Lenore said, “We’re going past the school.”
Charlie opened her eyes. Pikeville Middle School had been Pikeville Junior High when Charlie was a student. The building had sprawled over the years, hastily overbuilt to accommodate the twelve hundred students pulled in from the neighboring communities. The high school beside it was even larger, meant to house almost two thousand kids.
She saw the empty space where her car had been parked. Police tape cordoned off the lot. There were other cars that belonged to teachers scattered among the police cruisers, government sedans, ambulances, fire trucks, crime scene buses, the coroner’s van. A news helicopter was flying low over the gymnasium. The scene felt surreal, like a director would yell “cut” and everyone would take lunch.
Charlie said, “Mrs. Pinkman had to be sedated.”
“She’s a good woman. She doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does.”
Charlie nodded because she couldn’t talk past the glass in her throat. Judith Heller Pinkman had been a weird touchstone to Charlie over the years. They would see each other in the hall when Charlie finally went back to school. Miss Heller always smiled, but she didn’t push Charlie, didn’t force her to talk about the tragedy behind their connection. She kept her distance, which in retrospect, took a kind of discipline that most people didn’t possess.
Lenore asked, “I wonder how long the media attention will last?” She was looking up at the helicopter. “Two victims. That’s quaint compared to most mass shootings.”
“Girls don’t kill. At least, not like this.”
“‘I Don’t Like Mondays.’”
“In general, or do you mean the Boomtown Rats’ song?”
“The song.” Lenore said, “It’s based on a shooting. 1979. A sixteen-year-old girl took a sniper rifle to a playground. I forget how many she killed. When the cops asked her why she did it, she said, ‘I don’t like Mondays.’”
“Jesus,” Charlie whispered, hoping like hell that Kelly Wilson hadn’t been that callous when she had whispered whatever she’d said in the hallway.
And then Charlie wondered why she cared about Kelly Wilson, because the girl was a murderer.
Charlie was jarred by the sudden clarity of thought.
Take away all that had happened this morning—the fear, the deaths, the memories, the heartache—and Charlie was left with one simple truth: Kelly Wilson had murdered two people in cold blood.
Unbidden, Rusty’s voice intruded: So what?
Kelly still had a right to a trial. She still had a right to the best defense she could find. Charlie had said as much to the angry group of cops who had wanted to beat the girl to death, but now, sitting in the car with Lenore, Charlie wondered if she had come to the girl’s defense simply because no one else would.
Another personality flaw that had become a sore point in her marriage.
She reached into the back seat, this time for her court clothes. She found what Ben called her Amish shirt and what Charlie considered one step up from a burka. The Pikeville judges, all of them cranky old men, were an aggressively conservative lot. Female lawyers had to choose between wearing long skirts and chaste blouses or having every objection, every motion, every word out of their mouth overruled.
Lenore asked, “Are you okay?”
“No, not really.” Letting out the truth took some of the pressure off of her chest. Charlie had always told Lenore things that she would never admit to anyone else. Lenore had known Rusty for over fifty years. She was a black hole into which all of the Quinn family secrets disappeared. “My head is killing me. My nose is broken. I feel like I threw up a lung. I can’t even see to read, and none of that matters because I cheated on Ben last night.”
Lenore silently shifted gears as she pulled onto the two-lane highway.
Charlie said, “It was okay while it lasted. I mean, he got the job done.” She carefully peeled off her Duke T-shirt, trying not to bump her nose. “I woke up crying this morning. I couldn’t stop. I just lay in bed for half an hour staring up at the ceiling and wanting to kill myself. And then the phone rang.”
Lenore shifted again. They were leaving the Pikeville city limits. The wind off the mountains buffeted the compact sedan.
“I shouldn’t have picked up the stupid phone. I couldn’t even remember his name. He couldn’t remember mine. At least he pretended not to. It was embarrassing and sordid and now Ben knows. The GBI knows. Everyone in his office knows.”
Charlie said, “That’s why I was at the school this morning, to meet the guy because he took my phone by mistake and he called and …” She put on her court shirt, a starched button-up with ruffles down the front to assure the judges that she was taking this woman thing seriously. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Lenore shifted into sixth. “That you were lonely.”
Charlie laughed, though there was nothing funny about the truth. She watched her fingers as she buttoned the shirt. The buttons were suddenly too small. Or maybe it was that her hands were sweating. Or maybe it was that the tremble was back in her fingers, the vibration of bone that felt like a tuning fork had been struck against her chest.
“Baby,” Lenore said. “Let it out.”
Charlie shook her head. She didn’t want to let it out. She wanted to hold it back, to put all the horrible images in their box, shove it onto a shelf, and never open it ever again.
But then a teardrop fell.
Then another.
Then Charlie was crying, then she was sobbing so hard that she doubled over, her head in her hands, because the grief was too much to carry.
Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Miss Heller. Gamma. Sam. Ben.
The car slowed. The tires bumped against gravel as Lenore pulled to the side of the road. She rubbed Charlie’s back. “It’s okay, baby.”
It wasn’t okay. She wanted her husband. She wanted her useless asshole of a father. Where was Rusty? Why was he never there when she needed him?
“It’s okay.” Lenore kept rubbing Charlie’s back and Charlie kept crying because it was never going to be all right.
From the moment Charlie had heard those first gunshots in Huck’s room, the entirety of the most violent hour of
her life had snapped back into her waking memory. She kept hearing the same words over and over again. Keep running. Don’t look back. Into the woods. To Miss Heller’s house. Up the school hallway. Toward the gunshots. But she was too late. Charlie was always too fucking late.
Lenore stroked back Charlie’s hair. “Deep breaths, sweetheart.”
Charlie realized she was starting to hyperventilate. Her vision blurred. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She made herself breathe until her lungs could take in more than a teaspoonful of air at a time.
“Take your time,” Lenore said.
Charlie took a few more deep breaths. Her vision cleared, at least as much as it was going to. She took another series of breaths, holding them for a second, maybe two, to prove to herself that she could.
“Better?”
Charlie whispered, “Was that a panic attack?”
“Might still be one.”
“Help me up.” Charlie reached for Lenore’s hand. The blood rushed from her head. Instinctively, she touched her aching nose, and the pain intensified.
Lenore said, “You really got whacked, sweetheart.”
“You should see the other guy. Not a scratch on him.”
Lenore didn’t laugh.
Charlie said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Don’t be stupid. You know what came over you.”
“Yeah, well,” Charlie said, the two words she always said when she didn’t want to talk about something.
Instead of putting the car in gear, Lenore’s long fingers laced through Charlie’s smaller ones. For all her miniskirts, she still had man hands, wide with knobby knuckles and lately, age spots. In many ways, Charlie had gotten more of her mothering from Lenore than Gamma. It was Lenore who showed her how to wear make-up, who took Charlie to the store to buy her first box of tampons, who warned her to never ever trust a man to take care of birth control.
Charlie said, “Ben texted you to pick me up. That’s something, right?”
“It is.”
Charlie opened the glove box and found some tissue. She couldn’t blow her nose. She patted underneath. She squinted her eyes out the window, relieved that she could see things rather than shapes. Unfortunately, the view was the worst one possible. They were three hundred yards away from where Daniel Culpepper had been shot in his trailer.