Her reflection looked as dubious as Lenore.
Charlie went back to her office. She dumped her purse on the floor to find her keys. Then she had to figure out how to shove everything back in. Then she realized that Lenore had already unlocked the door because Lenore was always two steps ahead of her. Charlie dropped her purse on the couch beside the door. She turned on the lights. Her desk. Her computer. Her chair. It felt good to be among familiar things. The office wasn’t her home, but she spent more time here, especially since Ben had moved out, so it was the next best thing.
She crammed down one of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Lenore had left on the desk. She skimmed her inbox on the computer and answered the emails asking if she was okay. Charlie should’ve listened to her voicemail, called her clients, and checked with the court to see when her hearings would be rescheduled, but she was too jittery to concentrate.
Huck had all but admitted to taking the murder weapon from the scene.
Why?
Actually, the better question was how?
A revolver was not a small thing, and considering it was the murder weapon, the police would have been searching for it almost immediately. How did Huck sneak it out of the building? In his pants? Did he slip it into an unwitting paramedic’s bag? Charlie supposed the Pikeville police had given Huck a wide berth. You didn’t frisk an innocent civilian you’d accidentally shot. Huck had also erased the video that Charlie had taken, proving he was firmly on their side—inasmuch as Mr. Huckleberry believed in sides.
But agents Delia Wofford and Louis Avery had no such loyalty to Mr. Huckabee. No wonder they had drilled him for four hours while the bullet wound in his arm slowly seeped. They probably suspected he’d taken the weapon, just like they suspected the local cops were idiots for letting him walk out the door without doing a thorough search.
Lying to an FBI agent carried up to five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. Add on top of that the destruction of evidence, lying to hinder an investigation and the possibility of Huck being charged as an accomplice after the fact to double homicide, and he would never work in a school, or probably anywhere else, ever again.
All of which made things tricky for Charlie. Unless she wanted to destroy the man’s life, she would need to find a way to tell her father about the gun without implicating Huck. She knew what Rusty would do if he smelled blood. Huck was the kind of handsome, clean-cut do-gooder that juries ate up with a spoon. His war record, his benevolent choice of profession, wouldn’t matter if he testified from the stand in an orange prison jumpsuit.
She looked at the clock over the couch: 2:16 PM.
This day was like a fucking never-ending sphere.
Charlie opened a new Word document on her computer. She should type out everything she remembered and give it to Rusty. He had likely heard Kelly Wilson’s story by now. Charlie could at least tell him what the prosecution had heard.
Her hands hovered over the keyboard, but she didn’t type. She watched the blinking cursor. She didn’t know where to start. Obviously, from the beginning, but the beginning was the hard part.
Charlie’s daily routine was normally set in granite. She got up at five. She fed the various animals. She went for a run. She showered. She ate breakfast. She went to work. She went home. With Ben gone, her nights were filled with reading case files, watching mindless TV, and clock-watching for a non-demeaning time to go to bed.
Today hadn’t been like that, and Rusty would need to know the reason why.
The least Charlie could do was find out Huck’s first name.
She opened the browser on her computer. She searched for “Pikeville Middle School faculty.”
The little rainbow wheel started spinning. Eventually, the screen showed the message: WEBSITE NOT RESPONDING.
She tried to get around the landing page, typing in different departments, teachers’ names, even the school newspaper. They all brought back the same message. The Pikeville Department of Education servers didn’t have the capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of curiosity-seekers trying to access their website.
She clicked open a fresh search page. She typed “Huckabee Pikeville.”
“Crap,” Charlie mumbled. Google had asked, Do you mean huckleberry?
The first site listed was a wiki entry saying that the huckleberry was the state fruit of Idaho. Then there were several stories about school boards trying to ban Huckleberry Finn. At the bottom of the page was an Urban Dictionary entry that claimed “I’m your huckleberry” was nineteenth-century slang for “I’m your man.”
Charlie tapped her finger on the mouse. She should look at CNN or MSNBC or even Fox, but she couldn’t bring herself to type in the news sites. An entire hour had passed without the slideshow coming back into her head. She didn’t want to invite the flood of bad memories.
Besides, this was Rusty’s case. Charlie was likely going to be called as a witness for the prosecution. She would corroborate Huck’s story, but that would only give the jury a small piece of the puzzle.
If anyone knew more, it was Mrs. Pinkman. Her room was directly across from where Kelly had most likely stood when she began shooting. Judith Pinkman would’ve been first on the scene. She would have found her husband dead. Lucy dying.
“Please, help us!”
Charlie could still hear the woman’s screams echoing in her ears. The four shots had already been fired. Huck had dragged Charlie behind the filing cabinet. He was calling the police when she heard two more shots.
Charlie was astonished by the sudden vividness of the memory.
Six gunshots. Six bullets in the revolver.
Otherwise Judith Pinkman would’ve been shot in the face when she opened the door to her classroom.
Charlie looked up at the ceiling. The thought had teased out an old image that she did not want to see.
She had to get out of this office.
She picked up the plastic bowl with the second PB&J and went to find Ava Wilson. Charlie knew that Lenore had already offered Ava food—she had that typically southern impulse to feed everyone she met—just as Charlie was sure Ava was too stressed out to eat, but she didn’t want the woman to be alone for too long.
In the reception area, Charlie found a familiar scene: Ava Wilson on the couch in front of the television, the sound up too loud.
She asked Ava, “Would you like my other sandwich?”
Ava did not answer. Charlie was about to repeat the question when she realized that Ava’s eyes were closed. Her lips were slightly parted, a soft whistle passing between a gap where one of her teeth was missing.