The Good Daughter

  Mason shrugged again. “Maybe. But she knew the Pinkmans from way back, and that didn’t keep her from killing Doug.”

  “She knew them?” Sam asked.

  “Kelly was the water girl for the football team. That’s when those rumors started about her and one of the players. I’m not one hundred percent on what happened, but Kelly missed a couple’a three weeks of school and the kid left town, so—” He shrugged off the rest, but he must have been talking about the rumors that had spurred half the school to denigrate Kelly Wilson in her own yearbook.

  Sam clarified, “Douglas Pinkman was the coach of the football team, so he would know Kelly Wilson from her stint as a water girl.”

  “Right. She did two seasons, I think, along with another girl from the special ed group. The county office sent down this edict that we were supposed to integrate the special kids into more extracurricular programs: marching band, cheerleading, basketball, football. It was a good idea. I think it really helped some of them. Obviously not Kelly, but—”

  “Thank you.” Sam went back to her notes. She turned the pages slowly, making notations with her pen. She hadn’t dismissed Mason so much as found something more interesting.

  Mason looked at Charlie for some kind of explanation.

  Charlie could shrug, too. “What did you want to talk to us about?”

  “Yeah.” He worked his hat between his hands. “Do you mind if I use your bathroom first?”

  She couldn’t believe he was dragging this out. “It’s back down the hall.”

  He nodded before leaving, like they were in an English drawing room.

  Charlie turned to Sam, who was still focused on her notes. “Why are you talking to him? We need to get him out of here.”

  “Can you look at this and tell me what you see?” Sam pointed to the right side of the screen. “I don’t trust my eyes. Does this shadow look odd to you?”

  Charlie heard Mason open the door to the bathroom, then close it. Thank God he hadn’t accidentally found Rusty’s office.

  Charlie told Sam, “Please help me get rid of him.”

  “I will,” Sam said. “Just look at the video.”

  Charlie stood in front of the giant set. She studied the paused footage. She could see that the camera was angled down, only capturing half of the hallway. The famous blind spot that Mason had told her about. The overhead lights were on, but a weird shadow came from the right-hand side of the hallway. Narrow, long, almost like a spider’s leg.

  “Wait,” Charlie said, but not because of the video. “How did he know where the bathroom is?”

  “What?”

  “He just walked right to it and opened the door.” Charlie felt a prickling sensation in her spine. “No one guesses the right door, Sam. There are five of them, and none of them make any sense. You know that. It’s pretty much a joke that no one can figure them out.” Charlie’s heart started throbbing at the base of her throat. “Do you think Mason knew Dad? That he’s been here before? Like a lot of times before, so he knows where the bathroom is without being told?”

  Sam opened her mouth. She closed it.

  “You know something,” Charlie guessed. “Did Dad tell you—”

  “Charlie, sit down. I don’t know anything for certain at the moment, but I’m trying to work it out.”

  Sam’s calmness made her anxious. “Why do you want me to sit down?”

  “Because you’re hovering over me like a military drone.”

  “You couldn’t say something delicate, like a hummingbird?”

  “Hummingbirds are quite vicious, actually.”

  “Chuck!” Ben yelled.

  Charlie felt her heart lurch. She had never heard him scream so loudly before.

  “Chuck!” Ben yelled again.

  His footsteps pounded up the hall. He overshot the living room. He doubled back, frantic.

  “Are you okay?” Ben looked over his shoulder, up and down the hall. “Where is he?”

  Charlie said, “Ben, what—”

  “Where the fuck is he!” Ben screamed so loudly that she put her hands to her ears. “Mason!” He slammed his fist into the wall. “Mason Huckabee!”

  The bathroom door creaked open.

  “You fucker!” Ben screamed, storming back down the hall.

  Charlie ran after him. She skidded to a stop as Ben tackled Mason to the floor.

  Ben’s fists started to swing. Mason held up his arms, covering his face. Charlie was filled with horror as she watched her husband beat another man.

  “Ben!” She had to do something. “Ben—stop!”

  Sam grabbed Charlie by the waist, holding her back.

  “I have to—” Charlie stopped. She didn’t know what to do. Mason would kill Ben. He was a trained soldier. “Sam, we have to—”

  “He’s not fighting back,” Sam said, almost as if she was narrating a documentary. “Look, Charlie. He’s not fighting back.”

  She was right. Mason lay on the floor, his hands covering his face, as he absorbed every blow to his head, his neck, his chest.

  “You coward!” Ben screamed. “Show me your fucking face!”

  Mason took away his hands.

  Ben landed a solid blow across Mason’s jaw. Charlie heard teeth crack. Blood spewed from Mason’s mouth. He lay there, hands out to the side, and took the beating.

  Ben did not let up. He punched him again, then again, then again.

  “No,” Charlie whispered.

  Blood spattered the wall.

  Mason’s eyebrow opened against the edge of Ben’s wedding band.

  His lip was split.

  The skin of his cheek was rent.

  Mason still just lay there, taking it.

  Ben hit him again.

  Again.

  “I’m sorry,” Mason said, slurring the word. “I’m sorry.”

  “You fucking—” Ben reared back his elbow, his whole body twisting, then slammed his fist into Mason’s jaw.

  Charlie watched the skin on Mason’s cheek ripple like the wake behind a boat. She heard a sharp crack, a bat hitting a ball. Mason’s head whipped to the side.

  His eyelids fluttered.

  Blood dribbled from his mouth, his nose.

  He blinked again, but he did not move. His gaze stayed on the wall. Blood dripped down the dusty baseboard and pooled onto the hardwood floor.

  Ben sat back on his heels. He was panting from exertion.

  “I’m sorry,” Mason said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck your sorry.” Ben spat in his face. He fell to the side, his shoulder hitting the wall. His hands dropped to his sides. Blood dripped from his knuckles. He wasn’t screaming anymore. He was crying. “You—” he tried again, his voice breaking. “You let him rape my wife.”

  18

  Charlie felt her vision blur. Panic gripped her throat. She could only hear the screaming inside her head.

  Ben knew.

  She asked Sam, “Did you tell him?”

  “No,” Sam said.

  “Don’t lie to me, Samantha. Just tell me.”

  “Charlie,” Sam said. “You’re focusing on the wrong thing.”

  There was only one wrong thing. Her husband knew what had happened to her. He had beat a man nearly senseless because of it. He had spat on him, he had told him—

  You let him rape my wife.

  Let him.

  Charlie felt a rush of air leaving her lungs. Her hand slapped to her mouth as bile swirled up her throat.

  “It was him,” Ben said. “Not Daniel.”

  “In the woods?” Charlie asked, her vocal cords straining around the question. She saw Zachariah Culpepper’s hideous face. She had punched him so hard that his head had whipped around. Blood had come out of his mouth. And then Daniel Culpepper had tackled him to the ground and started beating him the way that Ben had just beaten Mason Huckabee.

  Except it had not been Daniel Culpepper in the woods.

  Charlie said, “You tackled Zachariah.” She had to s
wallow before she could add, “You were too late.”

  “I know.” Mason rolled over onto his back. He covered his eyes with his hand. “In the house. In the woods. I was always too late.”

  Charlie felt her knees turn rubbery. She leaned her shoulder into the wall. “Why?”

  Mason moved his head side to side. He was breathing hard. Blood bubbled out of his nose.

  “Tell them,” Ben said, fists clenched.

  Mason wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He looked at Ben, then Sam, then Charlie. Finally, he answered, “I hired Zach to help me take care of Rusty. I gave him everything I’d saved up for college. I knew that he owed Rusty money, but—” He stopped, his voice cracking. “You guys were supposed to be at track practice. We were gonna take Rusty, drive him down the access road, and get rid of him. Zach would get three grand on top of wiping away his legal bills. I would get my revenge …” He looked at Sam again, then Charlie. “I tried to stop Zach when your dad wasn’t here, but he—”

  “You don’t have to tell us what he did.” Sam’s words were so strained that they were almost inaudible in the open space.

  Mason covered his face again. He started to cry.

  Charlie listened to his dry sobs and wanted to punch him in the throat.

  Mason said, “I was going to take the fall for your mom. I said that out in the woods. Five times, at least. You both heard me. I never wanted any of it to happen.” His voice cracked again. “When your mom was shot, it was like I was numb, like, I couldn’t believe it. I just felt sick, and shaky, and I wanted to do something but I was scared of Zach. You know what he’s like. We were all scared of him.”

  Charlie felt rage pumping through every artery in her body. “Don’t you we any of this, you pathetic prick. There was no we in the kitchen except me and Sam. We were forced out of our house. We were led into the woods at gunpoint. We were terrified for our lives. You shot my sister in the head. You buried her alive. You let that monster chase me through the woods, rape me, beat me, take away everything—everything—from me. That was you, Mason. That was all you.”

  “I tried—”

  “Shut up.” Charlie clenched her fists as she stood over him. “You might tell yourself that you tried to stop it, but you didn’t. You let it happen. You helped it happen. You pulled that trigger.” She stopped, trying to catch her breath. “Why? Why did you do it? What did we ever do to you?”

  “His sister,” Sam said. Her voice had a deathly kind of calmness. “That’s what he meant about getting his revenge. Mason and Zachariah showed up the same day Kevin Mitchell walked on the rape charge. We assumed it was about Culpepper’s legal bills when it was really about Mason Huckabee being mad enough to kill but too scared to do it with his own hands.”

  Charlie’s tongue turned into lead. She had to lean against the wall again to keep from falling down.

  Mason said, “I was the one who found my sister. She was in the barn. Her neck was—” He shook his head. “She was tortured by what that bastard did to her. She couldn’t get out of bed. She just cried all the time. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that useless, that helpless. I wanted someone to be punished. Someone had to be punished.”

  “So you came looking for my father?” Charlie felt the now-familiar vibration in her hands. It spread up her arms, into her chest. “You came here to kill my father, and you—”

  “I’m sorry.” Mason started crying again. “I’m sorry.”

  Charlie wanted to kick him. “Don’t you fucking cry. You shot my sister in the head.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Charlie yelled. “You shot her! You buried her alive!”

  Sam’s arm went out. She blocked Charlie from standing over Mason, beating him the same way Ben had.

  Ben.

  Charlie looked at her husband. He was sitting on the floor, back to the wall. His glasses were blood-streaked, crooked on his face. He kept flexing his hands, opening the wounds, encouraging more blood to flow.

  Sam asked, “Why was Rusty writing checks to Zachariah Culpepper’s son?”

  Charlie was so shocked she could not make her mouth form a question.

  Sam explained, “The check numbers. Twelve checks a year for twenty-eight years, four months, would be a total of three hundred forty checks.”

  “That’s the most recent check number,” Charlie remembered.

  “Right,” Sam confirmed. “And then there’s the balance. You started at one million, correct?”

  She was asking Mason.

  Slowly, reluctantly, Mason nodded.

  Sam said, “If you start at one million and subtract two thousand dollars a month for twenty-eight years and change, that leaves you with approximately three hundred twenty thousand dollars.” She told Mason, “Everything began to click into place when you told us that your parents had money. Back in 1989, no one else in Pikeville had that kind of wealth and especially that kind of reach. They traded your freedom for one million dollars. That would’ve been a lot back then. More than Culpepper would ever see in his abbreviated lifetime. He bargained away his dead brother for his unborn son.”

  Mason looked up at her. He slowly nodded.

  Sam asked, “What was my father’s part in this? Did he set up the deal between you and Culpepper?”

  “No.”

  “Then, what?” Sam demanded.

  Mason rolled to his side. He pushed himself up. He sat with his back toward the door. The masking tape Rusty had used on the window made a sort of lightning bolt above his head. “I didn’t know about any of it.”

  Ben glowered at Mason. “You’re gonna rot in hell for dragging Rusty into your bullshit.”

  “It wasn’t Rusty. Not at first.” Mason winced as he touched his jaw. “My parents set up the arrangement. The night it happened, I walked home. Six miles. Zach took my shoes, my jeans, because they had his blood on them. I was half-naked, covered in blood, by the time I got home. I confessed to both of them. I wanted to go to the police. They wouldn’t let me. I found out later they sent a lawyer to talk to Zach.”

  “Rusty,” Ben said.

  “No, someone from Atlanta. I don’t know who.” Mason worked his jaw. The joint popped. “They left me out of it. I had no choice.”

  Sam said, “You were a seventeen-year-old man. I’m certain you had a car. You could’ve gone to the police on your own, or waited until you turned eighteen.”

  “I wanted to,” Mason insisted. “They locked me in my room. Four guys came. They drove me to a military academy up north. I joined the Marines as soon as I was old enough.” He wiped blood out of his eye. “I was in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia. I kept volunteering. I wanted to earn it, you know? I wanted to use my life to help other people. To redeem myself.”

  Charlie bit her lip so hard that she felt the skin start to open. There was no redemption, no matter how many countries he had pinned on his stupid world map.

  Mason said, “I put in my twenty years. I moved back home. I went to school. I thought it was important to give back here, in this town, to these people.”

  “You bastard.” Ben stood up. His hands were still clenched. He walked down the hall. Charlie was afraid that he was going to continue out the back door, but he stopped at Mason’s iPhone. He slammed his heel into the glass, breaking it into tiny pieces.

  Ben lifted his shoe. Glass clinked down from the sole. He said, “Daniel Culpepper was murdered because of you.”

  “I know,” Mason said, but he was wrong.

  Charlie was the one who unleashed Ken Coin on Daniel.

  She told Mason, “He called you brother.”

  Mason shook his head. “He called a lot of people brother. It’s just something guys do.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ben said. “Neither one of them should have been here in the first place. Whatever happened after that is on them.”

  “It is,” Mason agreed. “It’s on me. All of it’s on me.”

  Sam asked, “H
ow did your clothes and your gun end up at Daniel’s trailer?”

  Again, Mason shook his head, but it wasn’t hard to come up with the answer. Ken Coin had planted the evidence. He had framed an innocent man and let a guilty one go free.

  Mason said, “My mom told me about the arrangement after my dad died. I was stationed in Turkey, trying to do right by people. I came home for the funeral. She was worried something would happen and Zach would renege on his part of the deal.”

  Sam said, “To be clear, the deal was that Zach would keep silent about Daniel’s innocence—and your guilt—in exchange for two thousand dollars a month to be paid by your parents to his son, Danny Culpepper?”

  Mason nodded. “I didn’t know. Not until my mother told me. Eight years had gone by. Culpepper was still on death row. He kept getting out of his execution dates.”

  Charlie clenched her jaw. Eight years after the murder. Eight years after Sam clawed out of her grave. Eight years after Charlie was ripped apart.

  Sam had been starting her master’s at Northwestern. Charlie was applying to law school, praying that she could make a fresh start.

  Sam asked, “How did my father get roped into this?”

  “I went to him to confess,” Mason said. “Here, in this house. We sat in the kitchen. I don’t know why, but in a way it made it easier to sit at the table and unburden myself. The scene of the crime. I got sick just letting it all out, every piece of the truth. I told him how I was torn up about Mary-Lynne, how I paid Zach to help me get my revenge. When you’re young like that, you see things so clearly. You don’t understand how the world works. That there are consequences you can’t predict. That bad choices, bad deeds, can corrupt you.” Mason was nodding, as if to agree with himself. “I wanted to explain to Rusty what happened, why it happened, man to man.”

  “You’re not a man,” Charlie told him, sickened by the thought of Mason and Rusty sitting in the kitchen where Gamma had died, that the setting had brought Mason absolution rather than pain. “You’re an attempted murderer. You’re an accomplice to rape. To the murder of my mother. To abduction. Kidnapping. Breaking and fucking entering.” She could not let herself think about all the girlfriends he’d had, the parties he’d attended, the birthdays, the New Year’s Eve celebrations, while Sam got out of bed every morning praying that she could fucking walk. She told Mason, “Joining the Marines does not make you a good man. It makes you a coward for running away.”