Sam waved off the concern. She was unwilling to explain how she had always put her life into categories. The Sam who had sat across from the Culpepper brothers at the kitchen table was not the same Sam who had practiced law in Portland.
She said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve handled a criminal complaint.”
“It’s just an arraignment. It’ll come back to you.”
“I’ve never been on the other side.”
“Well, the first thing you’ll notice is the judge won’t be kissing your ass.”
“They didn’t in Portland. Even the cops had ‘fuck the man’ bumper stickers.”
Charlie shook her head. She had probably never been anywhere like it. “Usually, I have five minutes with my client before we’re in court. There’s not a lot to say. They generally did what they were charged with doing—buying drugs, selling drugs, using drugs, stealing shit or fencing shit so they can get more drugs. I look at their sheet and see if they qualify for rehab or some kind of diversion, and then I tell them what’s going to happen next. That’s what they usually want to know. Even if they’ve been in a courtroom a zillion times before, they want to know the sequence of events. What happens next? And then what happens? And then what? I tell them a hundred times, and each time they ask me again and again.”
Sam thought that sounded a hell of a lot like Charlie’s role during Sam’s early recovery. “Isn’t that tedious?”
“I always remind myself that they’re freaked the hell out, and knowing what comes next gives them some sense of control.” Charlie asked, “Why are you licensed in Georgia?”
Sam had wondered when this question would arise. “My firm has offices in Atlanta.”
“Come on. There’s a guy down here who handles the local stuff. You’re the micromanaging asshole partner who flies down every few months and looks over his shoulder.”
Sam laughed again. Charlie had more or less framed the dynamic. Laurens Van Loon was technically their point man in Atlanta, but Sam liked having the option to take over if needed. And she also liked walking into the bar exam and leaving with the certainty that she had passed without opening a book to study.
Charlie said, “The Georgia Bar Association has an online directory. I’m right above Rusty and he’s right above you.”
Sam thought about the three of their names appearing together. “Does Ben work with Daddy, too?”
“It’s not ‘too,’ because I don’t work with Dad, and no, he’s an ADA under Ken Coin.”
Sam ignored the inimical tone. “Doesn’t that cause conflicts?”
“There are enough criminals to go around.” Charlie pointed out the window. “They have good fish tacos here.”
Sam felt an arch in her eyebrow. There was a taco truck on the side of the road, the same sort of thing she’d see in New York or Los Angeles. The line stretched at least twenty people deep. Other trucks had even longer lines—Korean barbecue, Peri-Peri chicken, and something called the Fusion Obtrusion.
She asked, “Where are we?”
“We passed the line into Pikeville about a minute ago.”
Sam’s hand reflexively went to her heart. She hadn’t noticed the demarcation. She hadn’t felt the expected shift in her body, the dread, the feeling of despondency, that she had assumed would announce her homecoming.
“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?”
“I don’t have to if it’s a good day.” Charlie offered again, “I’ll drop you around back.”
“No, I’m not going to let them intimidate me.” Sam folded her collapsible cane and shoved it into her purse. “They’re not going to see me with this damn thing, either.”
Charlie slowly drove the car into the parking lot. There were sheriff’s cruisers and crime scene vans and black unmarked Town Cars in most of the spaces. She had to drive to the back, which put them over a dozen yards from the building.
Charlie turned off the engine. She asked, “Can you make the walk?”
“Yes.”
Charlie didn’t move. “I don’t want to be a jerk—”
“Be a jerk.”
“If you fall in front of those bitches, they’ll laugh at you. They might try to do something worse, and I’ll have to kill them.”
“Use my cane if it comes to that. It’s metal.” Sam opened the door. She grabbed the armrest and heaved herself out.
Charlie walked around the car, but not to help. To join Sam. To walk shoulder to shoulder toward the Culpepper girls.
The wind picked up as they crossed the parking lot. Sam experienced a self-reflective moment of her own ludicrousness. She could almost hear spurs jangling as they crossed the asphalt. The Culpepper girls narrowed their eyes. Charlie lifted her chin. They could be in a western, or a John Hughes movie if John Hughes had ever written about aggrieved, almost middle-aged women.
The police station was housed in a squat, sixties-style government complex with narrow windows and a Jetsons-like roof that pointed to the mountains. Charlie had taken the last parking spot, which was the farthest away. To reach the sidewalk they would have to traverse a roughly forty-feet walk up a slight incline. There was no ramp to the elevated building, only three wide concrete stairs that led to another fifteen feet of boxwood-lined walkway, and then, eventually, the glass front doors.
Sam could handle the distance. She would need Charlie’s help to ascend the stairs. Or the metal railing might be enough. The trick would be to lean on it while appearing to rest her hand. She would have to swing her left leg first, then pull her right, and then hope that the right could hold her unassisted weight as she somehow managed to swing her leg again.
She ran her fingers through her hair.
She felt the ridge of hard skin above her ear.
Her pace quickened.
The wind shifted back. Sam could hear the Culpepper girls’ voices. The taller of the two flicked her cigarette in Charlie and Sam’s direction. She raised her voice as she told her companion, “Looks like the bitch finally got the shit beat outta her.”
“Both eyes. Means she had to be tole twice,” the other cackled. “Next time you’uns go out, maybe you can fetch Precious over there a bowl of ice cream.”
Sam felt the muscles in her right leg start to quiver. She looped her hand through Charlie’s arm as if they were taking a walk in the park. “I had forgotten the sociolect of the native Appalachians.”
Charlie laughed. She placed her hand over Sam’s.
“What’s that?” the tall girl said. “What’d she call you?”
The glass doors banged open.
They all recoiled from the loud sound.
A menacing-looking young man stomped down the walkway. Not tall, but thickly muscled. Here was the jangling sound: the chain linking his wallet to his belt swung at his side. His wardrobe ticked all the stereotypical redneck boxes, from his sweat-stained ball cap to the ripped-off sleeves of his red-and-black flannel shirt to his torn, filthy blue jeans.
Danny Culpepper, Zachariah’s youngest son.
The spitting image of his father.
His boots made a heavy stomping sound as he jumped down the three stairs. His beady eyes homed in on Charlie. He made a gun sign with his hand and pretended to line her up in his sights.
Sam clenched her teeth. She tried not to relate the young man’s stocky build to Zachariah Culpepper’s. The hedonistic swagger. The way his thick lips smacked as he took a toothpick out of his mouth.
“Who we got here?” He stood in front of them, arms out to his sides, effectively blocking their way. “You got a familiar look about you, lady.”
Sam tightened her grip on Charlie’s arm. She would not show fear to this animal.
“I gotcha.” He snapped his fingers. “Seen your picture from my daddy’s trial, but your head was all swoll up with the bullet still in it.”
Sam dug her fingernails into Charlie’s arm. She begged her leg not to collapse out from under her, for her body not to shake, for her temper not to annihilate this disgusting man outside of the police station.
She said, “Get out of our way.”
He did not get out of their way. Instead, he started clapping his hands, stomping his foot. He sang, “Two Quinn gals standing in the lot. One got fucked, t’other got shot.”
The girls yapped with laughter.
Sam tried to walk around him, but Charlie grabbed onto her hand, effectively nailing them both in place. Charlie told him, “It’s hard to fuck a thirteen-year-old girl when your dick doesn’t work.”
The boy snorted. “Shit.”
“I’m sure your dad can get it up for his buddies in prison.”
The insult was obvious, but effective. Danny jammed his finger in Charlie’s face. “You think I won’t get my rifle and shoot off your ugly fucking head right here in
front of this police station?”
“Make sure you get close,” Sam said. “Culpeppers aren’t known for their aim.”
Silence cut a rift through the air.
Sam tapped her finger to the side of her head. “Lucky for me.”
Charlie gave a startled laugh. She kept laughing until Danny Culpepper brushed past her, his shoulder bumping Charlie’s.
“Fucking bitches.” He told the two girls, “Get the fuck in, you wanna ride home.”
Sam pulled at Charlie’s arm to get her moving. She was afraid that Charlie would not take the win, that she would say something vitriolic that brought Danny Culpepper back.
“Come on,” Sam whispered, tugging harder. “Enough.”
Only when Danny was behind the wheel of his truck did Charlie allow herself to be led away.
They walked arm-in-arm toward the stairs.
Sam had forgotten about the stairs.
She heard the rumble of Danny Culpepper’s diesel truck behind her. He kept racing the engine. Being run over would take less effort than mounting the stairs.
She told Charlie, “I don’t—”
“I’ve got you.” Charlie would not allow her to stop the forward motion. She slipped her arm under Sam’s bent elbow, offering a sort of shelf to lean on. “One, two—”
Sam swung her left leg, leaned into Charlie to move her right, then her left took over and she was up the stairs.
The show was wasted.
Tires screeched behind them. Smoke filled the air. The truck peeled off in a cacophonous blend of engine grumble and rap music.
Sam stopped to rest. The front door was another five feet away. She was almost breathless. “Why would they be here? Because of Dad?”
“If I were in charge of the investigation into who stabbed Dad, the first suspect I would pick up is Danny Culpepper.”
“But you don’t think the police brought him in for questioning?”
“I don’t think they’re seriously looking into it, either because they’ve got bigger fish to fry with this school shooting or they don’t care that somebody tried to kill Dad.” Charlie explained, “Generally, the police don’t let you drive yourself and your cousins to the station when you’re being questioned for attempted murder. They bust down your door and drag you in by your collar and do everything they can to scare the shit out of you so that you know you’re in trouble.”