So who was this profoundly unhappy woman that her sister had turned into?
Charlie was picking at the string on her pants again. She sniffed. She touched her fingers to her nose. “Jesus Christ. I’m bleeding again.” She continued sniffing to no avail. “Do you have any tissue?”
Kelly Wilson had depleted Sam’s supply. She looked around Rusty’s office. She opened the desk drawers.
Charlie sniffed again. “Dad’s not going to have Kleenex.”
Sam found a roll of toilet paper in the bottom drawer. She handed it to Charlie, saying, “You should get your nose set before it’s too late. Weren’t you in a hospital all night?”
Charlie dabbed at the blood. “It really hurts.”
“Are you going to tell me who hit you?”
Charlie looked up from examining the bloody toilet paper. “In the scheme of things, it’s not a big deal, but somehow, it’s grown into this thing and I really don’t want to tell you.”
“Fair enough.” Sam glanced down into the drawer. There was an empty wire frame for files. Rusty had thrown a stack of letters on top of a dog-eared copy of a three-year-old volume of Georgia Court Rules and Procedures. Sam was about to close the drawer when she saw the return address on one of the envelopes.
Handwritten.
Angry, precise letters.
GEORGIA DIAGNOSTIC
& CLASSIFICATION PRISON
PO BOX 3877
JACKSON, GA 30233
Sam froze.
The Georgia D&C.
Death-row inmates were housed at the facility.
“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked. “Did you find something dead?”
Sam could not see the name above the address. Another envelope obscured the inmate’s personal information, except for one half of the first letter.
Sam could see a curved line, possibly part of an O, possibly a hastily written I, or perhaps the edge of a capital letter C.
The rest of the name was covered by a bulk mailer advertising Christmas wreaths.
“Please don’t tell me it’s porn.” Charlie walked around the desk. She stared down into the drawer.
Sam stared, too.
Charlie said, “Everything in here is Dad’s private property. We have no right to look at it.”
Sam reached into the drawer with her pen.
She pushed away the brightly colored mailer.
CULPEPPER, ZACHARIAH INMATE #4252619
Charlie said, “It’s probably a death threat. You saw the Culpeppers today. Every time it looks like Zachariah might finally get an execution date—”
Sam picked up the letter. The weight was nothing, though she felt a heaviness in the bones of her fingers. The flap had already been ripped open.
Charlie said, “Sam, that’s private.”
Sam pulled out a single notebook page. Folded twice to fit inside the envelope. Blank on the back. Zachariah Culpepper had taken the time to tear off the tattered edges where the paper had been ripped from the metal spiral.
He had used those same fingers to shred apart Sam’s eyelids.
“Sam,” Charlie said. She was looking in the drawer. There were dozens more letters from the murderer. “We don’t have a right to read any of these.”
“What do you mean, ‘right’?” Sam demanded. Her throat choked around the word. “I have a right to know what the man who murdered my mother is telling my father.”
Charlie snatched away the letter.
She threw it back into the drawer and kicked it closed with her foot.
“That’s perfect.” Sam dropped the empty envelope onto the desk. She pulled at the drawer. It would not budge. Charlie had kicked the front panel past the frame. “Open it.”
“No,” Charlie said. “We don’t need to read anything he has to say.”
“‘We’,” Sam repeated, because she was not the lunatic whose idea it was to pick a fight with Danny Culpepper today. “Since when has it ever been ‘we’ where the Culpeppers are concerned?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Nothing. It’s pointless to discuss.” Sam reached down and pulled on the drawer again. Nothing moved. Her fingers might as well be feathers.
Charlie said, “I knew you were still pissed at me.”
“I’m not still pissed at you,” Sam countered. “I am newly pissed at you, because you are acting like a three-year-old.”
“Sure,” Charlie agreed. “Whatever you say, Sammy. I’m a three-year-old. Fine.”
“What the hell is going on with you?” Sam could feel her own anger feeding off Charlie’s. “I want to read the letters from the man who murdered our mother.”
“You know what they say,” Charlie said. “You’ve been in town one day and you already heard it from the bastard’s bastard himself: we lied. He’s innocent. We’re killing him because of some fucking legal bill that Dad would’ve never collected on anyway.”
Sam knew that she was right, but that did not change her mind. “Charlie, I’m tired. Can you please open the damn drawer?”
“Not until you tell me why you stayed today. Why you did the arraignment. Why you’re still here now.”
Sam felt as if she had an anvil on either shoulder. She leaned against the desk. “Okay, you want to know why I stuck around today? Because I cannot believe how much you have screwed up your life.’”
Charlie snorted so hard that blood dripped from her nose. She wiped it away with her fingers. “Because your life is so fucking perfect?”
“You have no idea what—”
“You put a thousand miles between us. You never return Dad’s phone calls, or Ben’s emails, or call any of us, for that matter. You apparently fly down to Atlanta all the time, less than two hours away, and you never—”
“You told me not to reach out to you. ‘Neither one of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.’ Those were your exact words.”
Charlie shook her head, which only served to amplify Sam’s irritation.
“Charlotte, you’ve been trying to pick this fight all day,” Sam said. “Stop shaking your head as if I’m some kind of madwoman.”
“You’re not a madwoman, you’re a fucking bitch.” Charlie crossed her arms. “I told you we shouldn’t look back. I didn’t say we shouldn’t look forward, or try to move forward together, like sisters are supposed to.”
“Excuse me if I could not read between the lines of your poorly constructed invective on the status of our failed relationship.”
“Well, you were shot in the head, so I’m sure there’s a hole where your invective processing used to be.”
Sam gripped together her hands. She was not going to explode. “I have the letter. Do you want me to send you a copy?”
“I want you to go to the copy store, duplex it for me, and then shove it up your tight Yankee ass.”
“Why would I duplex a single-page letter?”
“Jesus Christ!” Charlie punched her fist into the desktop. “You’ve been here less than a day, Sam. Why is my miserable, pathetic little life suddenly such a huge concern for you?”
“Those are not my adjectives.”
“You just pick at me.” Charlie jabbed Sam’s shoulder with her fingers. “Pick and pick like a fucking needle.”