Shotgun and revolver.
Revolver and shotgun.
Mason Huckabee had extended his hand toward Kelly, reaching over his left shoulder, offering his palm. He was talking to her, most likely still trying to coax the gun away.
The cops shook their weapons. Their stances were aggressive. Sam did not need to see their faces to know that they were shouting orders.
In contrast, Mason was calm, collected. His mouth moved slowly. His movements were almost cat-like.
Sam’s gaze returned to Charlie just as she looked up. The expression on her face was heartbreaking. Sam wanted to climb into the film and hold her.
“She moved back,” Lenore said.
She meant Kelly. The girl was almost out of frame now. Only a patch of black from her jeans indicated Kelly was still there. Mason had moved back with her. His head, his left shoulder and left hand were completely gone. The angle of the camera had cut a diagonal line across his torso.
The cops did not move.
Mason did not move.
There was a puff of smoke from the cop’s gun.
Mason’s right arm recoiled.
The cop had shot him.
“Oh my God,” Sam said. She could not see Mason’s face, but his torso had only slightly twisted.
The cops appeared to be as surprised as Sam. They did not move, not for several more seconds, before slowly, they both lowered their weapons. They spoke to one another. The man with the shotgun unclipped the radio mic from his shoulder. The other turned around in the hall, looked at Charlie, then turned back.
He extended his hand to Mason.
Mason stood up. The second cop walked in the direction of Kelly Wilson.
Suddenly, the girl appeared on screen, face down, the cop’s knee in her back. She had been tossed over like a sack.
Sam looked for the murder weapon.
Not in Kelly’s hands or on her person.
Not on the floor near Kelly.
Not in the hands of the cop who had his knee in her back.
Mason Huckabee was standing, empty hands at his sides, talking to the cop with the shotgun. Blood had turned his shirtsleeve almost black. He was talking to the cop as if they were discussing a bad call at a sporting event.
Sam scanned the ground at their feet.
Nothing.
No lockers had been cracked open.
None of the cops appeared to have tucked the revolver into the waistband of their pants.
No one had kicked the weapon across the floor.
No one had reached up to secrete it behind a ceiling tile.
Sam returned to Charlie. Her hands were empty. She still sat cross-legged on the floor, still looked dazed. Her head was turned away from the men. Sam noticed that a patch of blood swiped her cheek. She must have touched her face.
Her nose was not yet broken. Bruises did not encircle her eyes.
Charlie didn’t seem to register the group of cops rushing down the hall. Their weapons were drawn. Their vests flapped open.
The monitor went black.
Sam stared at the blank screen for a few seconds more, even though there was nothing to see.
Lenore let out a long stream of breath.
Sam asked the only question that mattered. “Is Charlie okay?”
Lenore’s lips pursed. “There was a time when I could tell you everything about her.”
“But now?”
“A lot has changed in the last few years.”
Rusty’s heart attacks. Had Charlie been shaken by the sudden prospect of Rusty’s death? It would be just like her to hide her fear, or to find self-destructive ways to take her mind off of it. Like sleeping with Mason Huckabee. Like alienating herself from Ben.
“You should eat,” Lenore said. “I’ll make you a sandwich.”
“Thank you, but I’m not hungry,” Sam said. “I need a place to make some notes for Dad.”
“Use his office.” Lenore took a key from her purse. She slid it over to Sam. “I’m going to transcribe this video, make sure we haven’t missed anything. I want to pull that so-called re-enactment from the news, too. I’m not sure where they’re getting their information about the sequence, especially the gunshots, but they’re wrong, based on this video.”
Sam said, “In court, Coin indicated there was audio.”
“He didn’t correct Lyman,” Lenore said. “My guess is there’s an alternate source. The school can barely afford its electric bill. The cameras are probably decades old. They wouldn’t pay to wire them for sound.”
“A useless endeavor, considering the number of children who are typically in the hallway. Isolating one voice from the din would be challenging.” She guessed, “A cell phone, maybe?”
“Maybe.” Lenore shrugged as she returned to her computer. “Rusty will figure it out.”
Sam looked down at the key on Lenore’s desk. The last thing she wanted to do was sit in Rusty’s office. Her father had been a hoarder before television popularized the disorder. She imagined there were boxes at the farmhouse that had not been unpacked since Gamma had brought them home from the thrift store.
Gamma.
Charlie had said that the photo—the photo of Gamma—was on Rusty’s desk.
Sam walked back to her father’s office. She could only get the door partway open before it caught against a pile of debris. The room was large, but the clutter brought down the scale. Boxes, papers and files overflowed from almost every surface. Only a narrow path to the desk indicated anyone ever used the space. The stagnant air inside made Sam cough. She reached for the lights, then thought better of it. Her headache had only slightly receded since taking off her glasses in court.
Sam left her cane by the door. She carefully picked her way toward Rusty’s desk, imagining that a virtual stroll through her father’s convoluted brain would not be dissimilar. How on earth he managed to work in here was a mystery. She turned on the desk lamp. She opened the blinds to the filthy, barred window. Sam supposed the flat surface provided by a stack of depositions served as his writing table. There was no computer. A clock radio Gamma had given him when Sam was a child was the only acknowledgment of modernity.
The desk was walnut, a large expanse that Sam recalled had a green leather blotter. It was probably as pristine as the day it was made, preserved under piles of rubbish. She tested the sturdiness of Rusty’s chair. The thing listed to the side because he was an inveterate leaner. When Sam thought of her father seated, he was always propped on his right elbow, cigarette in his hand.
Sam sat in Rusty’s unsteady chair. The squeal from the height actuator assembly was loud and completely unnecessary. A simple can of spray lubricant could eradicate the noise. The arms could be tightened down with some Loctite on the bolts. Replacing the friction rings on the casters would probably improve the stability.
Or the fool could go online and order a new chair from Amazon.
Sam moved around papers and stacks of transcripts as she searched for the photo of Gamma. She wanted to slide the flotsam off the desktop, but she was sure that Rusty had a system to his madness. Not that Sam would ever let her desk get like this, but if anyone moved around her things, she would kill them.
Sam checked the top of the cluttered credenza, which held, among many other things, a pack of unopened yellow legal pads. She broke open the pack. She found her notes in her purse. She changed out her glasses. She wrote Kelly Wilson’s name at the top of the yellow pad. She added the date. She made a list of items for Rusty to follow up on.
Pregnancy test
Paternity: Adam Humphrey? Frank Alexander?
Hospital video; security footage (audio?)
Why was Kelly at middle school? (victims were random)
List of tutors/teachers/class schedules
Judith Pinkman–?
Sam traced the letters of the woman’s name.
During Sam’s tenure at the middle school, the main floor outside the front office had been designated for the English departm
ent. Judith Pinkman was an English teacher, so that would explain why she was there when the shooting began.
Sam considered the security footage.
Mrs. Pinkman had appeared in the hallway after Lucy was shot in the neck. Sam believed less than three seconds passed from the time that the little girl was on her back, on the floor, and the time Judith Pinkman appeared at the end of the hallway.
Five gunshots. One in the wall. Three in Douglas Pinkman. One in Lucy.
If the revolver held six bullets, then why didn’t Kelly use the last shot on Judith Pinkman?
“I think she was pregnant.” Charlie was standing in the doorway, a plate with a sandwich in one hand, a bottle of Coke in the other.
Sam turned over her notes. She tried to keep her expression composed lest she give herself away. “What?”
“Back in middle school when all of that shit talk was going on. I think Kelly was pregnant.”
Sam had a momentary sense of relief, but then she realized what her sister was saying. “Why do you think that?”
“I got it off Facebook. I’ve friended one of the girls from the school.”
“Charlie.”
“It’s a fake account.” Charlie put the plate on the desk in front of Sam. “This girl, Mindy Zowada, she’s one of the bitches who was nasty in the yearbook. I prodded her a little, said that I’d heard some rumors that Kelly was loose in middle school. It took her about two seconds to spill that Kelly had an abortion when she was thirteen. Or, ‘a abortion’ as Mindy said.”
Sam leaned her head against her hand. This information shed new light on Kelly Wilson. If the girl had been pregnant before, then surely she recognized the symptoms now. So why hadn’t she told Sam? Was she playing dumb to gain Sam’s sympathy? Could anything she’d said be trusted?
“Hey,” Charlie said. “I tell you Kelly Wilson’s deep, dark secret and all I get is a blank stare?”
“Sorry.” Sam sat up in the chair. “Did you watch the video?”
Charlie didn’t answer, but she knew about the audio problem. “I’m not sure about the cell phone theory. The sound would have to come from somewhere else. There’s a lockdown procedure in case of an active shooter. The teachers do practice drills once a year. Everyone would’ve been in their rooms, doors shut. If someone made a call to 9-1-1, they wouldn’t pick up the conversation in the hallway.”
“Judith Pinkman didn’t follow procedure,” Sam said. “She ran into the hall after Lucy was shot.” Sam turned over her pad and kept it angled away from Charlie as she added this to her notes. “She didn’t run to her husband, either. She ran straight to Lucy.”
“It was clear that he was gone.” Charlie indicated the side of her face. Douglas Pinkman’s jaw had been shot off almost completely. There had been a bullet hole in his eye cavity.
Sam asked, “So, was Coin lying when he let us believe there was audio of Kelly asking about ‘the Baby’?”
“He’s a liar, and I’m given to believe that liars always lie.” Charlie seemed to think about it for a bit longer. “The cop could’ve told Coin. He was standing right there in the hallway when Kelly said whatever she said. It really affected him. He got angrier than before, and he was pretty fucking angry before.”
Sam finished her notes. “Makes sense.”
Charlie asked, “What about the murder weapon?”
“What about it?”
Charlie leaned back against a chair-shaped pile of junk. She picked at a string on her blue jeans, the same one she had picked at this morning.
Sam took a bite of the sandwich. She glanced out the dirty window. This day had been an exhaustively drawn-out one, and the sun had only now begun to set.
Sam pointed to the Coke. “Can I have some?”
Charlie unscrewed the cap. She set the bottle on top of Sam’s overturned notes. “Are you going to tell Dad about Huck and the gun?”
“Why does it matter to you?”
Charlie did the half-shrug thing.
Sam asked, “What’s going on between you and Ben?”
“Undetermined.”
Sam washed down the peanut butter with a mouthful of Coke. Now would be the time to tell Charlie about Anton. To explain that she knew how marriages worked, understood the petty grievances that could build up. She should tell Charlie that it didn’t matter. That if you loved someone, you should do everything you could to make it work because the person you adored more than anyone else in the world could complain of a sore throat one day and be dead the next.
Instead, she told her sister, “You need to make things right with Ben.”
“I wonder,” Charlie said, “how often you would speak if you eradicated the words ‘you need’ from your vocabulary.”
Sam was too tired to argue a losing point. She took another bite of sandwich. She chewed slowly. “I was looking for the picture of Gamma.”
“It’s on his desk at home.”
That fixed it. Sam was not going to the farmhouse.
“There’s this.” Charlie used her thumb and two fingers to edge a paperback out from under a file box, Jenga-style, without toppling the papers on top.
She handed the book to Sam.
Sam read the title aloud. “‘Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.’” The book appeared ancient but well-read. Sam thumbed through the pages. Pencil markings highlighted paragraphs. The text appeared to be as advertised; a guide to predicting the weather based on a specific algorithm that incorporated barometric pressure, temperature and humidity. “Whose calculus is this?”
“I was thirteen,” Charlie said.
“You weren’t a moron.” Sam corrected one of the equations. “At least, I didn’t think you were.”
“It was Gamma’s.”
Sam’s pen stopped.
“She ordered the book before she died. It came a month after,” Charlie said. “There’s an old weather tower behind the farm.”
“Is there really?” Sam had almost drowned in the stream underneath the tower because she was too weak to lift her head from the water.
“Anyway,” Charlie said. “Rusty and I were going to fix up the instruments on the weather tower to surprise Gamma. We thought she’d get a kick out of tracking the data. NOAA calls it being a citizen scientist. There are thousands of people around the country who track for them, but computers take care of the reporting now. I guess the book proves she was one step ahead of us. As usual.”
Sam flipped through the charts and arcane algorithms. “You know that this is physically unrealistic. The atmosphere has a delicate dynamical balance between the fields of mass and motion.”
“Yes, Samantha, everyone knows that.” Charlie explained, “Dad and I worked on the calculations together. We’d get the data from the weather equipment every morning, then plug it into the algorithm and predict the weather for the next day. Or at least, we tried to. It made us feel closer to her.”
“She would’ve liked that.”
“She would’ve been furious that I couldn’t do the calculus.”
Sam shrugged, because it was true.
She slowly paged through the book, not really paying attention to the words. She thought of Charlie when she was little, the way she would work at the kitchen table with her head bent, tongue between her lips, as she did her homework. She always hummed when she did her math. She whistled when she did art projects. Sometimes, she sang aloud lines that she read in books, but only if she thought she was alone. Sam would often hear her low, operatic warbling through the thin wall dividing their rooms. “‘Be worthy, love, and love will come!’” or “‘As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!’”
What had happened to that humming, whistling, singing Charlie?
Gamma’s death, Sam’s injury, had understandably quelled some of that joy, but Sam had seen that gleeful spark in Charlie when they were together that last time in New York. She was making jokes, teasing Ben, humming and singing and generally entertaining herself with her own noise. Her behavior
back then reminded Sam of the way she would sometimes find Fosco alone in a room, purring to himself for his own pleasure.
So who was this profoundly unhappy woman that her sister had turned into?
Charlie was picking at the string on her pants again. She sniffed. She touched her fingers to her nose. “Jesus Christ. I’m bleeding again.” She continued sniffing to no avail. “Do you have any tissue?”
Kelly Wilson had depleted Sam’s supply. She looked around Rusty’s office. She opened the desk drawers.
Charlie sniffed again. “Dad’s not going to have Kleenex.”
Sam found a roll of toilet paper in the bottom drawer. She handed it to Charlie, saying, “You should get your nose set before it’s too late. Weren’t you in a hospital all night?”
Charlie dabbed at the blood. “It really hurts.”
“Are you going to tell me who hit you?”
Charlie looked up from examining the bloody toilet paper. “In the scheme of things, it’s not a big deal, but somehow, it’s grown into this thing and I really don’t want to tell you.”
“Fair enough.” Sam glanced down into the drawer. There was an empty wire frame for files. Rusty had thrown a stack of letters on top of a dog-eared copy of a three-year-old volume of Georgia Court Rules and Procedures. Sam was about to close the drawer when she saw the return address on one of the envelopes.
Handwritten.
Angry, precise letters.
GEORGIA DIAGNOSTIC
& CLASSIFICATION PRISON
PO BOX 3877
JACKSON, GA 30233
Sam froze.
The Georgia D&C.
Death-row inmates were housed at the facility.
“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked. “Did you find something dead?”
Sam could not see the name above the address. Another envelope obscured the inmate’s personal information, except for one half of the first letter.
Sam could see a curved line, possibly part of an O, possibly a hastily written I, or perhaps the edge of a capital letter C.
The rest of the name was covered by a bulk mailer advertising Christmas wreaths.
“Please don’t tell me it’s porn.” Charlie walked around the desk. She stared down into the drawer.