The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,148

eyes. She listened. She waited. She prayed.

Sam pulled herself away.

She sat down on the bench.

Her eyes blurred with tears.

Her father was gone.

14

Sam woke up on Charlie’s couch. She stared up at the white ceiling. Her head had not stopped aching since she had left New York. Last night, she had been unable to navigate the stairs to the guest bedroom. She had barely been capable of making it up the two steps into the house. Her body had started shutting down, her brain unwilling or incapable of fighting off the stress and the exhaustion and the unexpected despondency after finding Rusty dead in his wheelchair.

Normally, at the end of particularly bad days, Sam negotiated with herself about whether or not to add more pharmaceuticals to her daily cocktail of Celebrex for joint paint, Neurontin to ward off seizures, Paroxetine to treat chronic pain, and Cyclobenzaprine for muscle spasms. Did she really need another anti-inflammatory? Could she sleep without another muscle relaxer? Was the pain bad enough for half of an OxyContin, all of a Percocet?

Last night, her body had ached so badly that she had to keep herself from taking everything.

Sam turned her head away from the ceiling. She looked at the photographs lining Charlie’s fireplace mantel. Sam had studied them more closely last night before the drugs had taken effect. Rusty sitting in a rocking chair, elbow propped, cigarette in hand, mouth open. Ben wearing a funny hat at a Devils basketball game. Various dogs that had likely passed away. Charlie and Ben standing together at the edge of what looked like a Caribbean beach. Suited up for skiing at the base of a snow-covered mountain. Standing beside a cable suspension for a bridge painted in the unmistakable red of the Golden Gate.

Proof that things had been better at some point in their lives.

Sam felt understandably drugged as she sat up on the couch. Her legs moved stiffly. Her head pounded. Her eyes would not focus. She stared at Charlie’s giant television that took up most of the wall. The shadow of her reflection stared back.

Rusty was dead.

Sam had always assumed she would get the news while she was in a meeting, or when she landed in a different city, in a different world. She had assumed his death would elicit a sense of sadness, but a temporary one, the same way she had felt when Charlie had told her Peter Alexander, her old high school boyfriend, had been killed by a car.

Sam had not thought that she would find Rusty herself. That she would be the one required to deliver the news to her sister. That she would find herself so paralyzed by grief that she sat on the bench beside Rusty for half an hour before she could alert the hospital staff.

She had cried for the father she had lost.

She had cried for the father she had never known.

Sam found her glasses on the coffee table. She stretched her legs, starting with her ankles, moving into her calves, then her quads. Her back arched. She pushed her hands out in front of her, raised her arms over her head. When she was ready, she stood up. She performed more stretches until her muscles warmed and her limbs moved with only a modicum of discomfort.

There was no rug on the hardwood floor. Sam doubted Charlie had a yoga mat. She sat cross-legged beside the couch. She stared out at the backyard. The sliding door was cracked open to let in the morning breeze. The rabbit hutch, Charlie’s long ago Brownie project, was still standing. Sam had been too overwhelmed with grief to comment on it last night, but she was glad to see that Charlie and Ben had built their home on the old lot where the red-brick house had been.

Not that Ben had stayed here last night. He’d gone upstairs for only a few minutes. Sam had heard the floorboards squeak as he walked into Charlie’s room. There was no screaming. There was no crying. Ben had sneaked down the stairs and left the house without telling Sam goodbye.

Sam straightened her spine. She rested the backs of her hands on her knees. Before she could close her eyes, she spotted Charlie pushing a wheelbarrow through the yard. Sam watched her sister spread hay in the rabbit hutch while stray cats mewed at her feet. Bags of food were in the wheelbarrow. Kibble, birdseed, peanuts. Judging by the way Sam’s eyes were watering, a dog had at some