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day.”
Charlie put her hand to her eyes. She was too tired for the merry-go-round. “Dad, I need to tell you something.”
Her words went unanswered. She dropped her hand.
Rusty said, “This about why you were at the school this morning?” He had no problem looking at Charlie now. Their eyes locked for a very brief but uncomfortable moment before she looked away.
He said, “So now you know I know.”
“Did Ben tell you?”
He shook his head. “Ol’ Kenny Coin had the pleasure.”
Charlie wasn’t going to apologize to her father. “I’ll write down everything I can remember from today, what I told the GBI agent who took my statement. She’s a SAC, Delia Wofford. I’ve got her card. She interviewed the other witness along with an agent named Avery or Atkins. Ben was in the room with me. I think Coin was behind the mirror or in the other room most of the time.”
Rusty made sure she was finished before saying, “Charlotte, I am assuming if you were not okay, you would tell me.”
“Russell, I am assuming that you are smart enough to extrapolate that information from the raw data.”
“Hello, familiar impasse.” He dropped the papers on his desk. “The last time I tried to guess your mood, a first-class stamp was twenty-nine cents and you stopped talking to me for sixteen and three-quarter days.”
Charlie had long lost the will to negotiate his sympathy. “I heard there’s a hole in the school’s security footage.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“The gettin’ place.”
“Pick up anything else while you were there?”
“They’re worried about the murder weapon. Like, maybe they don’t know exactly where it ended up.”
His eyebrows jumped. “That’s a pickle.”
“That’s a guess,” Charlie said, not wanting to throw scent onto Huck. “The GBI agent was asking me a lot of questions about where it was, when did I see it last, who had it when/what/where. Revolver. I’m not one hundred percent, but I think it was a six-shot.”
Rusty’s eyes narrowed. “There’s something else, right? If I am allowed the extrapolation?”
Charlie turned around, knowing he would follow. She was halfway across the building when she heard his heavy footsteps behind her. He had a long, quick stride because he thought walking fast passed for cardio. She heard his fingers tap the wall. He hummed what sounded like “Happy Birthday.” The only time Charlie ever saw her father completely still was inside a courtroom.
Charlie found her bag on the couch in her office. She pulled out the yearbook.
Rusty came to a breathless standstill. “What’s that?”
“It’s a yearbook. Sometimes it’s called an annual.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “You need to be more specific with your old pappy.”
“You buy it at school at the end of the year. It has class pictures and club photos and people write things in the pages, like ‘I’ll never forget you’ or ‘Thanks for helping me in biology.’” She shrugged. “It’s a stupid thing. The more signatures you get, the more popular you are.”
“That explains why you never brought one home.”
“Ha ha.”
He asked, “So, was our gal popular? Not popular?”
“I didn’t open it.” Charlie waved the book in Rusty’s face, indicating he should take it.
He kept his arms crossed, but she saw that switch flick inside him, the same one that came on inside the courtroom.
He asked, “Where was this found?”
“In Kelly Wilson’s closet in her home.”
“Before the execution of the search warrant?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone from law enforcement tell you there was going to be a search warrant filed?”
“No.”
“Did the mother—”
“Ava Wilson.”
“Did Ava Wilson give this to you to hold on to?”
“No.”
“Is she your client?”
“No, and thanks for trying to help me lose my license.”
“You’d have the best attorney in the country making sure you kept it.” Rusty nodded toward the yearbook. “Open it for me.”
“Take it or I’ll drop it on the floor.”
“God damn, you make me miss your mama.” Rusty’s voice had a funny quiver. He rarely mentioned Gamma, and if he did, it was only to make a not-always-favorable comparison to Charlie. He took the yearbook and gave her a salute. “Many thanks.”
She watched his exaggerated march up the hallway.
Charlie called, “Hey, asshole.”
Rusty turned around, grinning as he marched back the same way he’d left. He opened the yearbook with a flourish. The inside flap was filled with written messages, some in black ink, some in blue, a few in pink. Different handwriting. Different signatures. Rusty turned the page. More ink colors. More hastily scratched missives.
If Kelly Wilson was a loner, she was the most popular loner at school.
Rusty said, “Excuse me, miss. I’m not stepping on your scruples here if I ask you to read me some of this?” He tapped his temple. “Don’t have my spectacles.”
Charlie indicated that he should turn the book around. She read the first line that jumped out at her, a blocky print that looked like it belonged to a boy. “‘Hey girl thanks for the awesome head. You suck.’” She looked up at her father. “Whoa.”
“Whoa, indeed.” Rusty was unshockable. Charlie had given up trying years ago. “Continue.”
“‘Gonna rape you bitch.’ No signature.” She skimmed around. “Another rape threat, ‘Gonna do some sodomy on your ass bitch,’ sodomy spelled with an ‘i.’”
“At the end or in the middle?”
“End.” She searched for some pink cursive, hoping the girls proved to be a lesser evil. “‘You are a fucking whore and I hate you and I want you to die—six exclamation points. K-I-T, Mindy Zowada.’”
“K-I-T?” Rusty asked.
“Keep in touch.”
“Heart-felt.”
Charlie scanned the other notes, which were equally as lewd as the first few. “They’re all like that, Dad. Either calling her a whore or referring to sex or asking for sex or saying they’re going to rape her.”
He turned to the next page, which had been left blank so that classmates could write more notes. There were no notes. A giant cock and balls took up most of the space. At the top was a drawing of a girl with stringy hair and wide eyes. Her mouth was open. There was an arrow pointed at her head with the word KELLY.
Rusty said, “A picture slowly starts to emerge.”
“Keep going.”
He turned more pages. More drawings. More lewd messages. Some rape threats. Kelly’s class picture had been defiled; this time the cock and balls pointing at her mouth was ejaculating. Charlie said, “They must have passed this around the school. Hundreds of kids were in on it.”
“She was how old do you think when this was done?”
“Twelve or thirteen?”
“And she kept it a-a-a-all this time.” He drew out the word as if he was testing how it would sound in front of a jury. Charlie couldn’t fault him the performance. He was holding in his hands a textbook example of a mitigating factor.
Kelly Wilson had not only been bullied at school. The sexual aggression in the messages from her classmates pointed to something even darker.
Rusty asked, “Did the mother say the girl was sexually assaulted?”
“The mother thinks the girl is a snowflake.”
“All right,” Rusty said. “So, if something happened, then it might be in her school records or there might be somebody you could ask at the DA’s office who—”
“No.” Charlie knew to shut him down quickly. “You can ask Ava to request a copy of her school records and you can do a juvenile court query on a possible file.”
“I will do exactly that.”
Charlie said, “You need a really good computer guy, someone who can do forensic searches into social media accounts. If enough kids were involved in this yearbook project, there might even be a separate Facebook page for it.”
“I don’t need a guy. I’ve got CNN.” He was right. The media would already have experts scouring the web. Their reporters would be talking to Kelly’s classmates, her teachers, looking for friends or people who claimed to be friends who were willing to go on camera and say anything, true or not, about Kelly Wilson.
Charlie asked, “Did you get a chance to check on Mrs. Pinkman?”
“I tried to pay a social visit, but she was heavily sedated.” He exhaled a raspy breath. “Bad enough to lose a partner, but to lose ’em like that is the very definition of anguish.”
Charlie studied him, trying to figure out his tone. Twice now he had mentioned Gamma. She supposed that was her fault, considering her involvement this morning at the school. Another arrow she had slung her father’s way. “Where did you go today after the hospital?”
“Took a little side trip down to Kennesaw to do a satellite interview. You’ll be treated to your daddy’s handsome visage all over your TV tonight.”
Charlie wasn’t going to be near a TV if she could help it. “You’re going to have to be careful with Ava, Daddy. She doesn’t understand a lot. I don’t think it’s just shock. She doesn’t track.”
“Daughter has the same problem. I’d put her IQ in the low seventies.” He tapped the yearbook. “Thanks for the help, my dear. Did Ben get in touch with you this morning?”
Her heart flipped the same way it had when she’d first heard that Ben had called. “No, do you know why he was calling me?”
“I do.”
Her desk phone rang. Rusty started to leave.
“Dad?”
“You will need your umbrella tomorrow. Sixty-three percent chance of rain in the AM.” He hummed a passable “Happy Birthday,” giving her a salute as he backed down the hall, knees high like a marching-band leader.
She said, “You’re going to give yourself another heart attack.”
“You wish!”
Charlie rolled her eyes. He always had to make a fucking exit. She picked up the phone. “Charlie Quinn.”
“I’m not supposed to be talking to you,” Terri, the youngest of Ben’s older sisters, said. “But I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“I’m good.” Charlie could hear Terri’s twins screaming in the background. Ben called them “Denise” and “Denephew.” She told Terri, “Ben said he called you guys this morning.”
“He was pretty upset.”
“Upset at me or about me?”
“Well, you know that’s been a damn nine-month-long mystery.”
It wasn’t, actually, but Charlie knew anything she told Terri would be passed on to Carla and Peggy, who would tell Ben’s mother, so she kept her mouth firmly shut.
Terri asked, “You there?”
“Sorry, I’m at work.”
Terri didn’t take the hint. “I was thinking when Ben called about how funny he is about talking about things. You have to poke and poke and poke and then maybe, eventually, he’ll tell you back in 1998 you stole a French fry off his plate and it really hurt his feelings.”
She said more, but Charlie tuned her out, listening instead to Terri’s children try to kill each other. Charlie had been sucked in by Ben’s bitchy sisters once before, taking them at face value when she should have realized there was a reason Ben only saw them at Thanksgiving. They were bossy, unthinking women who tried to rule Ben with an iron fist. He was in college before he realized that men were allowed to pee standing up.
Terri said, “And then I was talking to Carla about this thing going on with you two. Doesn’t make any sense at all. You know he loves you. But he’s got something up his butt and he won’t say anything.” She stopped a moment to yell at her children, then picked up the conversation where she’d left off. “Has Benny said anything to you yet? Given you any kind of reason?”
“No,” Charlie lied, thinking if they knew Ben at all, they would know that he would never walk out without a reason.
“Keep poking at him. I bet it’s nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing.
“He’s too sensitive for his own good. Did I ever tell you about the time at Disneyland when—”
“All we can do is work on it.”
“Y’all need to work harder,” she said. “Nine months is too long, Charlie. Peggy was saying the other day how she grew a whole baby in nine months so why can’t y’all figure out—shit.”
Charlie felt her hand tighten around the phone.
“Shit,” Terri repeated. “You know I don’t think before I speak. That’s just how I am.”
“It’s fine, really. Don’t worry about it. But, look, I’ve got a client calling on the other line.” Charlie spoke too fast to let her get a word in. “Thanks so much for calling. Please send my best to the others and I’ll talk to you later.”
Charlie slammed down the phone.
She put her head in her hands. The worst part about that phone call was that she wasn’t going to be able to climb into bed with Ben tonight, put her head on his chest and tell him what an awful fucking bitch his sister was.
Charlie slumped back in her chair. She saw that Lenore had kept her part of the bargain. A brand new iPhone was plugged into the back of her computer. Charlie pressed the home button. She tried 1-2-3-4 for the password, but it didn’t take. She put in her birthday, and the phone unlocked.
The first thing she pulled up was her list of voicemails. One message from Rusty this morning. Several messages from friends after the shooting.
Nothing from Ben.
The distinct rumble of Rusty’s voice echoed through the building. He was leading Ava Wilson back to his office. Charlie could guess what he was saying by the cadence of his voice. He was giving his usual speech: “You don’t have to tell me the whole truth, but you do have to tell me the truth.”
Charlie wondered if Ava was capable of grasping the subtlety. And she prayed that Rusty wouldn’t float his unicorn theory past the woman. Ava was already drowning in her own version of false hope. She didn’t need Rusty to weigh her down with more.
Charlie tapped her computer awake. The browser was still open on huckleberries. She did a new search: “Mindy Zowada Pikeville.”
The girl who had called Kelly Wilson a fucking whore in her yearbook had a Facebook page. Mindy’s setting was private, but Charlie could see her banner, which was heavy on the Justin Bieber. The account photo of Mindy showed her dressed as a Rebel cheerleader. She looked exactly the way Charlie thought she’d look: pretty and nasty and smug.
Charlie skimmed Mindy’s list of likes and dislikes, annoyed that she was too old to understand half of what the teenager was into.
She tapped her finger on the mouse again.
Charlie had two Facebook accounts: one in her own name, and another in a fake name. She had created the second account as a joke. Or at least she’d initially let herself believe it was a joke. After creating an email address for the account and a profile picture of a pig wearing a bow tie, she had finally accepted that she was going to use it to spy on the Culpepper girls who had tormented her in high school. That they had all accepted a friend request from Iona Trayler proved correct a lot of stereotypes that Charlie had about their intelligence. Weirdly, she had also been friended by an extended family of Traylers who sent her greetings on her made-up birthday and were always asking her to pray for ailing aunts and distant cousins.
Charlie logged in to the Trayler account and sent out a friend request to Mindy Zowada. It was a shot in the dark, but she wanted to know what the girl who’d been so vile to Kelly Wilson was saying about her now. That Charlie had extended her catfishing from the Culpeppers to another girl’s tormentors would be a neurosis to analyze at a later date.
Charlie collapsed the browser. The blank Word document was on her desktop. There was nothing else she could do to procrastinate, so she started typing up her statement for Rusty. She relayed the events in as dry a manner as possible, thinking about the morning the way she might think about a story she had read in the newspaper. This happened, then this happened, then this happened.
Horrible things were a hell of a lot easier to digest when you took away the emotion.
The school part of the story did not deviate from what she’d told Delia Wofford. The Word document could be subpoenaed, and there was nothing to Charlie’s recollection that was much different than what she had told the agent. What had changed was her certainty. Four shots before Mrs. Pinkman screamed. Two shots after.
Charlie stopped typing. She stared at the screen until the words blurred. Had Mrs. Pinkman opened the door when she heard the four initial gunshots? Had she screamed when she saw her husband and a child on the ground? Had Kelly Wilson emptied the remaining bullets in the revolver in an attempt to shut her up?
Unless Kelly opened up to Rusty, they might not know the truth about the sequence for weeks, possibly months, until Rusty held the forensic reports and witness statements in his hands.
Charlie blinked her eyes to clear them. She hit the return key for a new paragraph, skipping over her conversation with Ben at the police station and jumping right into the interview she had granted Delia Wofford. For all of Charlie’s sphere bullshit, she was right about the passage of time sharpening perspective. Again, it was the certainty that had changed. She would have to amend parts of the statement she had made to the GBI before signing off on it.
An alert chirped on her computer.
[email protected]: Mindy Zowada has accepted your friend request!
Charlie expanded the girl’s Facebook page. Mindy’s banner had been changed to a single burning candle fluttering in the wind.
“Oh for fucksakes,” Charlie mumbled, scrolling down to the posts.
Six minutes ago, Mindy Zowada had written:
idk what to do i am so sad about this thot kelly was a good person i guess all we can do is pray?
Funny, considering what the girl thought about Kelly Wilson five years ago.
Charlie scrolled through the replies. The first three concurred with Mindy’s assessment that they were all shocked—shocked!—that the girl they bullied on a school-wide scale had snapped. The fourth reply was the asshole in the bunch, because the point of Facebook was that there was always an asshole who would shit on everything, from an innocent photo of a cat to a video of your kid’s birthday party.
Nate Marcus wrote:
i know what was wrong with her she was a fucking slut that fucked the whole football team so maybe thats why she did it because she has aids
Chase Lovette responded:
aw man they gone hang that bitch she sucked my cock clean off maybe my wikked cum made her do it
Then Alicia Todd supplied:
bitch gonna burn in hell kelly wilson so sorry uuuu!
Charlie had to read the sentence aloud before she guessed that the four “u”s meant “for you.”
She wrote down all the names, thinking Rusty would want to have a word with them. If they had been in Kelly’s class in middle school, at least some of the posters would now be over the age of eighteen, which meant that Rusty would not need their parents’ permission to speak with them.
“Lenore took Ava Wilson to meet her husband.”
The sound of Rusty’s voice made her jump. The noisiest man alive had managed to sneak up on her.
“They wanna be alone for a while, talk this through.” Rusty plopped down on the couch across from her desk. He tapped his hands against his legs. “Don’t know that they can afford a hotel. Guess they’ll sleep in their car. Revolver’s not in the glove box, by the by.”
Charlie looked at the time: 6:38 PM. Time had crawled and then it had sprinted.
She asked, “You didn’t talk to her about innocence?”
“Nope.” He leaned back on the couch, one hand on the cushions, the other still tapping his leg. “Didn’t talk to her about much, to be honest. I wrote down some things for her to show her husband—what to expect in the coming weeks. She thinks the girl’s gonna come home.”
“Like a good little unicorn?”
“Well, Charlie Bear, there’s innocent and there’s not guilty, and there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason in between.” He gave her a wink. “Why don’t you drive your old daddy home?”
Charlotte hated going to the farmhouse, even to drop him off. She hadn’t been inside the HP in years. “Where’s your car?”
“Had to drop it off for service.” He tapped his knee harder. There was a rhythm to the beats now. “Did you figure out why Ben called you this morning?”
Charlie shook her head. “Do you know?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but then grinned instead.
She said, “I can’t deal with your motherfuckery right now, Rusty. Just tell me the truth.”
He groaned as he got up from the couch. “‘Seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.’”
He left before Charlie could find something to throw at him.
She didn’t hurry to meet him at the car because, despite his harried rushing around, Rusty was always late. She printed out a copy of her statement. She emailed a copy to herself in case she wanted to look at it at home. She grabbed a stack of files she needed to work on. She checked the Facebook page again for new posts. Finally, she gathered up her things, locked up her office, and found her father standing outside the back door smoking a cigarette.
“Such a scowl on your pretty face,” he said, grinding the cigarette on the heel of his shoe and dropping the butt into his coat pocket. “You’re gonna get those same lines around your mouth that your grandmama had.”
Charlie tossed her bag into the back seat of her car and got in. She waited for Rusty to lock up the building. He brought the trace of cigarette smoke with him. By the time she pulled onto the road, she might as well have been inside a Camel factory.
She rolled down the window, already annoyed that she had to go to the farmhouse. “I’m not saying anything about how stupid it is to smoke after having two heart attacks and open-heart surgery.”
“That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.”
Charlie reached into the back seat and found the printout of her statement. “Read this. Silent car until the HP.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rusty found his reading glasses in his pocket. He turned on the dome light. His foot tapped as he read the first paragraph. And then his foot stopped tapping.
She could tell from the heat on the side of her face that he was staring at her.
Charlie said, “All right. I’ll own it. I don’t know the guy’s first name.”
The pages fluttered as Rusty’s hand dropped to his lap.
She looked at him. He had taken off his reading glasses. Nothing was tapping or clapping or jumping. He was staring out the window, silent, his gaze fixed on the distance.
She asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Headache.”
Her father never complained about real ailments. “Is it about the guy?” Rusty said nothing, so she asked, “Are you mad at me about the guy?”
“Of course not.”
Charlie felt anxious. For all of her bluster, she could not abide disappointing her father. “I’ll get his name tomorrow.”
“Not your job.” Rusty tucked his glasses into his shirt pocket. “Unless you plan to keep seeing him?”
Charlie sensed an odd weight behind his question. “Would it matter?”
Rusty didn’t answer. He was staring out the window again.
She said, “You need to start humming or making stupid jokes or I’m going to take you to the hospital so they can make sure nothing’s wrong with your heart.”
“It’s not my heart I’m worried about.” The statement came across as hokey, absent his usual flourishes. He asked, “What happened between you and Ben?”
Charlie’s foot almost slipped off the gas.
In nine months, Rusty had not asked her this question. She had waited five days to tell him that Ben had left. Charlie was standing in his office doorway. She had planned to relay to her father the fact of Ben leaving, nothing more, which was exactly what she’d done. But then Rusty had nodded curtly, like she was reminding him to get a haircut, and his ensuing silence had brought out a sort of verbal diarrhea that Charlie hadn’t experienced since the ninth grade. Her mouth would not stop moving. She’d told Rusty that she hoped Ben would be home by the weekend. That she hoped he would return her calls, her texts, her voicemails, the note she had left on the windshield of his car.
Finally, probably to shut her up, Rusty had quoted the first stanza from Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
“Dad,” Charlie said, but she couldn’t think of anything more to say. An oncoming car’s headlights flashed into her eyes. Charlotte looked in her rear-view mirror, watching the red tail-lights recede. She didn’t want to, but she told Rusty, “It wasn’t one thing. It was a lot of things.”
He said, “Maybe the question is, how are you going to fix it?”
She could see now that talking about this was a mistake. “Why do you assume I’m the only one who can fix it?”
“Because Ben would never cheat on you or do anything to purposefully hurt you, so it must be something that you did or are not doing.”
Charlie bit her lip too hard.
“This man you’re seeing—”
“There’s no seeing,” she snapped. “It happened once, and it was the first and only time, and I don’t appreciate—”
“Is it because of the miscarriage?”
Charlie’s breath caught in her chest. “That was three years ago.” And six. And thirteen. “Besides, Ben would never be that cruel.”
“That’s true, Ben would not be cruel.”
She wondered at his comment. Was he implying that Charlie would be?
Rusty sighed. He curled the stack of papers in his hand. His foot tapped the floorboard twice. He said, “You know, I’ve had a long, long time to think about this, and I think what I loved most about your mother was that she was a hard woman to love.”
Charlie felt the sting of the implied comparison.
“Her problem, her only problem, if you ask the man who worshipped her, was that she was too damn smart.” He tapped his foot along with the last three words to add emphasis. “Gamma knew everything, and she could tell you without having to give it a moment’s worth of thinking. Like the square root of three. Just off the top of her head, she’d say … well, hell, I don’t know the answer, but she’d say—”
“One point seven-three.”
“Right, right,” he said. “Or someone would ask, say, what’s the most common bird on earth?”
Charlie sighed. “The chicken.”
“The deadliest thing on earth?”
“Mosquito.”
“Australia’s number one export?”
“Uh … iron ore?” She furrowed her brow. “Dad, where is this going?”
“Let me ask you this: what were my contributions to that little exchange we just had?”
Charlie couldn’t follow. “Dad, I’m too tired for riddles.”
“A visual aid—” He played at the window button, rolling it down a fraction, then up a fraction, then down, then up.
She said, “Okay, your contributions are to annoy me and break my car.”
“Charlotte, let me give you the answer.”
“Okay.”
“No, darling. Listen to what I’m saying. Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you’ve got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.”
She chewed her lip again.
“We return to our visual aid.” Rusty pressed the window button again, but held it this time. The glass slid all the way down. Then he pressed in the other direction and the window rolled back up. “Nice and easy. Back and forth. Like you’d volley a ball on the tennis court, except this way I don’t have to run around a tennis court to show you.”
Charlie heard him tap his foot along with the car blinker as she took a right onto the farmhouse driveway. “You really should’ve been a marriage counselor.”
“I tried, but for some reason, none of the women would get into the car with me.”
He nudged her with his elbow, until she reluctantly smiled.
He said, “I remember one time your mama said to me—she said, ‘Russell, I’ve got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.’”
Charlie felt a weird pang in her heart, because that sounded exactly like the kind of announcement Gamma would make. “Was she happy?”
“I think she was getting there.” He blew out a wheezy breath. “She was inscrutable. She was beautiful. She was—”
“Goat fucker?” The Subaru’s lights showed the broad side of the farmhouse. Someone had spray-painted GOAT FUCKER across the white clapboard in giant letters.
“Funny thing about that,” Rusty said. “Now, the goat, that’s been there a week or two. The fucker just showed up today.” He slapped his knee. “Damn efficient of ’em, don’t you think? I mean, the goat’s already there. No need to pull out the Shakespeare.”
“You need to call the police.”
“Hell, honey, the police probably did it.”
Charlie pulled the car close to the kitchen door. The floodlights came on. They were so bright that she could see the individual weeds in the overgrown yard.
She didn’t want to, but she offered: “I should go with you to make sure there’s no one inside.”
“Nope.” He threw open the door and jumped out. “Be sure to bring your umbrella tomorrow. I am extremely certain about the rain.”
She watched his jaunty walk to the house. He stood on the porch where all those years ago Charlie and Sam had left their socks and sneakers. Rusty unlocked the two locks and threw open the door. Instead of going inside, he turned to salute her, well aware that he was standing between the GOAT and the FUCKER.
He shouted, “‘What’s done cannot be undone! And now, to bed, to bed, to—’”
Charlie threw the car into reverse.
There was no need to pull out the Shakespeare.