She told Roland, “You were part of this. Don’t think I’ll forget that.”
Roland gave another labored sigh.
“I hate men who sigh instead of telling me to fuck off.” Charlie told Flora, “Get up.” When Flora didn’t stand, Charlie pulled her up. She practically dragged the girl to the door, telling Coin, “This is shitty, even for you.”
“She ain’t gonna be free for long,” Coin said. “Only a matter of time before she screws up.”
“Unbelievable,” Charlie muttered. She kept pulling Flora down the hallway. She punched the buzzer so the desk sergeant would open the door to the lobby.
“I don’t understand,” Flora said. “What happened?”
“You were never under arrest. There’s no way a judge would’ve signed off on their flimsy evidence, so they swooped down and gave you a twenty-person escort to the police station. They were hoping you would be scared enough to confess.”
“Confess to what?” Flora put on her innocent babe-in-the-woods look. “Miss Quinn, I didn’t do anything.”
Charlie punched the buzzer again. “Shut your lying mouth.”
The door buzzed back before it slowly swung open.
Maude Faulkner was in the waiting room. She jumped up from one of the hard plastic chairs. “What the hell is going on?”
Charlie banged open the exit door. She was done talking to anyone connected to these vile people. It was one thing to be lied to by a client. That happened on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Flora Faulkner had not just lied. She had manipulated Charlie. She had played off the memory of Charlie’s dead mother—a wound that was still so raw that Charlie felt tears in her eyes whenever she remembered that last day, that last breath her mother had taken. Charlie had been sitting inches away from the shotgun. If she thought about it hard enough, she could still feel the hot splash of blood from the buckshot ripping her mother in two.
And Flora had used that tragedy not as a lever, but as a crude weapon. A cudgel. A baseball bat. A Molotov cocktail thrown straight into Charlie’s heart.
She spotted her Subaru at the back of the parking lot. Her hands shook as she searched for her keys. The hot and cold was back, the ringing in her ears. She didn’t care about the why of it all. She just wanted to extricate herself from this awful situation. She had wasted enough time on their crazy bullshit. She had more important things to worry about, like that her entire life was about to change and she had to go to the drugstore to get the test and then she had to tell her husband and he might not be as excited about the news as she was.
Charlie stopped five feet away from the parking lot.
Her burning desire to leave fizzled at the sight of a sapphire blue Porsche Boxter parked in one of the handicapped slots.
The car had to cost at least fifty grand, roughly half of Charlie’s student loans. Black interior. Navy blue top. Sparkling in the overhead parking lot lights. And the overhead lights were on because it was dark outside and instead of being home with Ben, telling him how enormously wonderful their life was going to be in nine months, Charlie was outside the police station fighting the urge to strangle a fifteen-year-old monster.
She turned around.
Flora was right behind her.
Maude knew enough to keep her distance.
Charlie said, “Nice car.”
“It is, isn’t it?” She had the beatific smile of a Chuckie doll. “Am I allowed to open my mouth now?”
“Is there something you want to say?”
“It’s privileged, right? Strictly between you and me?”
Charlie crossed her arms. “Sure.”
“First,” Flora said, “thanks for getting me out of there.”
“Good luck keeping it that way, you stupid child.” Charlie saw the familiar flash of anger in the girl’s eyes. “You heard the man in there. They’re coming after you, Flora. You’ll be forty before you get out of prison. Your life will be over.”
Maude grunted. “Shit, wait ’till you’re fifty!”
“This isn’t a joke,” Charlie said. “Flora is in serious trouble. They found over five hundred grams of meth in the trunk of the Porsche.”
Maude pursed her lips. “That’s some weight.”
Charlie wanted to slap the woman. “The district attorney and the police are not going to drop this case. They’re coming after her for trafficking.” She jammed her finger into Flora’s face. “And you’re not smart enough to get yourself out of this mess.”
“Good thing I’ve got a lawyer who can be smart for me.”
“Not this lawyer,” Charlie countered. “I’m done with you.”
“Miss Quinn, you can’t abandon me.” There was a lilting tone in the girl’s voice that had worked like a charm a few hours ago. “I need your help.”
“Help with what?” Charlie remembered the way Flora had crossed her arms in the interrogation room. The girl’s fingers had laid across the three bruised dots on her bicep almost exactly. “You did that to yourself, didn’t you? The bruises on your arm?”
Flora looked down at her bicep. She answered the question by pressing her fingers deep into the bruises. They matched exactly. “I thought you might need a visual aid to push you off the fence. Sometimes the sad I-Lost-My-Mama stories only get half the work done.”
Charlie thought about what the girl had said about putting her head in her mother’s lap and tasted bile in the back of her mouth. “How’d you get the bruise on your hip?”
Flora said nothing, but Maude provided, “She snagged her hip on one of the tables at the diner. What’d she tell you?”
“She told me you were abusing her.”
Maude recoiled. “I ain’t never fucked a girl in my life.”
Charlie wondered at a woman more concerned with being called a homosexual than a pedophile. “She told me you were beating her. She blamed you for the bruises.”
“Florabama Faulkner.” Maude stuck her hands on her hips. “Why would you tell her that?”
Flora shrugged. “People fight harder when they think you’re helpless.”
“I would’ve fought for you!” Charlie shouted. “If you’d been honest about your problem to begin with, I still would’ve helped you.”
“Not like you did in there,” Flora said. “You would’a been trying to cut a deal, not helping me take a walk. You got your code, like you said—you don’t wanna suffer the ramifications of being a dirty lawyer like your paw.”
Charlie let the dig at her father slide. “Is that why you told me about your mother dying? To manipulate me? You know my mother was murdered. What happened to my sister. They were real people. They meant something to me. And all you saw about that tragedy was a way to use me. Is my life all just a game to you?”
Flora looked down. She snubbed her sneaker on the concrete walk. “I’m sorry, Miss Quinn. I know I should’ve been honest. I promise I won’t—”
“You were playing the Pattersons, too, weren’t you? You were stringing Mark along, letting him think you’d sell him the apartments if he let you move into his house?”
“He wasn’t going to hold onto his land that long. And I’ve been working with the bank to get that house. I figured I could charge them rent if it came to that.” She shrugged. “You might think I’m a bad person, but I’m not in the business of kicking people out of their homes.”
Charlie wasn’t interested in land deals or rental agreements. She wanted Flora to say the real reason she’d pulled Charlie into this mess. “Your grandfather said he was going to rehab. He’s the executor of the trust. If he sobered up, you couldn’t bribe him with meth anymore.”
“Son of a bitch,” Maude hissed. “Stupid bastard left for the clinic an hour ago.”
Flora said, “That don’t matter, Meemaw. The thing about Paw is, there’s always something he wants.” She gave Charlie a pointed look. “Everybody has a price. Whether it’s meth or cookies or a state approved highway access point, all you gotta do is dangle it in front of ’em and they’
ll jump as high as you say.”
Charlie felt the implied dig. Her price had been exactly zero.
“I tried to do this easy,” Flora said. “I was being honest when I said I didn’t want to get Meemaw and Paw into trouble. I need the money now. Not in two years. Not while I’m waiting for Paw to fall off the wagon. This town is about to take off. More people are coming up from Atlanta. We’ll get liquor sales approved any day now. The economy’s on the upswing. Right now is the time to buy.”
Charlie said, “You’re pretty convincing—except for the part where you turned into a drug dealer.”
“Three million dollars,” Flora told her. “That’s the amount of money that was in the trust after the lawyers got paid. It’s down to less than nine hundred grand, last time I checked. Putting it into land is the only investment that makes sense. Land never drops in value.”
Charlie said, “Your mother wouldn’t have wanted this.”
“You didn’t know my mama.”
“No, but I know what mothers are like,” Charlie said. “My mother loved me with her last breath, Flora. Her last breath. You were with your mom when she died, same as I was. I know she was the same way with you. She wanted you to do good things.”
“She wanted me to survive,” Flora countered. “That’s what she told me with her last breath, right before that semi near about took off her head. She was yelling at me, telling me to get out of this shitty place and make something of myself no matter who I had to step over to get there. You can’t do that with nine hundred grand.”