The Good Daughter

  Sam turned around. The woman was sitting at the counter. “Excuse me?”

  The waitress pushed herself up from the counter and returned to their table with visible reluctance. She sighed before asking Sam, “What?”

  Sam looked at Lenore, who shook her head. “I’m ready to pay the bill.”

  The woman slapped the check down on the table. She picked up Lenore’s mug between her thumb and index finger as if she was scared of contaminants.

  Sam waited for the awful woman to leave. She asked Lenore, “Why do you live here? In this backward place?”

  “It’s my home. And there are still some good people here who believe in live-and-let-live.” Lenore added, “Besides, New York lost the moral high ground during the last presidential election.”

  Sam gave a rueful laugh.

  “I’m going to go check on Charlie.” Lenore took a dollar bill out of her wallet, but Sam waved her off.

  “Thank you,” Sam said, though she could only guess at what Lenore had done for her family. Sam had always been so wrapped up in the agony of her own recovery that she had not given much consideration to what life had been like for Rusty and Charlie. Lenore had obviously filled some of the void left by Gamma.

  Sam heard the bell over the door clatter as Lenore left. The waitress made a nasty remark to the cook. Sam considered correcting her, cutting her in two with a sharp comment, but she lacked the energy to fight any more battles today.

  She went to the bathroom. She stood at the sink and performed a perfunctory wash as she dreamed of the shower at the Four Seasons back in Atlanta. Sixteen hours had passed since Sam had left New York. She’d spent almost twice as many hours awake. Her head had the dull ache of a rotting tooth. Her body was uncooperative. She looked at her tired, ragged face in the mirror and saw her mother’s bitter disappointment.

  Sam was giving up on Charlie.

  There was no other option. Charlie would not speak to her, would not open her locked office door that Sam had knocked on repeatedly. This was not like the last time when Charlie had fled in the middle of the night, fearing for her safety. This was Sam begging, apologizing—for what, she did not know—only to be met with Charlie’s stark silence. Finally, unhappily, Sam felt herself relent to what she should have known all along.

  Charlie did not need her.

  Sam used some toilet paper to wipe her eyes. She did not know if she was crying from the uselessness of her journey or from exhaustion. Twenty years ago, the loss of her sister had felt like a mutual agreement. Sam had exploded. Charlie had exploded back. There was a fight, an actual, drag-down fight, and they had both agreed in the end to walk away.

  This latest break came more like a theft. Sam had grasped something good, something that felt true, in her hands, and Charlie had wrenched it away.

  Was it because of Zachariah Culpepper?

  Sam had the letters in her purse. Some of them, at least, because there were many, many more back at Rusty’s. Sam had stood behind his desk opening envelope after envelope. They all held the same type of single, folded notebook paper, and had the same three words written on them with such a heavy hand that the pencil had embossed the paper:

  YOU OWE ME.

  One line, mailed hundreds of times, once a month to Rusty’s office.

  Sam’s phone chirped.

  She scrambled to find it in her purse. Not Charlie. Not Ben. There was a text message from the taxi company. The driver was outside.

  Sam patted her eyes dry. She ran her fingers through her hair. She went back to the booth. She left a one-dollar bill on the table. She rolled her suitcase out to the waiting taxi. The man jumped out to help her load it into the trunk. Sam took her place in the back seat. She stared out the window as the man drove her through downtown Pikeville.

  Stanislav was going to meet her at the hospital. Sam was reluctant to see her father, but she had a responsibility to Rusty, to Kelly Wilson, to turn over her notes, to share her thoughts and suspicions.

  Lenore was right about the bullets. Kelly had shown remarkable firing accuracy in the hallway. She had managed to hit both Douglas Pinkman and Lucy Alexander from a considerable distance.

  So why hadn’t Kelly been able to shoot Judith Pinkman when the woman came out of her room?

  More mysteries for Rusty to solve.

  Sam rolled down the window in the taxi. She looked up at the stars dotting the sky. There was so much light pollution in New York that Sam had forgotten what the night-time was supposed to look like. The moon was little more than a sliver of blue light. She took off her glasses. She felt the fresh air on her face. She let her eyelids close. She thought of Gamma looking at the stars. Had that magnificent, brilliant woman really craved a conventional life?

  A housewife. A mother. A husband to take care of her; a vow to take care of him.

  Sam’s enduring memory of her mother was one of Gamma always searching. For knowledge. For information. For solutions. Sam remembered one of the many, anonymous days she had come home from school to find Gamma working on a project. Charlie was at a friend’s. They were still living in the red-brick house. Sam had opened the back door. She dropped her bag on the kitchen floor. She kicked off her shoes. Gamma turned around. She had a marker in her hand. She had been writing on the large window that overlooked the backyard. Equations, Sam could see, though their meaning was elusive.

  “I’m trying to figure out why my cake fell,” Gamma had explained. “That’s the problem with life, Sam. If you’re not rising, you’re falling.”

  The taxi bumped Sam awake.

  For a panicked second, she was unsure of her surroundings.

  Sam put on her glasses. Almost half an hour had passed. They were already in Bridge Gap. Four- and five-story office buildings sprouted up above cafés. Signs advertised concerts in the park and family picnics. They passed the movie theater where Mary-Lynne Huckabee had gone with her friends and ended up being raped in the bathroom.

  Such violent men in this county.

  Sam put her hand over her purse. The letters inside gave off a palpable heat.

  YOU OWE ME.

  Did Sam care what Zachariah Culpepper felt he was owed? Almost three decades ago, Rusty had argued for the man’s life to be spared. If anything, Zachariah owed Rusty. And Sam. And Charlie. And Ben, if it came to that.

  Sam unlocked her phone.

  She pulled up a new email and typed in Ben’s address. Her fingers could not decide on a combination of letters to press for the subject line. Charlie’s name? A request for advice? An apology that she had not been able to fix what was broken?

  That Charlie was broken was the only fact Sam saw with any clarity. Her sister had wanted Sam to come home for something. So that Sam would push Charlie into admitting something, giving away something, telling the truth about something that was bothering her. There was no other reason for the constant provocation, the lashing out, the pushing away.

  Sam was familiar with the tactics. She had been so volatile after getting shot, infuriated by the weakness of her body, livid that her brain was not working as it had before, that there was not one person who was spared her temper. The steroids and antidepressants and anticonvulsants the doctors had prescribed only inflamed her emotions. Sam had felt furious most of the time, and the only thing that had made the anger lessen was to direct it outward.

  Charlie and Rusty were the two targets she hit the hardest.

  After rehab, the six months that Sam had lived at the farmhouse had been hell for everyone. Sam was never satisfied. She was always complaining. She had tortured Charlie, made her feel as if nothing she did was right. When anyone suggested therapy for her moods, Sam had screamed like a banshee, insisting that she was fine, that she was recovering, that she was not fucking angry—she was just tired, she was just annoyed, she just needed space, time, a chance to be alone, to get away, to recover her sense of self.

  Finally, Rusty had allowed Sam to take the GED so that she could gain early acceptance to Stanfo
rd. It wasn’t until Sam was at school, 2,500 miles away, that she had realized that her anger was not a creature solely confined to the farmhouse.

  You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.

  Sam was angry at Rusty for bringing the Culpeppers into their lives. She was angry at Charlie for opening the kitchen door. She was angry at Gamma for grabbing the shotgun. She was angry at herself for not listening to her gut when she stood in the bathroom, gripping the ball-peen hammer in her hand, and walked toward the kitchen instead of running out the back door.

  She was angry. She was angry. She was so God damn, fucking angry.

  Yet, Sam was thirty-one years old before she gave herself permission to say the words aloud. The blow-up with Charlie had opened the scab, and Anton, in his very deliberate way, had been the only reason that the wound had finally begun to heal.

  Sam was at his apartment. New Year’s Eve. On television, they watched the ball drop in Times Square. They were drinking champagne, or at least Sam was pretending to.

  Anton had said, “It’s bad luck if you don’t take a sip.”

  Sam had laughed it off, because by that point, bad luck had followed her for more than half her life. Then she had admitted to him something that she had never before confessed to anyone else. “I worry all the time that I’ll drink something, or take something, or move the wrong way, and it will cause a seizure, or a stroke, and break what’s left of my mind.”

  Anton had not offered platitudes about the mysteries of life or advice on how to fix the problem. Instead, he had said, “Many people must have told you that you are lucky to be alive. I think you would have been lucky had you not been shot in the first place.”

  Sam had cried for almost a full hour.

  Everyone constantly, incessantly, told her that she had been lucky to survive the shooting. No one had ever acknowledged that she had a right to be angry about how she must survive.

  “Ma’am?” The taxi driver flipped up the turn signal. He pointed to the white sign up ahead.

  The Dickerson County Hospital. Rusty would be in his room watching the news, likely trying to catch a glimpse of himself. He would know about Sam’s courtroom performance. She felt her butterflies return, then chastised herself for caring about anything to do with Rusty.

  Sam was only here to turn over her notes. She would say goodbye to her father, probably the last time she would ever say goodbye in person, then head back to Atlanta where, tomorrow morning, she would wake up with her real life restored like Dorothy back in Kansas.

  The driver stopped underneath the concrete canopy. He pulled Sam’s suitcase from the trunk. He lifted up the handle. Sam was rolling the case toward the entrance when she smelled cigarette smoke.

  “‘Oh, I am fortune’s fool,’” Rusty bellowed. He was in a wheelchair, right elbow on the armrest, cigarette in his hand. Two IV bags were attached to a pole on the back of the chair. His catheter bag hung down like a chatelaine. He had stationed himself beneath a sign warning smokers to maintain a perimeter of one hundred feet from the door. He was twenty feet away, if that.

  Sam said, “Those things are going to kill you.”

  Rusty smiled. “It’s a balmy night. I’m talking to one of my beautiful daughters. I’ve got a fresh pack of smokes. All I need is a glass of bourbon and I’d die a happy man.”

  Sam waved away the smoke. “It’s not so balmy with that smell.”

  He laughed, then started coughing.

  Sam rolled her suitcase to the concrete bench by his chair. The reporters were gone, probably on to the next mass shooting. She sat on the far end of the bench, upwind from the smoke.

  Rusty said, “I heard there was some rain-making at the arraignment.”

  Sam shrugged one shoulder. She had picked up the bad habit from Charlie.

  “‘Was the baby killed?’” He made his voice quiver with drama. “‘Was the baby killed?’”

  “Dad, a child was murdered.”

  “I know, darling. Believe me, I know.” He took one last hit off his cigarette before stubbing it out on the bottom of his slipper. He dropped the butt into the pocket of his robe. “A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial. And Ken’s come right out the gate with a damn good story.”

  Sam quelled the urge to be her father’s cheerleader, to tell him he could come up with the better story and save the day.

  Rusty asked, “What’d you think of her?”

  “Kelly?” Sam considered her answer. “I’m not sure. She could be smarter than we think. She could be lower functioning than any of us wants to believe. You can lead her anywhere, Dad. Anywhere.”

  “I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.” Rusty looked over his shoulder, checking to make sure they were alone. “I heard about the abortion.”

  Sam pictured her sister back in her office, calling Rusty to tattle. “You spoke to Charlie.”

  “Nope.” Rusty leaned on his elbow, hand up, fingers spread, as if the cigarette were still there. “Jimmy Jack, that’s my investigator, came up with it yesterday afternoon. We found some evidence from Kelly’s middle-school days that pointed to something bad going on. Just rumors, you know. Kelly shows up plump one week, then she takes a vacation and comes back skinny. I confirmed the abortion with her mother last night. She was still real torn up about it. The baby daddy was a kid on the football team, long since left town. He paid for the abortion, or his family did. The mama took her down to Atlanta. Almost lost her job from taking the time off.”

  Sam said, “Kelly could be pregnant again.”

  Rusty’s eyebrows went up.

  “She’s been throwing up the same time of day, every day. She’s missed school. She’s got a bump in her belly.”

  “She’s started wearing dark clothes lately. The mama said she has no idea why.”

  Sam realized an obvious point she hadn’t yet mentioned to Rusty. “Mason Huckabee has a connection to Kelly.”

  “He does.”

  Sam waited for more, but Rusty just gazed out into the parking lot.

  She told him, “Lenore already has your investigator on this, but there’s a boy named Adam Humphrey that Kelly has a crush on. You could also look at Frank Alexander, Lucy’s father.” She tried again, “Or Mason Huckabee.”

  Rusty scratched his cheek. For the second time, he ignored the man’s name. “Her being pregnant—that’s not good.”

  “It could help your case.”

  “It could, but she’s still an eighteen-year-old girl with a baby in her belly and a lifetime of prison ahead of her.” He added, “If she’s lucky.”

  “I thought she was your unicorn.”

  “Do you know how many innocent people are in prison?”

  “I’d rather not know.” Sam asked, “Why do you think she’s innocent? What else have you learned?”

  “I have learned nothing, in general or in specific. It’s this—” he pointed to his gut. “The knife just missed my intuition. It is still intact. It still tells me that there is more to this than meets the eye.”

  “My eyes have seen quite a lot,” Sam said. “Did Lenore tell you that she managed to get her hands on the security footage?”

  “I also heard that you and your sister almost resorted to fisticuffs in my office.” Rusty covered his heart with his hands. “May the circle be unbroken.”

  Sam didn’t want to make light of this. “Dad, what’s wrong with her?”

  Rusty stared out at the parking lot. Bright lights glared against the parked cars. “‘There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.’”

  Sam was certain Charlie would recognize the quote. “I’ve never understood your relationship with her. You two talk all the time, but you never say anything of substance.” Sam imagined two roosters circling each other in the barnyard. “I guess that’s why she was always your favorite.”

  “You were both my favorite.??
?

  Sam didn’t buy it. Charlie had always been the good daughter, the one who laughed at his jokes, the one who challenged his opinions, the one who had stayed.

  Rusty said, “A father’s job is to love each of his daughters in the way they need to be loved.”

  Sam laughed out loud at the silly platitude. “How did you never win father of the year?”

  Rusty chuckled along with her. “The one disappointment in my life is that I have never received one of those father of the year coffee mugs.” He reached into the pocket of his robe. He found his pack of cigarettes. “Did Charlotte tell you about her personal involvement with Mason?”

  “Are we finally going to talk about that?”

  “In our own roundabout way.”

  Sam said, “I told her about Mason. She had no idea who he was.”

  Rusty took his time lighting the cigarette. He coughed out a few puffs of smoke. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “I could never again represent a rapist after that day.”

  Sam was surprised by the revelation. “You’ve always said that everyone deserves a chance.”

  “They do, but I don’t have to be the one who gives it to them.” Rusty coughed out more smoke. “When I looked at the photos of that girl, Mary-Lynne was her name, I realized something about rape that I had never understood before.” He rolled his cigarette between his fingers. He looked at the parking lot, not Sam.

  He said, “What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it’s worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.” He waved his hand in the air. “Or not, in some cases.”

  “Sounds a lot like being shot in the head.”

  Rusty coughed as smoke caught in his throat.

  He said, “Charlotte has always been a pack animal. She doesn’t need to be the leader, but she needs to be in a group. Ben was her group.”

  “Why did she cheat on him?”

  “It’s not my place to tell you about your sister.”