That was Rusty’s problem now. Exactly the kind of thorny, moral and legal issue that got him out of bed in the morning.
Exactly the kind of law that Charlie had never wanted to practice.
“Come on.” Ben walked ahead of her. He had a long, loping stride because he always put too much weight on the balls of his feet.
Was Kelly Wilson being abused? That would be Rusty’s first line of inquiry. Was there some sort of mitigating circumstance that would keep her off death row? She had been held back at least one year in school. Did that indicate a low IQ? Diminished capacity? Was Kelly Wilson capable of telling right from wrong? Could she participate in her own defense, as required by law?
Ben pushed open the exit door.
Was Kelly Wilson a bad seed? Was the explanation here the only explanation that would never make sense? Would Delia Wofford tell Lucy Alexander’s parents and Mrs. Pinkman that the reason they lost their loved ones was because Kelly Wilson was bad?
“Charlie,” Ben said. He was holding open the door. His iPhone was back in his hand.
Charlie shielded her eyes as she walked outside. The sunlight was as sharp as a blade. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Here.” Ben handed her a pair of sunglasses. They belonged to her. He must have gotten them out of her car.
Charlie took the glasses but couldn’t put them on her tender nose. She opened her mouth for air. The sudden heat was too much. She leaned down, hand braced on her knee.
“Are you going to be sick?”
“No,” she said, then “maybe,” then she threw up just enough to make a splatter.
Ben didn’t step back. He managed to gather her hair away from her face without touching her skin. Charlie retched two more times before he asked, “All right?”
“Maybe.” Charlie opened her mouth. She waited for more. A line of spit came out, but nothing else. “Okay.”
He let her hair drop back around her shoulders. “The paramedic told me that you have a concussion.”
Charlie couldn’t lift her head, but she told him, “There’s nothing they can do about it.”
“They can monitor you for symptoms like nausea and blurred vision and headaches and forgetting names and not tracking when you’re asked a simple question.”
“They wouldn’t know the names I was forgetting,” she said. “I don’t want to spend the night in a hospital.”
“Stay at the HP.” The higgledy-piggledy. Sam’s name for the meandering farmhouse had stuck. Ben said, “Rusty can watch you.”
“So I die from second-hand smoke instead of a brain aneurysm?”
“That’s not funny.”
Head still down, Charlie reached back for the wall. The feel of the solid concrete block gave her enough steadiness to risk standing up straight. She cupped her hand to her eyes. She remembered cupping her hand to the window of the front office this morning.
Ben handed her the water bottle. He had already taken the top off for her. She took a few slow sips and tried not to read too much into his thoughtfulness. Her husband was thoughtful with everybody.
She asked, “Where was Mrs. Jenkins when the shooting started?”
“In the file room.”
“Did she see anything?”
“Rusty will find out everything during discovery.”
“Everything,” Charlie repeated. In the coming months, Ken Coin would be required by law to turn over any material in the investigation that could be reasonably interpreted as evidence. Coin’s idea of “reasonable” was as fixed as a spider’s web.
She asked Ben, “Is Mrs. Pinkman okay?”
He didn’t bring up her “Heller” slip because that wasn’t his way. “She’s at the hospital. They had to sedate her.”
Charlie should visit her, but she knew that she would find an excuse not to. “You let me think Kelly Wilson was sixteen years old.”
“I thought you could figure it out by holding a sphere in your hand and pulling apart time.”
Charlie laughed. “That was some next-level bullshit I laid down in there.”
“There’s some out here, too.”
Charlie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She smelled dried blood again. Like everything else, she remembered the smell from before. She remembered the dark flecks falling like ash from her hair. She remembered that even after she’d bathed, even after she’d scrubbed herself raw, the odor of death had lingered.
She said, “You called me this morning.”
Ben shrugged like it didn’t matter.
Charlie poured the rest of the water onto her hands to clean them. “Have you talked to your mom and your sisters? They’ll be worried.”
“We talked.” He did that shrug again. “I should go back in.”
Charlie waited, but he didn’t go back in. She grappled for a reason to make him stay. “How’s Barkzilla?”
“Barky.” Ben took the empty bottle. He screwed on the cap. He dropped it back into his jacket pocket. “How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”
“Quiet.”
He tucked his chin into his chest, returning to silence. This was nothing new. Her normally articulate husband had not articulated much to her in the past nine months.
But he wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t nodding her along, urging her to go. He wasn’t telling her that the only reason he wasn’t asking her if she was okay was because she would say that she was okay even if she wasn’t. Especially if she wasn’t.
She asked, “Why did you call me this morning?”
Ben groaned. He leaned his head back against the wall.
Charlie leaned her head back against the wall, too.
She studied the sharp line of his jaw. This was her type—a lanky, laid-back nerd who could quote Monty Python as easily as the United States constitution. He read graphic novels. He drank a glass of milk every night before he went to bed. He loved potato salad, and Lord of the Rings, and model trains. He preferred fantasy football to the real kind. He could not put on weight if you force-fed him butter. He was six feet tall when he stood up straight, which didn’t happen often.
She loved him so much that her heart literally hurt at the thought of never holding him again.
Ben said, “Peggy had this friend when she was fourteen. Her name was Violet.”
Peggy was the bossiest of his three older sisters.
“She was killed in a car crash. She was on her bicycle. We went to the funeral. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, taking me. I was too yo
ung to see that kind of thing. It was open casket. Carla held me up so I could see her.” His throat worked. “I, like, lost my shit. Mom had to take me out into the parking lot. It gave me nightmares. I thought that was the worst thing that I would ever see. A dead kid. A dead little girl. But she was cleaned up. You couldn’t see what had happened, that the car had hit her in the back. That she had bled to death, but inside. Not like the girl today. Not like what I saw at the school.”
There were tears in his eyes. Each word out of his mouth broke another piece of Charlie’s heart. She had to clench her fists to keep from reaching out to him.
Ben said, “Murder is murder. I can deal with that. Dealers. Gangbangers. Even domestic violence. But a kid? A little girl?” He kept shaking his head. “She didn’t look like she was sleeping, did she?”
“No.”
“She looked like she had been murdered. Like someone had fired a gun at her throat and the bullet ripped it open and she died a horrible, violent death.”
Charlie looked up into the sun because she didn’t want to see Lucy Alexander dying all over again.
Ben said, “The guy’s a war hero. Did you know that?”
He was talking about Huck.
“He saved a platoon or something, but he won’t talk about it because he’s like fucking Batman or something.” Ben pushed himself away from the wall, away from Charlie. “And this morning, he took a bullet in his arm. To save a murderer, whom he kept from getting murdered. And then he stood up for the guy who almost killed him. He lied in a sworn statement to keep another guy out of trouble. He’s so fucking handsome, right?” Ben was angry now, but his voice was low, shrunken by the humiliation that came courtesy of his bitch wife. “A guy like that, you see him walking down the street, you don’t know whether you want to fuck him or have a beer with him.”
Charlie looked down at the ground. They knew she had done both.
“Lenore’s here.”
Rusty’s secretary had pulled up to the gate in her red Mazda.
Charlie said, “Ben, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. An awful, awful mistake.”
“Did you let him on top?”
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Lenore tapped the horn. She rolled down her window and waved. Charlie waved back, her hand splayed, trying to let Lenore know that she needed a minute.