You let him rape my wife.
Let him.
Charlie felt a rush of air leaving her lungs. Her hand slapped to her mouth as bile swirled up her throat.
“It was him,” Ben said. “Not Daniel.”
“In the woods?” Charlie asked, her vocal cords straining around the question. She saw Zachariah Culpepper’s hideous face. She had punched him so hard that his head had whipped around. Blood had come out of his mouth. And then Daniel Culpepper had tackled him to the ground and started beating him the way that Ben had just beaten Mason Huckabee.
Except it had not been Daniel Culpepper in the woods.
Charlie said, “You tackled Zachariah.” She had to s
wallow before she could add, “You were too late.”
“I know.” Mason rolled over onto his back. He covered his eyes with his hand. “In the house. In the woods. I was always too late.”
Charlie felt her knees turn rubbery. She leaned her shoulder into the wall. “Why?”
Mason moved his head side to side. He was breathing hard. Blood bubbled out of his nose.
“Tell them,” Ben said, fists clenched.
Mason wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He looked at Ben, then Sam, then Charlie. Finally, he answered, “I hired Zach to help me take care of Rusty. I gave him everything I’d saved up for college. I knew that he owed Rusty money, but—” He stopped, his voice cracking. “You guys were supposed to be at track practice. We were gonna take Rusty, drive him down the access road, and get rid of him. Zach would get three grand on top of wiping away his legal bills. I would get my revenge …” He looked at Sam again, then Charlie. “I tried to stop Zach when your dad wasn’t here, but he—”
“You don’t have to tell us what he did.” Sam’s words were so strained that they were almost inaudible in the open space.
Mason covered his face again. He started to cry.
Charlie listened to his dry sobs and wanted to punch him in the throat.
Mason said, “I was going to take the fall for your mom. I said that out in the woods. Five times, at least. You both heard me. I never wanted any of it to happen.” His voice cracked again. “When your mom was shot, it was like I was numb, like, I couldn’t believe it. I just felt sick, and shaky, and I wanted to do something but I was scared of Zach. You know what he’s like. We were all scared of him.”
Charlie felt rage pumping through every artery in her body. “Don’t you we any of this, you pathetic prick. There was no we in the kitchen except me and Sam. We were forced out of our house. We were led into the woods at gunpoint. We were terrified for our lives. You shot my sister in the head. You buried her alive. You let that monster chase me through the woods, rape me, beat me, take away everything—everything—from me. That was you, Mason. That was all you.”
“I tried—”
“Shut up.” Charlie clenched her fists as she stood over him. “You might tell yourself that you tried to stop it, but you didn’t. You let it happen. You helped it happen. You pulled that trigger.” She stopped, trying to catch her breath. “Why? Why did you do it? What did we ever do to you?”
“His sister,” Sam said. Her voice had a deathly kind of calmness. “That’s what he meant about getting his revenge. Mason and Zachariah showed up the same day Kevin Mitchell walked on the rape charge. We assumed it was about Culpepper’s legal bills when it was really about Mason Huckabee being mad enough to kill but too scared to do it with his own hands.”
Charlie’s tongue turned into lead. She had to lean against the wall again to keep from falling down.
Mason said, “I was the one who found my sister. She was in the barn. Her neck was—” He shook his head. “She was tortured by what that bastard did to her. She couldn’t get out of bed. She just cried all the time. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that useless, that helpless. I wanted someone to be punished. Someone had to be punished.”
“So you came looking for my father?” Charlie felt the now-familiar vibration in her hands. It spread up her arms, into her chest. “You came here to kill my father, and you—”
“I’m sorry.” Mason started crying again. “I’m sorry.”
Charlie wanted to kick him. “Don’t you fucking cry. You shot my sister in the head.”
“It was an accident.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Charlie yelled. “You shot her! You buried her alive!”
Sam’s arm went out. She blocked Charlie from standing over Mason, beating him the same way Ben had.
Ben.
Charlie looked at her husband. He was sitting on the floor, back to the wall. His glasses were blood-streaked, crooked on his face. He kept flexing his hands, opening the wounds, encouraging more blood to flow.
Sam asked, “Why was Rusty writing checks to Zachariah Culpepper’s son?”
Charlie was so shocked she could not make her mouth form a question.
Sam explained, “The check numbers. Twelve checks a year for twenty-eight years, four months, would be a total of three hundred forty checks.”
“That’s the most recent check number,” Charlie remembered.
“Right,” Sam confirmed. “And then there’s the balance. You started at one million, correct?”
She was asking Mason.
Slowly, reluctantly, Mason nodded.
Sam said, “If you start at one million and subtract two thousand dollars a month for twenty-eight years and change, that leaves you with approximately three hundred twenty thousand dollars.” She told Mason, “Everything began to click into place when you told us that your parents had money. Back in 1989, no one else in Pikeville had that kind of wealth and especially that kind of reach. They traded your freedom for one million dollars. That would’ve been a lot back then. More than Culpepper would ever see in his abbreviated lifetime. He bargained away his dead brother for his unborn son.”
Mason looked up at her. He slowly nodded.
Sam asked, “What was my father’s part in this? Did he set up the deal between you and Culpepper?”
“No.”
“Then, what?” Sam demanded.
Mason rolled to his side. He pushed himself up. He sat with his back toward the door. The masking tape Rusty had used on the window made a sort of lightning bolt above his head. “I didn’t know about any of it.”
Ben glowered at Mason. “You’re gonna rot in hell for dragging Rusty into your bullshit.”
“It wasn’t Rusty. Not at first.” Mason winced as he touched his jaw. “My parents set up the arrangement. The night it happened, I walked home. Six miles. Zach took my shoes, my jeans, because they had his blood on them. I was half-naked, covered in blood, by the time I got home. I confessed to both of them. I wanted to go to the police. They wouldn’t let me. I found out later they sent a lawyer to talk to Zach.”
“Rusty,” Ben said.
“No, someone from Atlanta. I don’t know who.” Mason worked his jaw. The joint popped. “They left me out of it. I had no choice.”
Sam said, “You were a seventeen-year-old man. I’m certain you had a car. You could’ve gone to the police on your own, or waited until you turned eighteen.”
“I wanted to,” Mason insisted. “They locked me in my room. Four guys came. They drove me to a military academy up north. I joined the Marines as soon as I was old enough.” He wiped blood out of his eye. “I was in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia. I kept volunteering. I wanted to earn it, you know? I wanted to use my life to help other people. To redeem myself.”
Charlie bit her lip so hard that she felt the skin start to open. There was no redemption, no matter how many countries he had pinned on his stupid world map.
Mason said, “I put in my twenty years. I moved back home. I went to school. I thought it was important to give back here, in this town, to these people.”
“You bastard.” Ben stood up. His hands were still clenched. He walked down the hall. Charlie was afraid that he was going to continue out the back door, but he stopped at Mason’s iPhone. He slammed his heel into the glass, breaking it into tiny pieces.
Ben lifted his shoe. Glass clinked down from the sole. He said, “Daniel Culpepper was murdered because of you.”
“I know,” Mason said, but he was wrong.
Charlie was the one who unleashed Ken Coin on Daniel.
She told Mason, “He called you brother.”
Mason shook his head. “He called a lot of people brother. It’s just something guys do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ben said. “Neither one of them should have been here in the first place. Whatever happened after that is on them.”
“It is,” Mason agreed. “It’s on me. All of it’s on me.”
Sam asked, “H
ow did your clothes and your gun end up at Daniel’s trailer?”
Again, Mason shook his head, but it wasn’t hard to come up with the answer. Ken Coin had planted the evidence. He had framed an innocent man and let a guilty one go free.
Mason said, “My mom told me about the arrangement after my dad died. I was stationed in Turkey, trying to do right by people. I came home for the funeral. She was worried something would happen and Zach would renege on his part of the deal.”
Sam said, “To be clear, the deal was that Zach would keep silent about Daniel’s innocence—and your guilt—in exchange for two thousand dollars a month to be paid by your parents to his son, Danny Culpepper?”
Mason nodded. “I didn’t know. Not until my mother told me. Eight years had gone by. Culpepper was still on death row. He kept getting out of his execution dates.”
Charlie clenched her jaw. Eight years after the murder. Eight years after Sam clawed out of her grave. Eight years after Charlie was ripped apart.
Sam had been starting her master’s at Northwestern. Charlie was applying to law school, praying that she could make a fresh start.
Sam asked, “How did my father get roped into this?”
“I went to him to confess,” Mason said. “Here, in this house. We sat in the kitchen. I don’t know why, but in a way it made it easier to sit at the table and unburden myself. The scene of the crime. I got sick just letting it all out, every piece of the truth. I told him how I was torn up about Mary-Lynne, how I paid Zach to help me get my revenge. When you’re young like that, you see things so clearly. You don’t understand how the world works. That there are consequences you can’t predict. That bad choices, bad deeds, can corrupt you.” Mason was nodding, as if to agree with himself. “I wanted to explain to Rusty what happened, why it happened, man to man.”
“You’re not a man,” Charlie told him, sickened by the thought of Mason and Rusty sitting in the kitchen where Gamma had died, that the setting had brought Mason absolution rather than pain. “You’re an attempted murderer. You’re an accomplice to rape. To the murder of my mother. To abduction. Kidnapping. Breaking and fucking entering.” She could not let herself think about all the girlfriends he’d had, the parties he’d attended, the birthdays, the New Year’s Eve celebrations, while Sam got out of bed every morning praying that she could fucking walk. She told Mason, “Joining the Marines does not make you a good man. It makes you a coward for running away.”