Now she felt the wound. “So, this was recent.”
“The last time was almost two months ago. I thought I was just having trouble peeing.”
“You didn’t think that was a sign that you should go to the doctor?”
“Eventually, obviously,” he said. “But that’s why I didn’t—the other night. I tested clean, but it didn’t feel right to not tell you. And I was there to check on you because I was worried. I didn’t need a file. There was no plea deal that went south.”
Charlie did not care about the lie. “How long did it last?”
“It didn’t last. It was four times, and it was fun at first, but then it was just sad. She’s so young. She thinks Kate Mulgrew got her start on Orange Is the New Black.”
“Wow,” Charlie said, trying to make a joke so she didn’t cry. “How did she manage to get through law school?”
Ben tried to joke, too. “You were right about being on top. It’s a lot of work.”
Charlie felt nauseated. “Thanks for the image.”
“Try never being able to sneeze again.”
Charlie chewed the inside of her cheek. She should have never told him the details. She sure as hell wished she had not heard his.
He said, “I’m going to go pack up that stuff for Sam.”
Charlie nodded, but she didn’t want him to go, not even down the hall.
He kissed her forehead. She leaned into him, smelling his sweat and the wrong detergent he was using on his shirts.
He said, “I’ll be in your dad’s office.”
Charlie watched his goofy, loping gait as he walked away.
He hadn’t left the house.
That had to be something.
Charlie didn’t immediately go to Sam. She turned around. She looked into the kitchen. The door was hanging open. She could feel the breeze coming through. She tried to adjust her memory to that moment when she had opened the door, expecting to find Rusty, instead seeing two men, one in black, one wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt.
One with a shotgun.
One with a revolver.
Zachariah Culpepper.
Mason Huckabee.
The man who had been too late to stop Charlie’s rapist was the same man she’d had frenzied sex with in the parking lot of Shady Ray’s.
The same man who had shot her sister in the head.
Who had buried Sam in a shallow grave.
Who had beaten Zachariah Culpepper, but not before he had torn Charlie into a million tiny pieces.
“Charlie?” Sam called.
She was sitting in the straight-back chair when Charlie entered the living room. Sam was not throwing things or fretting or doing that slow boil that she did when she was ready to go off. Instead, she had been studying something in her notepad.
Sam said, “Quite a day.”
Charlie laughed at the understatement. “How did you figure it out so fast?”
“I’m your big sister. I’m smarter than you are.”
Charlie could offer no evidence to the contrary. “Do you think Mason will go to the police station like you said?”
“Did it seem likely to you that I wouldn’t follow through on my threat?”
“It seemed likely that you would’ve killed him if someone had put a knife in your hand.” Charlie winced at the thought, but only because she didn’t want Sam to have literal blood on her hands. “He didn’t just lie to the GBI. He lied to an FBI agent.”
“I’m sure the arresting officer will happily explain to him the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.”
Charlie smiled at the neat trick, which could mean years in federal prison as opposed to monitored probation with weekends at the county jail. “Why are you so calm right now?”
Sam shook her head, puzzled. “Shock? Relief? I always felt that Daniel got away with something, that he hadn’t suffered enough. In a strange way, it brings me some satisfaction to know that Mason was tormented. And also that he’s going to go to prison for at least five years. Or at least he’d better unless the prosecutors want me hounding their very existence.”
“You think Ken Coin will do the right thing?”
“I don’t think that man has ever done the right thing in his life.” Her lips curved into a private smile. “Maybe there’s a way to knock him off his perch.”
Charlie didn’t ask her to explain how that miracle would come about. Men like Coin always managed to weasel their way back on top. “I’m the person who pointed the finger at Daniel. I said that Zachariah called the second man his brother.”
“Don’t put that on yourself, Charlie. You were thirteen years old. And Ben was right. If Mason and Zachariah hadn’t been here in the first place, none of it would have happened.” She added, “Ken Coin is the one who took it upon himself to frame and murder Daniel. Don’t forget that.”
“Coin also stopped the investigation into finding the real shooter.” Charlie felt sick when she considered the unknowing part she had played in the cover up. “How hard would it be to figure out that the rich kid who was suddenly shipped off to military school in the middle of the night was involved?”
“You’re right. Zachariah would have flipped on Mason without inducement,” Sam said. “I want to care about Daniel, even about Mason, but I just can’t. I feel like it’s behind me now. Is that strange?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Charlie sat in Rusty’s cleared-out space on the couch. She tried to examine her emotions, to explore how she felt about everything Mason had told them. She realized that there was a feeling of lightness in her chest. She had expected to feel unburdened after telling Sam the truth about what happened in the woods, but it hadn’t come.
Until now.
“What about Dad?” Charlie asked. “He hid this from us.”
“He was trying to protect us. Like he always did.”
Charlie raised her eyebrows at her sister’s sudden conversion to Rusty’s side.
Sam said, “There is value in forgiveness.”
Charlie wasn’t so sure about that. She slumped back into the couch. She looked up at the ceiling. “I feel so tired. The way cons feel when they confess. They just go to sleep. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the middle of an interview and they start snoring.”
“It’s relief,” Sam told her. “Am I wrong for not feeling guilty that Daniel was a victim in this just as much as we were?”
“If you’re wrong, then so am I,” Charlie admitted. “I know Daniel didn’t deserve to die lik
e that. I can tell myself he’s a Culpepper and he would’ve eventually ended up behind bars or six feet under, but he should’ve been allowed the luxury of making his own choices.”
“Apparently, Dad got past it,” Sam said. “He spent most of his life working to exonerate guilty men, but he never cleared Daniel’s name.”
“‘Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility.’”
“Shakespeare?”
“Mr. Darcy to Bingley.”
“Of all people.”
“If it wasn’t his pride, it was his prejudice.”
Sam laughed, but then she turned serious. “I’m glad Dad didn’t tell us about Mason. I think I could handle it now, but back then?” She shook her head. “I know this sounds horrible, because the decision obviously haunted Dad, but when I consider where my mind was eight years after being shot, I think that making me come back here to testify would have killed me. How’s that for hyperbole?”
“Pretty accurate, if you include me.” Charlie knew that a trial would have accelerated her own downward trajectory. She would not have gone to law school. She would not have met Ben. Neither she nor Sam would be here talking to each other. She asked, “Why do I feel like I can handle it better now? What’s changed?”
“That is a complicated question with an equally complicated answer.”
Charlie laughed. This was Rusty’s real legacy. They were going to sit around quoting a dead man quoting dead people for the rest of their lives.
Sam said, “Dad must have known that we would find the confession in the safe.”
Charlie easily spotted one of Rusty’s high-stakes gambles. “I bet he thought he’d outlive Zachariah Culpepper’s execution date.”
“I bet he thought he’d figure out how to fix it on his own.”
Charlie thought they were probably both right. There was not a plate that Rusty would not try to spin. “When I was little, I thought Dad was driven to help people because he had this burning sense of justice. And then I got older and I thought it was because he loved the idea of himself as the scrappy, asshole hero fighting the good fight.”