Charlie sat in the garage, hands wrapped around the steering wheel.
She hated everything about going into her empty house.
Their empty house.
She hated hanging her keys on the hook by the door because Ben’s hook was always empty. She hated sitting on the couch because Ben wasn’t on the other side with his spidery toes hooked onto the coffee table. She couldn’t even sit at the kitchen counter because Ben’s empty bar stool made her too sad. Most nights, she ended up eating a bowl of cereal over the sink while she stared into the darkness outside the window.
This was no way for a woman to feel about her husband after almost two decades of marriage, but absent her actual husband, Charlie had been rocked by a kind of lovesickness that she hadn’t experienced since high school.
She hadn’t washed Ben’s pillowcase. His favorite beer still took up door space in the refrigerator. She had left his dirty socks by the bed because she knew if she picked them up, he would not be back to leave another pair.
During the first year of their marriage, one of their biggest arguments had been over Ben’s habit of taking off his socks every night and dropping them on the floor of the bedroom. Charlie had started kicking them under the bed when he wasn’t looking, and one day Ben had realized that he didn’t have any socks left and Charlie had laughed and he had yelled at her and she had yelled back at him and because they were both twenty-five, they had ended up fucking each other on the floor. Magically, the fury she’d once felt every time she saw the socks had been dialed back to a mild irritation, like the tail end of a yeast infection.
The first month without Ben, when it had finally dawned on Charlie that his leaving wasn’t a blip, that he might not ever come back, she had sat on the floor by the socks and sobbed like a baby.
That had been the last and only time she had allowed herself to give in to her sorrow. After that long night of tears, Charlie had forced herself to stop sleeping late and to brush her teeth at least twice a day and bathe regularly and to do all those other things that showed the world that she was a functioning human being. She knew this from before: the moment she let her guard down, the world would spiral into a distant but familiar abyss.
Her first four years of college had been a headlong plunge into a bacchanalia she had only glimpsed in high school. With Lenore not there to slap some sense into her, Charlie had let loose. Too much alcohol. Too many boys. A blurring of the lines that only mattered the next morning when she didn’t recognize the boy in her bed, or whose bed she was in, and couldn’t recall if she had said yes or no or blacked out from the copious amounts of beer she had poured down her throat.
By some miracle, she had managed to clean up her act long enough to ace the LSAT. Duke was the only law school she applied to. Charlie had wanted to start over. New university. New city. The gamble had worked out after a long stretch of nothing working out. She had met Ben in Intro to Writing or Elements of the Law. On their third date, they had both agreed they were going to get married eventually, so they might as well go ahead and get married now.
A loud scraping noise pulled her out of her thoughts. Their neighbor was dragging his garbage can to the curb. Ben used to be in charge of that chore. Since he left, Charlie had accumulated so little garbage that most weeks she left a single bag at the end of the driveway.
She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. The bruises underneath her eyes were solidly black now, like a football player’s. She felt achy. Her nose throbbed. She wanted soup and crackers and some hot tea, but there was no one to make it for her.
She shook her head. “You are so fucking sad,” she told herself, hoping the verbal humiliation would snap her out of it.
It did not.
Charlie dragged herself out of the car before she was tempted to close the garage door and turn on the engine.
She ignored the empty space where Ben’s truck was not parked. The storage shelves that held neatly labeled boxes and sporting goods that he hadn’t yet claimed. She found a bag of cat food in the metal cabinet Ben had put together last summer.
They used to secretly laugh at other people whose garages were so filled with clutter that they couldn’t park inside. Tidiness was one of the things they were both really good at. They cleaned the house together every Saturday. Charlie washed clothes. Ben folded. Charlie did the kitchen. Ben vacuumed the rugs and dusted the furniture. They read the same books at the same time so that they could talk about them. They binge-watched Netflix and Hulu together. They snuggled on the couch and talked about their work days and their families and what they were going to do over the weekend.
She blushed when she recalled how smug they had been about their fantastic marriage. There were so many things that they agreed on: which way the toilet-paper roll should go, the number of cats a person should keep, the appropriate number of years to mourn if a spouse was lost at sea. When their friends would argue loudly in public, or make cutting remarks about each other at a dinner party, Charlie would always look at Ben, or Ben would look at Charlie, and they would smile because their relationship was so fucking solid.
She had belittled him.
That’s what Ben’s leaving was about.
Charlie’s shift from supportive spouse to raging harpy had not been gradual. Seemingly overnight, she was no longer capable of compromise. She was no longer able to let things go. Everything Ben did irritated her. This wasn’t like the socks. There was no chance of fucking their way past it. Charlie was aware of her nagging behavior, but she couldn’t stop it. Didn’t want to stop it. She felt the most angry when she mordantly feigned interest in things that had genuinely interested her before: the politics at Ben’s job, or the personality quirks of their various pets, or that weird bump one of Ben’s coworkers had on the back of his neck.
She had gone to a doctor. There was nothing wrong with her hormones. Her thyroid was fine. The problem was not medical. Charlie was just a bitchy, domineering wife.
Ben’s sisters had been ecstatic. She could remember them blinking their eyes that first time Charlie had laid into Ben at Thanksgiving like they had just come out of the wilderness.
Now she’s one of us.
Invariably, one or two of them had started calling her almost every day, and Charlie had vented like a steam engine. The slouching. The loping walk. The chewing on the tip of his tongue. The humming when he brushed his teeth. Why did he bring home skim milk instead of two percent? Why did he leave the trash bag by the back door instead of taking it to the garbage can when he knew that the raccoons would get it?
Then she had started telling the sisters about personal things. That time Ben had tried to contact his long-absent father. Why he had stopped talking to Peggy for six months when she went to college. What had happened with that girl they all liked—but not better than Charlie—whom he insisted he’d broken up with but they all suspected had broken his heart.
She argued with him in public. She cut him down at dinner parties.
This wasn’t just belittling. After almost two full years of constant abrasion, Charlie had worn Ben down to a nub. The resentment in his eyes, the persistent requests that she let something—anything—go, fell on deaf ears. The two times that he had managed to drag her into couples therapy, Charlie had been so nasty to him that the therapist had suggested that she see them separately.
It was a wonder Ben had the strength left to pack his bags and walk out the door.
“Fu-u-uck,” Charlie drew out the word. She had spilled cat food all over the back deck. Ben had been right about the appropriate number of cats. Charlie had started feeding strays, and the strays had multiplied and now there were squirrels and chipmunks and, to her horror, a possum the size of a small dog that shuffled onto the back deck every night, staring at her through the glass door, his beady red eyes flashing in the light from the television.
Charlie used her hands to scrape up the food. She cursed Ben for having the dog this week because Barkzilla, their greedy Jack Russell terrier, would’ve hoovered all of the kibble in seconds. Since she had skipped her chores this morning, there was more to do tonight. She added food and water to the appropriate bowls, used the pitchfork to shift the hay they’d laid down for bedding. She topped off the bird feeders. She washed down the deck. She used the outside broom to knock down some spiderwebs. She did everything she could to keep from going inside until, finally, it was too dark and too cold not to.
Ben’s empty key hook greeted her by the door. The empty bar stool. The empty couch. The emptiness followed her upstairs into the bedroom, into the shower. Ben’s hair was not stuck to the soap, his toothbrush wasn’t by the sink, his razor wasn’t on her side of the counter.
Charlie’s toxic level of patheticness was so pronounced that by the time she slouched downstairs in her pajamas, even pouring a bowl of cereal felt like too much work.
She fell onto the couch. She didn’t want to read. She didn’t want to stare at the ceiling and moan. She did what she had avoided doing all day and turned on the television.
The channel was already tuned to CNN. A pretty blonde teenager was standing in front of the Pikeville Middle School. She held a candle in her hand because there was some kind of vigil going on. The banner underneath her face identified her as CANDICE BELMONT, NORTH GEORGIA.
The girl said, “Mrs. Alexander talked about her daughter all the time in class. Called her ‘the Baby’ because she was so sweet, like a little baby. You could really tell that she loved her.”
Charlie muted the sound. The media were milking the tragedy the same way she was milking her self-pity over Ben. As someone who had been on the inside of violence, who had lived with its aftermath, she felt sick whenever she saw these kinds of stories covered. The sharp graphics. The haunting music. The montages of grieving people. The stations were desperate to keep viewers watching, and the easiest way they’d found to achieve that goal was to report everything they heard and sort out the truth later.
The camera cut away from the blonde at the vigil to the handsome field reporter, his shirtsleeves rolled up three-quarters, the candlelight glowing softly in the background. Charlie studied his pantomimed grief as he tossed the story back to the studio. The news anchor behind the desk had the same solemn expression on his face as he continued reporting what was not the news. Charlie read the chyron crawling at the bottom of the screen, a quote from the Alexander family: UNCLE: KELLY RENE WILSON “A COLD-BLOODED MURDERER.”
Kelly had been promoted to three names now. Charlie supposed some producer in New York had decided that it sounded more menacing.
The scroll stopped. The anchor disappeared. Both were replaced by an illustration of a locker-lined hallway. The drawing was three-dimensional, but had an odd flatness, Charlie supposed to make it very clear that this was not real. A lawyer had apparently not been satisfied by the crudeness. The word “RE-ENACTMENT” flashed red in the upper-right corner of the screen.
The drawing became animated. A figure entered the hallway, moving stiffly, drawn in a blocky style. The figure’s long hair and dark clothing all pointed to Kelly Wilson.
Charlie unmuted the sound.
“. . . approximately six fifty-five, the alleged shooter, Kelly Rene Wilson, walked into the hallway.” The animated Kelly stopped in the middle of the screen. There was a gun in her hand, more like a nine-millimeter than a revolver. “Wilson was said to be standing in this location when Judith Pinkman opened the door to her classroom.”
Charlie moved to the edge of the couch.
A squared-off Mrs. Pinkman opened her door. For some reason, the animator had made her white-ish blonde hair silvery gray, styled it in a bun instead of down around her shoulders.
“Wilson saw Pinkman and fired two shots,” the anchor continued. The gun in Kelly’s hands showed two puffs of smoke. The bullets were indicated by straight lines, more like arrows. “Both shots missed, but principal Douglas Pinkman, Judith Pinkman’s husband of twenty-five years, ran from his office when he heard the gunfire.”
The virtual Mr. Pinkman floated out of his office, his legs not moving at the same pace as his forward movement.
“Wilson saw her former principal and fired two more shots.” The gun puffed again. The arrow-bullets traced to Mr. Pinkman’s chest. “Douglas Pinkman was instantly killed.”
Charlie watched the virtual Mr. Pinkman fall flat to his side, his hand to his chest. Two squid-like red blotches appeared in the middle of his blue, short-sleeved shirt.
Which was wrong, too, because Mr. Pinkman’s shirt had been long-sleeved and white. And he hadn’t worn his hair in a buzz cut.
It was as if the animator had decided that a middle-school principal looked like a 1970s G-man and an English teacher was an old biddy with a bun on her head.
“Next,” the anchor narrated, “Lucy Alexander entered the hallway.”
Charlie squeezed her eyes shut.
The anchor said, “Lucy had forgotten to get lunch money from her mother, a biology teacher who was at a department meeting across the street when the shootings occurred.” There was a moment of silence, and Charlie saw an image in her head of Lucy Alexander—not the squared-off drawing that the animators would have gotten wrong, but the actual little girl—swinging her arms, smiling as she rounded the corner. “Two more shots were fired at the eight-year-old girl. The first one went into her upper torso. The second bullet went through the office window behind her.”
There were three loud knocks.
Charlie opened her eyes. She muted the TV.
Another two knocks.
Panic shot through her heart. She always felt a flicker of fear every time an unknown person knocked at her door.
Charlie stood from the couch. She thought about the gun in her bedside table as she looked out the front window.
She smiled as she went to open the door.
All day, Charlie had been so busy wondering how things could get worse that she had never thought how things could get better.
“Hey.” Ben stood on the porch, hands in his pockets. “Sorry I’m bothering you so late. I need to get a file out of the closet.”
“Oh,” was all that she could say, because the rush of wanting him was too overwhelming to say more. Not that he’d made an effort. Ben had changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt she didn’t recognize, which made her wonder if Kaylee Collins, the twenty-six-year-old at his office, had bought him the shirt. What else had the girl changed? Charlie wanted to smell his hair to see if he was using their shampoo. To check his underwear to see if it was the same brand.
Ben asked, “May I come in?”
“It’s still your house.” Charlie realized she would have to actually move so he could come in. She stepped back, holding open the door.
Ben stopped in front of the television. The animation had come to an end. The anchor was back on screen. Ben said, “Someone’s leaking details, but they don’t have the right details.”
“I know,” Charlie said. They weren’t just wrong about what had happened when, they were wrong about how the people looked, where they stood, how they moved. Whoever was leaking information to the media was likely not on the inside, but they were close enough to get a payday for whatever specious information they could provide.
“So.” Ben scratched his arm. He looked down at the floor. He looked back up at Charlie. “Terri called me.”
She nodded, because of course his sister had called him. What was the point of saying something awful to Charlie if Ben didn’t know about it?
Ben said, “I’m sorry she brought it up.”
She lifted up one shoulder. “Doesn’t matter.”
Nine months ago, he would’ve said it mattered, but now, he simply shrugged back. “So, I’ll go upstairs, if that’s okay?”
Charlie gestured toward the stairs like a maître d’.
She listened to his light footsteps as he sprinted up the stairs, wondering how she had forgotten what that sounded like. His hand squeaked on the banister as he rounded the landing. The polish was worn from the wood where he did this every time.
How was that detail not in her wallowing book?
Charlie stood where he had left her. She stared blankly at the flat-screen TV. It was massive, bigger than anything in the Holler. Ben had worked all day to get the components tied in. Around midnight, he’d asked, “Wanna watch the news?”
When Charlie had agreed, he’d pressed some keys on his computer and suddenly, Charlie was watching a video of a bunch of gnus.
Upstairs, she heard a door open. Charlie crossed her arms low over her stomach. What was the proper thing for a wife to do when her estranged husband, who hadn’t been inside their house in nine months, was inside the house?
She found Ben in the guest room, which was more of a catchall for extra books, some filing cabinets, and the custom shelves that used to hold Ben’s Star Trek collectibles.
It was when Charlie had realized the Star Trek stuff was gone that she had known Ben was serious.
“Hey,” she said.
He was inside the walk-in closet, rummaging through file boxes.
“Need help?” she asked.
“No.”
Charlie bumped her leg against the bed. Should she leave? She should leave.
“My plea bargain from today,” Ben said, so she guessed he was looking for old notes relating to the case. “Guy lied about his accomplice.”
“I’m sorry.” Charlie sat on the bed. “You should take Barkzilla’s squeaky. I found it by the—”
“I got him a new one.”
Charlie looked down at the floor. She tried not to think about Ben at the pet store looking for a toy for their dog without her. Or with someone else. “I wonder if the person who leaked the bad timeline to the news did it for the attention or did it to throw off the press.”
“Dickerson County is looking at the security footage from the hospital.”
Charlie couldn’t see the connection. “Great.”
“Whoever slashed your dad’s tires was probably some idiot acting out, but they’re taking it seriously.”
“Asshole,” Charlie muttered, because Rusty had lied about why he needed a lift.
Ben poked his head out of the closet. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Someone spray-painted his house, too. They wrote ‘goat fucker.’ Or just ‘fucker’ because the ‘goat’ was already there.”
“I saw the ‘goat’ last weekend.”
“What were you doing at the HP last weekend?”
He stepped out of the closet with a file box in his hands. “I see your dad the last Sunday of every month. You know that.”
Rusty and Ben had always had a weird kind of friendship. They treated each other like contemporaries despite the age difference. “I didn’t realize you were still doing that.”
“Yeah, well.” He put the box on the bed. The mattress sagged from the weight. “I’ll update Keith about the ‘fucker.’ ” He meant Keith Coin, the chief of police and Ken Coin’s older brother. “He said he’d send someone around about the goat, but with what happened today . . .” His voice trailed off as he took the top off the box.
“Ben.” Charlie watched him search the files. “Do you feel like I never let you answer questions?”
“Aren’t you letting me answer one right now?”
She smiled. “I mean, because Dad did this convoluted thing with the car window, and—that part doesn’t matter. He basically said that you have to choose between being right and being happy. He said that was something Gamma told him she needed to decide before she died, whether she wanted to be right or happy.”
He looked up from the box. “I don’t understand why you can’t be both.”
“I guess if you’re right too many times, like you know too much, or you’re too smart and you let people know it . . .” She wasn’t sure how to explain. “Gamma knew the answer to a lot of things. To everything, actually.”
“So your dad said she would’ve been happier if she pretended she wasn’t as smart as she was?”
Charlie instinctively defended her father. “Gamma said it, not Dad.”
“That sounds like a problem with their marriage, not ours.” He rested his hand on the box. “Charlie, if you’re worried that you’re like your mom, that’s not a bad thing. From everything I’ve heard, she was an amazing person.”
He was so fucking decent it took her breath away. “You’re an amazing person.”
He gave a sharp, sarcastic laugh. She had tried this before, overcorrecting her bitchiness, treating him like a toddler in need of a participation trophy.
She said, “I’m serious, Ben. You’re smart and funny and—” His surprised look cut off her praise. “What?”
“Are you crying?”
“Shit.” Charlie tried not to cry in front of anybody but Lenore. “I’m sorry. I’ve been doing this since I woke up.”
He was utterly still. “You mean since the school?”
Charlie smoothed together her lips. “Before that.”
“Do you even know who that guy is?”
She was sick of the question. “The whole point of being with a stranger is that they’re a stranger, and in a perfect world, you never have to see them again.”
“Good to know.” He pulled out a file and paged through it.
Charlie pushed herself up on her knees so she could look him in the eye. “It’s never happened before. Not once. Not even close.”
Ben shook his head.
“I never looked at another man when I was with you.”
He put the file back into the box and pulled out another one. “Did you come with him?”
“No,” she said, but that was a lie. “Yes, but I had to use my hand, and it was nothing. Like a sneeze.”
“A sneeze,” he repeated. “Great, now every time I sneeze, I’m going to think of you coming with fucking Batman.”
“I was lonely.”
“Lonely,” he echoed.
“What do you want me to say, Ben? I want you to make me come. I want to be with you.” She tried to touch his hand but he moved it away. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make this better. Just tell me.”
“You know what I want.”
The marriage counselor again. “We don’t need some frumpy licensed social worker with a bad haircut to tell me I’m the problem. I know I’m the problem. I’m trying to fix it.”
“You asked what I wanted and I told you.”
“What’s the point of picking apart something that happened thirty years ago?” Charlie sighed, exasperated. “I know I’m angry about it, Ben. I’m fucking furious. I don’t try to hide it. I don’t pretend it didn’t happen. If I was obsessed with it and wouldn’t shut up about it, she would say something was wrong with that, too.”
“You know that’s not what she said.”
“God, Ben, what’s the point of this? Do you still even want me?”
“Of course I do.” He looked anxious, like he wanted to take back his answer. “Why can’t you understand that part doesn’t matter?”
“It matters.” She moved closer to him. “I miss you, babe. Don’t you miss me?”
He shook his head again. “Charlie, that’s not going to fix things.”
“It might fix them a little.” She stroked back his hair. “I want you, Ben.”
He kept shaking his head, but he didn’t push her away.
“I’ll do whatever you want.” Charlie moved closer. Throwing herself at him was the only thing she hadn’t tried. “Tell me and I’ll do it.”
“Stop,” he said, but didn’t stop her.
“I want you.” She kissed his neck. The way his skin reacted to her mouth made Charlie want to cry. She kissed along his jaw, up to his ear. “I want to feel you inside of me.”
Ben let out a low groan as her hands moved down his chest.
She kept kissing him, licking him. “Let me go down on you.”
He inhaled a shaky breath.
“You can have whatever you want, babe. My mouth. My hands. My ass.”
“Chuck.” His voice was hoarse. “We can’t—”
She kissed him on the lips, and kept kissing him until he finally kissed her back. His mouth was like silk. The feel of his tongue sent a rush between her legs. Every nerve in her body was on fire. His hand went to her breast. He was getting hard, but Charlie reached down to make him harder.
Ben covered his hand over hers. At first, she thought he was helping her but then she realized he was stopping her.
“Oh God.” She backed away quickly, jumping off the bed, standing with her back to the wall, embarrassed, humiliated, frantic. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Charlie—”
“No!” She held up her hands like a traffic cop. “If you say something now, then it’ll be the end, and it can’t be the end of things, Ben. That can’t happen. It’s too much after—”
Charlie cut herself off, but her own words rang in her ears like a warning.
Ben stared at her. His throat moved as he swallowed. “After what?”
Charlie listened to the blood pounding in her ears. She felt jittery, like her toes were dangling over the edge of a bottomless chasm.
Ben’s phone played the opening bars of the COPS theme, the ringtone he’d set for the Pikeville Police Department.
Bad boys, bad boys, whatchu gonna do . . .
She said, “It’s work. You have to answer.”
“No, I don’t.” He tilted up his chin, waiting.
Bad boys, bad boys . . .
He said, “Tell me what happened today.”
“You were there when I gave my statement.”
“You ran toward the gunshots. Why? What were you thinking?”
“I didn’t run toward gunshots. I ran toward Mrs. Pinkman screaming for help.”
“You mean Heller?”
“That’s exactly the kind of Oprah bullshit a therapist would say.” She had to yell to be heard over his stupid phone. “That I put myself in danger because thirty years ago, when someone really needed me, I ran away.”
“And look what happened!” Ben’s sudden flash of anger reverberated through the quiet.
The ringtone had stopped.
The silence rumbled like thunder.
She said, “What the fuck does that mean?”
Ben’s jaw was clenched so tight she could practically hear his teeth grinding. He grabbed the box off the bed and threw it back into the closet.
“What are you talking about, Ben?” Charlie felt shaky, like something irreparable had torn apart. “Do you mean, look at what happened then, or look at what happened today?”
He shoved boxes around on the shelves.
She stood in the closet doorway, trapping him. “You don’t get to throw shit around and then turn your back on me.”
He said nothing.
Charlie heard the distant ring of her cell phone buried deep in her purse downstairs. She counted out five long rings, holding her breath through the pauses until voicemail picked up.
Ben kept moving boxes around.
The silence began to fester. She was going to start crying again because crying was all that she could do today.
“Ben?” She finally broke, begging, “Please tell me what you meant.”
He took the lid off one of the boxes. He traced his finger along the labeled files. She thought he was going to keep ignoring her, but he said, “Today is the third.”
Charlie looked away. That’s why Ben had called her this morning. It’s why Rusty had hummed “Happy Birthday” while she had stood by like an imbecile asking him again and again to tell her what he knew.
She said, “I saw last week on the calendar, what day it was, but—”
Ben’s phone started ringing again. Not the police this time, but a normal ring. Once. Twice. He answered on the third ring. She heard his curt responses, “When?” then, “How bad is it?” then, his tone deeper, “Did the doctor say . . .”
Charlie leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb. She had heard variations on this call multiple times before. Someone in the Holler had punched his wife too hard or grabbed a knife to end a fight and someone else had grabbed a gun, and now the assistant district attorney had to go to the station and offer a deal to the first person who talked.
“Will he make it?” Ben asked. He started nodding again. “Yeah. I’ll handle it. Thanks.”
Charlie watched him end the call, slip his phone back into his pocket. She said, “Let me guess, a Culpepper got arrested?”
He didn’t turn around. He gripped the edges of the shelf like he needed something to hold on to.
“Ben?” she asked. “What is it?”
Ben sniffed. He wasn’t a complete stoic, but Charlie could count on one hand the times she had seen her husband cry. Except he wasn’t just crying now. His shoulders were shaking. He seemed racked by grief.
Charlie started crying, too. His sisters? His mother? His selfish father who had run off when Ben was six?
She put her hand on his shoulder. He was still shaking. “Babe, what is it? You’re scaring me.”
He wiped his nose. He turned around. Tears streamed from his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“What?” Her voice was almost a whisper. “Ben, what?”
“It’s your dad.” He swallowed back his grief. “They had to life-flight him to the hospital. He—”
Charlie’s knees began to buckle. Ben caught her before she hit the floor.
Will he make it?
“Your neighbor found him,” Ben said. “He was at the end of the driveway.”
Charlie pictured Rusty walking to the mailbox—humming, marching, snapping his fingers—then clutching his heart and falling to the ground.
She said, “He’s so . . .” Stupid. Willful. Self-destructive. “We were in my office today, and I told him he was going to have another heart attack, and now—”
“It wasn’t his heart.”
“But—”
“Your dad didn’t have a heart attack. Somebody stabbed him.”
Charlie’s mouth moved soundlessly before she could get out the word, “stabbed?” She had to repeat it, because it didn’t make sense. “Stabbed?”
“Chuck, you need to call your sister.”
WHAT HAPPENED TO CHARLOTTE
Charlotte turned to her sister and shouted, “Last word!”
She ran toward the HP before Samantha could think of a good comeback. Red clay swirled up from Charlotte’s feet and gummed onto her sweaty legs. She jumped up the porch steps, kicked off her shoes, peeled off her socks, and pushed open the door in time to hear Gamma say, “Fuck!”
Her mother was bent at the waist, one hand braced on the counter, the other at her mouth like she had been coughing.
Charlotte said, “Mom, that’s a bad word.”
Gamma stood up. She used a tissue from her pocket to wipe her mouth. “I said ‘fudge,’ Charlie. What did you think I said?”
“You said—” Charlotte saw the trap. “If I say the bad word, then you’ll know that I know the bad word.”
“Don’t show your work, sweetheart.” She tucked the tissue back into her pocket and headed toward the hall. “Have the table set before I get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“Undetermined.”
“How will I know how fast to set the table if I don’t know when you’re going to get back?” She listened for an answer.
Gamma’s sharp coughs echoed back.
Charlotte grabbed the paper plates. She dumped the box of plastic forks onto the table. Gamma had bought real silverware and plates at the thrift store, but no one could find the box. Charlotte knew it was in Rusty’s study. They were supposed to unpack the room tomorrow, which meant that somebody would have to wash dishes at the sink tomorrow night.
Samantha slammed the kitchen door closed so hard that the wall shook.
Charlotte didn’t take the bait. She tossed out the paper plates onto the table.
Suddenly, without warning, Samantha threw a fork at her face.
Charlotte was opening her mouth to scream for Gamma when she felt the tines of the fork stab her bottom lip. She instinctively closed her mouth.
The fork stayed, a quivering arrow in a bull’s-eye.
Charlotte said, “Holy crap, that was amazing!”
Samantha shrugged, like the hard part wasn’t catching a somersaulting fork between your lips.
Charlotte said, “I’ll wash the dishes if you can do that twice in a row.”
“You toss it into my mouth once, and I’ll wash dishes for a week.”
“Deal.” Charlotte took aim, weighing her options: bean Samantha in the face on purpose or really try to get it into her mouth?
Gamma was back. “Charlie, don’t throw utensils at your sister. Sam, help me look for that frying pan I bought the other day.”
The table was already set, but Charlotte didn’t want to be enlisted into the search. The boxes smelled like mothballs and cheesy dog feet. She straightened the plates. She re-lined up the forks. They were going to have spaghetti tonight, so they would need knives because Gamma always undercooked the noodles and they clumped together like strands of tendons.
“Sam.” Gamma had started coughing again. She pointed toward the air conditioner. “Turn that thing on so we can get some air moving in here.”
Samantha looked at the giant box in the window like she’d never seen an air conditioner before. She had been moping since the red-brick house had burned down. Charlotte had been moping, too, but on the inside, because Rusty already felt bad enough without them rubbing it in.
Charlotte picked up an extra paper plate. She tried to fold it into an airplane so that she could give it to her father.
Samantha asked, “What time are we supposed to pick up Daddy from work?”
Gamma said, “He’ll get a ride from somebody at the courthouse.”
Charlotte hoped Lenore would give him a ride. Rusty’s secretary had loaned her a book called Lace, which was about four friends, and one of them was raped by a sheikh, only you don’t know which one, and she got pregnant and no one told the daughter what happened until she was an adult and she got really rich and she asked them, “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”
“Well, shit.” Gamma stood up. “I hope you girls don’t mind being vegetarian tonight.”
“Mom.” Charlotte dropped down into the chair. She put her head in her hands, feigning sickness in hope of soliciting a can of soup for dinner instead. “My stomach hurts.”
Gamma asked, “Don’t you have homework?”
“Chemistry.” Charlotte looked up. “Can you help me?”
“It’s not rocket science.”
Charlotte asked, “Do you mean, it’s not rocket science, so I should be able to figure it out on my own, or do you mean, it’s not rocket science, and that is the only science that you know how to perform, and so therefore you cannot help me?”
“There were too many conjunctions in that sentence,” Gamma said. “Go wash your hands.”
“I believe I had a valid question.”
“Now.”
Charlotte ran into the hall. It was so long that you could stand in the kitchen and treat it as a bowling alley. At least that was what Gamma said, and that was exactly what Charlotte was going to do as soon as she could get a ball.
She opened one of the five doors and found the stairs to the yucky basement. She tried another and found the hallway to the bachelor farmer’s scary bedroom.
“Fudge!” Charlotte bellowed, but only for Gamma’s sake.
She opened another door. The chifforobe. Charlotte grinned, because she was playing a joke on Samantha, or maybe not a joke—whatever it was called when you wanted to scare the crap out of somebody.
She was trying to convince her sister that the HP was haunted.
Yesterday, Charlotte had found a weird black-and-white photograph in one of the thrift store boxes. At first, she had started to color it, but she only got as far as yellowing the teeth when she had the idea to stick the picture in the bottom drawer of the chifforobe for Samantha to find.
Her sister had been appropriately freaked out, probably because the night before, Charlotte creaked the boards outside of her room so that Samantha would follow her down to the scary bedroom where the bachelor farmer had died, where she planted the idea that the old geezer had left the house in body, but not spirit. As in, he was a ghost.
Charlotte tried another door. “Found it!”
She yanked the cord for the light. She pulled down her shorts, but froze when she noticed a sprinkling of blood on the toilet seat.
This wasn’t the blood like Samantha sometimes left when she was having her period. This was a sprinkle, the kind that came out of your mouth when you coughed too hard.
Gamma was coughing too hard a lot.
Charlotte pulled up her shorts. She turned on the faucet and cupped her hands under the water. She splashed the toilet seat to wash away the red spots. Then she saw that there were more red dots on the floor. She threw some water on those, then on the mirror because there was some there, too. Even the moldy edge of the corner shower had been sprayed.
The phone rang in the kitchen. Charlotte waited through two more rings, wondering if they were going to answer it. Gamma wouldn’t let them pick up sometimes because it might be Rusty. She was still upset about the fire, but she wasn’t moping like Samantha. She was screaming, mostly. And she cried, too, but only Charlotte knew about that.
The handle of the ball-peen hammer was soaked by the time Charlotte banged off the faucet. Her butt got wet when she sat down on the toilet seat. Charlotte could see that she had made a mess. Some of the water had turned pink. She pulled up her shorts. She dotted at the water with a wad of toilet paper. The paper began to disintegrate, so she used more. And then she used even more. Paper was supposed to absorb stuff, but all she was doing was creating a giant wad of wet paper that would clog the toilet if she tried to flush it.
Charlotte stood up. She looked around the bathroom. The pink was gone, but there was still a lot of water. The room was kind of damp anyway. The shower mold was something out of a movie with a lagoon where a swamp monster comes out.
In the hall, a box jangled. Sam let out a strangled noise, like she’d stubbed her toe.
“Fudge,” Charlotte said, for real this time. The wad of toilet paper was pink with blood. She shoved it into the front pocket of her shorts. There wasn’t time to pee. She shut the bathroom door behind her. Samantha was ten feet away. Charlotte punched her sister in her arm to distract her from the wet lump in her shorts. Then she galloped the rest of the way up the hall because horses were faster.
“Dinner!” Gamma called. She was standing by the stove when Charlotte cantered into the kitchen.
Charlotte said, “I’m right here.”
“Your sister isn’t.”
Charlotte saw the thick noodles Gamma dug out of the pot with a pair of tongs. “Mom, please don’t make us eat that.”
“I’m not going to let you starve.”
“I could eat a bowl of ice cream.”
“Do you want explosive diarrhea?”
Charlotte got sick from anything that had milk in it, but she was pretty sure the ropey spaghetti would have the same effect. “Mama, what would happen if I ate two bowls of ice cream? Really big ones.”
“Your intestines would burst and you would die.”
Charlotte studied her mother’s back. Sometimes, she couldn’t tell when Gamma was being serious.
The phone gave the trill of a ring. Charlotte grabbed the receiver before Gamma could tell her not to.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey there, Charlie Bear.” Rusty chuckled, like he hadn’t said the same words to her a million times before. “I was hoping to speak with my dear Gamma?”
Gamma could hear Rusty’s question from across the room because he always talked too loud on the phone. She shook her head at Charlotte, and mouthed the word “no” to make it clear.
“She’s brushing her teeth,” Charlotte said. “Or maybe she’s flossing by now? I heard squeaking, but I thought it was a mouse, only—”
Gamma grabbed the phone. She told Rusty, “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops—at all.’ ”
She put the phone back on the hook. She asked Charlotte, “Did you know that the chicken is the most common bird on earth?”
Charlotte shook her head. She did not know that.
“I’ll help you with your chemistry after supper, which will not be ice cream.”
“The chemistry won’t be ice cream, or the supper?”
“Clever girl.” She held Charlotte’s face in one hand. “You’re going to find a man one day who is going to fall head over heels in love with that brain of yours.”
Charlotte pictured a man tripping and flipping through the air like the plastic fork. “What if he breaks his neck when he falls?”
Gamma kissed the top of Charlotte’s head before leaving the kitchen.
Charlotte sunk into the chair. She leaned back and saw that her mother was heading toward the pantry. Or the basement stairs. Or the chifforobe. Or the bedroom. Or the bathroom.
She dropped the chair back to the floor. She leaned her elbows on the table.
Charlotte wasn’t sure she wanted a man to fall in love with her. There was a boy at school who was in love with Samantha. Peter Alexander. He played jazz guitar and wanted to move to Atlanta and join a band when he got out of high school. At least, that’s what he wrote about in the long, boring letters that Samantha used to keep hidden between her mattress and boxspring.
Peter was the thing that Samantha moped about losing the most. Charlotte had seen Samantha let him touch her under her shirt, which meant that she really liked him, because you weren’t supposed to do that otherwise. He had a cool leather jacket that he’d let her borrow and it had been burned up in the fire. He’d gotten into a lot of trouble with his parents for losing it. He wasn’t talking to Samantha anymore.
Charlotte had a lot of friends who weren’t talking to her, too, but Rusty said that was because their parents were imbeciles who didn’t think it was a bad thing for a black man to be executed on death row even though he was innocent.
She whistled between her teeth as she folded down the sides of the paper plate and tried again to turn it into an airplane. Rusty had also told Charlotte that the fire had switched things around for a little while. Gamma and Samantha, who were usually the logical ones, had changed places with Rusty and Charlotte, who were usually the emotional ones. It was like Freaky Friday, except they couldn’t get a basset hound because Samantha was allergic.
Charlotte licked the creases of the plane, hoping her spit would help it retain the shape. She hadn’t told Rusty that her logical switch hadn’t really flipped. She was pretending like everything was okay when it wasn’t okay. Charlotte had lost stuff, too, like all of her Nancy Drews, her goldfish—which was an actual living thing—her Brownie badges, and six dead insects she had been saving for next year because she knew that in honors biology, the first assignment was that you had to pin insects to a board and identify them for the teacher.
Several times, Charlotte had tried to talk about her sadness with Samantha, but all Samantha would do was start listing all the things she had lost, like it was a contest. So then Charlotte had tried to talk about other things, like school and TV shows and the book she had checked out from the library, but Samantha would stare at her until Charlotte got the message and went away.
The only time her sister treated her like a normal human being was at night when they washed their shirts and shorts and sports bras out at the bathroom sink. Their track clothes and sneakers were the only things they had left after the fire, but Samantha didn’t talk about them. She would walk Charlotte slowly, patiently, through the blind pass, like it was the only thing left in their lives that mattered. Bend your front leg, hold your hand straight behind you, lean forward, into the track, but don’t push off until I’m at my mark. Once you feel the baton snap into your hand—go.
“Don’t look back,” Samantha would say. “You have to trust me to be there. Just keep your head down and run.”
Samantha had always loved running. She wanted to get a track scholarship so she could run all the way to college and never come back to Pikeville, which meant she could be gone in a year because Gamma was going to let her skip another grade if she scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT.
Charlotte gave up on the airplane, defeated. The plate wouldn’t hold its new shape. It wanted to stay a plate. She should get some notebook paper and do it the right way. Charlotte wanted to throw the airplane off the old weather tower. Rusty had promised to take her there because he was working on a surprise for Gamma.
The bachelor farmer had been a Citizen Scientist with the National Weather Service Cooperative Observers Program. Rusty had found boxes full of Weather Journal Data forms in the barn where the farmer had recorded the temperature, barometric pressure, precipitation, wind and humidity almost every day since 1948.
There were thousands of volunteers around the country just like him who sent their readings to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to help scientists predict when storms and tornadoes were going to form. Basically, you had to do a lot of math, and if there was one thing that could make Gamma happy, it was doing math every day.
The weather tower was going to be the biggest surprise of her life.
Charlotte heard a car in the driveway. She grabbed the failed airplane and tore it to pieces so that Rusty wouldn’t guess what she was up to, because he’d already told her she couldn’t climb to the top of the metal tower and throw a paper airplane off it. At the trash can, she dug into her shorts and pulled out the gross clumps of wet toilet paper. She wiped her hands on her shirt. She ran to the door to see her father.
“Mama!” Charlotte yelled, but she didn’t tell her that Rusty was here.
She pulled open the door, smiling, and then she stopped smiling because two men were on the front porch.
One of them stepped back onto the stairs. Charlotte saw his eyes go wide, like he wasn’t expecting the door to open, and then she saw that he was wearing a black ski mask, and a black shirt and leather gloves, and then she saw the barrel of a shotgun stuck in her face.
“Mom!” Charlotte screamed.
“Shut up,” Black Shirt hissed, pushing Charlotte back into the kitchen. His heavy boots tracked in red clay from the yard. Charlotte should’ve been terrified, she should’ve been screaming, but all she could think about was how mad Gamma was going to be about having to clean the floor again.
“Charlie Quinn,” Gamma called from the bathroom. “Do not shriek at me like a street urchin.”
Black Shirt said, “Where’s your daddy?”
“P-please,” Charlotte stuttered. She was talking to the second guy. He was in a mask and gloves, too, but he had on a white Bon Jovi T-shirt, which made him feel less threatening, even though he had a gun. “Please don’t hurt us.”
Bon Jovi was looking past Charlotte, down the hallway. She could hear her mother’s slow footsteps. Gamma must have seen him when she came out of the bathroom. She knew something was wrong, that Charlotte wasn’t in the kitchen on her own.
“Hey.” Black Shirt snapped his fingers for Charlotte’s attention. “Where’s your fucking daddy?”
Charlotte shook her head. Why would they want Rusty?
Black Shirt asked, “Who else is in the house?”
She said, “My sister’s in—”
Suddenly, Gamma’s hand was wrapped around Charlotte’s mouth. Her fingers dug into her shoulder. She told the men, “There’s fifty dollars in my purse and another two hundred in a Mason jar in the barn.”
“Fuck that,” Black Shirt said. “Call your other daughter in here. Don’t try any shit.”
“No.” Bon Jovi seemed nervous. “They were supposed to be at track practice, man. Let’s just—”
Charlotte was violently jerked out of Gamma’s arms. Black Shirt’s hand gripped her neck, his fingers like clamps. The back of her head was pinned to his chest. She felt his fingers cinching around her esophagus, pulling it like a handle.
He told Gamma, “Call her, bitch.”
“Sa—” Gamma was so scared that she could hardly raise her voice. “Samantha?”
They listened. They waited.
Bon Jovi said, “Forget it, man. He’s not here. Let’s do like she said and take the money and go.”
“Grow some balls, you fucking pussy.” Black Shirt tightened his grip on Charlotte’s throat. The pain burned like fire. She couldn’t breathe. She went up on her toes. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist, but he was too strong.
He told Gamma, “Get her in here before I—”
“Samantha!” Gamma’s tone was sharp. “Please ensure the faucet valve is closed and quickly make your way into the kitchen.”
Bon Jovi stepped away from the mouth of the hallway so that Samantha couldn’t see him. He told Black Shirt, “Come on, man. She did what you said. Let her go.”
Slowly, Black Shirt loosened his grip on Charlotte’s neck. She gagged on the rush of air. She tried to go to her mother, but his hand flattened to her chest. He pinned Charlotte tight against his body.
Gamma said, “You don’t have to do this.” She was talking to Bon Jovi. “We don’t know who you are. We don’t know your names. You can leave now and we won’t tell anyone.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Black Shirt shifted back and forth. “I’m not stupid enough to believe a God damn thing any of you say.”
“You can’t—” Gamma coughed into her hand. “Please. Let my daughters go and I’ll—” She coughed again. “You can take me to the bank. Keep the car. I’ll give you every penny we have.”
“I’m’a take whatever I want.” Black Shirt’s hand slid down Charlotte’s chest. He pressed hard against her sternum, rubbed into her back. His private parts poked her. She felt a sudden sickness. Her bladder wanted to release. Her face turned hot.
“Stop it.” Bon Jovi grabbed Charlotte’s arm. He pulled, then pulled harder, and finally, he managed to wrench her away.
“Baby.” Gamma enveloped Charlotte, throwing her arms tight around her shoulders, kissing her head, then her ear. She whispered, “Run if you—”
Without warning, Gamma let go, almost pushing Charlotte away. She took two steps back until she was against the kitchen counter. Her hands were in the air.
Black Shirt had the shotgun pointed at her chest.
“Please.” Gamma’s lips trembled. “Please. I beg you,” her voice was low, like it was just her and Black Shirt in the room. “You can do anything you want to me, but don’t hurt my baby.”
“Don’t worry.” Black Shirt whispered, too. “It only hurts the first couple’a dozen times.”
Charlotte started to shake.
She knew what he meant. The dark look in his eyes. His tongue darting out between his wet lips. The way his thing had pressed into her back.
Her knees stopped working.
She stumbled back into the chair. Sweat covered her face. More sweat poured down her back. She looked at her hands, but they weren’t like her normal hands. The bones were vibrating inside as if a tuning fork had been struck against her chest.
Gamma said, “It’s okay.”
Black Shirt said, “No it ain’t.”
They weren’t talking to each other anymore. Samantha was standing in the doorway, frozen like a frightened rabbit.
Black Shirt asked, “Who else is in the house?”
Gamma shook her head. “Nobody.”
“Don’t lie to me, bitch.”
Charlotte’s hearing became muffled. She heard her father’s name, saw the angry look in Gamma’s eyes.
Rusty. They were looking for Rusty.
Charlotte began to rock, unable to stop the back and forth movement as she instinctively tried to calm herself. This wasn’t a movie. There were two men inside the house. They had guns. They didn’t want money. They had come for Rusty, but now that they knew Rusty wasn’t here, Black Shirt had decided he wanted something else. Charlotte knew what that something else was. She had read about it in Lenore’s book. And Gamma was only here because Charlotte had called her and Samantha was only here because Charlotte had told the men that her sister was in the house.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte whispered. She couldn’t hold her bladder anymore. She felt the warm liquid slide down her leg. She closed her eyes. She rocked back and forth. “I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry.”
Samantha squeezed Charlotte’s hand so hard she could feel the bones move.
Charlotte was going to throw up. Her stomach kept clenching, rolling like she was trapped on a boat in the pitching sea. She squeezed her eyes closed. She thought about running. The soles of her shoes slapping the ground. Her legs burning. Her chest aching for air. Samantha was beside her, ponytail flapping in the wind, smiling, telling Charlotte what to do.
Breathe through it. Slow and steady. Wait for the pain to pass.
“I said shut the fuck up!” Black Shirt screamed.
Charlotte lifted her head, but it was like she was moving through a thick oil.
There was an explosion, then a blast of hot liquid slashed at her face and neck so hard that she fell against Samantha at the table.
Charlotte started screaming before she knew why.
Blood was everywhere, like a hose had been turned on. It was warm and viscous and it covered her face, her hands, her entire body.
“Shut up!” Black Shirt slapped Charlotte across the face.
Samantha grabbed her. She was sobbing, shaking, screaming.
“Gamma,” Samantha whispered.
Charlie clung to her sister. She turned her head. She made herself look at her mother, because she wanted to make sure she never forgot what these fuckers had done.
Bright white bone. Pieces of heart and lung. Cords of tendon and arteries and veins and life spilled out of her gaping wounds.
Bon Jovi yelled, “Jesus Christ, Zach!”
Charlie kept herself still, unresponsive. She was never going to give herself away ever again.
Zachariah Culpepper.
She had read his case files. Rusty had represented him at least four times. Gamma had said just last night that if Zach Culpepper paid his bills, the family wouldn’t have to live at the farmhouse.
“Fuck!” Zach was staring at Samantha. She had read the files, too. “Fuck!”
“Mama . . .” Charlie said, trying to distract them, to convince Zach that she didn’t know. “Mama, Mama, Mama . . .”
“It’s all right.” Samantha tried to soothe.
“It ain’t all right.” Zach threw his mask on the floor. He had raccoon eyes from Gamma’s blood. He looked like his mugshot, but uglier. “God dammit! What’d you have to use my name for, boy?”
“I d-didn’t—” Bon Jovi stammered. “I’m sorry.”
“We won’t tell.” Samantha was looking down at the floor like it wasn’t too late. “We won’t say anything. I promise.”
“Girl, I just blew your mama to bits. You really think you’re walking out of here alive?”
“No,” Bon Jovi said. “That’s not what we came for.”
“I came here to erase some bills, boy,” Zach said. “Now I’m thinking it’s me that Rusty Quinn’s gotta pay.”
“No,” Bon Jovi repeated. “I told you—”
Zach shut him up by jamming the shotgun into his face. “You ain’t seein’ the big picture here. We gotta get outta town, and that takes a hell of a lot of money. Everybody knows Rusty Quinn keeps cash in his house.”
“The house burned down,” Samantha said. “Everything burned down.”
“Fuck!” Zach screamed. “Fuck!” He pushed Bon Jovi into the hallway. He kept the shotgun pointed at Samantha’s head, his finger on the trigger.
“No!” Charlie pulled her sister down to the floor, away from the shotgun. She felt grit on her knees. Shattered bone riddled the floor. She looked at Gamma. She took her waxy, white hand. The heat had already left her body. She whispered, “Don’t be dead, Mama. Please. I love you. I love you so much.”
She heard Zach say, “Why you actin’ like you don’t know how this is gonna end?”
Sam tugged at Charlie’s arm. “Charlie, get up.”
Zach said, “We ain’t leaving this place without you getting some blood on your hands, too.”
Sam repeated, “Charlie, get up.”
“I can’t.” She was trying to hear what Bon Jovi was saying. “I can’t let—”
Samantha practically picked her up and put her back in the chair. “Run when you can,” she whispered to Charlie, the same thing Gamma had tried to tell her. “Don’t look back. Just run.”
“What’re you two saying?” Zach walked back to the table. His boots crunched something on the floor. He pressed the shotgun to Sam’s forehead. Charlie could see pieces of Gamma stuck to the barrel.
He asked Sam, “What did you tell her to do? Make a run for it? Try to get away?”
Charlie made a noise in her throat, trying to divert his attention.
Zach kept the shotgun on Sam, but he smiled at Charlie, showing a row of crooked, stained teeth. “What’d she tell you to do, baby doll?”
Charlie tried not to think about the way his voice changed when he talked to her.
“Come on, honey.” Zach stared at her chest. He licked his lips again. “Ain’t we gonna be friends?”
“S-stop,” Sam said. The shotgun was pressed so hard into her forehead that a trickle of blood seeped out. “Leave her alone.”
“Was I talking to you, bitch?” Zach leaned into the shotgun. Sam’s head tilted back from the pressure. “Was I?”
Sam’s jaw tightened. Her fists clenched. It was like watching a pot finally come to boil, except it was rage bubbling up inside of her. She shouted, “You leave us alone, Zachariah Culpepper.”
Zach shifted his weight back on his heels, startled by her defiance.
Sam said, “I know exactly who you are, you fucking pervert.”
He gripped the shotgun in his hands. His lip curled. “I’m gonna peel off your eyelids so you can watch me slice out your sister’s cherry with my knife.”
They glared at each other. Sam wasn’t going to back down. Charlie had seen her like this before, that look she got in her eyes when she wasn’t going to listen to anybody. Except this wasn’t Rusty, or the mean girls at school. This was a man with a shotgun, with a temper, who had almost beaten another man to death last year.
Charlie had seen the photos in Rusty’s files. She had read the police report. Zachariah had fractured the guy’s skull with his bare hands.
A whimper came out of Charlie’s mouth.
“Zach,” Bon Jovi said. “Come on, man.”
Charlie waited for Sam to look away, but she didn’t. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Bon Jovi said, “We had a deal, all right?”
Zach didn’t move. None of them moved.
“We had a deal,” Bon Jovi repeated.
“Sure.” Zach tossed the shotgun to Bon Jovi. “A man’s only as good as his word.”
He acted like he was going to walk away, but his hand moved fast, like a rattlesnake striking. He grabbed Sam’s face and pushed her so hard back into the sink that her head clanged against the cast iron.
“No!” Charlie screamed.
“You think I’m a pervert now?” Zach was so close to Sam that his spit globbed onto her face. “You got something else to say about me?”
Sam’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t scream. She grabbed at his arm with her hands, scratching, clawing, but Zach’s fingernails were digging into her eyeballs. Blood cried down like tears. Sam’s feet kicked out. She gasped for air.
“Stop it!” Charlie jumped on Zach’s back, punching him with her fists. “Stop!”
He threw her across the room. Charlie’s head smacked into the wall like a clattering bell. Her vision doubled, but then it sharpened on Sam. Zach had left her on the floor. Blood streamed down her cheeks, pooled into the collar of her shirt.
“Sammy!” Charlie cried. She tried to look at Sam’s eyes, to see the damage he had done. “Sam? Look at me. Can you see? Look at me, please!”
Carefully, Sam tried to open her eyelids. They were torn like pieces of wet paper.
Zach said, “What the fuck is this?”
The bathroom faucet hammer. He picked it up off the floor. He winked at Charlie. “Wonder what I can do with this?”
“Enough!” Bon Jovi snatched away the hammer and threw it down the hallway.
Zach shrugged. “Just having a little fun, brother.”
“Both of you stand up,” Bon Jovi said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Charlie didn’t move. Sam blinked away blood.
“Help her up,” Bon Jovi told Zach. “You promised, man. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”
Zach yanked Sam up so hard that her shoulder made a popping sound. She bumped against the table. Zach pushed her toward the door. She bumped into a chair. Charlie grabbed her hand to keep her from falling.
Bon Jovi opened the door. “Go.”
Charlie went first, shuffling sideways to help Sam down the stairs. Sam had her other hand out in front of her like she was blind. Charlie saw their shoes and socks. If they could put them on, they could run. But only if Sam could see where to go.
“Can you see?” Charlie asked her. “Sam, can you see?”
“Yes,” Sam said, but that had to be a lie. She couldn’t even open her eyelids all the way.
“This way,” Bon Jovi indicated the field behind the HP. The soil was freshly planted. They weren’t supposed to walk on it, but Charlie walked where she was told, guiding Sam behind her, helping her navigate the deep furrows.
Charlie asked Bon Jovi, “Where are we going?”
Zach dug the shotgun into Sam’s back. “Keep walking.”
“I don’t understand,” Charlie said to Bon Jovi. “Why are you doing this?”
He shook his head.
Charlie asked, “What did we do to you, mister? We’re just kids. We don’t deserve this.”
“Shut up,” Zach warned. “Both of you shut the fuck up.”
Sam squeezed Charlie’s hand even tighter than before. She had her head up, like she was a dog trying to get a scent. Instinctively, Charlie knew what her sister was doing. Two days ago, Gamma had shown them a topographical map of the area. Sam was trying to remember the landmarks, to get her bearings.
Charlie tried to, too.
The neighbor’s acreage went past the horizon, but the ground was completely flat that way. Even if Charlie managed to zigzag as she ran, Sam would end up tripping and falling. Trees bordered the far right side of the property. If she could lead Sam that way, they might be able to find a place to hide. There was a creek on the other side of the forest that went underneath the weather tower. Beyond that was a paved road, but people didn’t use it. There was an abandoned barn half a mile north. A second farm was two miles east. That would be the best bet. If she could get Sam to the second farm, they could call Rusty and he would save them.
Zach said, “What’s that?”
Charlie looked back at the farmhouse. She saw headlights, two floating dots in the distance. Not Lenore’s van. “It’s a car.”
“Shit, they’re gonna make my truck in two seconds.” Zach jammed the shotgun into Samantha’s back, using it like a rudder to steer her. “Y’all keep moving or I’ll shoot you right here.”
Right here.
Charlie stiffened at the words. She prayed that Sam hadn’t heard them, that she didn’t get their meaning.
“There’s another way out of this.” Sam’s head was turned toward Bon Jovi, even though she couldn’t see him.
Zach snorted.
Sam said, “I’ll do whatever you want.” She cleared her throat. “Anything.”
“Shit,” Zach said. “You don’t think I’m gonna take what I want anyways, you stupid bitch?”
Charlie swallowed back the taste of bile. She saw a clearing up ahead. She could run with Sam there, find a place to hide.
Sam said, “We won’t tell them it was you. We’ll say you had your masks on the entire time and—”
“With my truck in the driveway and your mama dead in the house?” Zach snorted again. “Y’all Quinns think you’re so fucking smart, can talk your way outta anything.”
Charlie didn’t know any places to hide in the woods. She’d been stuck unpacking boxes since they moved, no time for exploring. Charlie and Sam’s best bet was to run back to the HP where the policeman was. Charlie could lead Sam across the field. Her sister would have to trust her, the same way she kept saying Charlie should trust her with the blind pass. Sam was a fast runner, faster than Charlie. As long as she didn’t stumble—
“Listen to me,” Sam said. “You’ve got to leave town anyway. There’s no reason to kill us, too.” She turned toward Bon Jovi. “Please, just think about it. All you have to do is tie us up. Leave us somewhere they won’t find us. You’re going to have to leave town either way. You don’t want more blood on your hands.”
Bon Jovi was already shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”
Charlie felt a finger slide up her back. She shivered, and Zach laughed.
“Let my sister go,” Sam said. “She’s thirteen. Just a kid.”
“Don’t look like no kid to me.” Zach made pinching motions at Charlie’s chest. “Got them nice high titties.”
“Shut up,” Bon Jovi warned. “I mean it.”
“She won’t tell anyone,” Sam tried. “She’ll say it was strangers. Won’t you, Charlie?”
“Black fella?” Zach asked. “Like the one your daddy got off for murder?”
Charlie felt his fingers brush across her breast. She turned on him, screaming, “You mean like he got you off for showing your wiener to a bunch of little girls?”
“Charlie,” Sam begged. “Please, be quiet.”
“Let her speak,” Zach said. “I like it when they got a little fight in ’em.”
Charlie glared at him. She marched through the woods, pulling Sam behind her, trying not to go too fast, anxious to go fast enough so that Zach didn’t walk alongside her.
“No,” Charlie whispered. Why was she going fast? She needed to go slow. The farther they got away from the HP, the more dangerous it would be to break off and run back. Charlie stopped. She turned around. She could barely see the lights in the kitchen.
Zach had the shotgun in Sam’s back again. “Move.”
Pine needles cut into Charlie’s bare feet as she trudged deeper into the woods. The air got cooler. Her shorts were stiff with dried urine. She could feel the inside of her thighs starting to chafe. Every step felt like it was wearing away a fresh layer of skin.
She glanced back at Sam. Her eyes were closed, hand out in front of her. Leaves rustled under their feet. Charlie stopped to help Sam over a fallen tree. They walked through the stream, the water like ice on her feet. The clouds shifted, letting in a sliver more of moonlight. In the distance, Charlie could see the outline of the weather tower, the rusted steel structure like a skeleton against the dark sky.
Charlie felt her sense of direction click into place. If the tower was on her left, then they were walking east. The second farm was about two miles north on her right.
Two miles.
Charlie’s best mile was 7.01. Sam could do 5.52 on a flat surface. The forest wasn’t flat. The moonlight was unpredictable. Sam could not see. They could do an eight-minute mile, maybe, if Charlie paid attention, if she looked straight in front of her instead of looking back.
She scanned ahead, searching for the best path, the clearest route.
It was too late.
“Sam.” Charlie stumbled to a stop. A trickle of urine rolled down her leg again. She gripped her sister around the waist. “There’s a shovel. A shovel.”
Sam’s fingers felt along her face, pushed up her eyelids. She sucked in a quick rush of air when she saw what was in front of them.
Six feet away, dark, wet earth opened up like a wound in the ground.
Charlie’s teeth were chattering again. She could hear the clicking. Zach and Bon Jovi had dug a grave for Rusty, and now they were going to use it for Sam and Charlie.
They had to run.
Charlie knew that now, felt it to the core of her being. Sam could see, at least enough to see the grave. Which meant she might be able to see enough to run. There was no choice. They couldn’t stand here politely waiting for their own murders.
And whatever else Zachariah Culpepper had in mind.
Charlie squeezed Sam’s hand. Sam squeezed back that she was ready. All they had to do was wait for the right moment.
“All right, big boy. Time for you to do your part.” Zach leaned the shotgun butt on his hip. He slapped open a switchblade with his other hand. “The guns’ll be too loud. Take this. Right across the throat like you do with a pig.”
Bon Jovi stood there, unmoving.
Zach said, “Come on, like we agreed. You do her. I’ll take care of the little one.”
Bon Jovi said, “She’s right. We don’t have to do this. The plan wasn’t ever to hurt the women. They weren’t even supposed to be here.”
“Say what now?”
Sam squeezed Charlie’s hand even harder. They both watched, waited.
Bon Jovi said, “What’s done is done. We don’t have to make it worse by killing more people. Innocent people.”
“Jesus Christ.” Zach worked the knife closed then shoved it back into his pocket. “We went over this back in the kitchen, man. Ain’t like we gotta choice.”
“We can turn ourselves in.”
“Bull. Shit.”
Sam leaned into Charlie, pushing her a few steps to the right, getting her ready to go.
Bon Jovi said, “I’ll turn myself in. I’ll take the blame for everything.”
“The hell you will.” Zach shoved Bon Jovi in the chest. “You think I’m gonna go down on a murder charge ’cause you grew a fucking conscience?”
Sam let go of Charlie’s hand.
Charlie felt her heart drop into her stomach.
Sam whispered, “Charlie, run.”
“I won’t tell,” Bon Jovi said. “I’ll say it was me.”
Charlie tried to grab Sam’s hand back. They had to stay close so that she could show Sam the way.
“In my got-damn truck?”
Sam waved her away, whispering, “Go.”
Charlie shook her head. What did she mean? She couldn’t go without Sam. She couldn’t leave her sister here.
“Motherfucker.” Zach had the shotgun pointed at Bon Jovi’s chest. “This is what’s gonna happen, son. You’re gonna take my knife and you’re gonna slice open that bitch’s throat, or I will blow a hole in your chest the size of Texas.” He stamped his foot. “Right now.”
Bon Jovi pointed his gun at Zach’s head. “We’re gonna turn ourselves in.”
“Get that fucking gun outta my face, you pansy-ass piece of shit.”
Sam nudged Charlie, telling her to move. “Go.”
Charlie didn’t move. She wasn’t going to leave her sister.
Bon Jovi said, “I’ll kill you before I kill them.”
“You ain’t got the balls to pull that trigger.”
“I’ll do it.”
Charlie heard her teeth chattering again. Should she go? Would Sam follow her? Is that what she meant?
“Run,” Sam begged. “You have to run.”
Don’t look back. You have to trust me to be there.
“Piece of shit.” Zach’s free hand snaked out.
Bon Jovi backhanded the shotgun.
“Run!” Sam shoved her hard. “Charlie, go!”
Charlie fell back onto her ass, slamming into the ground. She saw the bright flash of the gun firing, heard the sudden explosion of the bullet leaving the barrel, and then a mist puffed from the side of Sam’s head.
Sam spun through the air, almost somersaulting like the fork had, into the gaping mouth of the grave.
Thunk.
Charlie stared at the open earth, waiting, begging, praying, for Sam to sit up, to look around, to say something, anything, that indicated that she was alive.
“Shit,” Bon Jovi said. “Christ. Jesus Christ.” He dropped the gun like it was poison.
Charlie saw the glint of metal from the weapon as it hit the ground. The flash of shock on Bon Jovi’s face. The sudden white of Zach’s teeth when he grinned.
At Charlie.
He was grinning at Charlie.
She scrambled away, crab-like, on her hands and heels.
Zach started toward her, but Bon Jovi grabbed his shirt. “What the fuck are we going to do?”
Charlie’s back hit a tree. She pushed herself up. Her knees shook. Her hands shook. Her whole body was shaking. She looked at the grave. Her sister was in a grave. Sam had been shot in the head. Charlie couldn’t see her, didn’t know if she was alive or dead or needed help or—
“It’s okay, sweetpea,” Zach told Charlie. “Stay right there for me.”
“I j-just—” Bon Jovi stuttered. “I just killed . . . I just . . .”
Killed.
He couldn’t have killed Sam. The bullet from the gun was small, not like the shotgun. Maybe it hadn’t really hurt her. Maybe Sam was okay, hiding in the grave, ready to spring up and run.
But she wasn’t springing up. She wasn’t moving, or talking, or shouting, or bossing everybody around.
Charlie needed her sister to speak, to tell her what to do. What would Sam say right now? What would she tell Charlie to do?
Zach said, “You cover this bitch up. Lemme take the little one off for a minute.”
“Christ.”
Sam wouldn’t be talking right now, she would be yelling, furious at Charlie for just standing there, for blowing this chance, for not doing what Sam had coached her to do.
Don’t look back . . . trust me to be there . . . keep your head down and—
Charlie ran.
Her arms flailed. Her feet struggled for purchase. Tree limbs slashed at her face. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt like needles were stabbing into her chest.
Breathe through it. Slow and steady. Wait for the pain to pass.
They used to be best friends. They used to do everything together. And then Sam had gone to high school and Charlie had been left behind, and the only way she could get her sister’s attention was to ask Sam to teach her how to run.
Don’t hold the tension. Breathe in for two strides. Breathe out for one.
Charlie hated every part of running because it was stupid and it hurt and it made you sore, but she had wanted to spend time with Sam, to do something that her sister was doing, to maybe be better at it one day than Sam was, so Charlie went to the track with her sister, she joined the team at school, and she timed herself every day because every day, she was getting faster.
“Get back here!” Zach yelled.
Two miles to the second farmhouse. Twelve, maybe thirteen minutes. Charlie couldn’t run faster than a boy, but she could run for longer. She had the stamina, the training. She knew how to ignore the pain in her body. To breathe into the shock in her lungs when the air sliced like a razor.
What she had never trained for was the panic from hearing the heavy tread of boots pounding dirt behind her, the way the thud-thud-thud vibrated inside of her chest.
Zachariah Culpepper was coming after her.
Charlie ran faster. She tucked her arms into her sides. She forced out the tension in her shoulders. She imagined her legs were pistons in a fast-working machine. She tuned out the pinecones and sharp rocks gouging open her bare feet. She thought about the muscles that were helping her move—
Calves, quads, hamstrings, tighten your core, protect your back.
Zachariah was getting closer. She could hear him like a steam engine bearing down.
Charlie vaulted over a fallen tree. She scanned left, then right, knowing she shouldn’t run in a straight line. She needed to locate the weather tower, to make sure she was heading in the correct direction, but she knew if she looked back she would see Zachariah Culpepper, and that seeing him would make her panic even more, and if she panicked even more, she would stumble, and if she stumbled, she would fall.
And then he would rape her.
Charlie veered right, her toes gripping the dirt as she altered direction. At the last minute, she saw another fallen tree. She flung herself over it, landing awkwardly. Her foot twisted. She felt her anklebone touch earth. Pain sliced up her leg.
She kept going.
And going.
And going.
Her feet were sticky with blood. Sweat dripped down her body. Her lungs burned in her chest, but not as much as it would burn if Zachariah pinched her breast again. Her guts cramped, her bowels had turned to liquid, but that was nothing compared to how she would feel if Zachariah shoved his thing inside of her.
Charlie scanned ahead for light, any indication of civilization.
How much time had passed?
How much longer could he keep running?
Picture the finish line in your head. You have to want it more than the person behind you.
Zachariah wanted something. Charlie wanted something more—to get away, to get help for her sister, to find Rusty so he could figure out a way to make it all better.
Suddenly, Charlie’s head jerked back with such violence that she felt like she was being decapitated.
Her feet flew out into the air in front of her.
Her back slammed against the ground.
She saw her breath huff out of her mouth like it was a real thing.
Zachariah was on top of her. His hands were everywhere. Grabbing her breasts. Pulling her shorts. His teeth clashed against her closed mouth. She scratched at his eyes. She tried to bring up her knee into his crotch but she couldn’t bend her leg.
Zachariah sat up, straddling her.
Charlie kept slapping at him, tried in vain to buck off the tremendous weight of his body.
He worked his belt back through the buckle.
Her mouth opened. She had no breath left to scream. She was dizzy. Vomit burned up her throat. She closed her eyes and saw Sam twisting through the air. She could hear the thump of her sister’s body hitting the grave like it was happening all over again. And then she saw Gamma. On the kitchen floor. Back to the cabinet.
Bright white bone. Pieces of heart and lung. Cords of tendon and arteries and veins and life spilling out of her gaping wounds.
“No!” Charlie screamed, her hands turning into fists. She pounded into Zachariah’s chest, swung so hard at his jaw that his head whipped around. Blood sprayed out of his mouth—big globs of it, not like the tiny dots from Gamma.
“Fucking bitch.” He reared back his hand to punch her.
Charlie saw a blur out of the corner of her eye.
“Get off her!”
Bon Jovi flew through the air, tackling Zachariah to the ground. His fists swung back and forth. He straddled Zachariah the same way Zachariah had straddled Charlie. Bon Jovi’s arms windmilled as he beat the other man into the ground.
“Motherfucker!” he yelled. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
Charlie backed away from the men. Her hands pressed deep into the earth as she forced herself to stand. She stumbled. She wiped her eyes. Sweat had turned the dried blood on her face and neck back to liquid. She spun around in a circle, blind as Sam. She couldn’t get her bearings. She didn’t know which way to run, but she knew that she had to keep moving.
Her ankle screamed as she ran back into the woods. She didn’t look for the weather tower. She didn’t listen for the stream, or try to find Sam, or head toward the HP. She kept running, then walking, then she felt so exhausted that she wanted to crawl.
Finally, she gave into it, collapsing to her hands and knees.
She listened for footsteps behind her, but all she could hear was her own heavy breaths panting out of her mouth.
She threw up. Bile hit the ground and splattered back into her face. She wanted to lie down, to close her eyes, to go to sleep and wake up in a week when this was all over.
Sam.
In the grave.
Bullet in her head.
Gamma.
In the kitchen.
Bright white bone.
Pieces of heart and lung.
Cords of tendon and arteries and veins and her life gone in the flash of a shotgun because of Zachariah Culpepper.
Charlie knew his name. She knew Bon Jovi’s build, his voice, the way he’d stood silently by while Gamma was murdered, the way his hand had arced through the air when he’d shot Sam in the head, the way Zachariah had called him brother.
Brother.
She would see them both dead. She would watch the executioner strap them to the wooden chair and put the metal hat on their heads with the sponge underneath so that they wouldn’t catch on fire and she would look between Zachariah Culpepper’s legs to watch the urine come out when he realized that he was going to be electrocuted to death.
Charlie got up.
She stumbled, then she walked, then she jogged and eventually, finally, she saw the light on the porch outside the second farmhouse.