The Good Daughter

  Judith put down the mug. She placed her palms flat on the table.

  “Thou shalt not lie,” Charlie said. “That’s a Bible verse, right?”

  Judith’s lips parted. She breathed out, then in again before she spoke. “It’s part of the Ten Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’ But I think you’re looking for Proverbs.” She closed her eyes. She recited, “‘These six things the Lord doth hate; yea, seven are an abomination unto him: a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent—’” Her throat worked. “‘That shed innocent blood.’” She paused again before finishing, “‘An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to evil, a false witness that speaketh lies and he that soweth discord among brethren.’”

  “That’s quite a list.”

  Judith looked down at her hands, still spread flat to the table. Her nails were clipped close. Her fingers were long and thin. They cast a narrow shadow on the top of the polished walnut table.

  Like the spider’s leg that Sam had seen inching its way into the camera’s frame.

  Ben had been able to work more wizardry on his laptop once he realized what they were all staring at. It was like an optical illusion. Once you understood what your eyes were seeing, you could never again see the image otherwise.

  In that paused frame, the camera had caught Kelly Wilson holding the revolver, just as she had confessed to Sam, but as with a lot of Kelly Wilson’s statements, there was more to the story.

  Kelly had worn black that day.

  Judith Pinkman had worn red.

  Charlie remembered thinking how the woman’s shirt was soaked through with Lucy Alexander’s blood.

  The sepia tone of the recording had almost blended the two dark colors, but once Ben had finished on his laptop, the truth was there for all to see.

  The black-sleeved arm had a red-sleeved arm alongside it.

  Two arms pointing toward the classroom door.

  Two fingers wrapped around the trigger.

  “The gun was in my hand.”

  Kelly Wilson had told Sam at least three times during the interview that she was holding the revolver when Douglas Pinkman and Lucy Alexander were murdered.

  What the girl had failed to mention was that Judith Pinkman’s hand was holding it there.

  Charlie said, “They tested Kelly for gunshot residue at the hospital. It was on her hand, all over her shirt. Exactly where you’d expect to find it.”

  Judith sat back in her chair. Her eyes stayed on her own hands.

  Charlie said, “The residue is like talcum powder, if that’s what you’re worried about. It washes off with soap and water.”

  “I know it does, Charlotte.” Her voice was scratchy, like the sound a record makes when the needle first hits the vinyl. “I know it does.”

  Charlie waited. She could hear a clock ticking somewhere. She felt a slight breeze snaking out from the edges of the closed kitchen door.

  Judith finally looked up. Her eyes glistened in the overhead light. She studied Charlie for a moment, then asked, “Why is it you? Why didn’t the police come?”

  Charlie did not realize that she was holding her breath until she felt the strain in her lungs. “Do you want it to be the police?”

  Judith looked up at the ceiling. Her tears began to fall. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

  Charlie said, “She was pregnant.”

  “Again,” Judith said. “She had an abortion in middle school.”

  Charlie braced herself for a polemic about the sanctity of life, but Judith did not offer one.

  Instead, the woman stood up. She pulled a paper towel from the roll. She wiped her face. “The father was a boy on the football team. Several boys had their fun, apparently. She was naïve. She had no idea what they were doing to her.”

  “Who was the father this time?”

  “You’re going to make me say it?”

  Charlie nodded. She was a recent convert to giving voice to the truth.

  “Doug,” she said. “He fucked her in my room.” Charlie must have reacted to the fuck, because she said, “I’m sorry for the language, but when you see your husband screwing a seventeen-year-old girl in the classroom where you teach middle schoolers, that’s the first word that comes to mind.”

  “Seventeen,” Charlie repeated. Douglas Pinkman had been an administrator. Kelly Wilson was a student in the same school system. What he had done was commit statutory rape. Fucking had nothing to do with it.

  Judith said, “That’s why the camera was angled down. Doug was smart about it. He was always smart about it.”

  “There were other students?”

  “Anything he could stick it into.” She balled the paper towel into her hand. She had become visibly angry. For the first time, Charlie was worried Sam and Ben had been right about how dangerous this could be.

  Charlie asked, “That’s why this happened, because Kelly got pregnant?”

  “It wasn’t for the reason you’re thinking. I’m sorry, Charlotte. You clearly wanted children, but I didn’t. I never did. I love them, I love how their minds work, I love how funny and interesting they can be, but I love it more when I can leave them at school, come home and read a book and enjoy the silence.” She tossed the paper towel into the trash can. “I’m not some desperate woman who couldn’t have a child so she snapped. Not having a child was a choice. A choice I thought Doug agreed with, but—” She shrugged. “You never know how bad your marriage is until it’s over.”

  Charlie guessed, “He wanted a divorce?”

  Judith laughed bitterly. “No, and I didn’t want one either. I had learned to live with his perpetual midlife crisis. He wasn’t a pedophile. He didn’t go after the young ones.”

  Charlie wondered at how easily the woman dismissed the fact that Kelly Wilson had the emotional intelligence of a child.

  Judith said, “Doug wanted us to keep the baby. Kelly was going to drop out of school anyway. There was no way she could graduate. He wanted us to give her some money, make her go away, and raise the baby together.”

  Of all the things Judith could have said, Charlie had never suspected this was what had finally broken her. “What changed his mind about wanting a kid?”

  “Feeling his mortality? Wanting to leave a legacy? Just so damn arrogant and selfish and stupid?” She huffed out an angry breath. “I’m fifty-six years old. Doug was about to turn sixty. We should be planning our retirement. I didn’t want to raise some other woman’s—some teenager’s—baby.” She shook her head, clearly still furious. “Not to mention Kelly’s mental deficits. Doug wasn’t just expecting me to raise a child for the next eighteen years. He wanted us to be stuck with it for the rest of our lives.”

  Any sympathy Charlie could have felt evaporated with those words.

  Judith asked, “What else did Kelly tell you?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I was going to play the martyr; the poor widow accused of being complicit by a cold-blooded simpleton. Who would believe her over me?”

  Charlie said nothing, but she knew that, without the footage, no one would have believed the girl.

  “So.” Judith angrily wiped away her tears. “Is this the part where I tell you how I did it?” She pointed to Charlie’s phone. “Make sure it’s still recording.”

  Charlie turned over the phone, though she trusted that Ben had set it up properly. The phone was not only recording, it was transmitting the audio back to his laptop.

  Judith said, “The affair started a year ago. I saw them through the window in my classroom. Doug thought I had left. He stayed to lock up—at least, that’s what he said. I went back for some papers. As I said, he was screwing her on one of the desks.”

  Charlie pressed her back to the chair. Judith seemed to be getting angrier with each word.

  “So, I did what any obedient wife would do. I turned around. I went home. I prepared dinner. Doug came home. He told me he got hung up with a parent
. We watched TV together and I seethed. I seethed all night.”

  “When did you start tutoring Kelly?”

  “When she started dressing like a witch again.” Judith braced the heels of her hands on the counter. “That’s what she did the last time. She started wearing black, like the Goths, to hide her belly. I knew the moment I saw her in the hall that she was pregnant again.”

  “Did you confront Doug?”

  “Why would I do that? I’m just the wife. I’m just the woman who cooks his meals and irons his clothes and bleaches the stains out of his underwear.” Her voice had a grinding undertone, like a clock being overwound. “Do you know what it’s like to not matter? To live in the same house with a man for almost your entire adult life and feel like you’re nothing? That your wishes, your desires, your plans, are irrelevant? That any burden, no matter how great, can be thrown at you and because you’re a good woman, a God-fearing, Christian woman, and you’ll just take it with a smile because your husband, the man who is supposed to be your protector, is the master of the house?”

  Judith had clasped her hands together so hard that the knuckles were white. She told Charlie, “Of course you don’t. You’ve been coddled, you’ve been cherished, all of your life. Even losing your mother, your sister almost dying, your father being reviled by everyone in the state, made people love you more.”

  Charlie’s heart pounded in her throat. She did not realize that she had stood up from the chair until she felt her back against the wall.

  Judith didn’t seem to notice the effect she was having. “You can talk Kelly into anything, did you know that?”

  Charlie did not move.

  “She’s so sweet. And fragile. And tiny. She’s like a child. She really is. But the more time I spent with her, the more I hated her.” She shook her head. Her hair was coming unpinned. Her eyes had a wild look. “Do you know how that feels, to hate an innocent kid? To focus all of your rage on someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, what’s happening to them, because you realize that you can see your own stupidity reflected in their behavior? That you see how your husband controls them, cheats on them, uses them, abuses them, the same way that he does with you?”

  Charlie scanned the room. She saw the knives in the wooden block, the drawers full of utensils, the cabinet that likely still had Mr. Heller’s rifle on top.

  “I’m sorry,” Judith said, visibly working to calm herself. She followed Charlie’s gaze to the top of the cabinet. “I thought I was going to have to make up a story about how Kelly had stolen it. Or give her the money and pray that she could follow the instructions to buy one.”

  Charlie said, “Her dad kept a revolver in his car.”

  “She told me he used it to shoot squirrels. Holler people eat them sometimes.”

  “It’s greasy,” Charlie said, trying to keep her calm. “I have a client who cooks it in stew.”

  Judith gripped the back of the chair. Her knuckles were white. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Charlie forced out a laugh. “Isn’t that what people say before they hurt someone?”

  Judith pushed away from the chair. She leaned against the counter again. She was still angry, but she kept working to control it. “I shouldn’t have said that about your tragedy. I apologize.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You’re saying that because you want me to keep talking.”

  Charlie shrugged her shoulder. “Is it working?”

  Her laugh was filled with disgust.

  Ben had said that Judith Pinkman had been hysterical when the paramedics had taken her out the middle-school doors. They’d had to sedate her to get her into the ambulance. She had stayed at the hospital all night. She had gone on camera to plead for Kelly’s life. Even now, her eyes were swollen from crying. Her face was haggard with grief. She was telling Charlie the truth, the brutal, unvarnished truth, though she knew that she was being recorded.

  She wasn’t bargaining, she wasn’t pleading, she wasn’t trying to make some kind of trade. This was how a person behaved when they felt true remorse for their actions.

  Judith said, “Kelly wouldn’t pull the trigger on her own. She promised me that she would, but I knew that she wasn’t like that. She was too kind, and she was too trusting, and she would’ve been a horrible shot, so I stood behind her in the hall, and I wrapped my hand around hers, and I fired a shot into the wall to get Doug’s attention.” She tapped her fingers to her mouth as if to remind her voice to stay calm. “He came running out, and I shot him three times. And then—”

  Charlie waited.

  Judith pressed her hand to her chest. Her anger had gone completely cold.

  She admitted, “I was going to kill Kelly. That was the plan: shoot Doug, then murder Kelly and say that I stopped her from slaughtering more children. Town hero. I’d get Doug’s pension, his social security. No messy divorce. More time to read my books, right?”

  Charlie wondered if she had planned on shooting Kelly in the stomach to make sure her baby was dead, too.

  Judith said, “I managed to hit Doug in all the right places. The coroner told me that any one of the three shots was fatal. I guess he thought that would be a comfort.” Her eyes glistened again. She swallowed, her throat making an audible sound. “But Kelly wouldn’t let go of the gun. I don’t think she knew the rest of the plan, that I was going to kill her. I think she panicked when she saw that Doug was dead. We struggled. The trigger was pulled. I don’t know if it was me or her, but the bullet ricocheted into the floor.”

  Judith breathed through her mouth. Her voice was raspy.

  She continued, “We were both shocked that the gun had gone off, and Kelly turned, and I—I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. I panicked. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and I pulled the trigger again and—” She was cut off by a whimper. Her lips had turned white. She was trembling. “I saw her. I saw her when—while—my finger pulled the trigger. It happened so slowly, and my brain recognized it, I remember thinking, ‘Judith, you’re shooting a child,’ but I couldn’t stop it. My finger kept pulling back, and—”

  She could not say the words, so Charlie did.

  “Lucy Alexander was shot.”

  Judith’s tears flowed like water. “I team-teach with her mother. I used to see Lucy at meetings, dancing around in the back of the room. She would sing to herself. She had such a sweet voice. I don’t know, maybe it would’ve been different if I hadn’t known her, but I knew her.”

  Charlie could not help but think that the woman had known Kelly Wilson, too.

  Judith said, “Charlotte, I’m so sorry that I made you a part of this. I had no idea you were in the building. I would’ve done it the next day, or next week. I never would have knowingly put you in that situation.”

  Charlie was not going to thank her.

  “I wish I could explain what came over me. I thought that Doug and I were—I don’t know. He wasn’t the great love of my life, but I thought that we cared for each other. Respected each other. But after that many years, everything is entangled. You’ll see when you get there. Finances, retirement, benefits, cars, this house, savings accounts, tickets we bought for a cruise this summer.”

  “Money,” Charlie said. Rusty had thousands of quotes about man’s destructive desires for sex and money.

  “It wasn’t just the money,” Judith said. “When I confronted Doug about the pregnancy, and he presented his brilliant plan for us to become geriatric parents, like it was nothing to take on that kind of commitment—and it wasn’t, not for him. He wasn’t going to be the one getting up at three in the morning to change diapers. I know it seems incredible that that was what finally did it, but it was the last straw.”

  She searched Charlie’s eyes as if she expected agreement.

  Judith said, “I let myself hate Kelly because that was the only way I could talk myself into doing it. I knew that she was pliable. All I had to do was whisper in her ear—wasn’t she a bad girl for w
hat she let Doug do to her? Wasn’t she going to hell for what happened in middle school? Couldn’t she punish Doug for his transgressions? Couldn’t she stop him from hurting other girls? I was amazed by how little time it took to convince another human being that she was nothing.” Judith repeated, “Nothing. Just like me.”

  Charlie’s hands were sweating. She wiped them on her dress.

  “There’s another verse you probably know, Charlotte. I’m sure you heard it in a movie or read it in a book. ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.’”

  “The Golden Rule,” Charlie said. “Do unto others as they do unto you.”

  “I did to Kelly what Doug did to me. That’s what I told myself. That’s how I justified my actions, and then I saw Lucy and I realized …” Judith held up her index finger, as if to start counting. “A proud look through the window of my room.” She held up another finger, listing her sins. “A lying tongue to my husband, to Kelly.” Another finger went up. “Wicked imaginations about murdering both of them. Running toward evil when I put that gun in her hand. False witness to the police about what happened. Sowing discord to you, to Mason Huckabee, to the entire town.” She gave up counting and held up all of her fingers. “‘Hands that shed innocent blood.’”

  Judith stood there, her hands in the air, palms out, fingers spread.

  Charlie did not know what to say.

  “What will happen to her?” Judith asked. “To Kelly?”

  Charlie shook her head, though she knew that Kelly Wilson would go to prison. Not to death row, probably not for the rest of her life, but low IQ or not, the girl was right: the gun was in her hand.

  Judith said, “I need you to leave, Charlotte.”

  “I—”

  “Take your phone.” She tossed the phone to Charlie. “Send the recording to that woman at the GBI. Tell her she can find me here.”

  Charlie fumbled to catch the phone. “What are you—”

  “Leave.” Judith reached her hand up to the top of the cabinet. She didn’t have her father’s rifle. She had a Glock.