“Go to the front door,” Charlie said. She did not want to go through the kitchen.
“‘Goat fucker,’” Sam said, reading the graffiti. “The suspect knew him.”
Charlie laughed.
Sam did not. “I never thought I would come back here.”
“You don’t have to.” Charlie offered, “I could go inside and look for the photo.”
The set to Sam’s jaw said she was determined. “I want us to find it together.”
Ben looped the truck around to the front porch. The grass was mostly weeds. A kid from down the street was supposed to keep it mowed, but Charlie was ankle-deep in dandelions when she stepped out of the truck.
Sam held her hand again. They had not touched each other this much when they were children.
Except for that day.
Sam said, “I remember that I was sad about losing the red-brick house, but I also remember that it was a good day.” She turned to Charlie. “Do you remember that?”
Charlie nodded. Gamma had wafted in and out of irritations, but everything had felt like it was starting to smooth out. “This could have been our home.”
Ben said, “That’s all kids want, right? To have a safe place to live.” He seemed to remember himself. “I mean, safe before or—”
“It’s all right,” Charlie told him.
Ben tossed his suit jacket back into the truck. He grabbed his laptop from behind the seat. “I’ll go inside and work on the TV.”
Sam placed the USB drive in his hands. She told him, “Make sure I get that back so I can have it destroyed.”
Ben gave her a salute.
Charlie watched him bolt up the stairs. He reached above the edge of the door frame for the key and let himself in.
Even from the yard, Charlie could smell the familiar odor of Rusty’s unfiltered Camels.
Sam looked up at the farmhouse. “Still higgledy-piggledy.”
“I guess we’ll sell it.”
“Did Dad buy it?”
“The bachelor farmer was a bit of a peeping Tom. And a foot fetishist. And he stole a lot of lingerie.” Charlie laughed at Sam’s expression. “He had a lot of legal bills when he died. The family deeded the house to Rusty.”
Sam asked, “Why didn’t Dad sell it years ago and rebuild the red-brick house?”
Charlie knew why. There had been a lot of bills from Sam’s recovery. The doctors, the hospitals, the therapists, the rehab. Charlie was familiar with the crushing weight of an unexpected illness. Not much time or energy was left for rebuilding anything.
She told Sam, “I think it was mostly inertia. You know Rusty wasn’t one for change.”
“You can have the house. I mean—not that you asked, but I don’t need the money. I just want Mom’s photo. Or a copy of it. Of course I’ll make one for you. Or for me. You can have the original if—”
“We’ll figure it out.” Charlie tried to smile. Sam was never rattled, but she was clearly rattled now. “I can do this for you, you know.”
“Let’s go.” Sam nodded toward the house.
Charlie helped her up the stairs, though Sam did not ask. Ben had left the door open. She could hear him opening more windows to help air the place out.
They would be better off sealing it, like Chernobyl.
The bulk of Charlie’s inheritance filled the front room. Old newspapers. Magazines. Copies of the Georgia Law Review dating back to the 1990s. File boxes from old cases. A prosthetic leg Rusty had taken as payment from a drunk everyone knew as Skip.
“The boxes,” Sam said, because some of Gamma’s thrift store finds had never been unpacked. She peeled back the dry tape on a cardboard box marked EVERYTHING $1 EA and took a purple Church Lady shirt off the top.
Ben watched from behind the TV set. He said, “There’s another box in the den. You could probably make a fortune from that stuff on eBay.” He looked at Charlie. “No Star Trek. Just Star Wars.”
Charlie couldn’t believe she had managed to disappoint her husband even as far back as when she was thirteen. “Gamma picked everything out, not me.”
His head ducked behind the set. He was trying to hook up the components that Rusty had unplugged, claiming all of the blinking lights were going to give him seizures.
Sam said, “Okay, I think I’m ready.”
Charlie did not know what she was ready for until she saw Sam looking into the long hallway that ran down the length of the house. The back door with its opaque window was at the far end. The kitchen was at the top. This was where Daniel Culpepper had stood when he had watched Gamma leave the bathroom.
Charlie could still remember her own trek down the hallway in search of the toilet, the way she had screamed “Fudge” for her mother’s benefit.
There were five doors, none of them laid out in any way that made sense. One door led to the creepy basement. One led to the chiffarobe. Another led to the pantry. Yet another led to the bathroom. One of the middle doors inexplicably led to the tiny downstairs bedroom where the bachelor farmer had died.
Rusty had turned this room into his office.
Sam went first. From behind, she seemed impervious. Her back was straight. Her head was held high. Even the slight hesitation in her gait was gone. Her only tell was that she kept her fingers touching the wall as if she needed to make sure she had access to something steady.
“The back door.” Sam pointed toward the door. The frosted glass was cracked. Rusty had attempted to repair it with yellow masking tape. “You have no idea how many times I’ve woken up over the years dreaming about running out that door instead of walking into the kitchen.”
Charlie said nothing, though she’d had the same kinds of dreams herself.
“All right.” Sam wrapped her hand around the doorknob to Rusty’s office. She opened her mouth and inhaled deeply, like a swimmer about to put her head under water.
The door opened.
More of the same, but draped with the clinging odor of stale nicotine. The papers, the boxes, the walls, even the air had a yellow tint. Charlie tried to open one of the windows but paint had sealed it shut. She realized that her wrist felt sprained from banging on her father’s casket. She was not having a good day with inanimate objects.
“I don’t see it,” Sam said, anxious. She was at Rusty’s desk. She pushed some papers around, stacked others together. “It’s not here.” She looked at the walls, but they were adorned with drawings from Charlie’s school projects. Only Rusty would tape on his wall an eighth grader’s rendering of the anatomy of a dung beetle.
“There’s this one,” Charlie said, spotting th
e flimsy black metal frame that had held the photo for almost fifty years. “Shit, Dad.” Rusty had let the sun bleach out their mother’s face. Only the dark holes of her eyes and mouth were evident under the black mop of her hair.
“It’s ruined.” Sam sounded devastated.
Charlie felt sick with guilt. “I should’ve taken this from him a long time ago and had it preserved, or whatever you’re supposed to do. I’m so sorry, Sam.”
Sam shook her head. She dropped the picture back on the file. “That’s not the photo he meant. Remember, he said there was a different one that he kept from us.” She started moving around papers again, checking behind manuscript boxes and bound depositions. She seemed distressed. The picture was obviously important on its own, but this was also one of the last things that Rusty had spoken to Sam about.
Charlie took off her shoes so she didn’t catch the heels on something and break her neck. The next year of her life was going to be wasted going through all of this shit. She might as well start now.
She hefted away some boxes from a shaky folding table. A row of unaccompanied red checkers spilled onto the floor. They managed to hit a pristine piece of bare hardwood. The sound was like jacks scattering.
She asked Sam, “Do you think he’d keep it in his filing cabinets?”
Sam looked wary. There were five wooden filing cabinets, all with heavy bar locks on them. “Can we find the keys in this mess?”
“He probably had them on him when they took him to the hospital.”
“Which means they’re in evidence.”
“And we don’t know anyone at the DA’s office who could help us because my husband apparently told them all to fuck off.” She thought of Kaylee Collins, and silently added, Maybe not all of them.
She asked Sam, “Dad was sure that you and I have never seen this picture before?”
“I told you this already. He said that he kept it to himself. That it captured the moment that he and Gamma fell in love.”
Charlie felt the poignancy of her father’s remark. His language had always been so annoyingly baroque that she had sometimes lost sight of the meaning. “He did love her,” she told Sam.
“I know,” she said. “I let myself forget that he lost her, too.”