“All right.” Delia spoke as she wrote. “Was Mr. Huckabee with you when you ran toward the gunshots?”
“He was behind me.” Charlie remembered sprinting past Kelly, leaping over her extended legs. This time, her memory showed Huck kneeling beside the girl. That made sense. He would’ve seen the gun in Kelly’s hand. He would’ve been trying to talk the teenager into giving him the revolver the entire time that Charlie was watching the little girl die.
She asked Delia, “Can you tell me her name? The little girl?”
“Lucy Alexander. Her mother teaches at the school.”
Charlie saw the girl’s features come into focus. Her pink coat. Her matching backpack. Was her name monogrammed on the inside of her jacket or was that a detail that Charlie was making up?
Delia said, “We haven’t released her name to the press, but her parents have been notified.”
“She didn’t suffer. At least, I don’t think so. She didn’t know she was …” Once again, Charlie shook her head, aware that she was filling in blanks with things that she wanted to be true.
Delia said, “So, you ran toward the gunshots, in the direction of the front office.” She turned to a fresh page in her pad. “Mr. Huckabee was behind you. Who else did you see?”
“I don’t remember seeing Kelly Wilson. I mean, I did remember later that I saw her, when I heard the cops shouting, but when I was running, well, before that, Huck caught up with me, he passed me at the corner, and then I passed him …” Charlie chewed her lip again. This meandering narrative was the kind of thing that drove her crazy when she talked to her clients. “I ran past Kelly. I thought she was a kid. A student.” Kelly Wilson had been both of those things. Even at eighteen, she was tiny, the kind of girl who would always look like a kid, even when she was a grown woman with children of her own.
“I’m getting fuzzy on the timeline,” Delia admitted.
“I’m sorry.” Charlie tried to explain, “It screws with your head when you’re in the middle of this kind of thing. Time turns from a straight line into a sphere, and it’s not until later that you can hold it in your hand and look at all the different sides, and you think, Oh, now I remember—this happened, then this happened, then … It’s only after the fact that you can pull it back into a straight line that makes sense.”
Ben was studying her. She knew what he was thinking because she knew the inside of his head better than she did her own. With those few sentences, Charlie had revealed more about her feelings when Gamma and Sam had been shot than she had alluded to in sixteen years of marriage.
Charlie kept her focus on Delia Wofford. “What I’m saying is that I didn’t remember seeing Kelly the first time until I saw her the second time. Like déjà vu, but real.”
“I get it.” Delia nodded as she resumed writing. “Go on.”
Charlie had to think to find her place. “Kelly hadn’t moved between the two times I saw her. Her back was to the wall. Her legs were straight out in front of her. The first time, when I was running up the hall, I remember glancing at her to make sure she was okay. To make sure she wasn’t a victim. I didn’t see the gun that time. She was dressed in black, like a Goth girl, but I didn’t look at her hands.” Charlie stopped to take a deep breath. “The violence seemed to be confined to the end of the hall, outside the front office. Mr. Pinkman was on the floor. He looked dead. I should’ve checked his pulse, but I went to the little girl, to Lucy. Miss Heller was there.”
Delia’s pen stopped. “Heller?”
“What?”
They stared at each other, both clearly confused.
Ben broke the silence. “Heller is Judith Pinkman’s maiden name.”
Charlie shook her aching head. Maybe she should’ve gone to the hospital after all.
“All right.” Delia turned to another fresh page. “What was Mrs. Pinkman doing when you saw her at the end of the hallway?”
Again, Charlie had to think back to find her place. “She screamed,” Charlie remembered. “Not then, but before. I’m sorry. I left that out. Before, when I was in Huck’s room, after he pulled me behind the filing cabinet, we heard a woman screaming. I don’t know if it was before or after the bell rang, but she screamed, ‘Help us.’”
“Help us,” Delia confirmed.
“Yes,” Charlie said. That was why she had started running, because she knew the excruciating desperation of waiting for someone, anyone, who could help make the world right again.
“And so?” Delia said. “Mrs. Pinkman was where in the hallway?”
“She was kneeling beside Lucy, holding her hand. She was praying. I held Lucy’s other hand. I looked into her eyes. She was still alive then. Her eyes were moving, her mouth opened.” Charlie tried to swallow down the grief. She had spent the last few hours reliving the girl’s death, but saying it out loud was too much. “Miss Heller said another prayer. Lucy’s hand let go of mine and …”
“She passed?” Delia provided.
Charlie squeezed her hand shut. All these years later, she could still recall what it felt like to hold Sam’s trembling fingers inside her own.
She wasn’t sure which was harder to witness: a sudden, shocking death or the slow, deliberate way that Lucy Alexander had faded into nothing.
Each existed in its own realm of the unbearable.
Delia asked, “Do you need a moment?”
Charlie let her silence answer the question. She stared past Ben’s shoulder into the mirror. For the first time since they’d locked her in the room, she studied her reflection. She’d dressed down on purpose to go to the school, not wanting to send the wrong message. Jeans, sneakers, a too-big, long-sleeved T-shirt. The faded Duke Devil logo was spattered with blood. Charlie’s face wasn’t any better. The red discoloration around her right eye was turning into a proper bruise. She pulled the wads of tissue out of her nose. The skin tore like a scab. Tears welled into her eyes.
Delia said, “Take your time.”
Charlie didn’t want to take her time. “I heard Huck telling the cop to put down his gun. He had a shotgun.” She remembered, “He tripped before. The cop with the shotgun. He stepped in some blood and …” She shook her head. She could still see the panic on the man’s face, the breathless sense of duty. He had been terrified, but like Charlie, he had run toward the danger instead of away.
“I want you to look at these photographs.” Delia rifled through her bag again. She spread three photos on the table. Headshots. Three white men. Three crew cuts. Three thick necks. If they hadn’t been cops, they would’ve been mobsters.
Charlie pointed to the one in the middle. “That’s who had the shotgun.”
Delia said, “Officer Carlson.”
Ed Carlson. He’d been a year ahead of Charlie at school. “Carlson was pointing the shotgun at Huck. Huck told him to take it easy, or something like that.” She pointed to another photo. The name below said RODGERS, but Charlie had never met him. She said, “Rodgers was there, too. He had a pistol.”
“A pistol?”
“A Glock 19,” Charlie said.