Mason said, “I was going to take the fall for your mom. I said that out in the woods. Five times, at least. You both heard me. I never wanted any of it to happen.” His voice cracked again. “When your mom was shot, it was like I was numb, like, I couldn’t believe it. I just felt sick, and shaky, and I wanted to do something but I was scared of Zach. You know what he’s like. We were all scared of him.”
Charlie felt rage pumping through every artery in her body. “Don’t you we any of this, you pathetic prick. There was no we in the kitchen except me and Sam. We were forced out of our house. We were led into the woods at gunpoint. We were terrified for our lives. You shot my sister in the head. You buried her alive. You let that monster chase me through the woods, rape me, beat me, take away everything—everything—from me. That was you, Mason. That was all you.”
“I tried—”
“Shut up.” Charlie clenched her fists as she stood over him. “You might tell yourself that you tried to stop it, but you didn’t. You let it happen. You helped it happen. You pulled that trigger.” She stopped, trying to catch her breath. “Why? Why did you do it? What did we ever do to you?”
“His sister,” Sam said. Her voice had a deathly kind of calmness. “That’s what he meant about getting his revenge. Mason and Zachariah showed up the same day Kevin Mitchell walked on the rape charge. We assumed it was about Culpepper’s legal bills when it was really about Mason Huckabee being mad enough to kill but too scared to do it with his own hands.”
Charlie’s tongue turned into lead. She had to lean against the wall again to keep from falling down.
Mason said, “I was the one who found my sister. She was in the barn. Her neck was—” He shook his head. “She was tortured by what that bastard did to her. She couldn’t get out of bed. She just cried all the time. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that useless, that helpless. I wanted someone to be punished. Someone had to be punished.”
“So you came looking for my father?” Charlie felt the now-familiar vibration in her hands. It spread up her arms, into her chest. “You came here to kill my father, and you—”
“I’m sorry.” Mason started crying again. “I’m sorry.”
Charlie wanted to kick him. “Don’t you fucking cry. You shot my sister in the head.”
“It was an accident.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Charlie yelled. “You shot her! You buried her alive!”
Sam’s arm went out. She blocked Charlie from standing over Mason, beating him the same way Ben had.
Ben.
Charlie looked at her husband. He was sitting on the floor, back to the wall. His glasses were blood-streaked, crooked on his face. He kept flexing his hands, opening the wounds, encouraging more blood to flow.
Sam asked, “Why was Rusty writing checks to Zachariah Culpepper’s son?”
Charlie was so shocked she could not make her mouth form a question.
Sam explained, “The check numbers. Twelve checks a year for twenty-eight years, four months, would be a total of three hundred forty checks.”
“That’s the most recent check number,” Charlie remembered.
“Right,” Sam confirmed. “And then there’s the balance. You started at one million, correct?”
She was asking Mason.
Slowly, reluctantly, Mason nodded.
Sam said, “If you start at one million and subtract two thousand dollars a month for twenty-eight years and change, that leaves you with approximately three hundred twenty thousand dollars.” She told Mason, “Everything began to click into place when you told us that your parents had money. Back in 1989, no one else in Pikeville had that kind of wealth and especially that kind of reach. They traded your freedom for one million dollars. That would’ve been a lot back then. More than Culpepper would ever see in his abbreviated lifetime. He bargained away his dead brother for his unborn son.”
Mason looked up at her. He slowly nodded.
Sam asked, “What was my father’s part in this? Did he set up the deal between you and Culpepper?”
“No.”
“Then, what?” Sam demanded.
Mason rolled to his side. He pushed himself up. He sat with his back toward the door. The masking tape Rusty had used on the window made a sort of lightning bolt above his head. “I didn’t know about any of it.”
Ben glowered at Mason. “You’re gonna rot in hell for dragging Rusty into your bullshit.”
“It wasn’t Rusty. Not at first.” Mason winced as he touched his jaw. “My parents set up the arrangement. The night it happened, I walked home. Six miles. Zach took my shoes, my jeans, because they had his blood on them. I was half-naked, covered in blood, by the time I got home. I confessed to both of them. I wanted to go to the police. They wouldn’t let me. I found out later they sent a lawyer to talk to Zach.”
“Rusty,” Ben said.
“No, someone from Atlanta. I don’t know who.” Mason worked his jaw. The joint popped. “They left me out of it. I had no choice.”
Sam said, “You were a seventeen-year-old man. I’m certain you had a car. You could’ve gone to the police on your own, or waited until you turned eighteen.”
“I wanted to,” Mason insisted. “They locked me in my room. Four guys came. They drove me to a military academy up north. I joined the Marines as soon as I was old enough.” He wiped blood out of his eye. “I was in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia. I kept volunteering. I wanted to earn it, you know? I wanted to use my life to help other people. To redeem myself.”
Charlie bit her lip so hard that she felt the skin start to open. There was no redemption, no matter how many countries he had pinned on his stupid world map.
Mason said, “I put in my twenty years. I moved back home. I went to school. I thought it was important to give back here, in this town, to these people.”
“You bastard.” Ben stood up. His hands were still clenched. He walked down the hall. Charlie was afraid that he was going to continue out the back door, but he stopped at Mason’s iPhone. He slammed his heel into the glass, breaking it into tiny pieces.
Ben lifted his shoe. Glass clinked down from the sole. He said, “Daniel Culpepper was murdered because of you.”
“I know,” Mason said, but he was wrong.
Charlie was the one who unleashed Ken Coin on Daniel.
She told Mason, “He called you brother.”
Mason shook his head. “He called a lot of people brother. It’s just something guys do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ben said. “Neither one of them should have been here in the first place. Whatever happened after that is on them.”
“It is,” Mason agreed. “It’s on me. All of it’s on me.”
Sam asked, “How did your clothes and your gun end up at Daniel’s trailer?”
Again, Mason shook his head, but it wasn’t hard to come up with the answer. Ken Coin had planted the evidence. He had framed an innocent man and let a guilty one go free.
Mason said, “My mom told me about the arrangement after my dad died. I was stationed in Turkey, trying to do right by people. I came home for the funeral. She was worried something would happen and Zach would renege on his part of the deal.”