Page 29 of The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter 1)

Charlie slammed down the phone.

She put her head in her hands. The worst part about that phone call was that she wasn’t going to be able to climb into bed with Ben tonight, put her head on his chest and tell him what an awful fucking bitch his sister was.

Charlie slumped back in her chair. She saw that Lenore had kept her part of the bargain. A brand new iPhone was plugged into the back of her computer. Charlie pressed the home button. She tried 1-2-3-4 for the password, but it didn’t take. She put in her birthday, and the phone unlocked.

The first thing she pulled up was her list of voicemails. One message from Rusty this morning. Several messages from friends after the shooting.

Nothing from Ben.

The distinct rumble of Rusty’s voice echoed through the building. He was leading Ava Wilson back to his office. Charlie could guess what he was saying by the cadence of his voice. He was giving his usual speech: “You don’t have to tell me the whole truth, but you do have to tell me the truth.”

Charlie wondered if Ava was capable of grasping the subtlety. And she prayed that Rusty wouldn’t float his unicorn theory past the woman. Ava was already drowning in her own version of false hope. She didn’t need Rusty to weigh her down with more.

Charlie tapped her computer awake. The browser was still open on huckleberries. She did a new search: “Mindy Zowada Pikeville.”

The girl who had called Kelly Wilson a fucking whore in her yearbook had a Facebook page. Mindy’s setting was private, but Charlie could see her banner, which was heavy on the Justin Bieber. The account photo of Mindy showed her dressed as a Rebel cheerleader. She looked exactly the way Charlie thought she’d look: pretty and nasty and smug.

Charlie skimmed Mindy’s list of likes and dislikes, annoyed that she was too old to understand half of what the teenager was into.

She tapped her finger on the mouse again.

Charlie had two Facebook accounts: one in her own name, and another in a fake name. She had created the second account as a joke. Or at least she’d initially let herself believe it was a joke. After creating an email address for the account and a profile picture of a pig wearing a bow tie, she had finally accepted that she was going to use it to spy on the Culpepper girls who had tormented her in high school. That they had all accepted a friend request from Iona Trayler proved correct a lot of stereotypes that Charlie had about their intelligence. Weirdly, she had also been friended by an extended family of Traylers who sent her greetings on her made-up birthday and were always asking her to pray for ailing aunts and distant cousins.

Charlie logged in to the Trayler account and sent out a friend request to Mindy Zowada. It was a shot in the dark, but she wanted to know what the girl who’d been so vile to Kelly Wilson was saying about her now. That Charlie had extended her catfishing from the Culpeppers to another girl’s tormentors would be a neurosis to analyze at a later date.

Charlie collapsed the browser. The blank Word document was on her desktop. There was nothing else she could do to procrastinate, so she started typing up her statement for Rusty. She relayed the events in as dry a manner as possible, thinking about the morning the way she might think about a story she had read in the newspaper. This happened, then this happened, then this happened.

Horrible things were a hell of a lot easier to digest when you took away the emotion.

The school part of the story did not deviate from what she’d told Delia Wofford. The Word document could be subpoenaed, and there was nothing to Charlie’s recollection that was much different than what she had told the agent. What had changed was her certainty. Four shots before Mrs. Pinkman screamed. Two shots after.

Charlie stopped typing. She stared at the screen until the words blurred. Had Mrs. Pinkman opened the door when she heard the four initial gunshots? Had she screamed when she saw her husband and a child on the ground? Had Kelly Wilson emptied the remaining bullets in the revolver in an attempt to shut her up?

Unless Kelly opened up to Rusty, they might not know the truth about the sequence for weeks, possibly months, until Rusty held the forensic reports and witness statements in his hands.

Charlie blinked her eyes to clear them. She hit the return key for a new paragraph, skipping over her conversation with Ben at the police station and jumping right into the interview she had granted Delia Wofford. For all of Charlie’s sphere bullshit, she was right about the passage of time sharpening perspective. Again, it was the certainty that had changed. She would have to amend parts of the statement she had made to the GBI before signing off on it.

An alert chirped on her computer.

[email protected]: Mindy Zowada has accepted your friend request!

Charlie expanded the girl’s Facebook page. Mindy’s banner had been changed to a single burning candle fluttering in the wind.

“Oh for fucksakes,” Charlie mumbled, scrolling down to the posts.

Six minutes ago, Mindy Zowada had written:

idk what to do i am so sad about this thot kelly was a good person i guess all we can do is pray?

Funny, considering what the girl thought about Kelly Wilson five years ago.

Charlie scrolled through the replies. The first three concurred with Mindy’s assessment that they were all shocked—shocked!—that the girl they bullied on a school-wide scale had snapped. The fourth reply was the asshole in the bunch, because the point of Facebook was that there was always an asshole who would shit on everything, from an innocent photo of a cat to a video of your kid’s birthday party.

Nate Marcus wrote:

i know what was wrong with her she was a fucking slut that fucked the whole football team so maybe thats why she did it because she has aids

Chase Lovette responded:

aw man they gone hang that bitch she sucked my cock clean off maybe my wikked cum made her do it

Then Alicia Todd supplied:

bitch gonna burn in hell kelly wilson so sorry uuuu!

Charlie had to read the sentence aloud before she guessed that the four “u”s meant “for you.”

She wrote down all the names, thinking Rusty would want to have a word with them. If they had been in Kelly’s class in middle school, at least some of the posters would now be over the age of eighteen, which meant that Rusty would not need their parents’ permission to speak with them.

“Lenore took Ava Wilson to meet her husband.”

The sound of Rusty’s voice made her jump. The noisiest man alive had managed to sneak up on her.

“They wanna be alone for a while, talk this through.” Rusty plopped down on the couch across from her desk. He tapped his hands against his legs. “Don’t know that they can afford a hotel. Guess they’ll sleep in their car. Revolver’s not in the glove box, by the by.”

Charlie looked at the time: 6:38 PM. Time had crawled and then it had sprinted.

She asked, “You didn’t talk to her about innocence?”

“Nope.” He leaned back on the couch, one hand on the cushions, the other still tapping his leg. “Didn’t talk to her about much, to be honest. I wrote down some things for her to show her husband—what to expect in the coming weeks. She thinks the girl’s gonna come home.”

“Like a good little unicorn?”

“Well, Charlie Bear, there’s innocent and there’s not guilty, and there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason in between.” He gave her a wink. “Why don’t you drive your old daddy home?”

Charlotte hated going to the farmhouse, even to drop him off. She hadn’t been inside the HP in years. “Where’s your car?”

“Had to drop it off for service.” He tapped his knee harder. There was a rhythm to the beats now. “Did you figure out why Ben called you this morning?”

Charlie shook her head. “Do you know?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but then grinned instead.

She said, “I can’t deal with your motherfuckery right now, Rusty. Just tell me the truth.”

&nbs

p; He groaned as he got up from the couch. “‘Seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.’”

He left before Charlie could find something to throw at him.

She didn’t hurry to meet him at the car because, despite his harried rushing around, Rusty was always late. She printed out a copy of her statement. She emailed a copy to herself in case she wanted to look at it at home. She grabbed a stack of files she needed to work on. She checked the Facebook page again for new posts. Finally, she gathered up her things, locked up her office, and found her father standing outside the back door smoking a cigarette.

“Such a scowl on your pretty face,” he said, grinding the cigarette on the heel of his shoe and dropping the butt into his coat pocket. “You’re gonna get those same lines around your mouth that your grandmama had.”

Charlie tossed her bag into the back seat of her car and got in. She waited for Rusty to lock up the building. He brought the trace of cigarette smoke with him. By the time she pulled onto the road, she might as well have been inside a Camel factory.

She rolled down the window, already annoyed that she had to go to the farmhouse. “I’m not saying anything about how stupid it is to smoke after having two heart attacks and open-heart surgery.”

“That is called paralipsis, or, from the Greek, apophasis,” Rusty informed her. “A rhetorical device by which you add emphasis to a subject by professing to say little or nothing about it.” He was tapping his foot with glee. “Also, a rhetorical relative of irony, whom I believe you went to school with.”

Charlie reached into the back seat and found the printout of her statement. “Read this. Silent car until the HP.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Rusty found his reading glasses in his pocket. He turned on the dome light. His foot tapped as he read the first paragraph. And then his foot stopped tapping.

She could tell from the heat on the side of her face that he was staring at her.

Charlie said, “All right. I’ll own it. I don’t know the guy’s first name.”