The Good Daughter

  “Jesus.” Charlie stumbled back.

  “Please leave.” Judith dropped the empty magazine from the gun. “I told you, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “What are you going to do?” Charlie’s heart quivered as she asked the question.

  She knew what the woman was planning to do.

  “Charlotte, go.” Judith found a box of bullets and scattered them onto the table. She started to load the magazine.

  “Jesus,” Charlie repeated.

  Judith paused her work. “I know how ridiculous this is going to sound, but please stop taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said. Ben was listening. He was probably on his way, running through the woods, jumping over trees, pushing limbs aside, trying to find Charlie.

  All she had to do was keep Judith talking.

  “Please,” Charlie begged. “Please don’t do this. I have questions to ask you about that day, about what—”

  “You need to forget about it, Charlotte. You need to do what your daddy told you and put it in a box and leave it there, because I am telling you right now that you don’t ever want to remember what that horrible man did to you.” Judith jammed the magazine into the gun. “Now, I really need for you to go.”

  “Oh, Judith, please don’t do this.” Charlie felt her voice shake. This couldn’t happen. Not in this kitchen. Not to this woman. “Please.”

  Judith pulled back the slide, loading a bullet into the chamber. “Leave, Charlotte.”

  “I can’t—” Charlie held out her hands, reaching toward Judith, toward the gun. “Please don’t do this. This can’t happen. I can’t let you—”

  Bright white bone. Pieces of heart and lung. Cords of tendon and arteries and veins and life spilling out of her gaping wounds.

  “Judith,” Charlie cried. “Please.”

  “Charlotte.” Her voice was firm, like a teacher in front of the classroom. “You are to go outside immediately. I want you to get in your truck, and drive to your father’s house and call the police.”

  “Judith, no.”

  “They’re used to handling these sorts of things, Charlotte. I know that you think you are, but I can’t take that on my conscience. I just can’t.”

  “Judith, please. I am begging you.” Charlie was so close to the gun. She could lunge for it. She was younger, faster. She could stop this.

  “Don’t.” Judith placed the gun behind her on the counter. “I told you that I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t make me go back on my word.”

  “I can’t!” Charlie was sobbing. She felt like razors were pumping through her heart. “I can’t leave you here to kill yourself.”

  Judith opened the kitchen door. “You can and you will.”

  “Judith, please. Don’t put this burden on me.”

  “I’m lifting your burden, Charlotte. Your father is gone. I’m the last person who knows. Your secret dies with me.”

  “It doesn’t need to die!” Charlie screamed. “I don’t care! People already know. My husband. My sister. I don’t care. Judith, please, please don’t—”

  Without warning, Judith charged toward her. She grabbed Charlie around the middle. Charlie felt her feet leave the ground. She braced her hands against the woman’s shoulders. Her ribs felt crushed as she was carried across the kitchen and thrown out onto the porch.

  “Judith, no!” Charlie scrambled to stop her.

  The door slammed in her face.

  The lock clicked.

  “Judith!” Charlie yelled, banging her fist on the door. “Judith! Open the—”

  She heard a loud crack echo inside the house.

  Not a car backfiring.

  Not fireworks.

  Charlie fell to her knees.

  She pressed her hand to the door.

  A person who has been up close when a gun is fired into another human being never mistakes the sound of a gunshot for something else.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO SAM

  Sam alternated her arms in the water, cutting a narrow channel through the warm waters of the swimming pool. She turned her head every third stroke and drew in a long breath. Her feet fluttered. She waited for the next breath.

  Left-right-left-breathe.

  She performed a perfect flip-turn against the wall of the pool, keeping her eyes on the black line guiding her lane. She had always loved the calmness, the simplicity, of the freestyle stroke; that she had to concentrate just enough on swimming so that all extraneous thoughts floated away.

  Left-right-left-breathe.

  Sam saw the mark at the end of the line. She coasted until her fingers touched the wall. She kneeled on the floor of the pool, breathing heavily, checking her swimmer’s watch: 2.4 kilometers at 154.2 seconds per 100 meters, so 38.55 seconds per 25-meter length.

  Not bad. Not as good as yesterday, but she had to make peace with the fact that her body worked at its own speed. Sam tried to tell herself that accepting this truth was progress. Still, as she got out of the pool, her competitive streak niggled at the edge of her encouragements. The desire to jump back in, to improve her time, was only dampened by a dull throb down her sciatic nerve.

  Sam quickly showered off the salt water. She dried herself with the towel, her wrinkled fingers catching on the Egyptian cotton. She examined the furrows in her fingertips; her body’s response to being submerged for so long.

  She kept on her prescription goggles as she rode up in the elevator. At the lobby floor, an older man got on, newspaper under one arm, wet umbrella in his hand. He chuckled when he saw Sam.

  “A beautiful mermaid!”

  She tried to match his ebullient grin. They talked about the bad weather, that a storm working its way up the coast was expected to bring even heavier rains to New York by the afternoon.

  “Almost June!” he said, as if the month had somehow sneaked up on him.

  Sam felt caught a bit unawares herself. She could not believe that only three weeks had passed since she had left Pikeville. Her life had easily gone back to normal since then. Her schedule was the same. She saw the same people at work, conducted the same meetings and conference calls, studied the same sanitary storage bin schematics in preparation for trial.

  And yet, everything felt different. Fuller. Richer. Even doing something as mundane as getting out of bed came with a sense of lightness that had eluded her since—well, if she was being honest, since she had woken up in the hospital twenty-eight years ago.

  The elevator bell dinged. They had reached the old man’s floor.

  “Happy swimming, beautiful mermaid!” He waved his paper in the air.

  Sam watched him walk down the hall. He had a jaunty step that reminded her of Rusty, especially when he began to whistle, then loudly jangled his keys to the beat.

  As the elevator doors closed, Sam whispered, “‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’”

  The wavy chrome that lined the doors showed a woman in ridiculous goggles, smiling to herself. Slim build. Black one-piece suit. She ran her fingers through her short, gray hair to help it dry. Her finger caught the edge of the scar where the bullet had entered her brain. She seldom thought of that day anymore. Instead, she thought of Anton. She thought of Rusty. She thought of Charlie and Ben.

  The elevator doors opened.

  Dark clouds showed through the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined her penthouse apartment. Sam heard car horns and cranes and the usual din of activity muffled behind the triple-paned glass.

  She walked to the kitchen, turning on lights as she went. She exchanged her goggles for her glasses. She put out food for Fosco. She filled the kettle. She prepared her tea infuser, mug and spoon, but before boiling the water, she went to the yoga mat in her living room.

  Sam took off her glasses. She ran through her stretches too quickly. She was anxious to start her day. She tried to meditate, but she found herself unable to clear her mind. Fosco, finished with his breakfast, took advantage of the break in routine. He dolphined his head into her arm until she gave
in. Sam scratched underneath his chin, listening to his soothing purrs, and wondered as she often did whether she should adopt another cat.

  Fosco nipped at her hand, indicating he’d had enough.

  She watched him saunter off, then fall onto his side in front of the windows.

  Sam put on her glasses. She returned to the kitchen and turned on the kettle. Rain slanted outside the windows, saturating the lower end of Manhattan. She closed her eyes and listened to the tinny splatter of thousands of raindrops hitting the glass. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that Fosco was staring out the windows, too. He was curved into a backward C, front legs stretched toward the glass, enjoying the heat coming up from the kitchen tiles.

  They both watched the rain beat down until the kettle gave a low whistle.

  Sam poured her mug of tea. She set the egg timer to three and a half minutes to allow the leaves to steep. She got yogurt from the fridge and mixed in granola with a spoon from the drawer. She took off her regular glasses and put on her reading glasses.

  Sam turned on her phone.

  There were several work emails, but she opened the one from Eldrin first. Ben’s birthday was next week. Sam had asked her assistant to come up with a clever message that would please her brother-in-law. Eldrin had suggested—

  That’s the tribble with getting older!

  Tribble in paradise!

  Yesterday, all my tribbles seemed so far away …

  Sam frowned. She didn’t know if tribble was inappropriate or too young for a forty-four-year-old woman to send to her sister’s husband.

  She tapped open her phone’s browser to research the word. Charlie’s Facebook page was already on the screen. Sam visited her sister’s page twice a day because that was the most reliable way to find out what Charlie and Ben were up to—Looking at houses together in Atlanta. Interviewing for new jobs. Trying to find someone who knew whether or not it was advisable to relocate rabbits from the mountains to the city.

  Instead of searching for tribble, Sam reloaded Charlie’s page. She shook her head at a new photo her sister had posted. Another stray had been found. The mutt was splotched like a bluetick hound, but with stubby dachshund legs. He was standing in the backyard, knee-deep in grass. One of Charlie’s friends, a person going by the dubious handle of Iona Trayler, had posted a snarky rejoinder about how Charlie’s husband needed to mow the grass.

  Poor Ben. He had spent hours with Charlie excavating Rusty’s offices and the main floors of the HP, boxing and donating and listing on eBay various magazines, articles of clothing and, unbelievably, a prosthetic leg that had sold for sixteen dollars to a man in Canada.

  They had never found the photograph of Gamma. There was the photo, the washed-out, sun-bleached picture that Rusty had let fade into nothing on his desk, but the photograph he had told Sam about, the one that he claimed captured the moment he and Gamma had fallen in love, was nowhere to be found. Not in the safe. Not in Rusty’s files. Not in the cabinets. Not anywhere in the downtown office or the HP.

  Sam and Charlie had finally decided that the mythical image was likely one of Rusty’s tall tales, embellished for the sake of the listener, founded in very little fact.

  Still, the loss of this phantom photo had opened up an ache inside of Sam. For years, she had scoured the academic and scientific world looking for the products of her mother’s brilliant mind. The thought had not occurred to her until three weeks ago how foolish she had been to have never once searched for her mother’s face.

  Sam could look in a mirror and see the similarities. She could share memories with Charlie. But except for two dry academic papers, there was no proof that their mother had been a vital, vibrant human being.

  The NASA postcard they had found in Rusty’s safe had given Sam an idea. The Smithsonian, in cooperation with the Johnson Space Center, maintained detailed records of every stage of the space race. Sam had put out feelers for a researcher or a historian to perform a proper investigation into whether or not the archives contained photographs of Gamma. She had already gotten several responses. There seemed to be a renaissance within the STEM fields to acknowledge the long-forgotten contributions of women and minorities to the scientific advancements of mankind.

  The search would be finding a proverbial needle in the haystack, but Sam felt to the core of her being that a photograph of Gamma existed in NASA’s or even Fermilab’s records. For the first time in her life, she found herself believing that there was such a thing as fate. What had happened in the kitchen almost three decades ago was not the end of it. Sam knew that she was meant to see her mother’s face again. All that it would take was money and time, two things Sam had in abundant supply.

  The egg timer buzzed.

  Sam poured milk into her hot tea. She stared out the window, watching the rain pelt the glass. The sky had turned darker. The wind had picked up. Sam could feel the slight shift of the building as it rocked against the coming storm.

  Oddly, Sam found herself wondering what the weather was like in Pikeville.

  Rusty would have known. Apparently, he had kept up the weather project that he had started with Charlie. Ben had found piles of forms in the barn where for twenty-eight years Rusty had almost daily notated wind direction and speed, air pressure, temperature, humidity and precipitation. They had no idea why Rusty was still tracking the information. The weather station Ben had installed on the tower wirelessly reported the data back to NOAA. Maybe what it boiled down to was that Rusty had been a creature of habit. Sam had always thought that she was more like her mother, but at least in this one regard, she was certainly like her father.

  The daily laps in the pool. The mug of tea. The yogurt and granola.

  One of Sam’s many small regrets was that she had not preserved that last message Rusty had left on her birthday. The boisterous greeting. The weather update. The arcane bit of history. The discordant sign-off.

  She missed his laughter most of all. He had always been impressed by his own cleverness.

  Sam was so lost in thought that she did not hear her phone ring. The stuttered vibrations of the device shook her back to the present. She slid the bar across the screen. She put the phone to her ear.

  “She signed the deal,” Charlie said by way of greeting. “I told her we could try to get it knocked down a few more years, but Lucy Alexander’s parents have been pushing pretty hard and the Wilsons just want it over with, so she’s at ten years, minimum security, eligible for monitored parole in five if she’s on good behavior, which of course she will be.”

  Sam had to silently repeat Charlie’s words back in her head before she fully understood them. Her sister was talking about Kelly Wilson. Sam had hired a lawyer from Atlanta to help work out a plea deal. With Ken Coin’s abrupt resignation and the recording that Charlie had made of Judith Pinkman being considered tantamount to a deathbed confession, the state prosecutor had been eager to make the Kelly Wilson case go away.

  Charlie said, “Coin would’ve never made that deal.”

  “I bet I could’ve talked him into it.”

  Charlie laughed appreciatively. “Are you ever going to tell me how you got him to quit?”

  “It’s an interesting story,” Sam said, but did not tell the story. Charlie still refused to explain how her nose had been broken, so Sam still refused to explain how she had used Mason’s confession to intimidate Coin into stepping down.

  Sam said, “Parole in five years is a good deal. Kelly will be in her early twenties when she gets out. Her child will be young enough for them to bond with each other.”

  “It rankles,” Charlie said, and Sam knew she did not mean Kelly Wilson or her unborn child or even Ken Coin. She was talking about Mason Huckabee.

  The FBI had done a full-court press against Mason for lying to a federal agent, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, and accessory to a double murder after the fact. Despite his voluntary confession to the Pikeville police, Mason Huckabee had, unsurprisingly, hired a really g
ood, really expensive lawyer who’d pled him down to six years without a chance of parole. The Atlanta Federal Pen was not an easy place to serve time, but over the last few weeks, both Charlie and Sam had found themselves wondering if they should follow through on Sam’s threat to release Mason’s written confession.

  Sam said what she always said: “It’s good for us to let this go, Charlie. Dad would not have wanted us to tie up our lives for the next five, ten, twenty years, hounding Mason Huckabee through the criminal justice system. We need to move on with our lives.”

  “I know,” Charlie admitted, but with obvious reluctance. “It just pisses me off that he only got one more year than Kelly. I guess that’s a lesson about lying to a federal agent. But, you know, we could always go after him before his release. Who knows where we’ll be in six years? There’s no statute of limitations on—”

  “Charlie.”

  “All right,” she said. “Maybe he’ll get shivved in the shower or someone will put glass in his food.”

  Sam let her sister talk.

  “I’m not saying he should be murdered or anything, but, like, he loses a kidney or his stomach is shredded or, hey, better yet, he’s forced to shit into a bag for the rest of his life.” She took a quick pause for breath. “I mean, okay, the living conditions in prisons are deplorable and healthcare is a joke, and they feed them, basically, rat turds, but aren’t you kind of glad that he could get something as stupid as an infected tooth and die a miserable, painful death?”

  Sam waited to make sure she was finished. “Once you and Ben are living in Atlanta, starting your new lives, it won’t matter as much. That’s your revenge. Enjoy your life. Appreciate what you have.”

  “I know,” Charlie repeated.

  “Be useful, Charlie. That’s what Mama wanted.”

  “I know,” she said, sighing out the words for a third time. “Let’s change the subject. Since I’m catching you up on the Pikeville crime report, they had to let Rick Fahey go.”

  Lucy Alexander’s grieving uncle. The man who had more than likely stabbed Rusty.