The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,135
only if she thought she was alone. Sam would often hear her low, operatic warbling through the thin wall dividing their rooms. “‘Be worthy, love, and love will come!’” or “‘As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!’”
What had happened to that humming, whistling, singing Charlie?
Gamma’s death, Sam’s injury, had understandably quelled some of that joy, but Sam had seen that gleeful spark in Charlie when they were together that last time in New York. She was making jokes, teasing Ben, humming and singing and generally entertaining herself with her own noise. Her behavior back then reminded Sam of the way she would sometimes find Fosco alone in a room, purring to himself for his own pleasure.
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.”