The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter 1)

Sam had a momentary sense of relief, but then she realized what her sister was saying. “Why do you think that?”

“I got it off Facebook. I’ve friended one of the girls from the school.”

“Charlie.”

“It’s a fake account.” Charlie put the plate on the desk in front of Sam. “This girl, Mindy Zowada, she’s one of the bitches who was nasty in the yearbook. I prodded her a little, said that I’d heard some rumors that Kelly was loose in middle school. It took her about two seconds to spill that Kelly had an abortion when she was thirteen. Or, ‘a abortion’ as Mindy said.”

Sam leaned her head against her hand. This information shed new light on Kelly Wilson. If the girl had been pregnant before, then surely she recognized the symptoms now. So why hadn’t she told Sam? Was she playing dumb to gain Sam’s sympathy? Could anything she’d said be trusted?

“Hey,” Charlie said. “I tell you Kelly Wilson’s deep, dark secret and all I get is a blank stare?”

“Sorry.” Sam sat up in the chair. “Did you watch the video?”

Charlie didn’t answer, but she knew about the audio problem. “I’m not sure about the cell phone theory. The sound would have to come from somewhere else. There’s a lockdown procedure in case of an active shooter. The teachers do practice drills once a year. Everyone would’ve been in their rooms, doors shut. If someone made a call to 9-1-1, they wouldn’t pick up the conversation in the hallway.”

“Judith Pinkman didn’t follow procedure,” Sam said. “She ran into the hall after Lucy was shot.” Sam turned over her pad and kept it angled away from Charlie as she added this to her notes. “She didn’t run to her husband, either. She ran straight to Lucy.”

“It was clear that he was gone.” Charlie indicated the side of her face. Douglas Pinkman’s jaw had been shot off almost completely. There had been a bullet hole in his eye cavity.

Sam asked, “So, was Coin lying when he let us believe there was audio of Kelly asking about ‘the Baby’?”

“He’s a liar, and I’m given to believe that liars always lie.” Charlie seemed to think about it for a bit longer. “The cop could’ve told Coin. He was standing right there in the hallway when Kelly said whatever she said. It really affected him. He got angrier than before, and he was pretty fucking angry before.”

Sam finished her notes. “Makes sense.”

Charlie asked, “What about the murder weapon?”

“What about it?”

Charlie leaned back against a chair-shaped pile of junk. She picked at a string on her blue jeans, the same one she had picked at this morning.

Sam took a bite of the sandwich. She glanced out the dirty window. This day had been an exhaustively drawn-out one, and the sun had only now begun to set.

Sam pointed to the Coke. “Can I have some?”

Charlie unscrewed the cap. She set the bottle on top of Sam’s overturned notes. “Are you going to tell Dad about Huck and the gun?”

“Why does it matter to you?”

Charlie did the half-shrug thing.

Sam asked, “What’s going on between you and Ben?”

“Undetermined.”

Sam washed down the peanut butter with a mouthful of Coke. Now would be the time to tell Charlie about Anton. To explain that she knew how marriages worked, understood the petty grievances that could build up. She should tell Charlie that it didn’t matter. That if you loved someone, you should do everything you could to make it work because the person you adored more than anyone else in the world could complain of a sore throat one day and be dead the next.

Instead, she told her sister, “You need to make things right with Ben.”

“I wonder,” Charlie said, “how often you would speak if you eradicated the words ‘you need’ from your vocabulary.”

Sam was too tired to argue a losing point. She took another bite of sandwich. She chewed slowly. “I was looking for the picture of Gamma.”

“It’s on his desk at home.”

That fixed it. Sam was not going to the farmhouse.

“There’s this.” Charlie used her thumb and two fingers to edge a paperback out from under a file box, Jenga-style, without toppling the papers on top.

She handed the book to Sam.

Sam read the title aloud. “‘Weather Prediction by Numerical Process.’” The book appeared ancient but well-read. Sam thumbed through the pages. Pencil markings highlighted paragraphs. The text appeared to be as advertised; a guide to predicting the weather based on a specific algorithm that incorporated barometric pressure, temperature and humidity. “Whose calculus is this?”

“I was thirteen,” Charlie said.

“You weren’t a moron.” Sam corrected one of the equations. “At least, I didn’t think you were.”

“It was Gamma’s.”

Sam’s pen stopped.

“She ordered the book before she died. It came a month after,” Charlie said. “There’s an old weather tower behind the farm.”

“Is there really?” Sam had almost drowned in the stream underneath the tower because she was too weak to lift her head from the water.

“Anyway,” Charlie said. “Rusty and I were going to fix up the instruments on the weather tower to surprise Gamma. We thought she’d get a kick out of tracking the data. NOAA calls it being a citizen scientist. There are thousands of people around the country who track for them, but computers take care of the reporting now. I guess the book proves she was one step ahead of us. As usual.”

Sam flipped through the charts and arcane algorithms. “You know that this is physically unrealistic. The atmosphere has a delicate dynamical balance between the fields of mass and motion.”

“Yes, Samantha, everyone knows that.” Charlie explained, “Dad and I worked on the calculations together. We’d get the data from the weather equipment every morning, then plug it into the algorithm and predict the weather for the next day. Or at least, we tried to. It made us feel closer to her.”

“She would’ve liked that.”

“She would’ve been furious that I couldn’t do the calculus.”

Sam shrugged, because it was true.

She slowly paged through the book, not really paying attention to the words. She thought of Charlie when she was little, the way she would work at the kitchen table with her head bent, tongue between her lips, as she did her homework. She always hummed when she did her math. She whistled when she did art projects. Sometimes, she sang aloud lines that she read in books, but only if she thought she was alone. Sam would often hear her low, operatic warbling through the thin wall dividing their rooms. “‘Be worthy, love, and love will come!’” or “‘As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!’”

What had happened to that humming, whistling, singing Charlie?

Gamma’s death, Sam’s injury, had understandably quelled some of that joy, but Sam had seen that gleeful spark in Charlie when they were together that last time in New York. She was making jokes, teasing Ben, humming and singing and generally entertaining herself with her own noise. Her behavior

back then reminded Sam of the way she would sometimes find Fosco alone in a room, purring to himself for his own pleasure.

So who was this profoundly unhappy woman that her sister had turned into?

Charlie was picking at the string on her pants again. She sniffed. She touched her fingers to her nose. “Jesus Christ. I’m bleeding again.” She continued sniffing to no avail. “Do you have any tissue?”

Kelly Wilson had depleted Sam’s supply. She looked around Rusty’s office. She opened the desk drawers.

Charlie sniffed again. “Dad’s not going to have Kleenex.”

Sam found a roll of toilet paper in the bottom drawer. She handed it to Charlie, saying, “You should get your nose set before it’s too late. Weren’t you in a hospital all night?”

Charlie dabbed at the blood. “It really hurts.”

“Are you going to tell me who hit you?”

Charlie looked up from examining the bloody toilet paper. “In the scheme of things, it’s not a big deal, but somehow, it’s grown into this thing and I really don’t want to tell you.”

“Fair enough.” Sam glanced down into the drawer. There was an empty wire frame for files. Rusty had thrown a stack of letters on top of a dog-eared copy of a three-year-old volume of Georgia Court Rules and Procedures. Sam was about to close the drawer when she saw the return address on one of the envelopes.

Handwritten.

Angry, precise letters.

GEORGIA DIAGNOSTIC

& CLASSIFICATION PRISON

PO BOX 3877

JACKSON, GA 30233

Sam froze.

The Georgia D&C.

Death-row inmates were housed at the facility.

“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked. “Did you find something dead?”

Sam could not see the name above the address. Another envelope obscured the inmate’s personal information, except for one half of the first letter.

Sam could see a curved line, possibly part of an O, possibly a hastily written I, or perhaps the edge of a capital letter C.

The rest of the name was covered by a bulk mailer advertising Christmas wreaths.

“Please don’t tell me it’s porn.” Charlie walked around the desk. She stared down into the drawer.