Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Copyright © Karin Slaughter 2017

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2018. Cover photographs © Stephen Carroll/Arcangel Images

Excerpt from letter “To A” – Flannery O’Connor

Copyright © 1979 by Regina O’Connor

Reprinted by permission of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust via Harold Matson Co., Inc. All rights reserved.

Dr Seuss quotation from an interview in the L.A. Times reproduced by kind permission of the Dr Seuss estate

Karin Slaughter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008150761

Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008150785

Version: 2018-09-24

Epigraph

“… what you call my struggle to submit … is not struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest.”

–Flannery O’Connor

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Thursday, March 16, 1989

What Happened to Samantha

28 Years Later

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

What Happened to Charlotte

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

What Really Happened to Charlie

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

What Happened to Sam

Acknowledgments

Cant’t wait for the next book from internationally-bestselling author Karin Slaughter?

About the Author

Also by Karin Slaughter

About the Publisher

Thursday, March 16, 1989

WHAT HAPPENED TO SAMANTHA

Samantha Quinn felt the stinging of a thousand hornets inside her legs as she ran down the long, forlorn driveway toward the farmhouse. The sound of her sneakers slapping bare earth bongoed along with the rapid thumps of her heart. Sweat had turned her ponytail into a thick rope that whipped at her shoulders. The twigs of delicate bones inside her ankles felt ready to snap.

She ran harder, choking down the dry air, sprinting into the pain.

Up ahead, Charlotte stood in their mother’s shadow. They all stood in their mother’s shadow. Gamma Quinn was a towering figure: quick blue eyes, short dark hair, skin as pale as an envelope, and with a sharp tongue just as prone to inflicting tiny, painful cuts in inconvenient places. Even from a distance, Samantha could see the thin line of Gamma’s disapproving lips as she studied the stopwatch in her hand.

The ticking seconds echoed inside Samantha’s head. She pushed herself to run faster. The tendons cording through her legs sent out a high-pitched wail. The hornets moved into her lungs. The plastic baton felt slippery in her hand.

Twenty yards. Fifteen. Ten.

Charlotte locked into position, turning her body away from Samantha, looking straight ahead, then started to run. She blindly stretched her right arm back behind her, waiting for the snap of the baton into the palm of her hand so that she could run the next relay.

This was the blind pass. The handoff took trust and coordination, and just like every single time for the last hour, neither one of them was up to the challenge. Charlotte hesitated, glancing back. Samantha lurched forward. The plastic baton skidded up Charlotte’s wrist, following the red track of broken skin the same as it had twenty times before.

Charlotte screamed. Samantha stumbled. The baton dropped. Gamma let out a loud curse.

“That’s it for me.” Gamma tucked the stopwatch into the bib pocket of her overalls. She stomped toward the house, the soles of her bare feet red from the barren yard.

Charlotte rubbed her wrist. “Asshole.”

“Idiot.” Samantha tried to force air into her shaking lungs. “You’re not supposed to look back.”

“You’re not supposed to rip open my arm.”

“It’s called a blind pass, not a freak-out pass.”

The kitchen door slammed shut. They both looked up at the hundred-year-old farmhouse, which was a sprawling, higgledy-piggledy monument to the days before licensed architects and building permits. The setting sun did nothing to soften the awkward angles. Not much more than an obligatory slap of white paint had been applied over the years. Tired lace curtains hung in the streaked windows. The front door was bleached a driftwoody gray from over a century of North Georgia sunrises. There was a sag in the roofline, a physical manifestation of the weight that the house had to carry now that the Quinns had moved in.

Two years and a lifetime of discord separated Samantha from her thirteen-year-old little sister, but she knew in this moment at least that they were thinking the same thing: I want to go home.

Home was a red-brick ranch closer to town. Home was their childhood bedrooms that they had decorated with posters and stickers and, in Charlotte’s case, green Magic Marker. Home had a tidy square of grass for a front yard, not a barren, chickenscratched patch of dirt with a driveway that was seventy-five yards long so that you could see who was coming.

None of them had seen who was coming at the red-brick house.

Only eight days had passed since their lives had been destroyed, but it felt like forever ago. That night, Gamma, Samantha and Charlotte had walked up to the school for a track meet. Their father was at work because Rusty was always at work.

Later, a neighbor recalled an unfamiliar black car driving slowly up the street, but no one had seen the Molotov cocktail fly through the bay window of the red-brick house. No one had seen the smoke billowing out of the eaves or the flames licking at the roof. By the time an alarm was raised, the red-brick house was a smoldering black pit.

Clothes. Posters. Diaries. Stuffed animals. Homework. Books. Two goldfish. Lost baby teeth. Birthday money. Purloined lipsticks. Secreted cigarettes. Wedding photos. Baby photos. A boy’s leather jacket. A love letter from that same boy. Mix tapes. CDs and a computer and a television and home.

“Charlie!” Gamma stood on the stoop outside the kitchen doorway. Her hands were on her hips. “Come set the table.”

Charlotte turned to Samantha and said, “Last word!” before she jogged toward the house.

“Dipshit,” Samantha muttered. You didn’t get the last word on something just by saying the words “last word.”

She moved more slowly toward the house on rubbery legs, because she wasn’t the moron who couldn’t reach back and wait for a baton to be slapped into her hand. She did not understand why Charlotte could not learn the simple handoff.

Samantha left her shoes and socks beside Charlotte’s on the kitchen stoop. The air inside the house was dank and still. Unloved, was the first adjective that popped into Samantha’s head when she walked through the door. The previous occupant, a ninety-six-year-old bachelor, had died in the downstairs bedroom last year. A friend of their father was letting them live in the farmhouse until things were worked out with the insurance company. If things could be worked out. Apparently, there was a disagreement as to whether or not their father’s actions had invited arson.

A verdict had already been rendered in the court of public opinion, which is likely why the owner of the motel they’d been staying at for the last week had asked them to find other accommodations.

Samantha slammed the kitchen door because that was the only way to make sure it closed. A pot of water sat idle on the olive-green stove. A box of spaghetti lay unopened on the brown laminate counter. The kitchen felt stuffy and humid, the most unloved space in the house. Not one item in the room lived in harmony with the others. The old-timey refrigerator farted every time you opened the door. A bucket under the sink shivered of its own accord. There was an embarrassment of mismatched chairs around the trembly chipboard table. The bowed plaster walls were spotted white where old photos had once hung.

Charlotte stuck out her tongue as she tossed paper plates onto the table. Samantha picked up one of the plastic forks and flipped it into her sister’s face.

Charlotte gasped, but not from indignation. “Holy crap, that was amazing!” The fork had gracefully somersaulted through the air and wedged itself between the crease of her lips. She grabbed the fork and offered it to Samantha. “I’ll wash the dishes if you can do that twice in a row.”

Samantha countered, “You toss it into my mouth once, and I’ll wash dishes for a week.”

Charlotte squinted one eye and took aim. Samantha was trying not to dwell on how stupid it was to invite her little sister to throw a fork in her face when Gamma walked in carrying a large cardboard box.

“Charlie, don’t throw utensils at your sister. Sam, help me look for that frying pan I bought the other day.” Gamma dropped the box onto the table. The outside was marked EVERYTHING $1 EA. There were dozens of partially unpacked boxes scattered through the house. They created a labyrinth through the rooms and hallways, all filled with thrift store donations that Gamma had bought for pennies on the dollar.

“Think of the money we’re saving,” Gamma had proclaimed, holding up a faded purple Church Lady T-shirt that read “Well, Isn’t That SPE-CIAL?”

At least that’s what Samantha thought the shirt said. She was too busy hiding in the corner with Charlotte, mortified that their mother expected them to wear other people’s clothes. Other people’s socks. Even other people’s underwear until thank God their father had put his foot down.

“For Chrissakes,” Rusty had yelled at Gamma. “Why not just sew us all up in sackcloth and be done with it?”

To which Gamma had seethed, “Now you want me to learn how to sew?”

Her parents argued about new things now because there were no longer any old things to argue about. Rusty’s pipe collection. His hats. His dusty law books splayed all over the house. Gamma’s journals and research papers with red lines and circles and notations. Her Keds kicked off by the front door. Charlotte’s kites. Samantha’s hair clips. Rusty’s mother’s frying pan was gone. The green crockpot Gamma and Rusty had gotten for a wedding present was gone. The burnt-smelling toaster oven was gone. The owl kitchen clock with the eyes that went back and forth. The hooks where they left their jackets. The wall that the hooks were mounted to. Gamma’s station wagon, which stood like a dinosaur fossil in the blackened cavern that had once been the garage.

The farmhouse contained five rickety chairs that had not been sold in the bachelor farmer’s estate sale, an old kitchen table that was too cheap to be called an antique and a large chiffarobe wedged into a small closet that their mother said they’d have to pay Tom Robinson a nickel to bust up.

Nothing hung in the chiffarobe. Nothing was folded into the keeping room drawers or placed on high shelves in the pantry.

They had moved into the farmhouse two days ago, but hardly any boxes had been unpacked. The hallway off the kitchen was a maze of mislabeled containers and stained brown paper bags that could not be emptied until the cabinets were cleaned, and the cabinets would not be cleaned until Gamma forced them to do it. The mattresses upstairs rested on bare floors. Overturned crates held cracked lamps to read by and the books that they read were not treasured possessions but on loan from the Pikeville public library.

Every night, Samantha and Charlotte hand-washed their running shorts and sports bras and ankle socks and Lady Rebels Track & Field T-shirts because these were among their few, precious possessions that had escaped the flames.

“Sam.” Gamma pointed to the air conditioner in the window. “Turn that thing on so we can get some air moving in here.”

Samantha studied the large, metal box before finding the ON button. Motors churned. Cold air with a tinge of wet fried chicken hissed through the vent. Samantha stared out the window at the side yard. A rusted tractor was near the dilapidated barn. Some unknown farming implement was half-buried in the ground beside it. Her father’s Chevette was caked in dirt, but at least it wasn’t melted to the garage floor like her mother’s station wagon.

She asked Gamma, “What time are we supposed to pick up Daddy from work?”

“He’ll get a ride from somebody at the courthouse.” Gamma glanced at Charlotte, who was happily whistling to herself as she tried to fold a paper plate into an airplane. “He has that case.”

That case.

The words bounced around inside Samantha’s head. Her father always had a case, and there were always people who hated him for it. There was not one low-life alleged criminal in Pikeville, Georgia, that Rusty Quinn would not represent. Drug dealers. Rapists. Murderers. Burglars. Car jackers. Pedophiles. Kidnappers. Bank robbers. Their case files read like pulp novels that always ended the same, bad way. Folks in town called Rusty the Attorney for the Damned, which was also what people had called Clarence Darrow, though to Samantha’s knowledge, no one had ever firebombed Clarence Darrow’s house for freeing a murderer from death row.

That was what the fire had been about.

Ezekiel Whitaker, a black man wrongly convicted of murdering a white woman, had walked out of prison the same day that a burning bottle of kerosene had been thrown through the Quinns’ bay window. In case the message wasn’t clear enough, the arsonist had also spray-painted the words NIGGER LOVER on the mouth of the driveway.

And now, Rusty was defending a man who’d been accused of kidnapping and raping a nineteen-year-old girl. White man, white girl, but still, tempers were running high because he was a white man from a trashy family and she was a white girl from a good one. Rusty and Gamma never openly discussed the case, but the details of the crime were so lurid that whispers around town had seeped in under the front door, mingled through the air vents, buzzed into their ears at night when they were trying to sleep.

Penetration with a foreign object.

Unlawful confinement.

Crimes against nature.

There were photographs in Rusty’s files that even nosy Charlotte knew better than to seek out, because some of the photos were of the girl hanging in the barn outside her family’s house because what the man had done to her was too horrible to live with, so she had taken her own life.

Samantha went to school with the dead girl’s brother. He was two years older than Samantha, but like everyone else, he knew who her father was and walking down the locker-lined hallway was like walking through the red-brick house while the flames stripped away her skin.

The fire hadn’t only taken her bedroom and her clothes and her purloined lipsticks. Samantha had lost the boy to whom the leather jacket had belonged, the friends who used to invite her to parties and movies and sleepovers. Even her beloved track coach who’d trained Samantha since sixth grade had started making excuses about not having enough time to work with her anymore.

Gamma had told the principal that she was keeping the girls out of school and track practice so that they could help unpack, but Samantha knew that it was because Charlotte had come home crying every day since the fire.

“Well, shit.” Gamma closed the cardboard box, giving up on the frying pan. “I hope you girls don’t mind being vegetarian tonight.”

Neither of them minded because it didn’t really matter. Gamma was an aggressively terrible cook. She resented recipes. She was openly hostile toward spices. Like a feral cat, she instinctively bristled against any domestication.

Harriet Quinn wasn’t called Gamma out of a precocious child’s inability to pronounce the word “Mama,” but because she held two doctorates, one in physics and one in something equally brainy that Samantha could never remember but, if she had to guess, had to do with gamma rays. Her mother had worked for NASA, then moved to Chicago to work at Fermilab before returning to Pikeville to take care of her dying parents. If there was a romantic story about how Gamma had given up her promising scientific career to marry a small-town lawyer, Samantha had never heard it.

“Mom.” Charlotte plopped down at the table, head in her hands. “My stomach hurts.”

Gamma asked, “Don’t you have homework?”

“Chemistry.” Charlotte looked up. “Can you help me?”

“It’s not rocket science.” Gamma dumped the spaghetti noodles into the pot of cold water on the stove. She twisted the knob to turn on the gas.

Charlotte crossed her arms low on her waist. “Do you mean, it’s not rocket science, so I should be able to figure it out on my own, or do you mean, it’s not rocket science, and that is the only science that you know how to perform, and so therefore you cannot help me?”

“There were too many conjunctions in that sentence.” Gamma used a match to light the gas. A sudden woosh singed the air. “Go wash your hands.”

“I believe I had a valid question.”

“Now.”

Charlotte groaned dramatically as she stood from the table and loped down the long hallway. Samantha heard a door open, then close, then another open, then close.

“Fudge!” Charlotte bellowed.

There were five doors off the long hallway, none of them laid out in any way that made sense. One door led to the creepy basement. One led to the chiffarobe. One of the middle doors inexplicably led to the tiny downstairs bedroom where the bachelor had died. Another led to the pantry. The remaining door led to the bathroom, and even after two days, none of them could quite retain the location in their long-term memory.

“Found it!” Charlotte called, as if they had all been breathlessly waiting.

Gamma said, “Grammar aside, she’s going to be a fine lawyer one day. I hope. If that girl doesn’t get paid to argue, she’s not going to get paid at all.”

Samantha smiled at the thought of her sloppy, disorganized sister wearing a blazer and carrying a briefcase. “What am I going to be?”

“Anything you want, my girl, just don’t do it here.”

This theme was coming up more often lately: Gamma’s desire for Samantha to move out, to get away, to do anything but whatever it was that women did here.

Gamma had never fit in with the Pikeville mothers, even before Rusty’s work had turned them into pariahs. Neighbors, teachers, people in the street, all had an opinion about Gamma Quinn, and it was seldom a positive one. She was too smart for her own good. She was a difficult woman. She didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut. She refused to fit in.

When Samantha was little, Gamma had taken up running. As with everything else, she had been athletic before it was popular, running marathons on the weekends, doing her Jane Fonda tapes in front of the television. It wasn’t just her athletic prowess that people found off-putting. You could not beat her at chess or Trivial Pursuit or even Monopoly. She knew all the questions on Jeopardy. She knew when to use who or whom. She could not abide misinformation. She disdained organized religion. In social situations, she had the strange habit of spouting obscure facts.

Did you know that pandas have enlarged wrist bones?

Did you know that scallops have rows of eyes along their mantles?

Did you know that the granite inside New York’s Grand Central Terminal gives off more radiation than what’s deemed acceptable at a nuclear power plant?

If Gamma was happy, if she enjoyed her life, if she was pleased with her children, if she loved her husband, were stray, unmatched pieces of information in the thousand-piece puzzle that was their mother.

“What’s taking your sister so long?”

Samantha leaned back in the chair and looked down the hall. All five doors were still closed. “Maybe she flushed herself down the toilet.”

“There’s a plunger in one of those boxes.”

The phone rang, a distinct jangling of a bell inside the old-fashioned rotary telephone on the wall. They’d had a cordless phone in the red-brick house, and an answering machine to screen all the calls that came in. The first time Samantha had ever heard the word “fuck” was on the answering machine. She was with her friend Gail from across the street. The phone was ringing as they walked through the front door, but Samantha had been too late to answer, so the machine had done the honors.

“Rusty Quinn, I will fuck you up, son. Do you hear me? I will fucking kill you, and rape your wife, and skin your daughters like I’m dressing a fucking deer, you fucking bleeding heart piece of shit.”

The phone rang a fourth time. Then a fifth.

“Sam.” Gamma’s tone was stern. “Don’t let Charlie answer that.”

Samantha stood from the table, leaving unsaid the “what about me?” She picked up the receiver and pressed it to her ear. Automatically, her chin tucked in, her jaw set, waiting for a punch. “Hello?”

“Hey there, Sammy-Sam. Lemme speak to your mama.”

“Daddy.” Samantha sighed out his name. And then she saw Gamma give a tight shake of her head. “She just went upstairs to take a bath.” Samantha realized too late that this was the same excuse she had given hours ago. “Do you want me to have her call you?”

Rusty said, “I feel our Gamma has been overly attentive to hygiene lately.”

“You mean since the house burned down?” The words slipped out before Samantha could catch them. The insurance agent at Pikeville Fire and Casualty wasn’t the only person who blamed Rusty Quinn for the fire.

Rusty chuckled. “Well, I appreciate you holding that back as long as you did.” His lighter clicked into the phone. Apparently, her father had forgotten about swearing on a stack of Bibles that he would quit smoking. “Now, listen, hon, tell Gamma when she gets out of the tub that I’m gonna have the sheriff send a car over.”

“The sheriff?” Samantha tried to convey her panic to Gamma, but her mother kept her back turned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, sugar. It’s just that they never caught that bad old fella who burned down the house, and today, another innocent man has gone free, and some people don’t like that, either.”

“You mean the man who raped that girl who killed herself?”

“The only people who know what happened to that girl are her, whoever committed the crime, and the Lord God in heaven. I don’t presume to be any of these people and I don’t opine that you should, either.”

Samantha hated when her father put on his country-lawyer-making-a-closing-argument voice. “Daddy, she hanged herself in a barn. That’s a proven fact.”

“Why is my life is riddled with contrary females?” Rusty put his hand over the phone and spoke to someone else. Samantha could hear a woman’s husky laugh. Lenore, her father’s secretary. Gamma had never liked her.

“All right now.” Rusty was back on the line. “You still there, honey?”

“Where else would I be?”

Gamma said, “Hang up the phone.”

“Baby.” Rusty blew out some smoke. “Tell me what you need me to do to make this better and I will do it immediately.”

An old lawyer’s trick; make the other person solve the problem. “Daddy, I—”

Gamma slammed her fingers down on the hook, ending the call.

“Mama, we were talking.”

Gamma’s fingers stayed hooked on the phone. Instead of explaining herself, she said, “Consider the etymology of the phrase ‘hang up the phone.’” She pulled the receiver from Samantha’s hand and hung it on the hook. “So, ‘pick up the phone’ even ‘off the hook,’ start to make sense. And of course you know the hook is a lever that, when depressed, opens up the circuit, indicating a call can be received.”

“The sheriff’s sending a car,” Samantha said. “Or, I mean, Daddy’s going to ask him to.”

Gamma looked skeptical. The sheriff was no fan of the Quinns. “You need to wash your hands for dinner.”

Samantha knew that there was no sense in trying to force further conversation. Not unless she wanted her mother to find a screwdriver and open the phone to explain the circuitry, which had happened with countless small appliances in the past. Gamma was the only mother on the block who changed the oil in her own car.

Not that they lived on a block anymore.

Samantha tripped on a box in the hallway. She grabbed her toes, holding onto them like she could squeeze out the pain. She had to limp the rest of the way to the bathroom. She passed her sister in the hallway. Charlotte punched her in the arm because that was the kind of thing Charlotte did.

The brat had closed the door, so Samantha had a false start before she found the bathroom. The toilet was low to the ground, installed back when people were shorter than they were now. The shower was a plastic corner unit with black mold growing inside the seams. A ball-peen hammer rested inside the sink. Black cast iron showed where the hammer had been repeatedly dropped into the bowl. Gamma had been the one to figure out why. The faucet was so old and rusted that you had to whack the tap handle to keep it from dripping.

“I’ll fix that this weekend,” Gamma had said, setting a reward for herself at the end of what would clearly be a difficult week.

As usual, Charlotte had left a mess in the tiny bathroom. Water pooled on the floor and flecked the mirror. Even the toilet seat was wet. Samantha reached for the roll of paper towels hanging on the wall, then changed her mind. From the beginning, the house had felt temporary, but now that her father had pretty much said he was sending the sheriff because it might get firebombed like the last one, cleaning seemed like a waste of time.

“Dinner!” Gamma called from the kitchen.

Samantha splashed water on her face. Her hair felt gritty. Streaks of red coated her calves and arms where clay had mixed in with her sweat. She wanted to soak in a hot bath, but there was only one bathtub in the house, claw-footed with a dark rust-colored ring around the lip from where the previous occupant had for decades sloughed the earth from his skin. Even Charlotte wouldn’t get in the tub, and Charlotte was a pig.

“It feels too sad in here,” her sister had said, slowly backing out of the upstairs bathroom.

The tub was not the only thing that Charlotte found unsettling. The spooky, damp basement. The creepy, bat-filled attic. The creaky closet doors. The bedroom where the bachelor farmer had died.

There was a photo of the bachelor farmer in the bottom drawer of the chiffarobe. They had found it this morning on the pretense of cleaning. Neither dared to touch it. They had stared down at the lonesome, round face of the bachelor farmer and felt overwhelmed by something sinister, though the photo was just a typical depression-era farm scene with a tractor and a mule. Samantha felt haunted by the sight of the farmer’s yellow teeth, though how something could look yellow in a black-and-white photo was a mystery.

“Sam?” Gamma stood in the bathroom doorway, looking at their reflections in the mirror.

No one had ever mistaken them for sisters, but they were clearly mother and child. They shared the same strong jawline and high cheekbones, the same arch to their eyebrows that most people took for aloofness. Gamma wasn’t beautiful, but she was striking, with dark, almost black hair and light blue eyes that sparkled with delight when she found something particularly funny or ridiculous. Samantha was old enough to remember a time when her mother took life a lot less seriously.

Gamma said, “You’re wasting water.”

Samantha tapped the faucet closed with the small hammer and dropped it back into the sink. She heard a car pulling up the driveway. The sheriff’s man, which was surprising because Rusty rarely followed through on his promises.

Gamma stood behind her. “Are you still sad about Peter?”

The boy whose leather jacket had burned in the fire. The boy who had written Samantha a love letter, but would no longer look her in the eye when they passed each other in the school hallway.

Gamma said, “You’re pretty. Do you know that?”

Samantha saw her cheeks blush in the mirror.

“Prettier than I ever was.” Gamma stroked Samantha’s hair back with her fingers. “I wish that my mother had lived long enough to meet you.”

Samantha rarely heard about her grandparents. From what she could gather, they had never forgiven Gamma for moving away to go to college. “What was Grandma like?”

Gamma smiled, her mouth awkwardly navigating the expression. “Pretty like Charlie. Very clever. Relentlessly happy. Always bubbling up with something to do. The kind of person that people just liked.” She shook her head. With all of her degrees, Gamma still had not deciphered the science of likability. “She had streaks of gray in her hair before she turned thirty. She said it was because her brain worked so hard, but you know of course that all hair is originally white. It gets melanin through specialized cells called melanocytes that pump pigment into the hair follicles.”

Samantha leaned back into her mother’s arms. She closed her eyes, enjoying the familiar melody of Gamma’s voice.

“Stress and hormones can leech pigmentation, but her life at the time was fairly simple—mother, wife, Sunday school teacher—so we can assume that the gray was due to a genetic trait, which means that either you or Charlie, or both, could have the same thing happen.”

Samantha opened her eyes. “Your hair isn’t gray.”

“Because I go to the beauty parlor once a month.” Her laughter tapered off too quickly. “Promise me you’ll always take care of Charlie.”

“Charlotte can take care of herself.”

“I’m serious, Sam.”

Samantha felt her heart tremble at Gamma’s insistent tone. “Why?”

“Because you’re her big sister and that’s your job.” She gripped both of Samantha’s hands in her own. Her gaze was steady in the mirror. “We’ve had a rough patch, my girl. I won’t lie and say it’s going to get better. Charlie needs to know that she can depend on you. You have to put that baton firmly in her hand every time, no matter where she is. You find her. Don’t expect her to find you.”

Samantha felt her throat clench. Gamma was talking about something else now, something more serious than a relay race. “Are you going away?”

“Of course not.” Gamma scowled. “I’m only telling you that you need to be a useful person, Sam. I really thought you were past that silly, dramatic teenager stage.”

“I’m not—”

“Mama!” Charlotte yelled.

Gamma turned Samantha around. She put her calloused hands on either side of her daughter’s face. “I’m not going anywhere, kiddo. You can’t get rid of me that easily.” She kissed her nose. “Give that faucet another whack before you come to supper.”

“Mom!” Charlotte screamed.

“Good Lord,” Gamma complained as she walked out of the bathroom. “Charlie Quinn, do not shriek at me like a street urchin.”

Samantha picked up the little hammer. The slim wooden handle was perpetually wet, like a dense sponge. The round head was rusted the same red as the front yard. She tapped the faucet and waited to make sure no more water dripped out.

Gamma called, “Samantha?”

Samantha felt her brow furrow. She turned toward the open door. Her mother never called her by her full name. Even Charlotte had to suffer through being called Charlie. Gamma had told them that one day they would appreciate being able to pass. She’d gotten more papers published and funding approved by signing her name as Harry than she’d ever gotten by signing it as Harriet.

“Samantha.” Gamma’s tone was cold, more like a warning. “Please ensure the faucet valve is closed and quickly make your way into the kitchen.”

Samantha looked back at the mirror, as if her reflection could explain to her what was going on. This was not how her mother spoke to them. Not even when she was explaining the difference between a Marcel handle and the spring-loaded lever on her curling iron.

Without thinking, Samantha reached into the sink and wrapped her hand around the small hammer. She held it behind her back as she walked up the long hall toward the kitchen.

All of the lights were on. The sky had grown dark outside. She pictured her running shoes alongside Charlotte’s on the kitchen stoop, the plastic baton left somewhere in the yard. The kitchen table laid with paper plates. Plastic forks and knives.

There was a cough, deep, maybe a man’s. Maybe Gamma’s, because she coughed that way lately, like the smoke from the fire had somehow made its way into her lungs.

Another cough.

The hair on the back of Samantha’s neck prickled to attention.

The back door was at the opposite end of the hall, a halo of dim light encircling the frosted glass. Samantha glanced behind her as she continued up the hall. She could see the doorknob. She pictured herself turning it even as she walked farther away. Every step she took, she asked herself if she was being foolish, or if she should be concerned, or if this was a joke because her mother used to love to play jokes on them, like sticking plastic googly eyes on the milk jug in the fridge or writing “help me, I’m trapped inside a toilet paper factory!” on the inside of the toilet paper roll.

There was only one phone in the house, the rotary dial in the kitchen.

Her father’s pistol was in the kitchen drawer.

The bullets were somewhere in a cardboard box.

Charlotte would laugh at her if she saw the hammer. Samantha tucked it down the back of her running shorts. The metal was cold against the small of her back, the wet handle like a curling tongue. She lifted her shirt to cover the hammer as she walked into the kitchen.

Samantha felt her body go rigid.

This wasn’t a joke.

Two men stood in the kitchen. They smelled of sweat and beer and nicotine. They wore black gloves. Black ski masks covered their faces.

Samantha opened her mouth. The air had thickened like cotton, closing her throat.

One was taller than the other. The short one was heavier. Bulkier. Dressed in jeans and a black button-up shirt. The tall one wore a faded white concert T-shirt, jeans and blue hightop sneakers with the red laces untied. The short one felt more dangerous but it was hard to tell because the only thing Samantha could see behind the masks was their mouths and eyes.

Not that she was looking at their eyes.

Hightop had a revolver.

Black Shirt had a shotgun that was pointed directly at Gamma’s head.

Her hands were raised in the air. She told Samantha, “It’s okay.”

“No it ain’t.” Black Shirt’s voice had the gravelly shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. “Who else is in the house?”

Gamma shook her head. “Nobody.”

“Don’t lie to me, bitch.”

There was a tapping noise. Charlotte was seated at the table, trembling so hard that the chair legs thumped against the floor like a woodpecker tapping a tree.

Samantha looked back down the hall, to the door, the dim halo of light.

“Here.” The man in the blue hightops motioned for Samantha to sit beside Charlotte. She moved slowly, carefully bending her knees, keeping her hands above the table. The wooden handle of the hammer thunked against the seat of the chair.

“What’s that?” Black Shirt’s eyes jerked in her direction.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte whispered. Urine puddled onto the floor. She kept her head down, rocking back and forth. “I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry.”

Samantha took her sister’s hand.

“Tell us what you want,” Gamma said. “We’ll give it to you and then you can leave.”

“What if I want that?” Black Shirt’s beady eyes were trained on Charlotte.

“Please,” Gamma said. “I will do whatever you want. Anything.”

“Anything?” Black Shirt said it in a way that they all understood what was being offered.

“No,” Hightop said. His voice was younger-sounding, nervous or maybe afraid. “We didn’t come for that.” His Adam’s apple jogged beneath the ski mask as he tried to clear his throat. “Where’s your husband?”

Something flashed in Gamma’s eyes. Anger. “He’s at work.”

“Then why’s his car outside?”

Gamma said, “We only have one car because—”

“The sheriff …” Samantha swallowed the last word, realizing too late that she shouldn’t have said it.

Black Shirt was looking at her again. “What’s that, girl?”

Samantha put down her head. Charlotte squeezed her hand. The sheriff, she had started to say. The sheriff’s man would be here soon. Rusty had said they were sending a car, but Rusty said a lot of things that turned out to be wrong.

Gamma said, “She’s just scared. Why don’t we go into the other room? We can talk this out, figure out what you boys want.”

Samantha felt something hard bang against her skull. She tasted the metal fillings in her teeth. Her ears were ringing. The shotgun. He was pressing the barrel to the top of her head. “You said something about the sheriff, girl. I heard you.”

“She didn’t,” Gamma said. “She meant to—”

“Shut up.”

“She just—”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

Samantha looked up as the shotgun swiveled toward Gamma.

Gamma reached out, but slowly, as if she was pushing her hands through sand. They were all suddenly trapped in stop-motion, their movements jerky, their bodies turned to clay. Samantha watched as one by one, her mother’s fingers wrapped around the sawed-off shotgun. Neatly trimmed fingernails. A thick callous on her thumb from holding a pencil.

There was an almost imperceptible click.

A second hand on a watch.

A door latching closed.

A firing pin tapping against the primer in a shotgun shell.

Maybe Samantha heard the click or maybe she intuited the sound because she was staring at Black Shirt’s finger when he pulled back the trigger.

An explosion of red misted the air.

Blood jetted onto the ceiling. Gushed onto the floor. Hot, ropey red tendrils splashed across the top of Charlotte’s head and splattered onto the side of Samantha’s neck and face.

Gamma fell to the floor.

Charlotte screamed.

Samantha felt her own mouth open, but the sound was trapped inside of her chest. She was frozen now. Charlotte’s screams turned into a distant echo. Everything drained of color. They were suspended in black and white, like the bachelor farmer’s picture. Black blood had aerosoled onto the grille of the white air conditioner. Tiny flecks of black mottled the glass in the window. Outside, the night sky was a charcoal gray with a lone pinlight of a tiny, distant star.

Samantha reached up with her fingers to touch her neck. Grit. Bone. More blood because everything was stained with blood. She felt a pulse in her throat. Was it her own heart or pieces of her mother’s heart beating underneath her trembling fingers?

Charlotte’s screams amplified into a piercing siren. The black blood turned crimson on Samantha’s fingers. The gray room blossomed back into vivid, blinding, furious color.

Dead. Gamma was dead. She was never again going to tell Samantha to get away from Pikeville, to yell at her for missing an obvious question on a test, for not pushing herself harder in track, for not being patient with Charlotte, for not being useful in her life.

Samantha rubbed together her fingers. She held a shard of Gamma’s tooth in her hand. Vomit rushed into her mouth. She was blinded by tears. Grief vibrated like a harp string inside her body.

In the blink of an eye, the world had turned upside down.

“Shut up!” Black Shirt slapped Charlotte so hard that she nearly fell out of the chair. Samantha caught her, clinging to her. They were both sobbing, shaking, screaming. This couldn’t be happening. Their mother couldn’t be dead. She was going to open her eyes. She was going to explain to them the workings of the cardiovascular system as she slowly put her body back together.

Did you know that the average heart pumps five liters of blood per minute?

“Gamma,” Samantha whispered. The shotgun blast had opened up her chest, her neck, her face. The left side of her jaw was gone. Part of her skull. Her beautiful, complicated brain. Her arched, aloof eyebrow. No one would explain things to Samantha anymore. No one would care whether or not she understood. “Gamma.”

“Jesus!” Hightop furiously slapped at his chest, trying to brush off the chunks of bone and tissue. “Jesus Christ, Zach!”

Samantha’s head snapped around.

Zachariah Culpepper.

The two words flashed neon in her mind. Then: Grand theft auto. Animal cruelty. Public indecency. Inappropriate contact with a minor.

Charlotte wasn’t the only one who read their father’s case files. For years, Rusty Quinn had saved Zach Culpepper from doing serious time. The man’s unpaid legal bills were a constant source of tension between Gamma and Rusty, especially since the house had burned down. Over twenty thousand dollars was owed, but Rusty refused to go after him.

“Fuck!” Zach had clearly seen Samantha’s flash of recognition. “Fuck!”

“Mama …” Charlotte hadn’t realized that everything had changed. She could only stare at Gamma, her body shaking so hard that her teeth chattered. “Mama, Mama, Mama …”

“It’s all right.” Samantha tried to stroke her sister’s hair but her fingers snagged in the braids of blood and bone.

“It ain’t all right.” Zach wrenched off his gloves and mask. He was a hard-looking man. Acne scars pocked his skin. A spray of red circled his mouth and eyes where the blowback from the shotgun had painted his face. “God dammit! What’d you have to use my name for, boy?”

“I d-didn’t—” Hightop stammered. “I’m sorry.”

“We won’t tell.” Samantha looked down, as if she could pretend she hadn’t seen his face. “We won’t say anything. I promise.”

“Girl, I just blew your mama to bits. You really think you’re walking out of here alive?”

“No,” Hightop said. “That’s not what we came for.”

“I came here to erase some bills, boy.” Zach’s steely gray eyes turreted around the room like a machine gun. “Now I’m thinking it’s me that Rusty Quinn’s gotta pay.”

“No,” Hightop said. “I told you—”

Zach shut him up by jamming the shotgun into his face. “You ain’t seein’ the big picture here. We gotta get outta town, and that takes a hell of a lot of money. Everybody knows Rusty Quinn keeps cash in his house.”

“The house burned down.” Samantha heard the words before she registered that they were coming from her own mouth. “Everything burned down.”

“Fuck!” Zach screamed. “Fuck!” He grabbed Hightop by the arm and dragged him into the hallway. He kept the shotgun pointed in their direction, his finger on the trigger. There was furious whispering back and forth that Samantha could clearly hear, but her brain refused to process the words.

“No!” Charlotte fell to the floor. A trembling hand reached down to hold their mother’s. “Don’t be dead, Mama. Please. I love you. I love you so much.”

Samantha looked up at the ceiling. Red lines criss-crossed the plaster like silly string. Tears flooded down her face, soaked into the collar of her only shirt that had been saved from the fire. She let the grief roll through her body before she forced it back out. Gamma was gone. They were alone in the house with her murderer and the sheriff’s man was not going to come.

Promise me you’ll always take care of Charlie.

“Charlie, get up.” Samantha pulled at her sister’s arm, eyes averted because she couldn’t look at Gamma’s ripped-open chest, the broken ribs that stuck out like teeth.

Did you know that shark teeth are made of scales?

Sam whispered, “Charlie, get up.”

“I can’t. I can’t let—”

Sam wrenched her sister back into the chair. She pressed her mouth to Charlie’s ear and said, “Run when you can.” Her voice was so quiet that it caught in her throat. “Don’t look back. Just run.”

“What’re you two saying?” Zach jammed the shotgun against Sam’s forehead. The metal was hot. Pieces of Gamma’s flesh had seared onto the barrel. She could smell it like meat on the grill. “What did you tell her to do? Make a run for it? Try to get away?”

Charlotte squeaked. Her hand went to her mouth.

Zach asked, “What’d she tell you to do, baby doll?”

Sam’s stomach roiled at the way his tone softened when he talked to her sister.

“Come on, honey.” Zach’s gaze slithered down to Charlie’s small chest, her thin waist. “Ain’t we gonna be friends?”

Sam stuttered out, “S-stop.” She was sweating, shaking. Like Charlie, she was going to lose control of her bladder. The round barrel of the gun felt like a drill burrowing into her skull.

Still, she said, “Leave her alone.”

“Was I talking to you, bitch?” Zach pressed the shotgun against Sam’s head until her chin pointed up. “Was I?”

Sam gripped her hands into tight fists. She had to stop this. She had to protect Charlotte. “You leave us alone, Zachariah Culpepper.” She was shocked by her own defiance. She was terrified, but every ounce of terror was tinged with an overwhelming rage. He had murdered her mother. He was leering at her sister. He had told them both that they weren’t walking out of here. She thought of the hammer tucked in the back of her shorts, pictured it lodging into Zach’s brain. “I know exactly who you are, you fucking pervert.”

He flinched at the word. Anger contorted his features. His hands gripped the shotgun so hard that his knuckles turned white, but his voice was calm when he told her, “I’m gonna peel off your eyelids so you can watch me slice out your sister’s cherry with my knife.”

Her eyes locked with his. The silence that followed the threat was deafening. Sam couldn’t look away. Fear ran like razor blades through her heart. She had never in her life met someone so utterly, soullessly evil.

Charlie began to whimper.

“Zach,” Hightop said. “Come on, man.” He waited. They all waited. “We had a deal, all right?”

Zach didn’t move. None of them moved.

“We had a deal,” Hightop repeated.

“Sure,” Zach broke the silence. He let Hightop take the shotgun from his hands. “A man’s only as good as his word.”

He started to turn away, but then changed his mind. His hand shot out like a whip. He grabbed Sam’s face, fingers gripping her skull like a ball, slamming her back so hard that the chair fell away and her head clanged into the front of the sink.

“You think I’m a pervert now?” His palm crushed her nose. His fingers gouged into her eyes like hot needles. “You got something else to say about me?”

Samantha opened her mouth, but she had no breath to form a scream. Pain ripped through her face as his fingernails cut into her eyelids. She grabbed his thick wrist, blindly kicked out at him, tried to scratch him, to punch him, to stop the pain. Blood wept down her cheeks. Zach’s fingers shook, pressing so hard that Sam could feel her eyeballs flex back into her brain. His fingers curled as he tried to rip off her eyelids. She felt his nails scrape against her bare eyeballs.

“Stop it!” Charlie screamed. “Stop!”

The pressure stopped just as suddenly as it had started.

“Sammy!” Charlie’s breath was hot, panicked. Her hands went to Sam’s face. “Sam? Look at me. Can you see? Look at me, please!”

Carefully, Sam tried to open her eyelids. They were torn, almost shredded. She felt like she was looking through a piece of old lace.

Zach said, “What the fuck is this?”

The hammer. It had fallen out of her shorts.

Zach picked it up off the floor. He examined the wooden handle, then gave Charlie a meaningful look. “Wonder what I can do with this?”

“Enough!” Hightop grabbed the hammer and threw it down the hallway. They all listened to the metal head skip across the hardwood floor.

Zach said, “Just having a little fun, brother.”

“Both of you stand up,” Hightop said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Charlie stayed on the floor. Sam blinked away blood. She could barely see to move. The overhead light was like hot oil in her eyes.

“Help her up,” Hightop told Zach. “You promised, man. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”

Zach yanked Sam’s arm so hard that it almost left the socket. She struggled to her feet, steadying herself against the table. Zach pushed her toward the door. She bumped into a chair. Charlie reached for her hand.

Hightop opened the door. “Go.”

They had no choice but to move. Charlie went first, shuffling sideways to help Sam down the stairs. Outside the bright lights of the kitchen, her eyes stopped throbbing as hard. There was no adjusting to the darkness. Shadows kept falling in and out of her gaze.

They should have been at track practice right now. They had begged Gamma to let them skip for the first times in their lives and now their mother was dead and they were being led out of the house at gunpoint by the man who had come here to erase his legal bills with a shotgun.

“Can you see?” Charlie asked. “Sam, can you see?”

“Yes,” Sam lied, because her vision was strobing like a disco ball, except instead of flashes of light, she was seeing flashes of gray and black.

“This way,” Hightop said, leading them not toward the old pickup truck in the driveway, but into the field behind the farmhouse. Cabbage. Sorghum. Watermelons. That’s what the bachelor farmer had grown. They had found his seed ledger in an otherwise empty upstairs closet. His three hundred acres had been leased to the farm next door, a thousand-acre spread that had been planted at the start of spring.

Sam could feel the freshly planted soil under her bare feet. She leaned into Charlie, who held tight to her hand. With her other hand, Sam reached out blindly, unreasonably afraid that she would run into something in the open field. Every step away from the farmhouse, away from the light, added one more layer of darkness to her vision. Charlie was a blob of gray. Hightop was tall and skinny, like a charcoal pencil. Zach Culpepper was a menacing black square of hate.

“Where are we going?” Charlie asked.

Sam felt the shotgun press into her back.

Zach said, “Keep walking.”

“I don’t understand,” Charlie said. “Why are you doing this?”

Her voice was directed toward Hightop. Like Sam, she understood that the younger man was the weaker one, but that he was also somehow in charge.

Charlie asked, “What did we do to you, mister? We’re just kids. We don’t deserve this.”

“Shut up,” Zach warned. “Both of you shut the fuck up.”

Sam squeezed Charlie’s hand even tighter. She was almost completely blind now. She was going to be blind forever, except forever wasn’t that much longer. At least not for Sam. She made her hand loosen around Charlie’s. She quietly willed her sister to take in their surroundings, to stay alert for the chance to run.

Gamma had shown them a topographical map of the area two days ago, the day they had moved in. She was trying to sell them on country life, pointing out all the areas they could explore. Now, Sam mentally flipped through the highlights, searching for an escape route. The neighbor’s acreage went past the horizon, a clear open plane that would likely lead to a bullet in Charlie’s back if she ran in that direction. Trees bordered the far right side of the property, a dense forest that Gamma warned was probably filled with ticks. There was a creek on the other side of the forest that fed into a tunnel that snaked underneath a weather tower and led to a paved but rarely used road. An abandoned barn half a mile north. Another farm two miles east. A swampy fishing hole. Frogs would be there. Butterflies would be over here. If they were patient, they might see deer in this field. Stay away from the road. Leaves three, quickly flee. Leaves five, stay and thrive.

Please flee, Sam silently begged Charlie. Please don’t look back to make sure I’m following you.

Zach said, “What’s that?”

They all turned around.

“It’s a car,” Charlie said, but Sam could only make out the sparkling headlights slowly traveling down the long driveway to the farmhouse.

The sheriff’s man? Someone driving their father home?

“Shit, they’re gonna make my truck in two seconds.” Zach pushed them toward the forest, using the shotgun like a cattle prod to make them walk faster. “Y’all keep moving or I’ll shoot you right here.”

Right here.

Charlie stiffened at the words. Her teeth started to chatter again. She had finally made the connection. She understood that they were walking to their deaths.

Sam said, “There’s another way out of this.”

She was talking to Hightop, but Zach was the one who snorted.

Sam said, “I’ll do whatever you want.” She heard Gamma’s voice speaking the words alongside her. “Anything.”

“Shit,” Zach said. “You don’t think I’m gonna take what I want anyways, you stupid bitch?”

Sam tried again. “We won’t tell them it was you. We’ll say you had your masks on the entire time and—”

“With my truck in the driveway and your mama dead in the house?” Zach huffed a snort. “Y’all Quinns think you’re so fucking smart, can talk your way outta anything.”

“Listen to me,” Sam begged. “You’ve got to leave town anyway. There’s no reason to kill us, too.” She turned her head toward Hightop. “Please, just think about it. All you have to do is tie us up. Leave us somewhere they won’t find us. You’re going to have to leave town either way. You don’t want more blood on your hands.”

Sam waited for a response. They all waited.

Hightop cleared his throat before finally saying, “I’m sorry.”

Zach’s laughter had an edge of triumph.

Sam couldn’t give up. “Let my sister go.” She had to stop speaking for a moment so she could swallow the saliva in her mouth. “She’s thirteen. Just a kid.”

“Don’t look like no kid to me,” Zach said. “Got them nice high titties.”

“Shut up,” Hightop warned. “I mean it.”

Zach made a sucking noise with his teeth.

“She won’t tell anyone,” Sam had to keep trying. “She’ll say it was strangers. Won’t you, Charlie?”

“Black fella?” Zach asked. “Like the one your daddy got off for murder?”

Charlie spat out, “You mean like he got you off for showing your wiener to a bunch of little girls?”

“Charlie,” Sam begged. “Please, be quiet.”

“Let her speak,” Zach said. “I like it when they got a little fight in ’em.”

Charlie went quiet. She stayed silent as they headed into the woods.

Sam followed closely, racking her brain for an appeal that would persuade the gunmen that they didn’t have to do this. But Zach Culpepper was right. His truck back at the house changed everything.

“No,” Charlie whispered to herself. She did this all of the time, vocalizing an argument she was having in her head.

Please run, Sam silently begged. It’s okay to go without me.

“Move.” Zach shoved the shotgun into her back until Sam walked faster.

Pine needles dug into her feet. They were going deeper into the forest. The air got cooler. Sam closed her eyes, because it was pointless trying to see. She let Charlie guide her through the woods. Leaves rustled. They stepped over fallen trees, walked into a narrow stream that was probably run-off from the farm to the creek.

Run, run, run, Sam silently prayed to Charlie in her head. Please run.

“Sam …” Charlie stopped walking. Her arm gripped Sam around the waist. “There’s a shovel. A shovel.”

Sam didn’t understand. She touched her fingers to her eyelids. Dried blood had caked them shut. She pushed gently, coaxing open her eyes.

Soft moonlight cast a blue glow on the clearing in front of them. There was more than a shovel. A mound of freshly turned earth was piled beside an open hole in the ground.

One hole.

One grave.

Her vision tunneled on the gaping, black void as everything came into focus. This wasn’t a burglary, or an attempt to intimidate away a bunch of legal bills. Everyone knew that the house burning down had put the Quinns in dire financial straits. The fight with the insurance company. The eviction from the motel. The thrift store purchases. Zachariah Culpepper had obviously assumed that Rusty was going to replenish his bank account by forcing non-paying clients to settle their bills. He wasn’t that far off. Gamma had screamed at Rusty the other night about how the twenty thousand dollars Culpepper owed them would go a long way toward making the family solvent again.

Which meant that all of this boiled down to money.

And worse, stupidity, because the outstanding bills would not have died with her father.

Sam felt the reverberations of her earlier rage. She bit her tongue so hard that blood seeped into her mouth. There was a reason Zachariah Culpepper was a lifelong con. As with all of his crimes, the plan was a bad one, poorly executed. Every single blunder had led them to this place. They had dug a grave for Rusty, but since Rusty was late because he was always late, and since today was the one day they had been allowed to skip track practice, now it was meant for Charlie and Sam.

“All right, big boy. Time for you to do your part.” Zach rested the butt of the shotgun on his hip. He pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and slapped it open with one hand. “The guns’ll be too loud. Take this. Right across the throat like you’d do with a pig.”

Hightop did not take the knife.

Zach said, “Come on, like we agreed. You do her. I’ll take care of the little one.”

Hightop still did not move. “She’s right. We don’t have to do this. The plan wasn’t ever to hurt the women. They weren’t even supposed to be here.”

“Say what now?”

Sam grabbed Charlie’s hand. They were distracted. She could run.

Hightop said, “What’s done is done. We don’t have to make it worse by killing more people. Innocent people.”

“Jesus Christ.” Zach closed the knife and shoved it back into his pocket. “We went over this in the kitchen, man. Ain’t like we gotta choice.”

“We can turn ourselves in.”

Zach gripped the shotgun. “Bull. Shit.”

“I’ll turn myself in. I’ll take the blame for everything.”

Sam pushed against Charlie, letting her know it was time to move. Charlie didn’t move. She held tight.

“The hell you will.” Zach thumped Hightop in the chest. “You think I’m gonna go down on a murder charge ’cause you grew a fucking conscience?”

Sam let go of her sister’s hand. She whispered, “Charlie, run.”

“I won’t tell,” Hightop said. “I’ll say it was me.”

“In my got-damn truck?”

Charlie tried to take Sam’s hand again. Sam pulled away, whispering, “Go.”

“Motherfucker.” Zach raised the shotgun, pointing it at Hightop’s chest. “This is what’s gonna happen, son. You’re gonna take my knife and you’re gonna slice open that bitch’s throat, or I will blow a hole in your chest the size of Texas.” He stamped his foot. “Right now.”

Hightop slung up the revolver, pointing it at Zach’s head. “We’re gonna turn ourselves in.”

“Get that fucking gun outta my face, you pansy-ass piece of shit.”

Sam nudged Charlie. She had to move. She had to get out of here. There would only be one chance. She practically begged her sister, “Go.”

Hightop said, “I’ll kill you before I kill them.”

“You ain’t got the balls to pull that trigger.”

“I’ll do it.”

Charlie still wouldn’t budge. Her teeth were chattering again.

“Run,” Sam pleaded. “You have to run.”

“Rich boy piece of shit.” Zach spat on the ground. He went to wipe his mouth, but only as a distraction. He reached out for the revolver. Hightop had anticipated the move. He backhanded the shotgun. Zach was thrown off balance. He couldn’t keep his footing. He fell back, arms flailing.

“Run!” Sam shoved her sister away. “Charlie, go!”

Charlie turned into a blur of motion. Sam started to follow, leg raised, arm bent—

Another explosion.

A flash of light from the revolver.

A sudden vibration in the air.

Sam’s head jerked so violently that her neck cracked. Her body followed in a wild twist. She spun like a top, falling into darkness the same way Alice fell into the rabbit hole.

Do you know how pretty you are?

Sam’s feet hit the ground. She felt her knees absorb the shock.

She looked down.

Her toes were spread flat against a water-soaked hardwood floor.

She looked up to find her reflection staring back from a mirror.

Inexplicably, Sam was at the farmhouse standing at the bathroom sink.

Gamma stood behind her, strong arms wrapped around Sam’s waist. Her mother looked younger, softer, in the mirror. Her eyebrow was arched up as if she’d heard something dubious. This was the woman who’d explained the difference between fission and fusion to a stranger at the grocery store. Who’d devised complicated scavenger hunts that took up all of their Easters.

What were the clues now?

“Tell me,” Sam asked her mother’s reflection. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

Gamma’s mouth opened, but she did not speak. Her face began to age. Sam felt a longing for the mother she would never see grow old. Fine lines spread out from Gamma’s mouth. Crow’s feet around her eyes. The wrinkles deepened. Streaks of gray salted her dark hair. Her jawline grew fuller.

Her skin began to peel away.

White teeth showed through an open hole in her cheek. Her hair turned into greasy white twine. Her eyes grew desiccated. She wasn’t aging.

She was decomposing.

Sam struggled to get away. The smell of death enveloped her: wet earth, fresh maggots burrowing underneath her skin. Gamma’s hands clamped around her face. She made Sam turn around. Fingers reduced to dry bone. Black teeth honed into razor blades as Gamma opened her mouth and screamed, “I told you to get out!”

Sam gasped awake.

Her eyes slit open onto an impenetrable blackness.

Dirt filled her mouth. Wet soil. Pine needles. Her hands were in front of her face. Hot breath bounced against her palms. There was a sound—

Shsh. Shsh. Shsh.

A broom sweeping.

An ax swinging.

A shovel dropping dirt into a grave.

Sam’s grave.

She was being buried alive. The weight of the soil on top of her was like a metal plate.

“I’m sorry.” Hightop’s voice caught around the words. “Please, God, please forgive me.”

The dirt kept coming, the weight turning into a vise that threatened to press the breath right out of her.

Did you know that Giles Corey was the only defendant in the Salem witch trials who was pressed to death?

Tears filled Sam’s eyes, slid down her face. A scream got trapped inside her throat. She couldn’t panic. She couldn’t start yelling or flailing because they would not help her. They would shoot her again. Begging for her life would only speed up the taking of her life.

“Don’t be silly,” Gamma said. “I thought you were past that teenager stage.”

Sam inhaled a shaky breath.

She startled as she realized that air was entering her lungs.

She could breathe!

Her hands were cupped to her face, creating an air pocket inside the dirt. Sam tightened the seal between her palms. She forced her breaths to slow in order to preserve what precious air she had left.

Charlie had told her to do this. Years ago. Sam could picture her sister in her Brownie uniform. Arms and legs like tiny sticks. Her creased yellow shirt and brown vest with all the patches she had earned. She had read aloud from her Adventure handbook at the breakfast table.

“‘If you find yourself caught in an avalanche, do not cry out or open your mouth,’” Charlie had read. “‘Put your hands in front of your face and try to create an airspace as you are coming to a stop.’”

Sam stuck out her tongue, trying to see how far away her hands were. She guessed a quarter of an inch. She flexed her fingers, trying to elongate the pocket of air. There was nothing to move into. The dirt was packed tightly around her hands, almost like cement.

She tried to glean the position of her body. She wasn’t flat on her back. Her left shoulder was pressed to the ground, but she wasn’t fully lying on her side, either. Her hips were turned at an angle to her shoulders. Cold seeped into the back of her running shorts. Her right knee was bent, her left leg was straight.

Torso twist.

A runner’s stretch. Her body had fallen into a familiar position.

Sam tried to shift her weight. She couldn’t move her legs. She tried her toes. Her calf muscles. Her hamstrings.

Nothing.

Sam closed her eyes. She was paralyzed. She would never walk again, run again, move again without assistance. Panic rushed into her chest like a swarm of mosquitos. Running was all that she had. It was who she was. What was the point of trying to survive if she could never use her legs again?

She pressed her face into her hands so that she wouldn’t cry out.

Charlie could still run. Sam had watched her sister bolt toward the forest. It was the last thing she’d seen before the revolver went off. Sam conjured into her mind the image of Charlie sprinting, her spindly legs moving impossibly fast as she flew forward, away, never hesitating, never stopping to look back.

Don’t think about me, Sam begged, the same thing she had told her sister a million times before. Just concentrate on yourself and keep running.

Had Charlie made it? Had she found help? Or had she looked over her shoulder to see if Sam was following and instead found Zachariah Culpepper’s shotgun jammed into her face?

Or worse.

Sam forced the thought from her mind. She saw Charlie running free, getting help, bringing the police back to the grave because she had their mother’s sense of direction and she never got lost and she would remember where her sister was buried.

Sam counted out the beats of her heart until she felt them slow to a less frantic pace.

And then she felt a tickle in her throat.

Everything was filled with dirt—her ears, nose, mouth, lungs. She couldn’t stop the cough that wanted to come out of her mouth. Her lips opened. The reflexive intake of air pulled more dirt into her nose. She coughed again, then again. The third time was so hard that she felt her stomach cramp as her body strained to pull itself into a ball.

Sam felt a jolt in her heart.

Her legs had twitched.

Panic and fear had cut off the vital connections between her brain and her musculature. She had not been paralyzed; she had been terrified, some ancient fight or flight mechanism pushing her out of her own body until she could understand what was happening. Sam felt elation as sensation slowly returned to her lower body. It was as if she was walking into a pool of water. At first, she could feel her toes spreading through the thick earth. Then her ankles were able to bend. Then she felt the tiniest amount of movement in her ankles.

If she could move her feet, what else could she move?

Sam flexed her calves, warming them up. Her quads started to fire. Her knees tensed. She concentrated on her legs, telling herself that they could move until her body sent back the message that yes, her legs could move.

She was not paralyzed. She had a chance.

Gamma always said that Sam had learned how to run before she’d learned how to walk. Her legs were the strongest part of her body.

She could kick her way out.

Sam worked her legs, making infinitesimal motions back and forth, trying to burrow through the heavy layer of dirt. Her breath grew hot in her hands. A dense fog clouded out the panic in her brain. Was she using up too much air? Did it matter? She kept losing track of what she was doing. Her lower body was moving back and forth and sometimes she found herself thinking she was lying on the deck of a tiny boat rocking on the ocean and then she would come to, would realize that she was trapped underground and struggle to move faster, harder, only to be lulled back onto the boat again.

She tried to count: One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi …

Her legs cramped. Her stomach cramped. Everything cramped. Sam made herself stop, if only for a few seconds. The rest was almost as painful as the effort. Lactic acid boiled off her spent muscles, causing her stomach to churn. Her vertebrae had twisted into overtightened bolts that pinched the nerves and shot an electric pain into her neck and legs. Every breath was caught in her hands like a trapped bird.

“‘There is a fifty percent chance of survival,’” Charlie had read from her Adventure book. “‘But only if the victim is found within one hour.’”

Sam didn’t know how long she’d been in the grave. Like losing the red-brick house, like watching her mother die, that had been a lifetime ago.

She tightened her stomach muscles and tried a sideways push-up. Her arm tensed. Her neck strained. The earth pressed back, grinding her shoulder into the wet soil.

She needed more room.

Sam tried to rock her hips. There was an inch of space at first, then two inches, then she could move her waist, her shoulder, her neck, her head.

Was there suddenly more space between her mouth and her hands?

Sam stuck out her tongue again. She felt the tip brush against the gap between her two palms. That was half an inch, at least.

Progress.

She worked on her arms next, shifting them up and down, up and down. There were no inches this time. Centimeters, then millimeters of dirt shifted. She had to keep her hands in front of her face so she could breathe. But then she realized that she had to dig with her hands.

One hour. That was all Charlie had given her. Sam’s time had to be running out. Her palms were hot, bathed in condensation. Her brain was awash in dizziness.

Sam took a last, deep breath.

She pushed her hands away from her face. Her wrists felt like they were going to break as she twisted her hands around. She pressed together her lips, gritted her teeth, and clawed at the ground, furiously trying to dislodge the dirt.

And still the earth pushed back.

Her shoulders ignited in pain. Trapezoids. Rhomboids. Scapulae. Hot irons pierced her biceps. Her fingers felt like they were going to snap. Her nails chipped off. The skin on her knuckles peeled away. Her lungs were going to collapse. She couldn’t keep holding her breath. She couldn’t keep fighting. She was tired. She was alone. Her mother was dead. Her sister was gone. Sam started to yell, first in her head, then through her mouth. She was so angry—furious at her mother for grabbing the shotgun, livid with her father for bringing this hell to their doorstep, pissed at Charlie for not being stronger, and fucking apoplectic that she was going to die in this God damn grave.

Shallow grave.

Cool air wrapped around her fingers.

She had broken through the soil. Less than two feet separated Sam from life and death.

There was no time to rejoice. She had no air in her lungs, no hope unless she could keep digging.

She flicked away debris with her fingers. Leaves. Pine cones. Her murderer had tried to hide the freshly dug earth but he hadn’t counted on the girl inside climbing her way out. She grabbed a handful of dirt, then another, then kept going until she was able to clench her abdominal muscles one last time and leverage herself up.

Sam gagged on the sudden rush of fresh air. She spat out dirt and blood. Her hair was matted. She touched her fingers to the side of her scalp. Her pinky slipped into a tiny hole. The bone was smooth inside the circle. This was where the bullet had gone in. She had been shot in the head.

She had been shot in the head.

Sam took away her hand. She dared not wipe her eyes. She squinted into the distance. The forest was a blur. She saw two fat dots of light floating like lazy bumblebees in front of her face.

She heard the trickling of water, echoing, like through an access tunnel that snaked underneath a weather tower and led to a paved road.

Another pair of lights floated by.

Not bumblebees.

Headlights.

28 Years Later

1

Charlie Quinn walked through the darkened halls of Pikeville middle school with a gnawing sense of trepidation. This wasn’t an early morning walk of shame. This was a walk of deeply held regret. Fitting, since the first time she’d had sex with a boy she shouldn’t have had sex with was inside this very building. The gymnasium, to be exact, which just went to show that her father had been right about the perils of a late curfew.

She gripped the cell phone in her hand as she turned a corner. The wrong boy. The wrong man. The wrong phone. The wrong way because she didn’t know where the hell she was going. Charlie turned around and retraced her steps. Everything in this stupid building looked familiar, but nothing was where she remembered it was supposed to be.

She took a left and found herself standing outside the front office. Empty chairs were waiting for the bad students who would be sent to the principal. The plastic seats looked similar to the ones in which Charlie had whiled away her early years. Talking back. Mouthing off. Arguing with teachers, fellow students, inanimate objects. Her adult self would’ve slapped her teenage self for being such a pain in the ass.

She cupped her hand to the window and peered inside the dark office. Finally, something that looked how it was supposed to look. The high counter where Mrs. Jenkins, the school secretary, had held court. Pennants drooping from the water-stained ceiling. Student artwork taped to the walls. A lone light was on in the back. Charlie wasn’t about to ask Principal Pinkman for directions to her booty call. Not that this was a booty call. It was more of a “Hey, girl, you picked up the wrong iPhone after I nailed you in my truck at Shady Ray’s last night” call.

There was no point in Charlie asking herself what she had been thinking, because you didn’t go to a bar named Shady Ray’s to think.

The phone in her hand rang. Charlie saw the unfamiliar screen saver of a German Shepherd with a Kong toy in its mouth. The caller ID read SCHOOL.

She answered, “Yes?”

“Where are you?” He sounded tense, and she thought of all the hidden dangers that came from screwing a stranger she’d met in a bar: incurable venereal diseases, a jealous wife, a murderous baby mama, an obnoxious Alabama affiliation.

She said, “I’m in front of Pink’s office.”

“Turn around and take your second right.”

“Yep.” Charlie ended the call. She felt herself wanting to puzzle out his tone of voice, but then she told herself that it didn’t matter because she was never going to see him again.

She walked back the way she’d come, her sneakers squeaking on the waxed floor as she made her way down the dark hallway. She heard a snap behind her. The lights had come on in the front office. A hunched old woman who looked suspiciously like the ghost of Mrs. Jenkins shuffled her way behind the counter. Somewhere in the distance, heavy metal doors opened and closed. The beep-whir of the metal detectors swirled into her ears. Someone jangled a set of keys.

The air seemed to contract with each new sound, as if the school was bracing itself for the morning onslaught. Charlie looked at the large clock on the wall. If the schedule was still the same, the first homeroom bell would ring soon, and the kids who had been dropped off early and warehoused in the cafeteria would flood the building.

Charlie had been one of those kids. For a long time, whenever she thought of her father, her mind conjured up the scene of his arm leaning out of the Chevette’s window, freshly lit cigarette between his fingers, as he pulled out of the school parking lot.

She stopped walking.

The room numbers finally caught her attention, and she knew immediately where she was. Charlie touched her fingers to a closed wooden door. Room three, her safe haven. Ms. Beavers had retired eons ago, but the old woman’s voice echoed in Charlie’s ears: “They’ll only get your goat if you show them where you keep your hay.”

Charlie still didn’t know what that meant, exactly. You could extrapolate that it had something to do with the extended Culpepper clan, who had bullied Charlie relentlessly when she’d finally returned to school.

Or, you could take it that, as a girls’ basketball coach named Etta Beavers, the teacher knew what it felt like to be taunted.

There was no one who could give Charlie advice on how to handle the present situation. For the first time since college, she’d had a one-night stand. Or a one-night sit, if it boiled down to the exact position. Charlie wasn’t the type of person who did that sort of thing. She didn’t go to bars. She didn’t drink to excess. She didn’t really make hugely regrettable mistakes. At least not until recently.

Her life had started to unspool back in August of last year. Charlie had spent almost every waking hour since then raveling out mistake after mistake. Apparently, the new month of May was not going to see any improvement. The blunders were now starting before she even got out of bed. This morning, she’d been wide awake on her back, staring up at the ceiling, trying to convince herself that what had happened last night had not happened at all when an unfamiliar ringtone had come from her purse.

She had answered because wrapping the phone in aluminum foil, throwing it into the dumpster behind her office and buying a new phone that would restore from her old phone backup did not occur to her until after she had said hello.

The short conversation that followed was of the kind you would expect between two total strangers: Hello, person whose name I must have asked for but now can’t recall. I believe I have your phone.

Charlie had offered to meet the man at his work because she didn’t want him to know where she lived. Or worked. Or what kind of car she drove. Between his pickup truck and his admittedly exquisite body, she’d thought he’d tell her he was a mechanic or a farmer. Then he’d said that he was a teacher and she’d instantly flashed up a Dead Poets Society kind of thing. Then he’d said he taught middle school and she’d jumped to the unfounded conclusion that he was a pedophile.

“Here.” He stood outside an open door at the far end of the hall.

As if on cue, the overhead fluorescents popped on, bathing Charlie in the most unflattering light possible. She instantly regretted her choice of ratty jeans and a faded, long-sleeved Duke Blue Devils basketball T-shirt.

“Good Lord God,” Charlie muttered. No such problems at the end of the hall.

Mr. I-Can’t-Remember-Your-Name was even more attractive than she remembered. The standard button-down-with-khakis uniform of a middle-school teacher couldn’t hide the fact that he had muscles in places that men in their forties had generally replaced with beer and fried meat. His scraggly beard was more of a five o’clock shadow. The gray at his temples gave him a wizened air of mystery. He had one of those dimples in his chin that you could use to open a bottle.

This was not the type of man Charlie dated. This was the exact type of man that she studiously avoided. He felt too coiled, too strong, too unknowable. It was like playing with a loaded gun.

“This is me.” He pointed to the bulletin board outside his room. Small handprints were traced onto white butcher paper. Purple cut-out letters read MR. HUCKLEBERRY.

“Huckleberry?” Charlie asked.

“It’s Huckabee, actually.” He held out his hand. “Huck.”

Charlie shook his hand, too late realizing that he was asking for his iPhone. “Sorry.” She handed him the phone.

He gave her a crooked smile that had probably sent many a young girl into puberty. “Yours is in here.”

Charlie followed him into the classroom. The walls were adorned with maps, which made sense because he was apparently a history teacher. At least if you believed the sign that said MR. HUCKLEBERRY LOVES WORLD HISTORY.

She said, “I may be a little sketchy on last night, but I thought you said you were a Marine?”

“Not anymore, but it sounds sexier than middle-school teacher.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Joined up when I was seventeen, took my retirement six years ago.” He leaned against his desk. “I was looking for a way to keep serving, so I got my master’s on a GI bill and here we are.”

“I bet you get a lot of tear-stained cards on Valentine’s Day.” Charlie would’ve failed history every single day of her life if her teacher had looked like Mr. Huckleberry.

He asked, “Do you have kids?”

“Not that I know of.” Charlie didn’t return the question. She assumed that someone with kids wouldn’t use a photo of his dog as his screen saver. “You married?”

He shook his head. “Didn’t suit me.”

“It suited me.” She explained, “We’ve been officially separated for nine months.”

“Did you cheat on him?”

“You’d think so, but no.” Charlie ran her finger along the books on the shelf by his desk. Homer. Euripides. Voltaire. Brontë. “You don’t strike me as the Wuthering Heights type.”

He grinned. “Not much talking in the truck.”

Charlie started to return the grin, but regret pulled down the corners of her mouth. In some ways, this easy, flirty banter felt like more of a transgression than the physical act of sex. She bantered with her husband. She asked inane questions of her husband.

And last night, for the first time in her married life, she had cheated on her husband.

Huck seemed to sense her mood shift. “It’s obviously none of my business, but he’s nuts for letting you go.”

“I’m a lot of work.” Charlie studied one of the maps. There were blue pins in most of Europe and some of the Middle East. “You go to all of these places?”

He nodded, but didn’t elaborate.

“Marines,” she said. “Were you a Navy SEAL?”

“Marines can be SEALs but not all SEALs are Marines.”

Charlie was about to tell him that he hadn’t answered the question, but Huck spoke first.

“Your phone started ringing at o’dark thirty.”

Her heart flipped in her chest. “You didn’t answer?”

“Nah, it’s much more fun trying to figure you out from your caller ID.” He pushed himself up on the desk. “B2 called around five this morning. I’m assuming that’s your hook-up at the vitamin shop.”

Charlie’s heart flipped again. “That’s Riboflavin, my spin-class instructor.”

He narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t push her. “The next call came at approximately five fifteen, someone who showed up as Daddy, who I deduce by the lack of the word ‘sugar’ in front of the name is your father.”

She nodded, even as her mother’s voice silently stressed that it was whom. “Any other clues?”

He pretended to stroke a long beard. “Beginning around five thirty, you got a series of calls from the county jail. At least six, spaced out about five minutes apart.”

“You got me, Nancy Drew.” Charlie held up her hands in surrender. “I’m a drug trafficker. Some of my mules got picked up over the weekend.”

He laughed. “I’m halfway believing you.”

“I’m a defense lawyer,” she admitted. “Usually people are more receptive to drug trafficker.”

Huck stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed again, but the playfulness had evaporated. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie Quinn.”

She could’ve sworn he flinched.

She asked, “Is there a problem?”

His jaw was clenched so hard the bone jutted out. “That’s not the name on your credit card.”

Charlie paused, because there was a lot wrong with that statement. “That’s my married name. Why were you looking at my credit card?”

“I wasn’t looking. I glanced at it when you put it down on the bar.” He stood up from the desk. “I should get ready for school.”

“Was it something I said?” She was trying to make a joke out of it, because of course it was something she’d said. “Look everybody hates lawyers until they need one.”

“I grew up in Pikeville.”

“You’re saying that like it’s an explanation.”

He opened and closed the desk drawers. “Homeroom’s about to start. I need to do my first-period prep.”

Charlie crossed her arms. This wasn’t the first time she’d had this conversation with long-time Pikeville residents. “There’s two reasons for you to be acting like you’re acting.”

He ignored her, opening and closing another drawer.

She counted out the possibilities on her fingers. “Either you hate my father, which is okay, because a lot of people hate him, or—” She held up her finger for the more likely excuse, the one that had put a target on Charlie’s back twenty-eight years ago when she’d returned to school, the one that still got her nasty looks in town from the people who supported the extended, inbred Culpepper clan. “You think I’m a spoiled little bitch who helped frame Zachariah Culpepper and his innocent baby brother so my dad could get his hands on some pissant life insurance policy and their shitty little trailer. Which he never did, by the way. He could’ve sued them for the twenty grand they owed in legal bills, but he didn’t. Not to mention I could pick those fuckers out of a line-up with my eyes closed.”

He was shaking his head before she even finished. “None of those things.”

“Really?” She had pegged him for a Culpepper truther when he’d told her that he’d grown up in Pikeville.

On the other hand, Charlie could see a career-Marine hating Rusty’s kind of lawyering right up until that Marine got caught with a little too much Oxy or a lot too much hooker. As her father always said, a Democrat is a Republican who’s been through the criminal justice system.

She told Huck, “Look, I love my dad, but I don’t practice the same kind of law that he does. Half my caseload is in juvenile court, the other half is in drug court. I work with stupid people who do stupid things, who need a lawyer to keep the prosecutor from overcharging them.” She held out her hands in a shrug. “I just level the playing field.”

Huck glared at her. His initial anger had escalated to furious in the blink of an eye. “I want you to leave my room. Right now.”

His hard tone made Charlie take a step back. For the first time, it occurred to her that no one knew she was at the school and that Mr. Huckleberry could probably break her neck with one hand.

“Fine.” She snatched her phone off his desk and started toward the door. Even as Charlie was telling herself she should shut up and go, she swung back around. “What did my father ever do to you?”

Huck didn’t answer. He was sitting at his desk, head bent over a stack of papers, red ink pen in hand.

Charlie waited.

He tapped the pen on his desk, a drumbeat of a dismissal.

She was about to tell him where to stick the pen when she heard a loud crack echo down the hallway.

Three more cracks followed in quick succession.

Not a car backfiring.

Not fireworks.

A person who has been up close when a gun is fired into another human being never mistakes the sound of a gunshot for something else.

Charlie was yanked down to the floor. Huck threw her behind a filing cabinet, shielding her body with his own.

He said something—she saw his mouth move—but the only sound she could hear was the gunshots echoing inside her head. Four shots, each a distinctive, terrifying echo to the past. Just like before, her mouth went dry. Just like before, her heart stopped beating. Her throat closed. Her vision tunneled. Everything looked small, narrowed to a single, tiny point.

Huck’s voice rushed back in. “Active shooter at the middle school,” he whispered calmly into his phone. “Sounds like he’s near the principal’s—”

Another crack.

Another bullet fired.

Then another.

Then the homeroom bell rang.

“Jesus,” Huck said. “There’s at least fifty kids in the cafeteria. I have to—”

A blood-curdling scream broke off the rest of his words.

“Help!” a woman yelled. “Please, help us!”

Charlie blinked.

Gamma’s chest exploding.

She blinked again.

Blood misting from Sam’s head.

Charlie, run!

She was out the door before Huck could stop her. Her legs pistoned. Her heart pounded. Her sneakers gripped the waxy floor but in her mind, she could feel the earth moving against her bare feet, tree limbs slicing into her face, fear cinching a length of barbed wire around her chest.

“Help us!” the woman cried. “Please!”

Huck caught up with Charlie as she rounded the corner. He was nothing more than a blur as her vision tunneled again, this time to the three people at the end of the hallway.

A man’s feet pointed up at the ceiling.

Behind him, to his right, a smaller set of feet splayed out.

Pink shoes. White stars on the soles. Lights that would flash when she walked.

An older woman knelt beside the little girl rocking back and forth, wailing.

Charlie wanted to wail, too.

Blood had sprayed the plastic chairs outside the office, splattered onto the walls and ceiling, jetted onto the floors.

There was a familiarity to the carnage that spread a numbness through Charlie’s body. She slowed to a jog, then a brisk walk. She had seen this before. She knew that you could put it all in a little box and close it up later, that you could go on with your life if you didn’t sleep too much, didn’t breathe too much, didn’t live too much so that death came back and snatched you away for the taking.

Somewhere, a set of doors banged open. Loud footsteps clumped through the hallways. Voices were raised. Screaming. Crying. Words were being shouted, but they were unintelligible to Charlie. She was underwater. Her body moved slowly, arms and legs floating against an exaggerated gravity. Her brain silently cataloged all of the things that she did not want to see.

Mr. Pinkman was on his back. His blue tie was tossed over his shoulder. Blood mushroomed from the center of his white dress shirt. The left side of his head was open, skin hanging like tattered paper around the white of his skull. There was a deep, black hole where his right eye should have been.

Mrs. Pinkman was not beside her husband. She was the screaming woman who had suddenly stopped screaming. She was cradling the child’s head in her lap, holding a pastel blue sweater to the girl’s neck. The bullet had ripped open something vital. Mrs. Pinkman’s hands were bright red. Blood had turned the diamond on her wedding ring the color of a cherry pit.

Charlie’s knees gave out.

She was on the floor beside the girl.

She was seeing herself lying on the ground in the forest.

Twelve? Thirteen?

Spindly little legs. Short black hair like Gamma. Long eyelashes like Sam.

“Help,” Mrs. Pinkman whispered, her voice hoarse. “Please.”

Charlie reached out her hands, not knowing where to put them. The little girl’s eyes rolled up, then just as suddenly, she focused on Charlie.

“It’s okay,” Charlie told her. “You’ll be okay.”

“Go before this lamb, oh Lord,” Mrs. Pinkman prayed. “Be not far from her. Make haste to help her.”

You won’t die, Charlie’s brain begged. You won’t surrender. You will graduate high school. You will go to college. You will get married. You will not leave a gaping hole in your family where your love used to be.

“Make haste to guide me, oh Lord my salvation.”

“Look at me,” Charlie told the girl. “You’re going to be fine.”

The girl was not going to be fine.

Her eyelids began to flutter. Her blue-tinged lips parted. Tiny teeth. White gums. The light pink tip of her tongue.

Slowly, the color began to drain from her face. Charlie was reminded of the way winter came down the mountain, the festive red and orange and yellow leaves turning umber, then brown, then starting to fall, so that by the time the cold reached its icy fingers into the foothills outside of town, everything was dead.

“Oh God,” Mrs. Pinkman sobbed. “Little angel. Poor little angel.”

Charlie couldn’t remember taking the child’s hand, but there were her little fingers caught between Charlie’s bigger ones. So small and cold, like a lost glove on the playground. Charlie watched the fingers slowly release until the girl’s hand fell slack to the floor.

Gone.

“Code Black!”

Charlie jerked at the sound.

“Code Black!” A cop was running up the hallway. He had his radio in one hand, a shotgun in the other. Panic cracked his voice. “Get to the school! Get to the school!”

For a brief second, the man made eye contact with Charlie. There was a spark of recognition, and then he saw the body of the dead child. Horror, then grief collapsed his features. The toe of his shoe caught a streak of blood. His feet slipped out from underneath him. He fell hard to the ground. His breath oofed out of his open mouth. The shotgun flew from his hand and skittered across the floor.

Charlie looked down at her own hand, the one that had held the child’s. She rubbed together her fingers. The blood was sticky, not like Gamma’s, which had felt slick like oil.

Bright white bone. Pieces of heart and lung. Cords of tendon and arteries and veins and life spilling out of her gaping wounds.

She remembered going back to the farmhouse after it was all over. Rusty had hired someone to clean, but they hadn’t done a thorough job. Months later, Charlie was looking for a bowl at the back of one of the cabinets and she’d found a piece of Gamma’s tooth.

“Don’t!” Huck yelled.

Charlie looked up, shocked by what she saw. What she had missed. What at first she couldn’t comprehend even though it was taking place less than fifty feet in front of her.

A teenage girl was sitting on the floor, her back to the lockers. Charlie’s brain flashed up an image from before, the girl sneaking into the edge of her tunnel vision as Charlie ran up the hallway toward the carnage. Charlie had instantly recognized the girl’s type: black clothes, black eyeliner. A Goth. No blood. Round face showing shock, not pain. She’s okay, Charlie had thought, running past her to reach Mrs. Pinkman, to reach the child. But the Goth girl wasn’t okay.

She was the shooter.

She had a revolver in her hand. Instead of picking off more victims, she was pointing the gun at her own chest.

“Put it down!” The cop was standing a few yards away, his shotgun jammed into his shoulder. Terror informed his every movement, from the way he was bouncing on the balls of his feet to the death grip he had on the weapon. “I said put it the fuck down!”

“She will.” Huck knelt with his back to the girl, shielding her. His hands were up. His voice was steady. “It’s okay, Officer. Let’s stay calm here.”

“Get out of my way!” The cop wasn’t calm. He was amped up, ready to pull the trigger the moment he got a clean shot. “Get the fuck out of my way!”

“Her name is Kelly,” Huck said. “Kelly Wilson.”

“Fucking move, asshole!”

Charlie didn’t watch the men. She watched the weapons.

Revolver and shotgun.

Shotgun and revolver.

She felt a wave pass through her body, the same kind of anesthesia that had numbed her so many times before.

“Move!” the cop screamed. He jerked the shotgun one way, then the other, trying to angle around Huck. “Get the fuck out of my way!”

“No.” Huck stayed on his knees, his back to Kelly. His hands stayed in the air. “Don’t do this, man. She’s only sixteen years old. You don’t want to kill a—”

“Move out of my way!” The cop’s fear was like an electric current crackling the air. “Get on the floor!”

“Stop it, man.” Huck moved with the shotgun, blocking him at every point. “She’s not trying to shoot anybody but herself.”

The girl’s mouth opened. Charlie couldn’t hear the words, but the cop obviously did.

“Did you hear that fucking bitch!” the cop screamed. “Let her do it or get the fuck out of my way!”

“Please,” Mrs. Pinkman whispered. Charlie had almost forgotten about the woman. The principal’s wife had her head in her hands, her eyes covered so she didn’t have to see. “Please stop.”

“Kelly.” Huck’s voice was calm. He reached his hand over his shoulder, palm up. “Kelly, give me the gun, sweetheart. You don’t have to do this.” He waited a few seconds, then said, “Kelly. Look at me.”

Slowly, the girl looked up. Her mouth was slack. Her eyes were glassy.

“Front hallway! Front hallway!” Another cop rushed past Charlie. He went down on one knee, sliding across the floor, two-handing his Glock and screaming, “Put it down!”

“Please, God,” Mrs. Pinkman sobbed into her hands. “Forgive this sin.”

“Kelly,” Huck said. “Hand me the gun. Nobody else has to get hurt.”

“Down!” the second cop boomed. Hysteria pitched his voice up too high. Charlie could see his finger tense on the trigger. “Get down on the ground!”

“Kelly.” Huck made his voice firm, like an angry parent. “I’m not asking anymore. Give me the gun right now.” He shook his open hand in the air for emphasis. “I mean it.”

Kelly Wilson began to nod. Charlie watched the teenager’s eyes gradually come back into focus as Huck’s words started to penetrate. Someone was telling her what to do, showing her a way out of this. Her shoulders relaxed. Her mouth closed. She blinked several times. Charlie intrinsically understood what the girl was going through. Time had stopped, and then someone, somehow, had found a key to wind it back up again.

Slowly, Kelly moved to put the revolver in Huck’s hand.

The cop pulled the trigger anyway.

2

Charlie watched Huck’s left shoulder jerk as the bullet ripped through his arm. His nostrils flared. His lips parted for breath. Blood wicked into the fibers of his shirt like a red iris. Still, he held onto the revolver that Kelly had placed in his hand.

Someone whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

“I’m all right,” Huck told the cop who had shot him. “You can holster your weapon, okay?”

The cop’s hands shook so hard that he could barely hold onto his gun.

Huck said, “Officer Rodgers, holster your weapon and take this revolver.”

Charlie felt rather than saw a swarm of police officers run past her. The air billowed around them like the cartoon swirls that came out of clouds, nothing more than thin, curved lines that indicated movement.

Then a paramedic was holding tightly to Charlie’s arm. Then someone was shining a flashlight into her eyes, asking if she was hurt, if she was in shock, if she wanted to go to the hospital.

“No,” Mrs. Pinkman said. Another paramedic was checking her for injuries. Her red shirt was soaked with blood. “Please. I’m fine.”

No one was checking on Mr. Pinkman.

No one was checking on the little girl.

Charlie looked down at her hands. The bones inside the tips of her fingers were vibrating. The sensation slowly spread until she felt like she was standing an inch outside of her body, that every breath was a reverberation of another breath that she had previously taken.

Mrs. Pinkman cupped her hand to Charlie’s cheek. She used her thumb to wipe away tears. Pain was etched into the deep wrinkles lining the woman’s face. With anyone else, Charlie would’ve pulled away, but she leaned into Mrs. Pinkman’s warmth.

They had been here before.

Twenty-eight years ago, Mrs. Pinkman was Miss Heller, living with her parents two miles away from the farmhouse. She was the one who’d answered the tentative knock at her door and found thirteen-year-old Charlie standing on the front porch, covered in sweat, streaked with blood, asking if they had any ice cream.

That was what people focused on when they told the story—not that Gamma had been murdered or that Sam had been buried alive, but that Charlie had eaten two bowls of ice cream before she’d told Miss Heller that something bad had happened.

“Charlotte.” Huck grabbed her shoulder. She watched his mouth move as he repeated the name that wasn’t her name anymore. His tie was undone. She saw the red splotches dotting the white bandage around his arm.

“Charlotte.” He shook her again. “You need to call your dad. Now.”

Charlie looked up, looked around. Time had moved on without her. Mrs. Pinkman was gone. The paramedics had disappeared. The only thing that remained the same was the bodies. They were still there, just a few feet away. Mr. Pinkman with his tie over his shoulder. The little girl with her pink jacket that was stained with blood.

“Call him,” Huck said.

Charlie fumbled for the phone in her back pocket. He was right. Rusty would be worried. She needed to let him know that she was okay.

Huck said, “Tell him to bring the newspapers, the chief of police, whoever he can get down here.” He looked away. “I can’t stop them on my own.”

Charlie felt a tightness in her chest, her body telling her that she was trapped inside something dangerous. She followed Huck’s gaze down the hallway.

He wasn’t worried about Charlie.

He was worried about Kelly Wilson.

The teenager was face down on the floor, both arms handcuffed tightly behind her back. She was petite, no more than Charlie’s size, but she was pinned down the same as if she were a violent con. One cop had his knee pressed into her back, another kneeled on her legs and yet another was grinding the sole of his boot into the side of the girl’s face.

These actions alone could be seen through the wide lens of admissible restraint, but that’s not why Huck had told her to call Rusty. Five more cops stood in a circle around the girl. She hadn’t heard them before but she could hear them clearly now. They were screaming, cursing, waving their arms around. Charlie knew some of these men, recognized them from high school or the courtroom or both. The expressions on their faces were all painted in the same shade of rage. They were furious about the deaths, livid about their own feelings of helplessness. This was their town. Their school. They had children who were students here, teachers, friends.

One of the cops punched a locker so hard that the hinge broke on the metal door. Others kept clenching and unclenching their hands. A few walked back and forth across the short length of the hall like animals in a cage. Maybe they were animals. One wrong word could spark a kick, then a punch, then batons would be pulled, guns would be drawn, and they would set upon Kelly Wilson like jackals.

“My girl’s that age,” someone hissed between gritted teeth. “They were in the same class.”

Another fist slammed into another locker.

“Pink coached me up,” someone said.

“He ain’t never gonna coach nobody up never again.”

Yet another locker door was kicked off its hinges.

“You—” Charlie’s voice cracked before she could finish. This was dangerous. Too dangerous. “Stop,” she said, then begged, “Please stop.”

They either didn’t hear her or didn’t care.

“Charlotte,” Huck said. “Don’t get into this. Just—”

“Fucking bitch.” The cop with his knee jammed into Kelly’s back yanked a fistful of the girl’s hair. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you kill ’em?”

“Stop,” Charlie said. Huck’s hand went to her arm, but she stood up anyway. “Stop,” she repeated.

No one was listening. Her voice was too timid because every muscle in her body was telling her not to insert herself into this buzz saw of masculine fury. It was like trying to stop dogs from fighting, except the dogs had loaded guns.

“Hey,” Charlie said, fear making her choke on the word. “Take her to the station. Put her in lock-up.”

Jonah Vickery, an asshole jock she knew from high school, snapped out his metal baton.

“Jonah.” Charlie’s knees were so weak that she had to lean against the wall to keep from sliding to the floor. “You need to Mirandize her and—”

“Charlotte.” Huck motioned for her to sit back down on the floor. “Don’t get into this. Call your dad. He can stop this.”

He was right. Cops were afraid of her father. They knew about his lawsuits, his public platform. Charlie tried to press the home button on the phone. Her fingers were too thick. Sweat had turned the dried blood into a thick paste.

“Hurry,” Huck said. “They’re going to end up killing her.”

Charlie watched a foot swing into Kelly’s side hard enough to make the girl’s hips leave the ground.

Another metal baton snapped out.

Charlie finally managed to press the home button. A photo of Huck’s dog filled the screen. She didn’t ask Huck for the code. It was too late to call Rusty. He wouldn’t make it to the school in time. She tapped the camera icon, knowing it bypassed the lock screen. Two swipes later, the video was recording. She zoomed in on the girl’s face. “Kelly Wilson. Look at me. Can you breathe?”

Kelly blinked. Her head looked like it was the size of a doll’s compared to the black police-issue boot that was pressing into the side of her face.

Charlie said, “Kelly, look into the camera.”

“God dammit,” Huck cursed. “I said to—”

“You guys need to stop this.” Charlie dragged her shoulder against the lockers as she walked closer to the lion’s den. “Take her to the station. Photograph her. Fingerprint her. Don’t let this blow back on—”

“She’s filming us,” one of the cops said. Greg Brenner. Another asshole jock. “Put it down, Quinn.”

“She’s a sixteen-year-old girl.” Charlie kept recording. “I’ll ride with her in the back of the car. You can arrest her and—”

“Make her stop,” Jonah said. He was the one with his foot pressed against the face of a teenage girl. “She’s worse than her fucking father.”

“Give her a bowl of ice cream,” Al Larrisy suggested.

Charlie said, “Jonah, get your boot off her head.” She trained the camera onto each man’s face. “There’s a right way to do this. You all know that. Don’t be the reason this case gets tossed.”

Jonah pressed his foot down so hard that Kelly’s jaw was forced open. Blood dribbled out where her braces had cut into her cheek. He said, “You see that dead baby over there?” He pointed up the hallway. “You see where her neck got blowed off?”

“What do you think?” Charlie asked, because she had the little girl’s blood all over her hands.

“I think you care more about a fucking murderer than you do about two innocent victims.”

“That’s enough.” Greg tried to grab the phone. “Turn it off.”

Charlie turned away so she could keep filming. “Put us both in the car,” she said. “Take us to the station and—”

“Give me that.” Greg reached for the phone again.

Charlie tried to feint away, but Greg was too fast. He snatched the phone out of her hand and threw it to the ground.

Charlie leaned down to retrieve it.

“Leave it,” he ordered.

Charlie kept reaching for the phone.

Without warning, the point of Greg’s elbow cracked against the bridge of her nose. Her head snapped back, banging into the locker. The pain was like a bomb had gone off inside of her face. Charlie’s mouth opened. She coughed out blood.

No one moved.

No one spoke.

Charlie cupped her hands to her face. Blood poured from her nose like a faucet. She felt stunned. Greg looked stunned. He held up his hands as if to say he didn’t mean it. But the damage had already been done. Charlie staggered sideways. She tripped over her own feet. Greg reached out to catch her. He was too late.

The last thing she saw was the ceiling spinning over her head as she hit the ground.

3

Charlie sat on the floor of the interview room with her back wedged into the corner. She had no idea how much time had passed since she’d been hauled off to the police station. An hour at least. Her wrists were still handcuffed. Toilet paper was still shoved up her broken nose. Stitches prickled the back of her scalp. Her head was pounding. Her vision was blurry. Her stomach was churning. She had been photographed. She had been fingerprinted. She was still wearing the same clothes. Her jeans were dotted with dark red splotches. The same pattern riddled her Duke Blue Devils T-shirt. Her hands were still caked with dried blood, because the cell where they had let her use the toilet only had a trickle of cold, brown water coming out of the filthy sink faucet.

Twenty-eight years ago, she had begged the nurses at the hospital to let her take a bath. Gamma’s blood was seared to her skin. Everything was sticky. Charlie had not completely submerged herself in water since the red-brick house had burned down. She’d wanted to feel the warmth envelop her, to watch the blood and bone float away like a bad dream fading from her memory.

Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.

Charlie let out a slow breath. She rested the side of her head against the wall. She closed her eyes. She saw the dead little girl in the school hallway, the way her color had drained like winter, the way her hand had fallen from Charlie’s hand the same way that Gamma’s hand had fallen away.

The little girl would still be in the cold hallway at school—her body, at least, along with Mr. Pinkman’s. Both still dead. Both still exposed to one more final injustice. They would be left out in the open, uncovered, unprotected, while people traipsed back and forth around them. That was how homicides worked. No one moved anything, not even a child, not even a beloved coach, until every inch of the crime scene was photographed, cataloged, measured, diagrammed, investigated.

Charlie opened her eyes.

This was all such sad, familiar territory: the images she couldn’t get out of her head, the dark places that her brain kept going to over and over again like car wheels wearing down a gravel road.

She breathed through her mouth. Her nose had a painful pulse. The paramedic had said it wasn’t broken, but Charlie didn’t trust any of them. Even while her head was being sutured, the cops were scrambling to cover for each other, articulating their reports, all of them agreeing that Charlie had been hostile, that she had knocked herself against Greg’s elbow, that the phone had been broken when she accidentally stepped on it.

Huck’s phone.

Mr. Huckleberry had repeatedly made that point that the phone and its contents belonged to him. He’d even shown them the screen so that they could watch the video being deleted.

While it was happening, it had hurt too much to shake her head, but Charlie did so now. They had shot Huck, unprovoked, and he was taking up for them. She had seen this kind of behavior in almost every police force she had ever dealt with.

No matter what, these guys always, always covered for each other.

The door opened. Jonah came in. He carried two folding chairs, one in each hand. He winked at Charlie, because he liked her better now that she was in his custody. He’d been the same kind of sadist in high school. The uniform had only codified it.

“I want my father,” she said, the same thing she said every time someone entered the room.

Jonah winked again as he unfolded the chairs on either side of the table.

“I have a legal right to counsel.”

“I just talked to him on the phone.” This came not from Jonah, but from Ben Bernard, an assistant district attorney for the county. He barely glanced at Charlie as he tossed a folder onto the table and sat down. “Take the cuffs off her.”

Jonah asked, “You want me to hook her leash to the table?”

Ben smoothed down his tie. He looked up at the man. “I said to take those fucking handcuffs off my wife right now.”

Ben had raised his voice to say this, but he hadn’t yelled. He never yelled, at least not in the eighteen years that Charlie had known him.

Jonah swung his keys around his fingers, making it clear that he was going to do this in his own time, of his own volition. He roughly unlocked the cuffs and stripped them from Charlie’s wrists, but the joke was on him because she was so numb that she didn’t feel any of it.

Jonah slammed the door when he left the room.

Charlie listened to the slam echo off the concrete walls. She stayed seated on the floor. She waited for Ben to say something jokey, like nobody puts baby in a corner, but Ben had two homicide victims at the middle school, a suicidal teenage murderer in custody and his wife was sitting in a corner covered in blood, so instead she took consolation in the way he lifted his chin to indicate that she should sit in the chair across from him.

She asked, “Is Kelly all right?”

“She’s on suicide watch. Two female officers, around the clock.”

“She’s sixteen,” Charlie said, though they both knew that Kelly Wilson would be direct filed as an adult. The teenager’s only saving grace—literally—was that minors were no longer eligible for the death penalty. “If she asked for a parent, that can be construed as the equivalent of asking for a lawyer.”

“Depends on the judge.”

“You know Dad will get a change of venue.” Charlie knew her father was the only lawyer in town who would take the case.

The overhead light flashed off Ben’s glasses as he nodded toward the chair again.

Charlie pushed herself up against the wall. A wave of dizziness made her close her eyes.

Ben asked, “Do you need medical treatment?”

“Somebody already asked me that.” Charlie didn’t want to go to a hospital. She probably had a concussion. But she could still walk as long as she kept some part of her body in contact with something solid. “I’m fine.”

He said nothing, but the silent, “of course you’re fine, you’re always fine,” reverberated around the room.

“See?” She touched the wall with the tips of her fingers, an acrobat on a wire.

Ben didn’t look up. He adjusted his glasses. He opened the file folder in front of him. There was a single form inside. Charlie’s eyes wouldn’t focus to read the words, even when he began writing in his big, blocky letters.

She asked, “With what offense have I been charged?”

“Obstruction of justice.”

“That’s a handy catch-all.”

He kept writing. He kept not looking at her.

She asked, “You already saw what they did to me, didn’t you?”

The only sound Ben made was his pen scratching across the paper.

“That’s why you won’t look at me now, because you already looked at me through that.” She nodded toward the two-way mirror. “Who else is there? Coin?” District Attorney Ken Coin was Ben’s boss, an insufferable dickslap of a man who saw everything in black and white and, more recently, brown, because of the housing boom that had brought an influx of Mexican immigrants up from Atlanta.

Charlie watched the reflection of her raised hand in the mirror, her middle finger extending in a salute to DA Coin.

Ben said, “I’ve taken nine witness statements that said you were inconsolable at the scene, and in the course of being comforted by Officer Brenner, your nose met with his elbow.”

If he was going to talk to her like a lawyer, then she was going to be a lawyer. “Is that what the video on the phone showed, or do I need to get a subpoena for a forensic examination of any deleted files?”

Ben’s shoulder went up in a shrug. “Do what you have to do.”

“All right.” Charlie braced her palms on the table so that she could sit. “Is this the part where you offer to drop the bogus obstruction charge if I don’t file an excessive force complaint?”

“I already dropped the bogus obstruction charge.” His pen moved down to the next line. “You can file as many complaints as you want.”

“All I want is an apology.”

She heard a sound behind the mirror, something close to a gasp. In the past twelve years, Charlie had filed two very successful lawsuits against the Pikeville Police force on behalf of her clients. Ken Coin had probably assumed she was sitting in here counting all of the money she was going to make off the city instead of grieving for the child who had died in her arms, or mourning the loss of the principal who had given her detention instead of kicking her out of school when they both knew that Charlie deserved it.

Ben kept his head bent down. He tapped his pen against the table. She tried not to think about Huck doing the same thing at his school desk.

He asked, “Are you sure?”

Charlie waved toward the mirror, hoping Coin was there. “If you guys could just admit when you did something wrong, then when you said that you did something right, people would believe you.”

Ben finally looked at her. His eyes tracked across her face, taking in the damage. She saw the fine lines around his mouth when he frowned, the deep furrow in his brow, and wondered if he had ever noticed the same signs of age in her face.

They had met in law school. He had moved to Pikeville in order to be with her. They had planned on spending the rest of their lives together.

She said, “Kelly Wilson has a right to—”

Ben held up his hand to stop her. “You know that I agree with everything you’re going to say.”

Charlie sat back in the chair. She had to remind herself that neither she nor Ben had ever bought into Rusty and Ken Coin’s “us against them” mentality.

She said, “I want a written apology from Greg Brenner. A real apology, not some bullshit, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ excuse like I’m a hysterical woman and he wasn’t acting like a God damn Brownshirt.”

Ben nodded. “Done.”

Charlie reached for the form. She grabbed the pen. The words were a blur, but she had read enough witness statements to know where you were supposed to sign your name. She scrawled her signature near the bottom, then slid the form back toward Ben. “I’ll trust you to keep your side of the bargain. Fill in the statement however you want.”

Ben stared down at the form. His fingers hovered at the edge. He wasn’t looking at her signature, but at the bloody brown fingerprints she’d left on the white paper.

Charlie blinked to clear her eyes. This was the closest they had come to touching each other in nine months.

“Okay.” He closed the folder. He made to stand.

“It was just the two of them?” Charlie asked. “Mr. Pink and the little—”

“Yes.” He hesitated before sitting back down in the chair. “One of the janitors locked down the cafeteria. The assistant principal stopped the buses at the street.”

Charlie did not want to think about the damage that Kelly Wilson could have done if she had started firing the gun a few seconds after the bell instead of before.

Ben said, “They all have to be interviewed. The kids. Teachers. Staff.”

Charlie knew the city wasn’t capable of coordinating so many interviews, let alone putting together such a large case on its own. The Pikeville Police Department had seventeen full-time officers. Ben was one of six lawyers in the district attorney’s office.

She asked, “Is Ken going to ask for help?”

“They’re already here,” Ben said. “Everybody just showed up. Troopers. State police. Sheriff’s office. We didn’t even have to call them.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.” He picked at the corner of the folder with his fingers. His lips twitched the way they always did when he chewed at the tip of his tongue. It was an old habit that wouldn’t die. Charlie had once seen his mother reach across the dinner table and slap his hand to make him stop.

She asked, “You saw the bodies?”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. Charlie knew that Ben had seen the crime scene. She could tell by the somber tone in his voice, the slump in his shoulders. Pikeville had grown over the last two decades, but it was still a small town, the kind of place where heroin was a much larger concern than homicide.

Ben said, “You know it takes time, but I told them to move the bodies as soon as possible.”

Charlie looked up at the ceiling to keep the tears in her eyes. He had awakened her dozens of times from her worst nightmare: a day in the life, Charlie and Rusty going about their mundane chores inside the old farmhouse, cooking meals and doing laundry and washing dishes while Gamma’s body rotted against the cabinets because the police had forgotten to take her away.

It was probably the piece of tooth Charlie had found in the back of the cabinet, because what else had they missed?

Ben said, “Your car is parked behind your office. They locked down the school. It’ll probably be closed for the rest of the week. There’s already a news van up from Atlanta.”

“Is that where Dad is, combing his hair?”

They both smiled a little, because they both knew that her father loved nothing more than to see himself on television.

Ben said, “He told you to hang tight. When I called him. That’s what Rusty said—‘Tell that girl to hang tight.’”

Which meant that Rusty wasn’t going to ride to her rescue. That he assumed his tough daughter could handle herself in a room full of Keystone Kops while he rushed to Kelly Wilson’s house and got her parents to sign his fee agreement.

When people talked about how much they hated lawyers, it was Rusty who came to mind.

Ben said, “I can have one of the squad cars take you to your office.”

“I’m not getting in a car with any of those assholes.”

Ben ran his fingers through his hair. He needed a trim. His shirt was wrinkled. His suit was missing a button. She wanted to think he was falling apart without her, but the truth was that he was always disheveled and Charlie was more likely to tease him about looking like a hipster hobo than to take out a needle and thread.

She said, “Kelly Wilson was in their custody. She wasn’t resisting. The moment they cuffed her, they were responsible for her safety.”

“Greg’s daughter goes to that school.”

“So does Kelly.” Charlie leaned closer. “We’re not living in Abu Ghraib, okay? Kelly Wilson has a constitutional right to due process under the law. It’s up to a judge and jury to decide, not a bunch of vigilante cops with hard-ons to beat down a teenage girl.”

“I get it. We all get it.” Ben thought she was grandstanding for the great Oz behind the mirror. “‘A just society is a lawful society. You can’t be a good guy if you act like a bad guy.’”

He was quoting Rusty.

She said, “They were going to beat the shit out of her. Or worse.”

“So you volunteered yourself instead?”

Charlie felt a burning sensation in her hands. Without thinking, she was scratching at the dried blood, rolling it into tiny balls. Her fingernails were ten black crescents.

She looked up at her husband. “You said you took nine witness statements?”

Ben gave a single, reluctant nod. He knew why she was asking the question.

Eight cops. Mrs. Pinkman wasn’t there when Charlie’s nose was broken, which meant that the ninth statement had come from Huck, which meant that Ben had already talked to him.

She asked, “Do you know?” That was the only thing that mattered between them right now, whether or not Ben knew why she had been at the school this morning. Because if Ben knew, then everyone else knew, which meant that Charlie had yet again found another uniquely cruel way to humiliate her husband.

“Ben?” she asked.

He ran his fingers through his hair. He smoothed down his tie. He had so many tells that they could never play cards together, not even Go Fish.

“Babe, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

There was a quick knock before the door opened. Charlie held out hope that it was her father, but an older black woman wearing a navy pantsuit and white blouse walked into the room. Her short black hair was tuffeted with white. She had a large, banged-up-looking purse on her arm that was almost as big as the one that Charlie carried to work. A laminated ID hung on a lanyard around her neck, but Charlie couldn’t read it.

The woman said, “I’m special agent in charge Delia Wofford with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. You’re Charlotte Quinn?” She reached out to shake Charlie’s hand, but changed her mind when she saw the dried blood. “Have you been photographed?”

Charlie nodded.

“For godsakes.” She opened her purse and pulled out a packet of Wet Wipes. “Use as many as you need. I can get more.”

Jonah was back with another chair. Delia pointed to the head of the table, indicating that’s where she wanted to sit. She asked Jonah, “Are you the jerk who wouldn’t let this woman clean herself up?”

Jonah didn’t know what to do with the question. He had probably never had to answer to any woman besides his mother, and that had been a long time ago.

“Close the door behind you.” Delia waved Jonah off as she sat down. “Ms. Quinn, we’ll get through this as quickly as possible. Do you mind if I record this?”

Charlie shook her head. “Knock yourself out.”

She tapped some buttons on her phone to activate the recorder, then unpacked her bag, tossing notepads and books and papers onto the table.

The concussion made it impossible for Charlie to read anything in front of her, so she opened up the pack of Wet Wipes and got to work. She scrubbed between her fingers first, dislodging specks of black that floated like ashes from a roaring fire. The blood had seared itself into the pores. Her hands looked like an old woman’s. She was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. She wanted to go home. She wanted a hot bath. She wanted to think about what had happened today, to examine all the pieces, then gather them up, put them in a box and place it high on a shelf so that she never had to deal with it again.

“Ms. Quinn?” Delia Wofford was offering her a bottle of water.

Charlie almost snatched it out of the woman’s hand. She hadn’t realized she was thirsty until that moment. Half of the water was gone before the logical part of her brain reminded her that it wasn’t a good idea to drink so quickly on a sour stomach.

“Sorry.” Charlie put her hand to her mouth to cover the noxious belch.

The agent had obviously endured worse. “Ready?”

“You’re recording this?”

“Yes.”

Charlie peeled another wipe out of the packet. “First, I want some information about Kelly Wilson.”

Delia Wofford had enough years under her belt to not look as annoyed as she must have felt. “She’s been examined by a doctor. She’s under constant surveillance.”

That’s not what Charlie had meant, and the agent knew it. “There are nine factors you have to consider before ascertaining whether or not a juvenile’s statement is—”

“Ms. Quinn,” Delia interrupted. “Let’s stop worrying about Kelly Wilson and start worrying about you. I’m sure you don’t want to spend a second longer here than you absolutely have to.”

Charlie would’ve rolled her eyes if not for the fear of making herself dizzy. “She’s sixteen. She’s not old enough to—”

“Eighteen.”

Charlie stopped cleaning her hands. She stared at Ben, not Delia Wofford, because they had both agreed very early on in their marriage that a lie by omission was still a lie.

Ben stared back. His expression told her nothing.

Delia said, “According to her birth certificate, Kelly Wilson turned eighteen two days ago.”

“You’ve—” Charlie had to look away from Ben because their broken marriage took a back seat to a death warrant. “You’ve seen her birth certificate?”

Delia shuffled through a stack of folders until she found what she was looking for. She put a sheet of paper in front of Charlie. All Charlie could make out was a round, official-looking seal.

Delia said, “The school records back it up, but we were faxed this official copy from the Georgia Department of Health an hour ago.” Her finger pointed to what must have been Kelly’s birth date. “She turned eighteen at six twenty-three on Saturday morning, but you know the law gives her until midnight before she’s officially an adult.”

Charlie felt sick. Two days. Forty-eight hours meant the difference between life with a possibility of parole and death by lethal injection.

“She was held back a grade. That’s probably where the confusion lies.”

“What was she doing at the middle school?”

“There are still a great many unanswered questions.” Delia dug around in her purse and found a pen. “Now, Ms. Quinn, for the record, are you willing to give a statement? It’s your right to refuse. You know that.”

Charlie could barely follow the agent’s words. She placed her palm flat against her stomach, forcing it to calm. Even if by some miracle Kelly Wilson managed to avoid the death penalty, Georgia’s Seven Deadly Sins law would make sure she never got out of prison.

Would that be so wrong?

There was no ambiguity here. Kelly had literally been caught holding the murder weapon in her hands.

Charlie looked at her own hands, still bloody from the little girl who had died in her arms. Died because Kelly Wilson had shot her. Murdered her. Just like she had murdered Mr. Pinkman.

“Ms. Quinn?” Delia glanced at her watch, but Charlie knew the woman was exactly where she needed to be.

Charlie also knew how the legal system worked. No one would tell the story of what happened this morning without an eye toward nailing Kelly Wilson to a cross. Not the eight cops who were there. Not Huck Huckabee. Maybe not even Mrs. Pinkman, whose husband had been murdered not ten yards from her classroom door.

Charlie said, “I agree to give a statement.”

Delia had a legal pad in front of her. She twisted open her pen. “Ms. Quinn, first I want to tell you how sorry I am that you’ve been pulled into this. I’m aware of your family history. I’m sure it was difficult witnessing …”

Charlie rolled her hand, indicating she should move on.

“All right,” Delia said. “This next bit I have to say. I want you to know that the door behind me is unlocked. You’re not under arrest. You are not being detained. As I told you before, you’re free to leave at any time, though as one of the few witnesses to today’s tragedy, your voluntary statement could be instrumental in helping us put together what happened.”

Charlie noted that the woman had not warned her that lying to a GBI agent could land her in prison. “You want me to help you build your case against Kelly Wilson.”

“I just want you to tell me the truth.”

“And I can only do that to the best of my knowledge.” Charlie didn’t realize that she was feeling hostile until she looked down and saw that her arms were crossed.

Delia rested her pen on the table, but the recorder was still going. “Ms. Quinn, let’s put this out there that this is a very awkward situation for all of us.”

Charlie waited.

Delia asked, “Would it help you speak more freely if your husband left the room?”

Charlie smoothed her lips together. “Ben knows why I was at the school this morning.”

If Delia was disappointed that her ace had been played, she didn’t let on. She picked up the pen. “Let’s start from that point, then. I know your car was parked in the faculty lot to the east of the main entrance. How did you enter the building?”

“The side door. It was propped open.”

“Did you notice the door was open when you parked your car?”

“It’s always open.” Charlie shook her head. “I mean, it was when I was a student there. It’s quicker from the parking lot to the cafeteria. I used to go to the …” Her voice trailed off, because it didn’t matter. “I parked in the side lot and went through the side door, which I assumed from my previous time as a student would be open.”

Delia’s pen moved across the pad. She didn’t look up when she asked, “You went directly to Mr. Huckabee’s classroom?”

“I got turned around. I walked by the front office. It was dark inside, except Mr. Pinkman’s light was on in the back.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“I didn’t see Mr. Pinkman, just that his light was on.”

“What about anybody else?”

“Mrs. Jenkins, the school secretary. I think I saw her go into the office, but I was way down the hall by then. The lights came on. I turned around. I was about thirty yards away.” Standing where Kelly Wilson had stood when she murdered Mr. Pinkman and the little girl. “I’m not sure it was Mrs. Jenkins who entered the office, but it was an older woman who looked like her.”

“And that’s the only person you saw, an older woman entering the office?”

“Yes. The doors were closed to the classrooms. Some teachers were inside, so I guess I saw them, too.” Charlie chewed her lip, trying to get her thoughts together. No wonder her clients talked themselves into trouble. Charlie was a witness, not even a suspect, and she was already leaving out details. “I didn’t recognize any of the teachers behind the doors. I don’t know if they saw me, but it’s possible they did.”

“Okay, so you went to Mr. Huckabee’s classroom next?”

“Yes. I was in his room when I heard the gunshot.”

“A gunshot?”

Charlie wadded the Wet Wipes into a ball on the table. “Four gunshots.”

“Rapid?”

“Yes. No.” She closed her eyes. She tried to remember. Only a handful of hours had passed. Why did everything feel like it had happened an eternity ago? “I heard two shots, then two more? Or three and then one?”

Delia held her pen aloft, waiting.

“I don’t remember the sequence,” Charlie admitted, and she again reminded herself that this was a sworn statement. “To the best of my recollection, there were four shots, total. I remember counting them. And then Huck pulled me down.” Charlie cleared her throat. She resisted the need to look at Ben, to gauge how he was taking this. “Mr. Huckabee pulled me down behind the filing cabinet, I assume for cover.”

“Any more gunshots?”

“I—” She shook her head because again she was unsure. “I don’t know.”

Delia said, “Let’s back up a little. It was only you and Mr. Huckabee in the room?”

“Yes. I didn’t see anyone else in the hall.”

“How long were you in Mr. Huckabee’s room before you heard the shots?”

Again, Charlie shook her head. “Maybe two to three minutes?”

“So, you go into his classroom, two to three minutes pass, you hear these four gunshots, Mr. Huckabee pulls you down behind the filing cabinet, and then?”

Charlie shrugged. “I ran.”

“Toward the exit?”

Charlie’s eyes flicked toward Ben. “Toward the gunshots.”

Ben silently scratched his jaw. This was one of their things, the way Charlie always ran toward danger when everyone else was running away.

“All right.” Delia spoke as she wrote. “Was Mr. Huckabee with you when you ran toward the gunshots?”

“He was behind me.” Charlie remembered sprinting past Kelly, leaping over her extended legs. This time, her memory showed Huck kneeling beside the girl. That made sense. He would’ve seen the gun in Kelly’s hand. He would’ve been trying to talk the teenager into giving him the revolver the entire time that Charlie was watching the little girl die.

She asked Delia, “Can you tell me her name? The little girl?”

“Lucy Alexander. Her mother teaches at the school.”

Charlie saw the girl’s features come into focus. Her pink coat. Her matching backpack. Was her name monogrammed on the inside of her jacket or was that a detail that Charlie was making up?

Delia said, “We haven’t released her name to the press, but her parents have been notified.”

“She didn’t suffer. At least, I don’t think so. She didn’t know she was …” Once again, Charlie shook her head, aware that she was filling in blanks with things that she wanted to be true.

Delia said, “So, you ran toward the gunshots, in the direction of the front office.” She turned to a fresh page in her pad. “Mr. Huckabee was behind you. Who else did you see?”

“I don’t remember seeing Kelly Wilson. I mean, I did remember later that I saw her, when I heard the cops shouting, but when I was running, well, before that, Huck caught up with me, he passed me at the corner, and then I passed him …” Charlie chewed her lip again. This meandering narrative was the kind of thing that drove her crazy when she talked to her clients. “I ran past Kelly. I thought she was a kid. A student.” Kelly Wilson had been both of those things. Even at eighteen, she was tiny, the kind of girl who would always look like a kid, even when she was a grown woman with children of her own.

“I’m getting fuzzy on the timeline,” Delia admitted.

“I’m sorry.” Charlie tried to explain, “It screws with your head when you’re in the middle of this kind of thing. Time turns from a straight line into a sphere, and it’s not until later that you can hold it in your hand and look at all the different sides, and you think, Oh, now I remember—this happened, then this happened, then … It’s only after the fact that you can pull it back into a straight line that makes sense.”

Ben was studying her. She knew what he was thinking because she knew the inside of his head better than she did her own. With those few sentences, Charlie had revealed more about her feelings when Gamma and Sam had been shot than she had alluded to in sixteen years of marriage.

Charlie kept her focus on Delia Wofford. “What I’m saying is that I didn’t remember seeing Kelly the first time until I saw her the second time. Like déjà vu, but real.”

“I get it.” Delia nodded as she resumed writing. “Go on.”

Charlie had to think to find her place. “Kelly hadn’t moved between the two times I saw her. Her back was to the wall. Her legs were straight out in front of her. The first time, when I was running up the hall, I remember glancing at her to make sure she was okay. To make sure she wasn’t a victim. I didn’t see the gun that time. She was dressed in black, like a Goth girl, but I didn’t look at her hands.” Charlie stopped to take a deep breath. “The violence seemed to be confined to the end of the hall, outside the front office. Mr. Pinkman was on the floor. He looked dead. I should’ve checked his pulse, but I went to the little girl, to Lucy. Miss Heller was there.”

Delia’s pen stopped. “Heller?”

“What?”

They stared at each other, both clearly confused.

Ben broke the silence. “Heller is Judith Pinkman’s maiden name.”

Charlie shook her aching head. Maybe she should’ve gone to the hospital after all.

“All right.” Delia turned to another fresh page. “What was Mrs. Pinkman doing when you saw her at the end of the hallway?”

Again, Charlie had to think back to find her place. “She screamed,” Charlie remembered. “Not then, but before. I’m sorry. I left that out. Before, when I was in Huck’s room, after he pulled me behind the filing cabinet, we heard a woman screaming. I don’t know if it was before or after the bell rang, but she screamed, ‘Help us.’”

“Help us,” Delia confirmed.

“Yes,” Charlie said. That was why she had started running, because she knew the excruciating desperation of waiting for someone, anyone, who could help make the world right again.

“And so?” Delia said. “Mrs. Pinkman was where in the hallway?”

“She was kneeling beside Lucy, holding her hand. She was praying. I held Lucy’s other hand. I looked into her eyes. She was still alive then. Her eyes were moving, her mouth opened.” Charlie tried to swallow down the grief. She had spent the last few hours reliving the girl’s death, but saying it out loud was too much. “Miss Heller said another prayer. Lucy’s hand let go of mine and …”

“She passed?” Delia provided.

Charlie squeezed her hand shut. All these years later, she could still recall what it felt like to hold Sam’s trembling fingers inside her own.

She wasn’t sure which was harder to witness: a sudden, shocking death or the slow, deliberate way that Lucy Alexander had faded into nothing.

Each existed in its own realm of the unbearable.

Delia asked, “Do you need a moment?”

Charlie let her silence answer the question. She stared past Ben’s shoulder into the mirror. For the first time since they’d locked her in the room, she studied her reflection. She’d dressed down on purpose to go to the school, not wanting to send the wrong message. Jeans, sneakers, a too-big, long-sleeved T-shirt. The faded Duke Devil logo was spattered with blood. Charlie’s face wasn’t any better. The red discoloration around her right eye was turning into a proper bruise. She pulled the wads of tissue out of her nose. The skin tore like a scab. Tears welled into her eyes.

Delia said, “Take your time.”

Charlie didn’t want to take her time. “I heard Huck telling the cop to put down his gun. He had a shotgun.” She remembered, “He tripped before. The cop with the shotgun. He stepped in some blood and …” She shook her head. She could still see the panic on the man’s face, the breathless sense of duty. He had been terrified, but like Charlie, he had run toward the danger instead of away.

“I want you to look at these photographs.” Delia rifled through her bag again. She spread three photos on the table. Headshots. Three white men. Three crew cuts. Three thick necks. If they hadn’t been cops, they would’ve been mobsters.

Charlie pointed to the one in the middle. “That’s who had the shotgun.”

Delia said, “Officer Carlson.”

Ed Carlson. He’d been a year ahead of Charlie at school. “Carlson was pointing the shotgun at Huck. Huck told him to take it easy, or something like that.” She pointed to another photo. The name below said RODGERS, but Charlie had never met him. She said, “Rodgers was there, too. He had a pistol.”

“A pistol?”

“A Glock 19,” Charlie said.

“You know your weapons?”

“Yes.” Charlie had spent the last twenty-eight years learning everything she could about every gun ever made.

Delia asked, “Officers Carlson and Rodgers were pointing their weapons at whom?”

“At Kelly Wilson, but Mr. Huckabee was on his knees in front of her, shielding her, so I guess that technically, they were pointing their weapons at him.”

“And what was Kelly Wilson doing at this time?”

Charlie realized she hadn’t mentioned the gun. “She had a revolver.”

“Five shot? Six?”

“I would only be guessing. It looked older. Not snub-nosed, but—” Charlie stopped. “Was there another gun? Another shooter?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because you asked how many shots were fired, and you asked how many bullets were in the revolver.”

“I wouldn’t extrapolate from my questions, Ms. Quinn. At this point in the investigation, we can say with a high degree of certainty that there was not another gun and there was not another shooter.”

Charlie pressed together her lips. Had she heard more than four gunshots in the beginning? Had she heard more than six?

Suddenly, she wasn’t certain of anything.

Delia said, “You said that Kelly Wilson had the revolver. What was she doing with it?”

Charlie closed her eyes to give her brain a moment to reset back to the hallway. “Kelly was sitting on the floor like I said. Her back was to the wall. She had the revolver pointed at her chest, like this.” Charlie clasped her hands together, miming the way the girl had held the gun with both hands, her thumb looped inside the trigger guard. “She looked like she was going to kill herself.”

“Her left thumb was inside the trigger guard?”

Charlie looked at her hands. “Sorry, I’m only guessing. I’m left-handed. I don’t know which thumb was inside the trigger guard, but one of them was.”

Delia continued writing. “And?”

Charlie said, “Carlson and Rodgers were screaming for Kelly to put down the gun. They were freaked out. We were all freaked out. Except for Huck. I guess he’s seen combat or …” She didn’t speculate. “Huck had his hand out. He told Kelly to give him the revolver.”

“Did Kelly Wilson make a statement at any time?”

Charlie wasn’t going to validate that Kelly Wilson had spoken, because she didn’t trust the two men who had heard her words to relay them truthfully.

She said, “Huck was negotiating Kelly’s surrender. She was complying.” Charlie’s gaze went back to the mirror, where she hoped Ken Coin was about to piss himself. “Kelly placed the revolver in Huck’s hand. She had completely relinquished it. That’s when Officer Rodgers shot Mr. Huckabee.”

Ben opened his mouth to speak, but Delia held up her hand to stop him.

“Where was he shot?” the agent asked.

“Here.” Charlie indicated her bicep.

“What was Kelly Wilson’s affect during this time?”

“She looked dazed.” Charlie silently berated herself for answering the question. “That’s just a guess. I don’t know her. I’m not an expert. I can’t speak to her state of mind.”

“Understood,” Delia said. “Was Mr. Huckabee unarmed when he was shot?”

“Well, he had the revolver in his hand, but sideways, the way Kelly had put it there.”

“Show me?” She took a Glock 45 out of her purse. She dropped the clip, pulled on the slide to eject the cartridge, and placed the gun on the table.

Charlie didn’t want to take the Glock. She hated guns, even though she practiced twice a month at the range. She was never, ever going to find herself in another situation where she didn’t know how to use a gun.

Delia said, “Ms. Quinn, you don’t have to, but it would be helpful if you could show me the position of the revolver when it was placed in Mr. Huckabee’s hand.”

“Oh.” Charlie felt like a giant light bulb turned on over her head. She had been so overwhelmed by the murders that she hadn’t processed the fact that there was a second investigation into the officer-involved shooting. If Rodgers had moved his gun an inch in the wrong direction, Huck could’ve been a third body lying in the front office hallway.

“It was like this.” Charlie picked up the Glock. The black metal felt cold against her skin. She hefted it into her left hand, but that was wrong. Huck had reached back with his right. She put the gun in her open right palm, turned sideways, muzzle facing backward, the same way Kelly had with the revolver.

Delia already had her cell phone in her hands. She took several pictures, saying, “You don’t mind?” when she knew full well it was too late if Charlie minded. “What happened to the revolver?”

Charlie placed the Glock on the table so that the muzzle pointed toward the back wall. “I don’t know. Huck didn’t really move. I mean, he flinched, I guess from the pain of a bullet shredding his arm, but he didn’t fall down or anything. He told Rodgers to take the revolver, but I don’t remember whether or not Rodgers took it, or if someone else did.”

Delia’s pen had stopped writing. “After Mr. Huckabee was shot, he told Rodgers to take the revolver?”

“Yes. He was very calm about it, but I mean, it was tense, because nobody knew whether or not Rodgers was going to shoot him again. He still had his Glock pointed at Huck. Carlson still had his shotgun.”

“But there wasn’t another shot fired?”

“No.”

“Could you see if anyone had their finger on a trigger?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t see Mr. Huckabee hand the revolver to anyone?”

“No.”

“Did you see him put it anywhere on his person? On the ground?”

“I don’t—” Charlie shook her head. “I was more concerned that he had been shot.”

“Okay.” She made a few more notes before looking up. “What do you remember next?”

Charlie didn’t know what she remembered next. Had she looked down at her hands the same way she was looking down at them now? She could remember the sound of heavy breathing from Carlson and Rodgers. Both men had looked as terrified as Charlie had felt, sweating profusely, their chests heaving up and down under the weight of their bulletproof vests.

My girl’s that age.

Pink coached me up.

Carlson hadn’t buckled his bulletproof vest. The sides had flapped open as he ran into the school with his shotgun. He’d had no idea what he would find when he turned that corner; bodies, carnage, a bullet to the head.

If you’ve never seen anything like that before, it could break you.

Delia asked, “Ms. Quinn, do you need a moment?”

Charlie thought about the terrified look on Carlson’s face when he slipped in the patch of blood. Had there been tears in his eyes? Was he wondering if the dead girl a few feet away from his face was his own child?

“I’d like to go now.” Charlie didn’t know that she was going to say the words until she heard them come out of her mouth. “I’m leaving.”

“You should finish your statement.” Delia smiled. “I’ll only need a few more minutes.”

“I’d like to finish it at a later date.” Charlie gripped the table so she could stand. “You said that I’m free to go.”

“Absolutely.” Delia Wofford again proved unflappable. She handed Charlie one of her business cards. “I look forward to speaking with you again soon.”

Charlie took the card. Her vision was still out of focus. Her stomach sloshed acid up into her throat.

Ben said, “I’ll take you out the back way. Are you okay to walk to your office?”

Charlie wasn’t sure about anything except that she had to get out of here. The walls were closing in. She couldn’t breathe through her nose. She was going to suffocate if she didn’t get out of this room.

Ben tucked her water bottle into his jacket pocket. He opened the door. Charlie practically fell into the hallway. She braced her hands against the wall opposite the door. Forty years of paint had turned the cinder blocks smooth. She pressed her cheek against the cold surface. She took a few deep breaths and waited for the nausea to pass.

“Charlie?” Ben said.

She turned back around. There was suddenly a river of people between them. The building was teeming with law enforcement. Muscle-bound men and women with big rifles strapped to their wide chests rushed back and forth. State troopers. Sheriff’s deputies. Highway patrol. Ben was right; they had all shown up. She saw letters on the backs of their shirts. GBI. FBI. ATF. SWAT. ICE. BOMB SQUAD.

When the hall finally cleared, Ben had his phone in his hands. He was silent as his thumbs moved across the screen.

She leaned against the wall and waited for him to finish texting whoever he was texting. Maybe the twenty-six-year-old from his office. Kaylee Collins. The girl was Ben’s type. Charlie knew this because, at that age, she had been her husband’s type, too.

“Shit.” Ben’s thumbs swiped across the screen. “Gimme another second.”

Charlie could’ve walked herself out of the police station. She could’ve walked the six blocks to her office.

But she didn’t.

She studied the top of Ben’s head, the way his hair grew from the crown like a spiral ham. She wanted to fold herself into his body. To lose herself in him.

Instead, Charlie silently repeated the phrases she had practiced in her car, in the kitchen, sometimes in front of the bathroom mirror:

I can’t live without you.

The last nine months have been the loneliest of my life.

Please come home because I can’t take it anymore.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

“Plea deal on another case went south.” Ben dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. It clinked against Charlie’s half-empty water bottle. “Ready?”

She had no choice but to walk. She kept her fingertips to the wall, turning sideways as more cops in black tactical gear passed by. Their expressions were cold, unreadable. They were either going somewhere or coming back from something, their collective jaws set against the world.

This was a school shooting.

Charlie had been so focused on the what that she had forgotten the where.

She wasn’t an expert, but she knew enough about these investigations to understand that every school shooting informed the next one. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook. Law enforcement agencies studied these tragedies in an effort to prevent, or at the very least understand, the next one.

The ATF would comb the middle school for bombs because others had used bombs before. The GBI would look for accomplices because sometimes, rarely, there were accomplices. Canine officers would hunt for suspicious backpacks in the halls. They would check every locker, every teacher’s desk, every closet for explosives. Investigators would look for Kelly’s diary or a hit list, diagrams of the school, stashes of weaponry, a plan of assault. Tech people would look at computers, phones, Facebook pages, Snapchat accounts. Everyone would search for a motive, but what motive could they find? What answer could an eighteen-year-old offer to explain why she had decided to commit cold-blooded murder?

That was Rusty’s problem now. Exactly the kind of thorny, moral and legal issue that got him out of bed in the morning.

Exactly the kind of law that Charlie had never wanted to practice.

“Come on.” Ben walked ahead of her. He had a long, loping stride because he always put too much weight on the balls of his feet.

Was Kelly Wilson being abused? That would be Rusty’s first line of inquiry. Was there some sort of mitigating circumstance that would keep her off death row? She had been held back at least one year in school. Did that indicate a low IQ? Diminished capacity? Was Kelly Wilson capable of telling right from wrong? Could she participate in her own defense, as required by law?

Ben pushed open the exit door.

Was Kelly Wilson a bad seed? Was the explanation here the only explanation that would never make sense? Would Delia Wofford tell Lucy Alexander’s parents and Mrs. Pinkman that the reason they lost their loved ones was because Kelly Wilson was bad?

“Charlie,” Ben said. He was holding open the door. His iPhone was back in his hand.

Charlie shielded her eyes as she walked outside. The sunlight was as sharp as a blade. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Here.” Ben handed her a pair of sunglasses. They belonged to her. He must have gotten them out of her car.

Charlie took the glasses but couldn’t put them on her tender nose. She opened her mouth for air. The sudden heat was too much. She leaned down, hand braced on her knee.

“Are you going to be sick?”

“No,” she said, then “maybe,” then she threw up just enough to make a splatter.

Ben didn’t step back. He managed to gather her hair away from her face without touching her skin. Charlie retched two more times before he asked, “All right?”

“Maybe.” Charlie opened her mouth. She waited for more. A line of spit came out, but nothing else. “Okay.”

He let her hair drop back around her shoulders. “The paramedic told me that you have a concussion.”

Charlie couldn’t lift her head, but she told him, “There’s nothing they can do about it.”

“They can monitor you for symptoms like nausea and blurred vision and headaches and forgetting names and not tracking when you’re asked a simple question.”

“They wouldn’t know the names I was forgetting,” she said. “I don’t want to spend the night in a hospital.”

“Stay at the HP.” The higgledy-piggledy. Sam’s name for the meandering farmhouse had stuck. Ben said, “Rusty can watch you.”

“So I die from second-hand smoke instead of a brain aneurysm?”

“That’s not funny.”

Head still down, Charlie reached back for the wall. The feel of the solid concrete block gave her enough steadiness to risk standing up straight. She cupped her hand to her eyes. She remembered cupping her hand to the window of the front office this morning.

Ben handed her the water bottle. He had already taken the top off for her. She took a few slow sips and tried not to read too much into his thoughtfulness. Her husband was thoughtful with everybody.

She asked, “Where was Mrs. Jenkins when the shooting started?”

“In the file room.”

“Did she see anything?”

“Rusty will find out everything during discovery.”

“Everything,” Charlie repeated. In the coming months, Ken Coin would be required by law to turn over any material in the investigation that could be reasonably interpreted as evidence. Coin’s idea of “reasonable” was as fixed as a spider’s web.

She asked Ben, “Is Mrs. Pinkman okay?”

He didn’t bring up her “Heller” slip because that wasn’t his way. “She’s at the hospital. They had to sedate her.”

Charlie should visit her, but she knew that she would find an excuse not to. “You let me think Kelly Wilson was sixteen years old.”

“I thought you could figure it out by holding a sphere in your hand and pulling apart time.”

Charlie laughed. “That was some next-level bullshit I laid down in there.”

“There’s some out here, too.”

Charlie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She smelled dried blood again. Like everything else, she remembered the smell from before. She remembered the dark flecks falling like ash from her hair. She remembered that even after she’d bathed, even after she’d scrubbed herself raw, the odor of death had lingered.

She said, “You called me this morning.”

Ben shrugged like it didn’t matter.

Charlie poured the rest of the water onto her hands to clean them. “Have you talked to your mom and your sisters? They’ll be worried.”

“We talked.” He did that shrug again. “I should go back in.”

Charlie waited, but he didn’t go back in. She grappled for a reason to make him stay. “How’s Barkzilla?”

“Barky.” Ben took the empty bottle. He screwed on the cap. He dropped it back into his jacket pocket. “How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“Quiet.”

He tucked his chin into his chest, returning to silence. This was nothing new. Her normally articulate husband had not articulated much to her in the past nine months.

But he wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t nodding her along, urging her to go. He wasn’t telling her that the only reason he wasn’t asking her if she was okay was because she would say that she was okay even if she wasn’t. Especially if she wasn’t.

She asked, “Why did you call me this morning?”

Ben groaned. He leaned his head back against the wall.

Charlie leaned her head back against the wall, too.

She studied the sharp line of his jaw. This was her type—a lanky, laid-back nerd who could quote Monty Python as easily as the United States constitution. He read graphic novels. He drank a glass of milk every night before he went to bed. He loved potato salad, and Lord of the Rings, and model trains. He preferred fantasy football to the real kind. He could not put on weight if you force-fed him butter. He was six feet tall when he stood up straight, which didn’t happen often.

She loved him so much that her heart literally hurt at the thought of never holding him again.

Ben said, “Peggy had this friend when she was fourteen. Her name was Violet.”

Peggy was the bossiest of his three older sisters.

“She was killed in a car crash. She was on her bicycle. We went to the funeral. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, taking me. I was too young to see that kind of thing. It was open casket. Carla held me up so I could see her.” His throat worked. “I, like, lost my shit. Mom had to take me out into the parking lot. It gave me nightmares. I thought that was the worst thing that I would ever see. A dead kid. A dead little girl. But she was cleaned up. You couldn’t see what had happened, that the car had hit her in the back. That she had bled to death, but inside. Not like the girl today. Not like what I saw at the school.”

There were tears in his eyes. Each word out of his mouth broke another piece of Charlie’s heart. She had to clench her fists to keep from reaching out to him.

Ben said, “Murder is murder. I can deal with that. Dealers. Gangbangers. Even domestic violence. But a kid? A little girl?” He kept shaking his head. “She didn’t look like she was sleeping, did she?”

“No.”

“She looked like she had been murdered. Like someone had fired a gun at her throat and the bullet ripped it open and she died a horrible, violent death.”

Charlie looked up into the sun because she didn’t want to see Lucy Alexander dying all over again.

Ben said, “The guy’s a war hero. Did you know that?”

He was talking about Huck.

“He saved a platoon or something, but he won’t talk about it because he’s like fucking Batman or something.” Ben pushed himself away from the wall, away from Charlie. “And this morning, he took a bullet in his arm. To save a murderer, whom he kept from getting murdered. And then he stood up for the guy who almost killed him. He lied in a sworn statement to keep another guy out of trouble. He’s so fucking handsome, right?” Ben was angry now, but his voice was low, shrunken by the humiliation that came courtesy of his bitch wife. “A guy like that, you see him walking down the street, you don’t know whether you want to fuck him or have a beer with him.”

Charlie looked down at the ground. They knew she had done both.

“Lenore’s here.”

Rusty’s secretary had pulled up to the gate in her red Mazda.

Charlie said, “Ben, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. An awful, awful mistake.”

“Did you let him on top?”

“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Lenore tapped the horn. She rolled down her window and waved. Charlie waved back, her hand splayed, trying to let Lenore know that she needed a minute.

“Ben—”

It was too late. Ben was already pulling the door closed behind him.

4

Charlie sniffed her sunglasses as she walked toward Lenore’s car. She knew she was acting like a foolish girl in a teen romance, but she wanted to smell Ben. What she got instead was a whiff of her own sweat tinged with vomit.

Lenore leaned across the car to push open the door. “You put those on your nose, sweetheart, not in front of it.”

Charlie couldn’t put anything on her nose. She tossed the cheap glasses onto the dashboard as she got in. “Did Daddy send you?”

“Ben texted me, but, listen, your dad wants us to fetch the Wilsons and bring them back to the office. Coin’s trying to execute a search warrant. I brought your court clothes to change into.”

Charlie had started shaking her head as soon as she heard the words “your dad wants.” She asked, “Where’s Rusty?”

“At the hospital with the Wilson girl.”

Charlie huffed a laugh. Ben had really honed his deception skills. “How long before Dad figured out she wasn’t being held at the station?”

“Over an hour.”

Charlie put on her seat belt. “I was thinking how much Coin loves to play his games.” She had no doubt the district attorney had put Kelly Wilson in the back of an ambulance for the trip to the hospital. By maintaining the illusion that she wasn’t in police custody, he could argue that any statement she made absent counsel was voluntary. “She’s eighteen years old.”

“Rusty told me. The girl was practically catatonic at the hospital. He barely got her mama’s phone number out of her.”

“That’s how she was when I saw her. Almost in a fugue state.” Charlie hoped Kelly Wilson snapped out of it soon. At the moment, she was Rusty’s most vital source of information. Until he received the discovery materials from Ken Coin—witness lists, police statements, investigators’ notes, forensics—her father would be flying blind.

Lenore put her hand on the gear. “Where am I taking you?”

Charlie pictured herself at home, standing under a hot shower, surrounding herself with pillows in bed. And then she remembered that Ben wouldn’t be there and said, “I guess to the Wilsons.”

“They live on the backside of the Holler.” Lenore put the car in gear. She made a wide U-turn and drove up the street. “There’s no street address. Your dad sent me country directions—take a left at the old white dog, take a right at the crooked oak tree.”

“That’s good news for Kelly, I guess.” Rusty could break a search warrant that didn’t have the right address or at least a proper description of the house. The odds were against Ken Coin to come up with either. There were hundreds of rental houses and trailers up and down the Holler. No one knew exactly how many people lived there, what their names were or whether or not their children were attending school. The slumlords didn’t bother with leases or background checks so long as the right amount of cash showed up every week.

Charlie asked, “How long do you think we have before Ken locates the house?”

“No idea. They brought in a helicopter from Atlanta an hour ago, but from what I can tell, it’s on the other side of the mountain.”

Charlie knew that she could find the Wilson house. She was in the Holler at least twice a month chasing down past-due legal bills. Ben had been horrified when she’d casually mentioned her night-time excursions. Sixty percent of the crime in Pikeville was committed in or near Sadie’s Holler.

Lenore said, “I packed a sandwich for you.”

“I’m not hungry.” Charlie looked at the clock on the dash: 11:52 AM. Less than five hours ago, she’d been looking inside the darkened front office at the middle school. Less than ten minutes after that, two people were dead, another was shot, and Charlie was about to get her nose broken.

Lenore said, “You should eat.”

“I will.” Charlie stared out the window. Sunlight strobed through the tall trees behind the buildings. The flickering light flashed images into her mind like an old-timey slideshow. Charlie allowed herself the rare indulgence of lingering on the ones of Gamma and Sam—running down the long driveway to the farmhouse, giggling over a thrown plastic fork. She knew what came later, so she fast-forwarded until Sam and Gamma were firmly back in the past and all that remained was the aftermath of this morning.

Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman.

A little girl. A middle-school principal.

The victims didn’t seem to have much in common except that they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Charlie had to guess, she would assume that Kelly Wilson’s plan was to stand in the middle of the hall, revolver out in front of her, and wait for the bell to ring.

Then little Lucy Alexander rounded the corner.

Pop.

Then Mr. Pinkman rushed out of his office.

Pop-pop-pop.

Then the bell had rung and, but for some quick-thinking staff, a sea of fresh victims would have rushed down that same hallway.

Goth. Loner. Held back a grade.

Kelly Wilson was the exact type of girl who got bullied. Alone at the lunch table, last to get picked during gym, attending the school dance with a boy who only wanted one thing.

Why had Kelly picked up a gun when Charlie hadn’t?

Lenore said, “At least drink that Coke in the cooler. It’ll help with the shock.”

“I’m not in shock.”

“I bet you think your nose isn’t broken, either.”

“Actually, I do think it’s broken.” Lenore’s persistent mentions of Charlie’s health finally made Charlie aware that her health wasn’t that great. Her head was in a vise. Her nose had its own heartbeat. Her eyelids felt like they were weighed down with honey. She gave in for a few seconds, letting them close, welcoming the blankness.

Over the hum of the engine, she could hear Lenore’s feet working the pedals as she shifted gears. She always drove barefooted with her high heels on the floor beside her. She tended toward short skirts and colored stockings. The look was too young for a seventy-year-old woman, but considering that Charlie currently had more hair on her legs than Lenore, she couldn’t sit in judgment.

“You need to drink some of that Coke,” Lenore said.

Charlie opened her eyes. The world was still there.

“Now.”

Charlie was too exhausted to argue. She found the cooler wedged against the seat. She took out the Coke but left the sandwich. Instead of opening the bottle, she held it to the back of her neck. “Can I have some aspirin?”

“Nope. Raises the risk of bleeding.”

Charlie would’ve welcomed a coma over the pain. There was something about the bright sun that had turned her head into a giant, ringing bell. “What’s that thing you get in your ears?”

“Tinnitus,” Lenore said. “I’ll stop the car if you don’t start drinking that Coke right now.”

“And let the police get to the Wilson house before we do?”

“They’d have to leave out on this road, for one, and for two, even if they find the location of the house, and even if they have a judge standing by, it’ll take at least half an hour to put the warrant together and three, shut the hell up and do what I tell you before I pop you on the leg.”

Charlie used her T-shirt to twist off the cap. She sipped the Coke and watched downtown slip into the side mirror.

Lenore asked, “Did you throw up?”

“Pass.” Charlie felt her stomach clench again. The world outside was too disorienting. She had to close her eyes to regain her equilibrium.

The slideshow popped into her head again: Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Gamma. Sam. Charlie clicked through the images quickly like she was searching for a file on her computer.

What had she said to special agent Delia Wofford that might hurt Kelly Wilson’s defense? Rusty would want to know. He would also want to know about the number and sequence of gunshots, the capacity of the revolver, what Kelly had whispered when Huck was begging her to give him the gun.

That last part would be crucial to Kelly Wilson’s defense. If she had made an admission, if she had offered a glib comment or stated a grim motive for her crimes, then no amount of oratory flourish on Rusty’s part would save her from the needle. Ken Coin would never turn such a high-profile prosecution over to the state. He had argued two capital cases before. No jury in Pikeville would refuse his request for death by lethal injection. Coin spoke with a particular authority. Back when he was a police officer, he’d executed a man with his own hands.

Twenty-eight years ago, Daniel Culpepper, Zachariah Culpepper’s brother, had been sitting in his trailer watching television when Officer Ken Coin had rolled up in his squad car. It was eight thirty in the evening. Gamma’s body had already been found at the farmhouse. Sam was bleeding her life away in the shallow stream that ran under the weather tower. Thirteen-year-old Charlie was sitting in the back of an ambulance begging the paramedics to let her go home. Officer Coin had kicked down the front door to Daniel Culpepper’s trailer. The suspect had grabbed his gun. Coin had shot the nineteen-year-old seven times in the chest.

To this day, the majority of the Culpepper clan insisted on Daniel’s innocence, but the evidence against the kid was incontrovertible. The revolver found in Daniel’s hand was later identified as the same weapon that had been used to shoot Sam in the head. Daniel’s blood-covered jeans and distinctive blue hightops were found smoldering in a burn barrel behind the trailer. Even his own brother said they both went to the HP to kill Rusty. They were worried they would lose their home over some stupid legal bill they assumed would come due after the Quinns lost everything in the fire. Charlie was left to survive the ordeal with the knowledge that her family’s life had been reduced to the price of a used trailer.

Lenore said, “We’re going past the school.”

Charlie opened her eyes. Pikeville Middle School had been Pikeville Junior High when Charlie was a student. The building had sprawled over the years, hastily overbuilt to accommodate the twelve hundred students pulled in from the neighboring communities. The high school beside it was even larger, meant to house almost two thousand kids.

She saw the empty space where her car had been parked. Police tape cordoned off the lot. There were other cars that belonged to teachers scattered among the police cruisers, government sedans, ambulances, fire trucks, crime scene buses, the coroner’s van. A news helicopter was flying low over the gymnasium. The scene felt surreal, like a director would yell “cut” and everyone would take lunch.

Charlie said, “Mrs. Pinkman had to be sedated.”

“She’s a good woman. She doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does.”

Charlie nodded because she couldn’t talk past the glass in her throat. Judith Heller Pinkman had been a weird touchstone to Charlie over the years. They would see each other in the hall when Charlie finally went back to school. Miss Heller always smiled, but she didn’t push Charlie, didn’t force her to talk about the tragedy behind their connection. She kept her distance, which in retrospect, took a kind of discipline that most people didn’t possess.

Lenore asked, “I wonder how long the media attention will last?” She was looking up at the helicopter. “Two victims. That’s quaint compared to most mass shootings.”

“Girls don’t kill. At least, not like this.”

“‘I Don’t Like Mondays.’”

“In general, or do you mean the Boomtown Rats’ song?”

“The song.” Lenore said, “It’s based on a shooting. 1979. A sixteen-year-old girl took a sniper rifle to a playground. I forget how many she killed. When the cops asked her why she did it, she said, ‘I don’t like Mondays.’”

“Jesus,” Charlie whispered, hoping like hell that Kelly Wilson hadn’t been that callous when she had whispered whatever she’d said in the hallway.

And then Charlie wondered why she cared about Kelly Wilson, because the girl was a murderer.

Charlie was jarred by the sudden clarity of thought.

Take away all that had happened this morning—the fear, the deaths, the memories, the heartache—and Charlie was left with one simple truth: Kelly Wilson had murdered two people in cold blood.

Unbidden, Rusty’s voice intruded: So what?

Kelly still had a right to a trial. She still had a right to the best defense she could find. Charlie had said as much to the angry group of cops who had wanted to beat the girl to death, but now, sitting in the car with Lenore, Charlie wondered if she had come to the girl’s defense simply because no one else would.

Another personality flaw that had become a sore point in her marriage.

She reached into the back seat, this time for her court clothes. She found what Ben called her Amish shirt and what Charlie considered one step up from a burka. The Pikeville judges, all of them cranky old men, were an aggressively conservative lot. Female lawyers had to choose between wearing long skirts and chaste blouses or having every objection, every motion, every word out of their mouth overruled.

Lenore asked, “Are you okay?”

“No, not really.” Letting out the truth took some of the pressure off of her chest. Charlie had always told Lenore things that she would never admit to anyone else. Lenore had known Rusty for over fifty years. She was a black hole into which all of the Quinn family secrets disappeared. “My head is killing me. My nose is broken. I feel like I threw up a lung. I can’t even see to read, and none of that matters because I cheated on Ben last night.”

Lenore silently shifted gears as she pulled onto the two-lane highway.

Charlie said, “It was okay while it lasted. I mean, he got the job done.” She carefully peeled off her Duke T-shirt, trying not to bump her nose. “I woke up crying this morning. I couldn’t stop. I just lay in bed for half an hour staring up at the ceiling and wanting to kill myself. And then the phone rang.”

Lenore shifted again. They were leaving the Pikeville city limits. The wind off the mountains buffeted the compact sedan.

“I shouldn’t have picked up the stupid phone. I couldn’t even remember his name. He couldn’t remember mine. At least he pretended not to. It was embarrassing and sordid and now Ben knows. The GBI knows. Everyone in his office knows.”

Charlie said, “That’s why I was at the school this morning, to meet the guy because he took my phone by mistake and he called and …” She put on her court shirt, a starched button-up with ruffles down the front to assure the judges that she was taking this woman thing seriously. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Lenore shifted into sixth. “That you were lonely.”

Charlie laughed, though there was nothing funny about the truth. She watched her fingers as she buttoned the shirt. The buttons were suddenly too small. Or maybe it was that her hands were sweating. Or maybe it was that the tremble was back in her fingers, the vibration of bone that felt like a tuning fork had been struck against her chest.

“Baby,” Lenore said. “Let it out.”

Charlie shook her head. She didn’t want to let it out. She wanted to hold it back, to put all the horrible images in their box, shove it onto a shelf, and never open it ever again.

But then a teardrop fell.

Then another.

Then Charlie was crying, then she was sobbing so hard that she doubled over, her head in her hands, because the grief was too much to carry.

Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Miss Heller. Gamma. Sam. Ben.

The car slowed. The tires bumped against gravel as Lenore pulled to the side of the road. She rubbed Charlie’s back. “It’s okay, baby.”

It wasn’t okay. She wanted her husband. She wanted her useless asshole of a father. Where was Rusty? Why was he never there when she needed him?

“It’s okay.” Lenore kept rubbing Charlie’s back and Charlie kept crying because it was never going to be all right.

From the moment Charlie had heard those first gunshots in Huck’s room, the entirety of the most violent hour of her life had snapped back into her waking memory. She kept hearing the same words over and over again. Keep running. Don’t look back. Into the woods. To Miss Heller’s house. Up the school hallway. Toward the gunshots. But she was too late. Charlie was always too fucking late.

Lenore stroked back Charlie’s hair. “Deep breaths, sweetheart.”

Charlie realized she was starting to hyperventilate. Her vision blurred. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She made herself breathe until her lungs could take in more than a teaspoonful of air at a time.

“Take your time,” Lenore said.

Charlie took a few more deep breaths. Her vision cleared, at least as much as it was going to. She took another series of breaths, holding them for a second, maybe two, to prove to herself that she could.

“Better?”

Charlie whispered, “Was that a panic attack?”

“Might still be one.”

“Help me up.” Charlie reached for Lenore’s hand. The blood rushed from her head. Instinctively, she touched her aching nose, and the pain intensified.

Lenore said, “You really got whacked, sweetheart.”

“You should see the other guy. Not a scratch on him.”

Lenore didn’t laugh.

Charlie said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Don’t be stupid. You know what came over you.”

“Yeah, well,” Charlie said, the two words she always said when she didn’t want to talk about something.

Instead of putting the car in gear, Lenore’s long fingers laced through Charlie’s smaller ones. For all her miniskirts, she still had man hands, wide with knobby knuckles and lately, age spots. In many ways, Charlie had gotten more of her mothering from Lenore than Gamma. It was Lenore who showed her how to wear make-up, who took Charlie to the store to buy her first box of tampons, who warned her to never ever trust a man to take care of birth control.

Charlie said, “Ben texted you to pick me up. That’s something, right?”

“It is.”

Charlie opened the glove box and found some tissue. She couldn’t blow her nose. She patted underneath. She squinted her eyes out the window, relieved that she could see things rather than shapes. Unfortunately, the view was the worst one possible. They were three hundred yards away from where Daniel Culpepper had been shot in his trailer.

Charlie said, “The really shitty thing is that I can’t even say that today was the worst day of my life.”

Lenore laughed this time, a husky, deep-throated acknowledgment that Charlie was right. She worked the gears and pulled back onto the highway. The going was smooth until she slowed for the turn onto Culpepper Road. Deep potholes gave way to gravel, which eventually turned into packed red clay. There was a subtle change in the temperature, maybe a few degrees, as they drove down the mountain. Charlie resisted the urge to shiver. Her trepidation felt like a thing she could hold in her hand. The hairs on the back of her neck rose up. She always felt this way when she came into the Holler. It wasn’t only the sense of not belonging, but the knowledge that the wrong turn, the wrong Culpepper, and physical danger would no longer be an abstract concept.

“Shit!” Lenore startled when a pack of dogs rushed a chain-link fence. Their frenzied barking sounded like a thousand hammers pounding against the car.

“Redneck alarm,” Charlie told her. You couldn’t step foot in the Holler without a hundred dogs howling your arrival. The deeper in you went, the more young white men you’d see standing on their front porches, one hand holding their cell phone and the other under their shirt rubbing their belly. These young men were capable of work, but they eschewed the labor-intensive jobs for which they were qualified. They smoked dope all day, played video games, stole when they needed money, beat their girlfriends when they wanted Oxy, sent their kids to pick up their disability checks at the post office, and let their glorious life choices form the backbone of Charlie’s legal practice.

She felt a flash of guilt for painting the entire Holler with the Culpepper brush. She knew that some good people lived here. They were hard-working, striving men and women whose only sin was to be poor, but Charlie could not help the knee-jerk reaction to the taint of proximity.

There had been six Culpepper girls of various ages who had made Charlie’s life a living hell when she went back to school. They were flea-bitten, nasty bitches with long painted fingernails and filthy mouths. They bullied Charlie. They stole her lunch money. They ripped up her textbooks. One of them had even left a pile of shit in her gym bag.

To this day, the family insisted that Charlie had lied about seeing Zachariah with the shotgun. They figured she was guided by some glorious scheme on Rusty’s part to lay claim to the meager life insurance policy and two-bedroom trailer that was up for grabs after Daniel had died and Zachariah was sent to prison. As if a man who had made it his life’s work to see justice done would trade his morality for a few pieces of silver.

The fact that Rusty had never sued the family for a penny did nothing to temper their wild conspiracy theories. They continued to firmly believe that Ken Coin planted the abundance of evidence found at the trailer and on Daniel’s person. That Coin murdered Daniel to kick-start his political career. That Coin’s brother, Keith, helped alter evidence at the state lab.

Still, it was Charlie who was on the receiving end of the majority of their rage. She had identified the brothers. The lies had not only started at her lips, but she continued to insist they were true. Thus the murder of one Culpepper brother and the death-row confinement of another rested squarely on her shoulders.

They weren’t entirely off the mark, at least not where Zachariah was concerned. Despite Rusty’s scathing disapproval, thirteen-year-old Charlie had stood in front of a packed courtroom and asked the judge to sentence Zachariah Culpepper to death. She would’ve done the same at Daniel’s trial if Ken Coin hadn’t robbed her of the pleasure.

“What is that racket?” Lenore asked.

Charlie heard the chopping sound of a helicopter overhead. She recognized the logo from one of the Atlanta news stations.

Lenore handed Charlie her phone. “Read me the directions.”

Charlie dialed in the passcode, which was her own birthday, and pulled up Rusty’s text. Her father had graduated from the University of Georgia law school and was one of the best known trial lawyers in the state, but he couldn’t spell for shit. “Left up here,” she told Lenore, pointing to a track marked by a white flagpole with a large Confederate flag. “Then right at this trailer.”

Charlie skimmed ahead, recognizing the route as one she had taken before. She had a client with a meth problem he financed by selling to other junkies with meth problems. He had tried to pay her in crystal once. Apparently, he lived two doors down from the Wilsons. She said, “Take a right up here, then another right at the bottom of the hill.”

“I stuck your fee agreement in your purse.”

Charlie felt her lips purse to ask why, but then she answered her own question. “Dad wants me to represent the Wilsons so it burns me as a witness against Kelly.”

Lenore looked at her, then looked at her again. “How did you miss that twenty minutes ago?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said, but she did know. Because she was traumatized. Because she ached for her husband. Because she was such an idiot that again and again she expected her father to be the kind of person who worried about his daughter the way he worried about pimps and gangbangers and murderers. “I can’t do it. Any judge worth his salt would slap me so hard with a bar complaint I’d be in China before my license to practice was revoked.”

“You won’t have to chase chicken bones up and down the Holler once you settle your lawsuit.” She nodded to her phone. “You need to take some pictures of your face while the bruises are fresh.”

“I told Ben I’m not filing a lawsuit.”

Lenore’s foot slipped off the gas.

“All I want is a sincere apology. In writing.”

“An apology isn’t going to change anything.” They had reached the bottom of the hill. Lenore took a sharp right. Charlie didn’t have to wait long for the lecture that was brewing. “Assholes like Ken Coin preach about small government, but they end up spending twice as much on lawsuits as they would on training cops the right way in the first place.”

“I know.”

“The only way to make them change is to hit them in the pocketbook.”

Charlie wanted to stick her fingers into her ears. “I’m going to get this from Dad. I don’t need it from you. It’s here.”

Lenore hit the brakes. The car lurched. She backed up a few feet, then turned onto another dirt track. Weeds sprung up between the wheel grooves. They passed a yellow school bus parked under a weeping willow. The Mazda bumped over a ridge, then a cluster of small houses came into view. There were four in all, scattered around a wide oval. Charlie checked Rusty’s text again, and matched the number to the house on the far right. There was no driveway, only the edge of the track. The house was made of painted chipboard. A large bay window blistered out in the front like a ripe pimple. Cinder blocks served as front steps.

Lenore said, “Ava Wilson drives a bus. She was at the school this morning when they locked down the building.”

“Did someone tell her that Kelly was the shooter?”

“She didn’t find out until Rusty called her cell.”

Charlie was glad Rusty hadn’t stuck her with making that phone call. “Is the father in the picture?”

“Ely Wilson. He works day labor down in Ellijay, one of those guys who waits outside the lumber yard every morning for somebody to put him to work.”

“Have the police located him?”

“Not that we know of. The family only has one cell phone, and the wife has it.”

Charlie stared at the sad-looking house. “So she’s in there alone.”

“Not for long.” Lenore looked up as another helicopter hovered into view. This one was painted in the distinctive blue and silver stripes of the Georgia State Patrol. “They’ll pop a Google map on the warrant and be here in half an hour.”

“I’ll be quick.” Charlie went to get out of the car, but Lenore stopped her.

“Here.” Lenore pulled Charlie’s purse from the back seat. “Ben gave me this when he brought back your car.”

Charlie wrapped her hand around the strap, wondering if she was holding the bag the same way Ben had. “That’s something, right?”

“It is.”

Charlie got out of the car and walked toward the house. She rummaged around in her purse for some breath mints. She had to settle for a handful of furry Tic Tacs stuck like lice into the seams of the front pocket.

She had learned the hard way that Holler people generally answered the door with some kind of weapon in their hands, so instead of traversing the cinder block front steps, she walked to the bay window. There were no curtains. Three pots of geraniums were underneath. There was a glass ashtray resting on the soil, but it was empty.

Inside, Charlie could see a petite, dark-haired woman sitting on the couch, transfixed by the image on the television. Everyone in the Holler had a giant, flat-screen TV that had apparently fallen off the same truck. Ava Wilson had the news on. The sound was up so high that the reporter’s voice was audible from outside.

“… new details coming in from our Atlanta affiliate …”

Charlie went to the front door and knocked, three sharp raps.

She waited. She listened. She knocked a second time. Then a third.

“Hello?” she called.

Finally, the television was muted. She heard the shuffling of feet. A lock clicking back. A chain sliding. Another lock opening. The extra security was a joke considering a thief could punch his hand through the flimsy wall.

Ava Wilson blinked at the stranger outside her door. She was as small as her daughter, with the same almost childlike quality. She was wearing light blue pajamas with cartoon elephants on the pants. Her eyes were bloodshot. She was younger than Charlie, but shoots of gray ran through her dark brown hair.

“I’m Charlie Quinn,” she told the woman. “My father, Rusty Quinn, is your daughter’s attorney. He asked me to pick you up and take you to his office.”

The woman did not move. She did not speak. This was what shock looked like.

Charlie asked, “Have the police spoken to you?”

“No, ma’am,” she said, her Holler accent blending together the words. “Your daddy told me not to answer the phone unless I recognized the number.”

“He’s right.” Charlie shifted on her feet. She could hear dogs barking in the distance. The sun was burning the top of her head. “Look, I know you’re devastated about your daughter, but I need to prepare you for what’s coming next. The police are on their way here right now.”

“Are they bringing Kelly home?”

Charlie was thrown off by the hopefulness in Ava Wilson’s voice. “No. They’re going to search your house. They’ll probably start in Kelly’s room, then—”

“Will they take her some clean clothes?”

Again, Charlie was thrown. “No, they’re going to search the house for weapons, any notes, computers—”

“We don’t got a computer.”

“Okay, that’s good. Did Kelly do her schoolwork at the library?”

“She didn’t do anything,” Ava said. “She didn’t kill …” Her voice trailed off. Her eyes glistened. “Ma’am, you gotta hear me. My baby didn’t do what they’re saying.”

Charlie had dealt with her share of mothers who were convinced that their children were being framed, but there was no time to give Ava Wilson the speech about how sometimes good people did bad things. “Listen to me, Ava. The police are going to come in whether you let them or not. They’ll remove you from the house. They’ll do a thorough search. They might break things or find things you don’t want them to find. I doubt they’ll hold you in custody, but they might if they think you’re going to alter evidence, so please don’t do that. You cannot, please, hear me on this: you cannot say anything to them about Kelly or why she might have done this or what might have happened. They are not trying to help her and they are not her friends. Understand?”

Ava did not acknowledge the information. She just stood there.

The helicopter swooped lower. Charlie could see the pilot’s face behind the bubbled glass. He was talking into the mic, probably giving the coordinates for the search warrant.

She asked Ava, “Can we go inside?”

The woman didn’t move, so Charlie took her by the arm and led her into the house. “Have you heard from your husband?”

“Ely don’t call until he’s done working, from the payphone outside the lumber yard.”

Which meant that Kelly’s father would probably learn about his daughter’s crimes from his car radio. “Do you have a suitcase or a small bag you can put some clothes in?”

Ava did not answer. Her eyes were fixed on the muted television.

The middle school was on the news. An aerial shot showed the top of the gymnasium, which was likely being used as a staging ground. The scroll at the bottom of the screen read: BOMB SQUAD SWEPT BUILDING FOR SUSPICIOUS DEVICES. TWO DEAD—8-YEAR-OLD STUDENT, HERO PRINCIPAL WHO TRIED TO SAVE HER.

Lucy Alexander was only eight years old.

“She didn’t do this,” Ava said. “She wouldn’t.”

Lucy’s cold hand.

Sam’s trembling fingers.

The sudden white waxiness of Gamma’s skin.

Charlie wiped her eyes. She glanced around the room, fighting against the slideshow of horror that had returned to her head. The Wilson house was shabby, but tidy. A Jesus hung on a cross by the front door. The galley kitchen was right off the cramped living room. Dishes were drying in the rack. Yellow gloves were folded limply over the edge of the sink. The counter was cluttered, but there was order to it.

Charlie told Ava, “You’re not going to be allowed back in the house for a while. You’ll need a change of clothes, some toiletries.”

“The toilet’s right behind you.”

Charlie tried again. “You need to pack some things.” She waited to see if Ava understood. “Clothes, toothbrushes. Nothing else.”

Ava nodded, but she either could not or would not look away from the television.

Outside, the helicopter lifted away. Charlie was burning through time. Coin had probably gotten his warrant signed by now. The search team would be en route from town, full lights and sirens.

She asked Ava, “Do you want me to pack some things for you?” Charlie waited for another nod. And waited. “Ava, I’m going to get some clothes for you, then we’re going to wait outside for the police.”

Ava clutched the remote in her hand as she sat on the edge of the couch.

Charlie opened kitchen cabinets until she found a plastic grocery bag. She slipped on one of the yellow dishwashing gloves from the sink, then walked past the bathroom down the short, paneled hallway. There were two bedrooms, both of them taking up one end of the house. Instead of a door, Kelly had a purple curtain for privacy. The sheet of notebook paper pinned to the material said NO ADULTS ALOWT.

Charlie knew better than to go into a murder suspect’s room, but she used Lenore’s phone to take a picture of the sign.

The Wilsons’ bedroom was on the right, facing a steep hill behind the house. They slept in a large waterbed that took up most of the space. A tall chest of drawers kept the door from opening all the way. Charlie was glad she’d thought to put on the yellow glove as she opened the drawers, though to be honest, the Wilsons were neater than she was. She found some women’s underwear, a few pairs of boxers, and a pair of jeans that looked like they came from the children’s department. She grabbed two more T-shirts and shoved all of the clothes into the plastic grocery bag. Ken Coin was notorious for needlessly drawing out his searches. The Wilsons would be lucky if they were allowed back into their home by the weekend.

Charlie turned around, planning to go to the bathroom next, but something stopped her.

ALOWT.

How could Kelly Wilson reach the age of eighteen without knowing how to spell such a simple word?

Charlie hesitated once, then pulled back the curtain. She wouldn’t enter the room. She would take pictures from the hall. Not as easy as it sounded. The bedroom was the size of a generous walk-in closet.

Or a prison cell.

Light slanted in from the narrow, horizontal window mounted high over the twin bed. The paneling on the walls had been painted a light lilac. The carpet was orange shag. The bedspread had Hello Kitty listening to a Walkman with large headphones over her ears.

This was not a Goth girl’s room. There were no black walls and heavy metal posters. The closet door was open. Stacks of shirts were neatly folded on the floor. A few longer pieces hung from a sagging rod. Kelly’s clothes were all lightly colored with ponies and rabbits and the sort of appliqués you would expect a ten-year-old girl to wear, not an eighteen-year-old almost woman.

Charlie photographed everything she could: the bedspread, the posters of kittens, the candy-pink lip gloss on top of the dresser. All the while, her focus was on the things that weren’t there. Eighteen-year-olds had all kinds of make-up. They had pictures with their friends and notes from possible future boyfriends and secrets that they kept all to themselves.

Her heart jumped when she heard wheels spinning down the dirt track. She stood on the bed and looked out the window. A black van with SWAT on the side slowed to a stop in front of the yellow school bus. Two guys with rifles drawn jumped out of the van and entered the bus.

“How …” Charlie started to say, but then she realized it didn’t matter how they’d managed to get here so quickly, because as soon as they cleared the bus, they would tear apart the house that she was standing in.

But Charlie wasn’t exactly standing in the house. She was standing on Kelly Wilson’s bed inside Kelly Wilson’s bedroom.

“Fuck me,” she whispered, because there was no other way to put it. She jumped off the bed. She used her rubber-gloved hand to swipe away the dirt from her tennis shoes. The deep purple fabric hid the grooves but a forensic tech with a sharp eye would know the size, brand and model number before the sun went down.

Charlie needed to leave. She needed to take Ava outside, hands raised in the air. She needed to make it clear to the heavily armed SWAT team that they were cooperating.

“Fuck,” Charlie repeated. How much time did she have? She stood on tiptoe and looked out the window. The two cops were searching the bus. The rest stayed inside the van. They either believed they had the element of surprise or they were looking for explosive devices.

Charlie saw movement closer by the house.

Lenore was standing by her car. Her eyes were wide as she stared at Charlie because any fool could tell that the slit of a window she was looking through was in one of the bedrooms.

Lenore jerked her head toward the front door. Her mouth mimed the words, “Get out.”

Charlie jammed the plastic bag of clothes into her purse and made to leave.

The purple walls. The Hello Kitty. The kitten posters.

Thirty, maybe forty seconds. That’s how long it would take them to clear the bus, get back in the van, and reach the front door.

She used her gloved hand to open the dresser drawers. Clothes. Underwear. Pens. No diary. No notebooks. She got on her knees and ran her hand between the mattress and boxspring, then looked underneath the bed. Nothing. She was checking between the stacked clothes on the closet floor when she heard the SWAT van doors thunk closed, the tires crunch against dirt as they drew closer to the house.

Teenagers’ rooms were never this neat. Charlie rifled the contents of the tiny closet with one hand, dumping out two shoe boxes of toys, pulling clothes off hangers and tossing them onto the bed. She patted pockets, turned hats inside out. She stood on tiptoe and reached blindly onto the shelf.

The rubber glove skipped across something flat and hard.

A picture frame?

“Officers.” Lenore’s deep voice reached her ears through the thin walls. “There are two women in the house, both unarmed.”

The cop wasn’t interested. “Go back to your car! Now!”

Charlie’s heart was going to blow up in her chest. She grabbed at the thing on the closet shelf. It was heavier than she thought. The sharp edge jabbed the top of her head.

A yearbook.

Pikeville Middle School class of 2012.

A deafening knock came at the front door. The walls rattled. “State police!” a man’s voice boomed. “I am executing a search warrant. Open the door!”

“I’m coming!” Charlie jammed the yearbook into her purse. She had made it as far as the kitchen when the front door splintered open.

Ava screamed like she was on fire.

“Get down! Get down!” Lasers swept around the room. The house shook on its foundation. Windows were broken. Doors were kicked in. Men yelled orders. Ava kept screaming. Charlie was on her knees, hands in the air, eyes wide open so that she could see which man ended up shooting her.

No one shot her.

No one moved.

Ava’s screaming stopped on a dime.

Six massive cops in full tactical gear took up every available inch of the room. Their arms were so tensed as they gripped their AR-15s that Charlie could make out the strands of muscle working to keep their fingers from moving to the triggers.

Slowly, Charlie looked down at her chest.

There was a red dot over her heart.

She looked at Ava.

Five more dots on her chest.

The woman was standing on the couch, knees bent. Her mouth was open, but fear had paralyzed her vocal cords. Inexplicably, she held a toothbrush in each of her raised hands.

The man closest to Ava lowered his rifle. “Toothbrushes.”

Another rifle was lowered. “Looked like a God damn trigger switch.”

“I know, right?”

More rifles were lowered. Someone chuckled.

The tension lightened incrementally.

From outside the house, a woman yelled, “Gentlemen?”

“Clear,” the first guy called back. He grabbed Ava by the arm and pushed her out the door. He turned around to do the same to Charlie, but she escorted herself out, hands in the air.

She didn’t lower her arms until she was out in the yard. She took a deep breath of fresh air and tried not to think about how she could’ve died if any one of those men hadn’t taken the time to differentiate between a toothbrush and a detonator for a suicide vest.

In Pikeville.

“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said, hoping it would pass for a prayer.

Lenore had stayed by the car. She looked furious to Charlie, which she had every right to be, but she only lifted her chin, asking the obvious question: You okay?

Charlie nodded back, but she didn’t feel okay. She felt angry—that Rusty had sent her here, that she had taken such a stupid risk, that she had violated the law for reasons that were completely unknown to her, that she had risked getting shot in the heart with what was likely a fast-expanding hollow-point bullet.

All for a fucking yearbook.

Ava whispered, “What’s happening?”

Charlie looked back at the house, which was still shaking from all the heavy men traipsing back and forth. “They’re searching for things they can use in court against Kelly.”

“Like what?”

Charlie listed off the things that she had been looking for. “A confession. An explanation. A diagram of the school. A list of people Kelly was mad at.”

“She’s never been mad at nobody.”

“Ava Wilson?” A tall woman in bulky tactical gear walked toward them. She had her rifle slung to her side. A rolled-up piece of paper was in her fist. That was how they’d gotten here so quickly. The warrant had been faxed to the van. “Are you Ava Wilson, mother to Kelly Rene Wilson?”

Ava stiffened at the sound of authority. “Yes, sir. Ma’am.”

“This is your house?”

“We rent it, yes, ma’am. Sir.”

“Mrs. Wilson.” The cop didn’t seem concerned with pronouns. “I’m Captain Isaac with the state police. I have a warrant to search your house.”

Charlie pointed out, “You’re already searching it.”

“We had reason to believe evidence might be tampered with.” Isaac studied Charlie’s bruised eye. “Were you accidentally injured during the breach, ma’am?”

“No. A different police officer hit me today.”

Isaac glanced at Lenore, who was still apparently livid, then looked back at Charlie. “Are you two ladies together?”

“Yes,” Charlie said. “Mrs. Wilson would like to see a copy of the warrant.”

Isaac made a point of noticing the yellow glove on Charlie’s hand.

“Dish-washing glove,” Charlie said, which was technically true. “Mrs. Wilson would like to see a copy of the warrant.”

“Are you Mrs. Wilson’s lawyer?”

“I’m a lawyer,” Charlie clarified. “I’m only here as a friend of the family.”

Isaac told Ava, “Mrs. Wilson, per your friend’s request, I am giving you a copy of the warrant.”

Charlie had to lift Ava’s arm so that the warrant could be placed in the woman’s hand.

Isaac asked, “Mrs. Wilson, are there any weapons in the house?”

Ava shook her head. “No, sir.”

“Any needles we should be worried about? Anything that’s going to cut us?”

Again, Ava shook her head, though she seemed troubled by the question.

“Explosives?”

Ava’s hand flew to her mouth. “Is there a gas leak?”

Isaac looked to Charlie for an explanation. Charlie shrugged. The mother’s life was upside down. Logic was the last thing they should expect from her.

Isaac asked Ava, “Ma’am, do I have your consent to search your person?”

“Ye—”

“No,” Charlie interrupted. “You don’t have consent to search anything or anyone beyond the scope of the warrant.”

Isaac glanced down at Charlie’s purse, which had conformed roughly to the shape of a rectangular yearbook. “Do I need to search your bag?”

Charlie felt her heart flip. “Do you have cause?”

“If you’ve concealed evidence, or removed something from the house with the purposes of concealment, then—”

“That would be illegal,” Charlie said. “Like searching a school bus when it’s not specifically listed in your warrant and it’s not part of the curtilage.”

Isaac nodded once. “You would be correct, unless there was cause.”

Charlie snapped off the yellow glove. “I did remove this from the house, but not intentionally.”

“Thank you for being forthcoming.” Isaac turned to Ava. She had a script to follow. “Ma’am, you can stay outside, or you can leave, but you cannot go back into the house until we’ve released it. Do you understand?”

Ava shook her head.

Charlie said, “She understands.”

Isaac walked across the yard and joined the men inside the house. Plastic containers were stacked by the door. Evidence logs. Zip ties. Plastic bags. Ava stared through the bay window. The television was still on. The screen was so large that Charlie could read the scroll along the bottom: PIKEVILLE PD SOURCE: SCHOOL SECURITY FOOTAGE WILL NOT BE RELEASED.

Security cameras. Charlie had not noticed them this morning, but now she recalled a camera at the end of every hallway.

The murder spree had been captured on video.

Ava asked, “What are we going to do?”

Charlie suppressed her first answer: Watch your daughter get strapped to a gurney and executed.

She told Ava, “My father will explain everything back at his office.” She took the rolled-up warrant from the woman’s sweaty hand. “There has to be an arraignment within forty-eight hours. Kelly will likely be held at the county jail, but then they’ll transfer her somewhere else. There will be a lot of court appearances and plenty of opportunities to see her. None of this will happen quickly. Everything takes a long time.” Charlie scanned the search warrant, which was basically a love letter from the judge allowing the cops to do whatever the hell they wanted. She asked Ava, “Is this your address?”

Ava looked at the warrant. “Yes, ma’am, that’s the street number.”

Through the open front door, Charlie saw Isaac start yanking out drawers in the kitchen. Silverware clattered. Carpet was being stripped from the floor. None of them were being gentle. They lifted their feet high as they stomped around, checking for hollow sounds under the floorboards, poking at the stained tile in the ceiling.

Ava grabbed Charlie’s arm. “When will Kelly come home?”

“You’ll need to talk about that with my father.”

“I don’t see how we can afford any of this,” Ava said. “We ain’t got no money, if that’s why you’re here.”

Rusty had never been interested in money. “The state will pay for her defense. It won’t be much, but I can promise you, my father will work his heart out for your daughter.”

Ava blinked. She didn’t seem to follow. “She’s got chores to do.”

Charlie looked into the woman’s eyes. Her pupils were small, but that could be explained by the intense sunlight. “Are you on something?”

She looked down at her feet. “No, ma’am. There was a pebble but I kicked it away.”

Charlie waited for an inappropriate smile, but the woman was being serious. “Did you take some medication? Or maybe you smoked a joint to take the edge off?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. I’m a bus driver. I can’t take drugs. Children depend on me.”

Charlie looked into her eyes again, this time for any sign of reason. “Did my father explain what’s happening to Kelly?”

“He said he was working for her, but I don’t know.” She whispered, “My cousin says Rusty Quinn is a bad man, that he represents low-lifes and rapists and killers.”

Charlie’s mouth went dry. The woman did not seem to understand that Rusty Quinn was exactly the kind of man that her daughter needed.

“There’s Kelly.” Ava was looking at the television again.

Kelly Wilson’s face filled the screen. Someone had obviously leaked a school photo. Instead of the heavy Goth make-up and black clothes, Kelly was wearing one of her rainbow pony T-shirts from the closet.

The photo disappeared and was replaced with live footage of Rusty leaving the Derrick County Hospital. He scowled at the reporter who shoved a microphone in his face, but he had left by the front doors for a reason. Rusty made a visible show of reluctantly stopping for the interview. Charlie could tell by the way his mouth was moving that he was offering a cavalcade of southern-y sound bites that would be played on a virtual loop by the national stations. This was how these high-profile cases worked. Rusty had to get out in front of the talking heads, to paint Kelly Wilson as a troubled teenager facing the ultimate punishment rather than as a monster who had murdered a child and her school principal.

Ava whispered, “Is a revolver a weapon?”

Charlie felt her stomach drop. She led Ava away from the house and stood with her in the middle of the track. “Do you have a revolver?”

Ava nodded. “Ely keeps it in the glove box of the car.”

“The car he drove to work today?”

She nodded again.

“Does he own the gun legally?”

“We don’t steal things, ma’am. We work for them.”

“I’m sorry, what I mean is, is your husband a convicted felon?”

“No, ma’am. He’s an honest man.”

“Do you know how many bullets the gun holds?”

“Six.” Ava sounded certain enough, but she added, “I think six. I seen it a million times, but I never paid attention to it. I’m sorry I can’t remember.”

“It’s all right.” Charlie had felt the same way when Delia Wofford was questioning her. How many shots did you hear? What was the sequence? Was Mr. Huckabee with you? What happened to the revolver?

Charlie had been right in the middle of it, but fear had dampened her recall.

She asked Ava, “When was the last time you saw the revolver?”

“I don’t—oh.” Ava’s phone was ringing from the front pocket of her pajamas. She pulled out a cheap flip phone, the kind that let you pre-pay for minutes. “I don’t know that number.”

Charlie knew the number. It belonged to her iPhone, which Huck apparently still had. “Get in the car,” she told Ava, motioning for Lenore to help. “Let me answer this.”

Ava gave Lenore a wary look. “I don’t know if—”

“Get in the car.” Charlie practically pushed the woman away. She answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Wilson, this is Mr. Huckabee, Kelly’s teacher from middle school.”

“How did you unlock my phone?”

Huck hesitated a good, long while. “You need a better password than 1-2-3-4.”

Charlie had heard the same thing from Ben on numerous occasions. She walked up the track for more privacy. “Why are you calling Ava Wilson?”

He hesitated a second time. “I taught Kelly for two years. I tutored her a few months when she moved up to the high school.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“I spent four hours answering questions from two assholes with the GBI and another hour answering questions at the hospital.”

“What assholes?”

“Atkins. Avery. Some ten-year-old with a cowlick and an older black chick kept tag-teaming me.”

“Shit,” Charlie mumbled. He probably meant Louis Avery, the FBI’s North Georgia field agent. “Did he give you his card?”

“I threw it away,” Huck said. “My arm’s fine, by the way. Bullet went straight through.”

“My nose is broken and I have a concussion,” Charlie told him. “Why were you calling Ava?”

His sigh said he was humoring her. “Because I care about my students. I wanted to help. To make sure she had a lawyer. That she was being looked after by someone who wasn’t going to exploit her or get her into more trouble.” Huck abruptly dropped the bravado. “Kelly’s not smart, Charlotte. She’s not a murderer.”

“You don’t have to be smart to kill somebody. Actually, the opposite is usually true.” She turned back to look at the Wilson house. Captain Isaac was carrying out a plastic box full of Kelly’s clothes.

Charlie told Huck, “If you really want to help Kelly, stay away from any and all reporters, don’t go on camera, don’t let them get a good photo of you, don’t even talk to your friends about what happened, because they’ll go on camera or they’ll talk to reporters and you won’t be able to control what comes out of their mouths.”

“That’s good advice.” He let out a short breath and said, “Hey, I need to tell you that I’m sorry.”

“For?”

“B2. Ben Bernard. Your husband called you this morning. I almost answered.”

Charlie felt her cheeks flush.

He said, “I didn’t know until one of the cops told me. This was after I had talked to him, told him what we’d been up to, why you were at the school.”

Charlie put her head in her hand. She knew how certain types of men talked about women, especially the ones they screwed in their trucks outside of bars.

Huck said, “You could’ve warned me. It put us all in an even worse situation.”

“You apologize, but really, it’s my fault?” She couldn’t believe this guy. “When would I have told you? Before Greg Brenner knocked me out? Or after you deleted the video? Or how about when you lied in your witness statement about how my nose got broken, which is a felony, by the way—the lying to cover a cop’s ass, not the standing around with your thumb up your ass while a woman gets punched in the face. That’s perfectly legal.”

Huck pushed out another sigh. “You don’t know what it’s like running into something like that. People make mistakes.”

“I don’t know what it’s like?” Charlie felt shaken by a sudden fury. “I think I was there, Huck. I think I got there before you did, so I know exactly what it’s like to run into something like that, and not for nothing, but if you really grew up in Pikeville, then you know I’ve done it twice now, so fuck you with your ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’”

“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

Charlie wasn’t finished. “You lied about Kelly’s age.”

“Sixteen, seventeen.” She could picture Huck shaking his head. “She’s in the eleventh grade. What difference does it make?”

“She’s eighteen, and the difference is the death penalty.”

He gasped. There was no other word for it—the sudden, quick inhalation that came from absolute shock.

Charlie waited for him to speak. She checked the bars on the phone. “Hello?”

He cleared his throat. “I need a minute.”

Charlie needed a minute, too. She was missing something big. Why had Huck been interviewed for four hours? The average interrogation lasted somewhere between half an hour and two hours. Charlie’s had topped out at around forty-five minutes. The entirety of her and Huck’s involvement with the crime had been less than ten minutes. Why had Delia Wofford brought in the FBI to play good cop/bad cop with Huck? He was hardly a hostile witness. He had been shot in the arm. But he’d said he was interrogated before he went to the hospital. Delia Wofford wasn’t the kind of cop who didn’t follow procedure. The FBI sure as shit didn’t mess around.

So why had they kept their star witness at the police station for four hours? That wasn’t how you treated a witness. That was how you treated a suspect who wasn’t playing ball.

“Okay, I’m back,” Huck said. “Kelly’s—what are they calling it now? Remedial? Intellectually handicapped? She’s in basic classes. She can’t retain concepts.”

“The law would call it diminished capacity, as in she’s too incapable to form the mental state required for a crime, but that’s a very hard argument to make,” Charlie told him. “There are very different priorities between a government-run school system and a government-run murder prosecution. One is trying to help her and the other is trying to kill her.”

He was so quiet that all she could hear was his breathing.

Charlie asked, “Did the two agents, Wofford and Avery, talk to you for four hours straight, or was there time in between?”

“What?” He seemed thrown by the question. “Yeah, one of them was always in the room. And your husband sometimes. And that guy, what’s his name? He wears those shiny suits?”

“Ken Coin. He’s the district attorney.” Charlie shifted tactics. “Was Kelly bullied?”

“Not in my classroom.” He added, “Off-campus, social media, we can’t regulate that.”

“So you’re saying she was bullied?”

“I’m saying she was different, and that’s never a good thing when you’re a kid.”

“You were Kelly’s teacher. Why didn’t you know that she was held back a grade?”

“I’ve got over a hundred twenty kids a year every year. I don’t look back at their files unless they give me a reason.”

“Being slow isn’t a reason?”

“A lot of my kids are slow. She was a solid C student. She never got in trouble.” Charlie could hear a tapping noise, a pen hitting the edge of a table. Huck said, “Look, Kelly’s a good kid. Not smart, but sweet. She follows whatever is in front of her. She doesn’t do things like today. That’s not her.”

“Were you intimate with her?”

“What the hell does—”

“Screwing. Fucking. You know what I mean.”

“Of course not.” He sounded disgusted. “She was one of my kids. Christ.”

“Was anyone else having sex with her?”

“No. I would’ve reported it.”

“Mr. Pinkman?”

“Don’t even—”

“Another student at school?”

“How should I—”

“What happened to the revolver?”

If she hadn’t been listening for it, she would’ve missed the slight catch in his breath.

And then he said, “What revolver?”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.