The Good Daughter

  Charlie looked out the window. She had cried enough to last the rest of her life.

  Sam said, “I can’t leave without finding it.”

  “He could’ve been making it up,” Charlie said. “You know how he loved to spin stories.”

  “He wouldn’t lie about this.”

  Charlie kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t so sure about that.

  Ben asked, “Did you check the safe?” He was standing in the hall with a bunch of colored cables looped over his shoulders.

  Charlie rubbed her eyes. “When did Dad get a safe?”

  “When he figured out that you and Sam were reading everything he brought home.” He pushed away a pile of boxes with his foot, revealing a floor safe that came up to the middle of his thigh. “Do you know the combination?”

  “I didn’t know he had a safe,” Charlie reminded him. “Why would I know the combination?”

  Sam knelt down. She studied the dial. “It would be a set of numbers that are relevant to Dad.”

  “What’s the price on a carton of Camels?”

  “I’ve got an idea.” Sam spun the dial a few times. She stopped at the number two, then turned back to the number eight, then back to seventy-six.

  Charlie’s birthday.

  Sam tried the handle.

  The safe did not open.

  Charlie said, “Try your birthday.”

  Sam spun the dial again, stopping at the correct numbers. She pulled on the handle. “Nope.”

  “Gamma’s birthday,” Ben suggested.

  Sam entered the numbers. No luck. She shook her head, as if she had figured out the obvious. “Rusty’s birthday.”

  She worked the dial quickly, entering Rusty’s date of birth.

  She tried the handle.

  Again, nothing.

  Sam looked at Ben. “Your birthday’s next.”

  Charlie said, “Try 3-16-89.”

  The day the Culpeppers had shown up at the kitchen door.

  Sam let out a slow breath. She turned back around. She spun the dial right, then left, then right again. She rested her fingers on the handle. She looked up at Charlie. She tried the handle.

  The safe opened.

  Charlie knelt down behind Sam. The safe was packed tight, just like everything else in Rusty’s life. At first, all she smelled was musty old papers, but then there was something else, almost like a woman’s perfume.

  Sam whispered, “I think that’s Mama’s soap.”

  “Rose Petal Delight,” Charlie recalled. Gamma bought it at the drug store. Her only vanity.

  “I think it’s coming from these.” Sam had to use both hands to extricate a stack of envelopes wedged against the top.

  They were tied with a red ribbon.

  Sam smelled the letters. She closed her eyes like a cat purring in the sun. Her smile was beatific. “It’s her.”

  Charlie smelled the envelopes, too. She nodded. The scent was faint, but it was Gamma’s.

  “Look.” Sam pointed to the address, which was made out to Rusty, care of the University of Georgia. “This is her handwriting.” Sam ran her fingers over the perfect, Palmer Method print of their mother. “The postmark is from Batavia, Illinois. That’s where Fermilab is. These must be love letters.”

  “Oh,” Ben said. “Yeah, you maybe don’t want to read those.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Because they were really in love.”

  Sam was beaming. “But, that’s wonderful.”

  “Is it?” Ben’s voice went up to a register he probably hadn’t used since puberty. “I mean, do you really wanna read a pack of scented letters your dad kept tied with a red string that are from way back when he and your mom just met and were probably—” He fucked his fingers into his open fist. “Think about it. Your dad could be a real horn dog.”

  Charlie felt queasy.

  Sam said, “Let’s put aside that decision for the moment.” She placed the letters on top of the safe. She wedged her hand back inside and slid out a postcard.

  Sam showed Charlie the aerial photo of the Johnson Space Center.

  Gamma had worked with NASA before going to Fermilab.

  Sam turned over the card. Again, their mother’s neat handwriting was unmistakable.

  Charlie read aloud the message to Rusty, “‘If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.’ —Dr. Seuss.”

  Sam gave Charlie a meaningful look, as if their mother was offering marital advice from the grave.

  Charlie said, “Obviously, she was trying to communicate with Dad on his level.”

  “Obviously.” Sam was smiling the same way she had on Christmas mornings. She had always opened presents so maddeningly slow, commenting on the wrapping paper, the amount of tape used, the size and shape of the box while Charlie tore through her gifts like a Chihuahua on methamphetamine.

  Sam said, “We need to go through all of this very carefully.” She made herself more comfortable on the floor. “I hope that we’ll find the photo today, but if not, or I guess either way, do you mind if I take all of this back to New York? Some of it is very precious. I can catalog everything and—”

  “It’s fine,” Charlie said, because she knew that Gamma and Sam had always spoken in their own, impenetrable language.

  And also that she would never make a catalog.

  “I’ll bring them back,” Sam promised. “You can meet me in Atlanta, or I can come up here.”

  Charlie nodded. She liked the idea of seeing her sister again.

  “I can’t believe Daddy kept this.” Sam was holding one of her track and field ribbons. “He must have had it in his office. Otherwise, it would’ve burned in the fire. And—oh my goodness.” She had found a pile of old school assignments. “Your paper on transcendentalism. Charlie, do you remember Gamma got into a two-hour argument with your teacher? She was so livid that he’d marginalized Louisa May Alcott. Oh—and look, my old report card. He was supposed to sign it.”

  Ben whistled for Charlie’s attention. He was holding up a blank sheet of paper. “Your dad kept my drawing of a rabbit in a snowstorm.”

  Charlie grinned.

  “Oh, wait.” He took a pen off the desk and drew a black dot in the center of the page. “It’s a polar bear’s asshole.”

  She laughed, and then she wanted to cry because she missed his humor so much.

  “Charlie,” Sam said, delighted. “I think we hit the jackpot. Do you remember Mother’s notebooks?” She was reaching into the safe again. This time, she brought out a large, leather-bound journal. She opened the cover.

  Instead of diary pages filled with equations, there were blank checks.

  Charlie looked over Sam’s shoulder again. Spiral bound. Three rows to a sheet, torn stubs where older checks had been written. The account was drawn on Bank of America, but she did not recognize the company name. “Pikeville Holding Fund.”

  Sam paged through the check stubs, but the usual information—the date, the amount, and the person to whom the check was made payable—were blank. She asked Charlie, “Why would Dad have a business checking account for a holding company?”

  “His escrow account is under Rusty Quinn, esquire,” Charlie said. Most litigators had non-interest-bearing holding accounts in which settlement funds were deposited. The lawyer took his cut, then paid out the rest to the client. “But this doesn’t make sense. Lenore does all of Dad’s bookkeeping. She took over when he forgot to pay his electric bill and the power was cut off.”

  Ben rifled through a pile of unopened mail on Rusty’s desk. He found an envelope and held it up. “Bank of America.”

  “Open it,” Charlie said.

  Ben extracted the one-page statement. “Holy crap. Over three hundred grand.”

  “Dad never had a client who got that kind of payout.”

  Ben said, “There’s only one withdrawal last month, check number zero-three-four-zero for two thousand dollars.”

  Sam said. “Normally the first
check number in an account starts with triple-zero one.” She asked, “On what day was the last check written?”

  “It doesn’t say, but it was cashed four weeks ago.”

  “The second Friday of every month.”

  “What?” Charlie looked down at the checkbook. “Did you find something?”

  Sam shook her head. She closed the leather cover.

  Ben said, “Not to go all Scooby-Doo and the Gang, but do you want to try the pencil trick? Rub the lead over the blank checks that were underneath the ones he wrote? Rusty was quite the bearer-downer when he had a pen in his hand.”

  “That’s brilliant, babe.” Charlie stood to look for a pencil on the desk.

  “We’ll need to get official copies,” Sam said. “A pencil rubbing won’t tell us anything.”

  “It’ll tell us who he wrote the checks to.”

  Sam held the journal to her chest. “I have several accounts with Bank of America. I can call them tomorrow and ask for copies. We’ll need to get Dad’s death certificate. Charlie, are you sure he didn’t have a will? We really should look for it. A lot of older people draw up wills, but they don’t tell their children.”

  Charlie froze. She felt sweat break out on the back of her neck. A car was making its way toward the house. The familiar bump when the front wheel hit the pothole. The crunching of rubber against packed red clay.

  Sam said, “That’s probably Stanislav, my driver. I told him to meet me here.” She looked at the clock on Rusty’s desk. “He made good time. I should find a box to put all of this in.”

  Charlie said, “Ben—”

  “I’ll go.” Ben walked down the hallway.

  Charlie stood in the hall, tracking his progress to the kitchen. He looked out the window. His hand encircled the doorknob. Her heart did a weird trembly thing inside of her chest. She did not want Ben in the kitchen. She did not want him to open the door.

  Ben opened the door.

  Mason Huckabee stood on the side porch. He looked up at Ben, surprised. He was wearing a black suit with a blue tie and a camouflage ball cap.

  Ben did not speak to the man. He turned around. He walked back down the hall.

  Charlie felt sick. She ran to meet Ben. She blocked his way, her hands touching either side of the wall. “I’m sorry.”

  Ben tried to go around.

  Charlie held firm. “Ben, I didn’t ask him here. I don’t want him here.”

  Ben wasn’t going to push her out of his way. He stared at her. He chewed the tip of his tongue.

  “I’ll get rid of him. I’ve been trying to get rid of him.”

  Sam called from the office, “Ben, can you help me pack this stuff?”

  Charlie knew that Ben was too much of a gentleman to tell her no.

  She reluctantly let him pass. She ran toward the kitchen, practically galloping down the hallway.

  Mason waved to her, because he had a clear line of sight to the back of the house. He had the sense not to smile as she got closer. He said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re going to be fucking sorry,” Charlie whispered, her voice hoarse. “I wasn’t bullshitting you about that restraining order. It’ll take me two minutes to blow up your entire fucking life.”

  “I know that,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I just want to talk to you and your sister.”

  Charlie ignored the desperation in his tone. “I don’t care what you want. You need to leave.”

  Sam said, “Charlie, let him in.”

  Charlie turned around. Sam stood in the hallway. She was touching the wall with her fingers again. “In here,” she told Mason, then walked into the living room before Charlie could tell her no.

  Mason stepped into the kitchen without being invited. He stood inside the doorway. He took off his ball cap. He worked it between his hands. He looked around the room, clearly unimpressed. Rusty had not changed anything since the day they had moved in. The rickety chairs, the chipped table. The only thing missing was the air conditioner that had been in the window. There had been no way to get the pieces of Gamma out of the fan.

  “This way.” Charlie scanned the empty hallway for Ben. The door to Rusty’s office was closed. Ben’s truck hadn’t left. He had not opened the back door. He must be in Rusty’s office wondering why his wife was such a whore.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Mason said.

  Charlie spun around. “I know who you are.”

  Mason looked alarmed.

  “I didn’t know when I met you, clearly, but then my sister told me about your sister, and—” She struggled to find the right words. “I’m very sorry for what happened to her. And to you and your family. But what you and I did, that was a one-time mistake, a huge mistake. I’m in love with my husband.”

  “You said that before. I understand. I respect that.” Mason nodded to Sam. She had made a space to sit on a straight-back chair. The footage from the school security camera was paused on the TV set beside her. Ben had figured out how to make it work.

  Mason stared at the massive screen. “Who’s going to be Kelly’s lawyer now?”

  Sam said, “We’ll find someone from Atlanta.”

  “I can pay,” he said. “My family has money. My parents do. Did. They had a trucking company.”

  Charlie remembered the signs from her childhood. “Huckabee Hauling.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at the paused footage again. “Is that from the other day?”

  Charlie did not want to open the conversation. “Why are you here?”

  “It’s just—” He cut himself off. Instead of offering an explanation for his continued, unwanted presence, he said, “Kelly tried to kill herself. That shows remorse. I read about it on the Internet, that remorse matters in death penalty cases. So you could use that during her trial to make the jury give her life, or maybe life with a chance of parole. They know that, right?”

  “Who knows that?” Sam asked.

  “The police. The prosecutor. You guys.”

  Charlie told him, “They’ll say it was a cry for help. She gave up the gun. She didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “She did,” he said. “Three times.”

  “What?” Sam stood up from the chair.

  Charlie said, “You can’t lie about this. People were there.”

  “I’m not lying. She put the gun to her chest. You were twenty feet away. You had to see it, or at least hear it.” He told Sam, “Kelly pressed the muzzle to her chest, and she pulled the trigger three times.”

  Charlie had absolutely no recollection of any of this.

  “I heard the clicks,” he said. “I bet Judith Pinkman did, too. I’m not making this up. She really tried to kill herself.”

  Sam asked, “Then why didn’t you just take away the gun?”

  “I didn’t know if she’d reloaded. I’m a Marine. You always assume a weapon is hot unless you can clearly visualize the empty chamber.”

  “Reloaded,” Sam repeated, giving weight to the word. “When the shooting began, how many shots did you hear?”

  “Six,” he said. “One, then there was a pause, then there were three real quick in a row, then there was a shorter pause, then another shot, then a quick pause, then another shot.” He shrugged. “Six.”

  Sam sat back down. She reached into her purse. “You’re sure about that?”

  “If you’ve been in close-quarters combat as many times as I have, you learn really fast to count the bullets.”

  She had her notepad in her lap. “And Kelly’s revolver holds six shots?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Charlie asked, “Was it empty when you took it?”

  Mason glanced nervously at Sam.

  She said, “Now would be a good time to explain why you stuck it down the back of your pants.”

  “Instinct.” He shrugged, as if committing a felony was inconsequential. “The cop wouldn’t take it, so I just stowed it, temporarily, like you said, in the waist of my pants. And then none of the co
ps asked me about it, or searched me for it, and then I was out the door and in my truck before I realized it was still there.”

  Sam did not poke holes in the thin story. Instead, she asked, “What did you do with the gun?”

  “I took it apart and dropped it around the lake. The deepest parts.”

  Again, she let him off the hook. “Is it possible to tell whether a gun is loaded just by looking at it?”

  “No,” Mason said. “I mean, a nine-mill, the slide will go back, but you can pop the catch and—”

  Charlie interrupted, “With a revolver, once the bullets are fired, the shells stay in the cylinder.”

  “They do,” Mason confirmed. “All six of them were left in the cylinder, so she hadn’t reloaded.”

  Charlie said, “Which means that she knew the gun was empty when she clicked the trigger three times.”

  “You don’t know that,” Mason insisted. “Kelly probably thought—”

  “Verify the sequence for me, please.” Sam slid the pen out of her notepad. She started writing as she spoke. “One shot, long pause, three quick shots, then a short pause, then another shot, then another short pause, then another shot. Right?”

  Mason nodded.

  She said, “There was another shot fired after Lucy Alexander was hit in the neck.”

  “Into the floor,” Mason said. “I mean, that’s what I’m assuming.”

  Sam arched her brow.

  He explained, “I saw a bullet hole in the floor, right around here.” He pointed to the right side of the screen. “It wouldn’t be on the video because of the camera angle. It’s closer to the door. More like where Kelly ended up when they cuffed her.”

  Charlie asked, “What did the hole look like?”

  “The tile was chipped away, but there was no stippling, so it was probably fired from a distance of at least two, three feet. It was oval, too. Like a tear drop, so it was shot down and at an angle.” He held out his hand, finger and thumb in the shape of a weapon. “So, at her waist, maybe? She’s shorter than I am, but the angle wasn’t that steep. You’d have to string it.” Mason shrugged. “I’m not really an expert. I took a class as part of my continuing ed during my service.”

  Sam said, “She didn’t want to kill Judith Pinkman, so she shot the last bullet into the floor.”