“Ben loves that place, but I can’t stand it.” Charlie pointed to a building with a distinct Alpine design to match the restaurant’s name: the Biergarten.
The chalet was not the only new addition. Downtown was unrecognizable. Two-and three-story brick buildings had loft apartments upstairs and downstairs shops selling clothing, antiques, olive oils and artisanal cheeses.
Sam asked, “Who in Pikeville would pay that much for cheese?”
“Weekenders, at first. Then people started moving up here from Atlanta. Retired baby boomers. Wealthy tech types. A handful of gay people. We’re not a dry county anymore. They passed a liquor ordinance five or six years ago.”
“What did the old guard think about that?”
“The county commissioners wanted the tax base and the good restaurants that come with alcohol sales. The religious nutjobs were furious. You could buy meth on any corner, but you had to drive to Ducktown for a watered-down beer.” Charlie stopped for a red light. “I guess the nutjobs were right, though. Liquor changed everything. That’s when the building boom really took off. Mexicans come up from Atlanta for the work. Tour buses pour into the Apple Shack all day. The marina rents boats and hosts corporate parties. The Ritz Carlton is building a golf resort. Whether you think that’s good or bad depends on why you live here in the first place.”
“Who broke your nose?”
“I’ve been told it’s not really broken.” Charlie took a right without engaging the turn signal.
“Are you not answering because you don’t want me to know or are you not answering because you want to annoy me?”
“That is a complicated question with an equally complicated answer.”
“I’m going to jump out of this car if you start quoting Dad.”
Charlie slowed the car.
“I was teasing.”
“I know.” She pulled over to the side of the road. She put the gear in park. She turned to Sam. “Look, I’m glad you came down here. I know it was for a difficult and awful reason, but it’s good to see you, and I’m happy that we’ve been able to talk.”
“However?”
“Don’t do this for me.”
Sam studied her sister’s bruised eyes, the shift in her nose where the cartilage had surely fractured. “What does Kelly Wilson’s arraignment have to do with you?”
“She’s an excuse,” Charlie said. “I don’t need you to take care of me, Sam.”
“Who broke your nose?”
Charlie rolled her eyes in frustration. She said, “Do you remember when you were trying to help me learn the blind pass?”
“How could I forget?” Sam asked. “You were an awful student. You never listened to me. You kept hesitating, over and over.”
“I kept looking back,” Charlie said. “You thought that was the problem, that I couldn’t run forward because I was looking back.”
Sam heard echoes from the letter that Charlie had sent all those years ago—
Neither one of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.
Charlie held up her hand. “I’m left-handed.”
“So is Rusty,” Sam said. “Though handedness is believed to be polygenic; there is a less than twenty-five percent chance that you inherited from Dad one of the forty loci that—”
Charlie made a loud snoring sound until Sam stopped speaking. She said, “My point is, you were teaching me to take the pass with my right hand.”
“But you were the second handoff. That’s the rule: the baton moves right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand.”
“But you never thought to ask me what the problem was.”
“You never thought to tell me what the problem was.” Sam didn’t understand the novelty of the excuse. “You would’ve failed in first or third. You’re an inveterate false starter. You’re terrible on bends. You had the speed to be a finisher, but you were always too much of a frontrunner.”
“You mean I only ever ran as hard as I needed to in order to get there first.”
“Yes, that is the definition of ‘frontrunner.’” Sam felt herself becoming exasperated. “The second handoff played to all of your strengths: you’re an explosive sprinter, you were the fastest runner on the team. All you needed was the handoff, and with enough practice, even a chimpanzee could master the twenty-meter takeover. I don’t understand your issue. You wanted to win, didn’t you?”
Charlie gripped the steering wheel. Her nose made that whistling sound again as she breathed. “I think I’m trying to pick a fight with you.”
“It’s working.”
“I’m sorry.” Charlie turned back in her seat. She put the car in gear and pulled onto the road.
Sam asked, “Is this over?”
“Yes.”
“Are we fighting?”
“No.”
Sam tried to silently play back the conversation, picking apart the various points at which she had been provoked. “No one made you join the track team.”
“I know. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was a gazillion years ago.”
Sam was still irked. “This isn’t about the track team, is it?”
“Fuck.” Charlie slowed the car to a stop in the middle of the road. “Culpeppers.”
Sam felt sick even before her brain had time to process exactly what the word meant.
Or who, to be specific.
“That’s Danny Culpepper’s truck,” Charlie said. “Zachariah’s youngest. They named him after Daniel.”
Daniel Culpepper.
The man who had shot her.
The man who had buried her alive.
All of the air left Sam’s lungs.
She could not prevent her eyes from following the line of Charlie’s gaze. A gaudy black pickup truck with gold trim and spinning wheels took up the only two handicapped spaces in front of the police station. The word “Danny” was written in mirror gold script across the tinted back window. The cab was the extended kind that could accommodate four people. Two young women were leaning against the closed doors. They each held cigarettes between their stubby fingers. Red nail polish. Red lipstick. Dark eyeshadow. Heavy eyeliner. Bleach-blonde hair. Tight black pants. Tighter shirts. High heels. Sinister. Hateful. Aggressively ignorant.
Charlie said, “I can drop you behind the building.”
Sam wanted her to. If there was a list of reasons she had left Pikeville, the Culpeppers were at the top. “They still think we lied? That there was some grand conspiracy to frame them both?”
“Of course they do. They even set up a Facebook page.”
Sam had yet to disengage from life in Pikeville when Charlie was finishing high school. She had been provided with monthly updates about the treacherous Culpepper girls, their family’s firmly held belief that Daniel had been home the night of the attacks, that Zachariah was working in Alabama, and that the Quinn girls, one of them a liar, the other mentally incapacitated, had framed them because Zachariah owed Rusty twenty thousand dollars in legal bills.
Sam asked, “Are those the same girls from high school? They look too young.”
“Daughters or nieces, but they’re all the same.”
Sam shuddered just to be this near to them. “How can you stand to see them every day?”