“And now?”
“I think he knew that bad people did bad things, but he still believed that they deserved a chance.”
“That’s a very romanticized way to look at the world.”
“I was talking about Dad, not me.” Charlie felt sad that they were talking about Rusty in the past tense. “He was always searching for his unicorn.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” Sam said. “I think he found one.”
19
Charlie stood with her nose a few inches from the television screen. She scrutinized the right-hand corner of the paused school security footage for so long that her eyes started blurring in and out. She took a step back. She blinked to clear her vision. She studied the entirety of the image. The long, empty hallway. The vivid blue lockers rendered navy by the ancient camera. The lens was angled down, capturing the hallway roughly to the middle point. Her eyes went back to the corner. There was a door, possibly closed, a millimeter out of frame, but clearly there. The light from the window cast a shadow onto something that was reaching into the hallway.
Charlie asked, “Is it Kelly’s shadow?” She pointed past the TV, as if they were both standing in the hallway rather than Rusty’s living room. “She would’ve been standing here, right?”
Sam kept her own counsel. She had her head turned, using her good eye to view the image. “What do you see?”
“This.” Charlie pointed to the shadow reaching into the hall. “It’s a blurry, hairy line, like a spider’s leg.”
“There’s something strange about it.” Sam narrowed her eyes, clearly seeing something that Charlie could not. “Don’t you think there’s something strange?”
“I can try to make it bigger.” Charlie went to Ben’s laptop, but then remembered she had no idea what she was doing. She hit random keys. There had to be a way to do this.
Sam said, “Let’s get Ben to help.”
“I don’t want Ben to help.” Charlie leaned down to read the menu icons. “We left it in a really good—”
“Ben!” Sam called.
“Don’t you have a flight to catch?”
“The plane won’t leave without me.” Sam used her hands to frame the upper-right section of the footage. “It’s not right. The angle doesn’t work.”
“What angle?” Ben asked.
“This.” Charlie pointed to the shadow. “It looks like a spider’s leg to me, but Sherlock Holmes over here sees a hound in the Baskerville.”
“More like a Study in Scarlet,” Sam said, but still did not explain herself. “Ben, can you make this upper-right corner larger?”
Ben performed some magic on the laptop and the corner of the frame was isolated, then enlarged to fill the television. Because her husband was not a tech wizard in a Jason Bourne movie, the image did not sharpen, but became more blurred.
“Oh, I see it.” Ben pointed to the furry spider’s leg. “I thought it was a shadow, but—”
“There wouldn’t be one,” Sam said. “The lights are on in the hallway. They’re on in the classroom. Absent a third light source, shadows would be cast backward from the door, not to the front.”
“Okay, yeah.” Ben started to nod. “I thought it was coming out of the open door, but it looks like it’s pointing in.”
“Correct,” Sam said. She had always been good at puzzles. This time, she had apparently figured out the solution before Charlie even understood there was a puzzle to be solved.
“I can’t see anything,” Charlie admitted. “Can’t you just tell me?”
Sam said, “I think it’s better if you both independently validate my suspicion.”
Charlie wanted to throw her out the window like a sack of bullshit. “Do you really think this is the time for the Socratic method?”
“Sherlock or Socrates. Pick one and stay with it.” Sam asked Ben, “Can you correct for color?”
“I think so.” Ben opened another program on his laptop, a purloined copy of Photoshop he’d used to insert Captain Kirk into their Christmas cards two years ago. “Let me see if I remember how to do this.”
Charlie crossed her arms, making sure Sam knew she was displeased, but Sam was watching Ben too closely to take notice.
There was more tapping, more tracking, and then the colors on the screen were saturated, almost too much. The blacks were up so far that gray spots bubbled through the midnight fields.
Charlie suggested, “Use the blue on the lockers as a color guide. They’re close to the same blue as Dad’s funeral suit.”
Ben opened the color chart. He clicked on random squares.
“That’s it,” Charlie said. “That’s the blue.”
“I can clean it up more.” He sharpened the pixels. Smoothed out the edges. Finally, he zoomed in as close as he could without distorting the image into nothing.
“Holy shit,” Charlie said. She finally got it.
Not a leg, but an arm.
Not one arm, but two.
One black. One red.
A sexual cannibal. A slash of red. A venomous bite.
They had not found Rusty’s unicorn.
They had found a black widow.
Charlie sat in Ben’s truck, hands sweaty on the wheel. She looked at the time on the radio: 5:06 PM. Rusty’s funeral would be winding down by now. The drunks at Shady Ray’s would be spent of their stories. The stragglers, the sightseers, the hypocrites, would be whispering gossip into their phones, posting snipey tributes on Facebook.
Rusty Quinn was a good lawyer, but—
Charlie filled in the blank with the things that only the people who really knew Rusty understood:
He had loved his daughters.
He had adored his wife.
He had tried to do the right thing.
He had found his mythical creature.
A harpy, Sam had said, referring to the half-woman, half-bird from Roman and Greek mythology.
Charlie was sticking with her spider analogy because it better fit the situation. Kelly Wilson had gotten caught up in a carefully spun web.
The heat in the truck was on, but Charlie felt herself shudder from the cold. She reached down for the keys. She turned off the engine. The truck shook as it came to a stop.
She angled the rear-view mirror to look at her face. Sam had helped her cover the bruises. She had done a good job. No one would guess that Charlie had been punched in the face two days ago.
Sam had almost punched her again.
She didn’t want Charlie to do this. Ben certainly did not.
Charlie was doing it anyway.
She smoothed out her funeral dress as she got out of the truck. She put on her heels, balancing against the steering wheel. She found her cell phone on the dash. She closed the door quietly, listening for the click of the latch.
She had parked away from the farmhouse, hiding the truck around a bend. Charlie walked carefully, avoiding the pocks in the red clay. The house came into view. Any similarities to the HP were slight. Colorful plants and evergreens filled the front yard. The clapboard was painted bright white, the trim a stark black. The roof looked new. An American flag hung from a swiveling bracket by the front door.
Charlie didn’t go to the front. She rounded the side of the house. She could see the old back porch, the floor freshly painted robin’s egg blue. The kitchen curtains were closed. Not yellow with red strawberries anymore, but white damask.
There were four steps up to the porch. Charlie stared at them, trying not to think of the steps at the HP, the way she had run up them two at a time all of those years ago, kicked off her shoes, peeled off her socks and found Gamma cursing in the kitchen.
Fudge.
Her heel caught on a knotty hole in the first step. She held onto the sturdy railing. She blinked at the porch light, which even in the early dusk was bright white, like a flame. Sweat had dripped into her eyes. Charlie used her fingers to wipe it away. The welcome mat had a lattice design on it, rubber and coir fibers that reminded her of the grass t
hat grew in the fields behind the farmhouse. A cursive P was in the center of the design.
Charlie raised her hand.
Her sprained wrist still felt tender.
She rapped three times on the door.
In the house, she heard a chair scrape back. Light footsteps across the floor. A woman’s voice asked, “Who is it?”
Charlie did not answer.
There were no locks that clicked, no chain that slid back. The door opened. An older woman stood in the kitchen. Hair more white than blonde, pinned in a loose ponytail. Still pretty. Her eyes went wide when she saw Charlie. Her mouth opened. Her hand fluttered to her chest, as if she had been hit by an arrow.
Charlie said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call first.”
Judith Pinkman pressed together her chapped lips. Her lined face looked windburned from crying. Her eyes were swollen. She cleared her throat. “Come in,” she told Charlie. “Come in.”