“I’m going to go check on Charlie.” Lenore took a dollar bill out of her wallet, but Sam waved her off.
“Thank you,” Sam said, though she could only guess at what Lenore had done for her family. Sam had always been so wrapped up in the agony of her own recovery that she had not given much consideration to what life had been like for Rusty and Charlie. Lenore had obviously filled some of the void left by Gamma.
Sam heard the bell over the door clatter as Lenore left. The waitress made a nasty remark to the cook. Sam considered correcting her, cutting her in two with a sharp comment, but she lacked the energy to fight any more battles today.
She went to the bathroom. She stood at the sink and performed a perfunctory wash as she dreamed of the shower at the Four Seasons back in Atlanta. Sixteen hours had passed since Sam had left New York. She’d spent almost twice as many hours awake. Her head had the dull ache of a rotting tooth. Her body was uncooperative. She looked at her tired, ragged face in the mirror and saw her mother’s bitter disappointment.
Sam was giving up on Charlie.
There was no other option. Charlie would not speak to her, would not open her locked office door that Sam had knocked on repeatedly. This was not like the last time when Charlie had fled in the middle of the night, fearing for her safety. This was Sam begging, apologizing—for what, she did not know—only to be met with Charlie’s stark silence. Finally, unhappily, Sam felt herself relent to what she should have known all along.
Charlie did not need her.
Sam used some toilet paper to wipe her eyes. She did not know if she was crying from the uselessness of her journey or from exhaustion. Twenty years ago, the loss of her sister had felt like a mutual agreement. Sam had exploded. Charlie had exploded back. There was a fight, an actual, drag-down fight, and they had both agreed in the end to walk away.
This latest break came more like a theft. Sam had grasped something good, something that felt true, in her hands, and Charlie had wrenched it away.
Was it because of Zachariah Culpepper?
Sam had the letters in her purse. Some of them, at least, because there were many, many more back at Rusty’s. Sam had stood behind his desk opening envelope after envelope. They all held the same type of single, folded notebook paper, and had the same three words written on them with such a heavy hand that the pencil had embossed the paper:
YOU OWE ME.
One line, mailed hundreds of times, once a month to Rusty’s office.
Sam’s phone chirped.
She scrambled to find it in her purse. Not Charlie. Not Ben. There was a text message from the taxi company. The driver was outside.
Sam patted her eyes dry. She ran her fingers through her hair. She went back to the booth. She left a one-dollar bill on the table. She rolled her suitcase out to the waiting taxi. The man jumped out to help her load it into the trunk. Sam took her place in the back seat. She stared out the window as the man drove her through downtown Pikeville.
Stanislav was going to meet her at the hospital. Sam was reluctant to see her father, but she had a responsibility to Rusty, to Kelly Wilson, to turn over her notes, to share her thoughts and suspicions.
Lenore was right about the bullets. Kelly had shown remarkable firing accuracy in the hallway. She had managed to hit both Douglas Pinkman and Lucy Alexander from a considerable distance.
So why hadn’t Kelly been able to shoot Judith Pinkman when the woman came out of her room?
More mysteries for Rusty to solve.
Sam rolled down the window in the taxi. She looked up at the stars dotting the sky. There was so much light pollution in New York that Sam had forgotten what the night-time was supposed to look like. The moon was little more than a sliver of blue light. She took off her glasses. She felt the fresh air on her face. She let her eyelids close. She thought of Gamma looking at the stars. Had that magnificent, brilliant woman really craved a conventional life?
A housewife. A mother. A husband to take care of her; a vow to take care of him.
Sam’s enduring memory of her mother was one of Gamma always searching. For knowledge. For information. For solutions. Sam remembered one of the many, anonymous days she had come home from school to find Gamma working on a project. Charlie was at a friend’s. They were still living in the red-brick house. Sam had opened the back door. She dropped her bag on the kitchen floor. She kicked off her shoes. Gamma turned around. She had a marker in her hand. She had been writing on the large window that overlooked the backyard. Equations, Sam could see, though their meaning was elusive.
“I’m trying to figure out why my cake fell,” Gamma had explained. “That’s the problem with life, Sam. If you’re not rising, you’re falling.”
The taxi bumped Sam awake.
For a panicked second, she was unsure of her surroundings.
Sam put on her glasses. Almost half an hour had passed. They were already in Bridge Gap. Four-and five-story office buildings sprouted up above cafés. Signs advertised concerts in the park and family picnics. They passed the movie theater where Mary-Lynne Huckabee had gone with her friends and ended up being raped in the bathroom.
Such violent men in this county.
Sam put her hand over her purse. The letters inside gave off a palpable heat.
YOU OWE ME.
Did Sam care what Zachariah Culpepper felt he was owed? Almost three decades ago, Rusty had argued for the man’s life to be spared. If anything, Zachariah owed Rusty. And Sam. And Charlie. And Ben, if it came to that.
Sam unlocked her phone.
She pulled up a new email and typed in Ben’s address. Her fingers could not decide on a combination of letters to press for the subject line. Charlie’s name? A request for advice? An apology that she had not been able to fix what was broken?
That Charlie was broken was the only fact Sam saw with any clarity. Her sister had wanted Sam to come home for something. So that Sam would push Charlie into admitting something, giving away something, telling the truth about something that was bothering her. There was no other reason for the constant provocation, the lashing out, the pushing away.
Sam was familiar with the tactics. She had been so volatile after getting shot, infuriated by the weakness of her body, livid that her brain was not working as it had before, that there was not one person who was spared her temper. The steroids and antidepressants and anticonvulsants the doctors had prescribed only inflamed her emotions. Sam had felt furious most of the time, and the only thing that had made the anger lessen was to direct it outward.