“I shouldn’t have picked up the stupid phone. I couldn’t even remember his name. He couldn’t remember mine. At least he pretended not to. It was embarrassing and sordid and now Ben knows. The GBI knows. Everyone in his office knows.”
Charlie said, “That’s why I was at the school this morning, to meet the guy because he took my phone by mistake and he called and …” She put on her court shirt, a starched button-up with ruffles down the front to assure the judges that she was taking this woman thing seriously. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Lenore shifted into sixth. “That you were lonely.”
Charlie laughed, though there was nothing funny about the truth. She watched her fingers as she buttoned the shirt. The buttons were suddenly too small. Or maybe it was that her hands were sweating. Or maybe it was that the tremble was back in her fingers, the vibration of bone that felt like a tuning fork had been struck against her chest.
“Baby,” Lenore said. “Let it out.”
Charlie shook her head. She didn’t want to let it out. She wanted to hold it back, to put all the horrible images in their box, shove it onto a shelf, and never open it ever again.
But then a teardrop fell.
Then another.
Then Charlie was crying, then she was sobbing so hard that she doubled over, her head in her hands, because the grief was too much to carry.
Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Miss Heller. Gamma. Sam. Ben.
The car slowed. The tires bumped against gravel as Lenore pulled to the side of the road. She rubbed Charlie’s back. “It’s okay, baby.”
It wasn’t okay. She wanted her husband. She wanted her useless asshole of a father. Where was Rusty? Why was he never there when she needed him?
“It’s okay.” Lenore kept rubbing Charlie’s back and Charlie kept crying because it was never going to be all right.
From the moment Charlie had heard those first gunshots in Huck’s room, the entirety of the most violent hour of her life had snapped back into her waking memory. She kept hearing the same words over and over again. Keep running. Don’t look back. Into the woods. To Miss Heller’s house. Up the school hallway. Toward the gunshots. But she was too late. Charlie was always too fucking late.
Lenore stroked back Charlie’s hair. “Deep breaths, sweetheart.”
Charlie realized she was starting to hyperventilate. Her vision blurred. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She made herself breathe until her lungs could take in more than a teaspoonful of air at a time.
“Take your time,” Lenore said.
Charlie took a few more deep breaths. Her vision cleared, at least as much as it was going to. She took another series of breaths, holding them for a second, maybe two, to prove to herself that she could.
“Better?”
Charlie whispered, “Was that a panic attack?”
“Might still be one.”
“Help me up.” Charlie reached for Lenore’s hand. The blood rushed from her head. Instinctively, she touched her aching nose, and the pain intensified.
Lenore said, “You really got whacked, sweetheart.”
“You should see the other guy. Not a scratch on him.”
Lenore didn’t laugh.
Charlie said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Don’t be stupid. You know what came over you.”
“Yeah, well,” Charlie said, the two words she always said when she didn’t want to talk about something.
Instead of putting the car in gear, Lenore’s long fingers laced through Charlie’s smaller ones. For all her miniskirts, she still had man hands, wide with knobby knuckles and lately, age spots. In many ways, Charlie had gotten more of her mothering from Lenore than Gamma. It was Lenore who showed her how to wear make-up, who took Charlie to the store to buy her first box of tampons, who warned her to never ever trust a man to take care of birth control.
Charlie said, “Ben texted you to pick me up. That’s something, right?”
“It is.”
Charlie opened the glove box and found some tissue. She couldn’t blow her nose. She patted underneath. She squinted her eyes out the window, relieved that she could see things rather than shapes. Unfortunately, the view was the worst one possible. They were three hundred yards away from where Daniel Culpepper had been shot in his trailer.
Charlie said, “The really shitty thing is that I can’t even say that today was the worst day of my life.”
Lenore laughed this time, a husky, deep-throated acknowledgment that Charlie was right. She worked the gears and pulled back onto the highway. The going was smooth until she slowed for the turn onto Culpepper Road. Deep potholes gave way to gravel, which eventually turned into packed red clay. There was a subtle change in the temperature, maybe a few degrees, as they drove down the mountain. Charlie resisted the urge to shiver. Her trepidation felt like a thing she could hold in her hand. The hairs on the back of her neck rose up. She always felt this way when she came into the Holler. It wasn’t only the sense of not belonging, but the knowledge that the wrong turn, the wrong Culpepper, and physical danger would no longer be an abstract concept.
“Shit!” Lenore startled when a pack of dogs rushed a chain-link fence. Their frenzied barking sounded like a thousand hammers pounding against the car.
“Redneck alarm,” Charlie told her. You couldn’t step foot in the Holler without a hundred dogs howling your arrival. The deeper in you went, the more young white men you’d see standing on their front porches, one hand holding their cell phone and the other under their shirt rubbing their belly. These young men were capable of work, but they eschewed the labor-intensive jobs for which they were qualified. They smoked dope all day, played video games, stole when they needed money, beat their girlfriends when they wanted Oxy, sent their kids to pick up their disability checks at the post office, and let their glorious life choices form the backbone of Charlie’s legal practice.
She felt a flash of guilt for painting the entire Holler with the Culpepper brush. She knew that some good people lived here. They were hard-working, striving men and women whose only sin was to be poor, but Charlie could not help the knee-jerk reaction to the taint of proximity.
There had been six Culpepper girls of various ages who had made Charlie’s life a living hell when she went back to school. They were flea-bitten, nasty bitches with long painted fingernails and filthy mouths. They bullied Charlie. They stole her lunch money. They ripped up her textbooks. One of them had even left a pile of shit in her gym bag.
To this day, the family insisted that Charlie had lied about seeing Zachariah with the shotgun. They figured she was guided by some glorious scheme on Rusty’s part to lay claim to the meager life insurance policy and two-bedroom trailer that was up for grabs after Daniel had died and Zachariah was sent to prison. As if a man who had made it his life’s work to see justice done would trade his morality for a few pieces of silver.
The fact that Rusty had never sued the family for a penny did nothing to temper their wild conspiracy theories. They continued to firmly believe that Ken Coin planted the abundance of evidence found at the trailer and on Daniel’s person. That Coin murdered Daniel to kick-start his political career. That Coin’s brother, Keith, helped alter evidence at the state lab.
Still, it was Charlie who was on the receiving end of the majority of their rage. She had identified the brothers. The lies had not only started at her lips, but she continued to insist they were true. Thus the murder of one Culpepper brother and the death-row confinement of another rested squarely on her shoulders.
They weren’t entirely off the mark, at least not where