The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,168

cheating with Charlie’s husband didn’t seem to get that she might not be wanted here. Then again, the entire legal community was treating this as a social occasion. Coin was obviously telling a story about Rusty, some kind of courtroom antic her father had pulled. Charlie watched Kaylee throw back her head and laugh. She tossed her long, blonde hair out of her eyes. She did that intimate thing that women do where they reach out and touch a man’s arm in a way that only the man’s wife could tell was inappropriate.

Charlie drank her wine, wishing it was acid she could throw in the woman’s face.

Her phone started to ring. She walked toward an empty corner, answering it right before voicemail picked up.

“It’s me,” Mason Huckabee said.

Charlie turned her back to the room, guilt manifesting itself in shame. “I told you not to call me.”

“I’m sorry. I had to talk to you.”

“No, you didn’t,” she told him. “Listen to me very carefully: What happened between us was the worst mistake of my life. I love my husband. I am not interested in you. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want anything to do with you, and if you call me again, I will slap you with a restraining order and make sure the state board of education knows that you’ve got a record against you for harassing a woman. Is that what you want?”

“No. Christ. Dial it back, okay? Please?” He sounded desperate. “Charlotte, I need to talk to you face to face. This is really important. Bigger than both of us. Bigger than what we did.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she assured him. “The biggest thing in my life is my relationship with my husband, and I am not going to let you get in the way of that.”

“Charlotte, if you could—”

Charlie ended the call before he could spread any more of his bullshit.

She dropped her phone back into her purse. She neatened her hair. She finished her glass of wine. She got another from the bar. Half of it was gone before she felt the shaking stop. Thank God Mason had only called on the phone. If he’d come to the funeral, if the town had seen them together, if Ben had seen them, Charlie would have melted into a pool of self-disgust and hate.

“Charlotte.” Newton Palmer, another shiftless lawyer in a room full of them, gave her a practiced look of condolence. “How are you doing?”

Charlie finished her wine to drown out the curses. Newton was one of those prototypical old white men who ran most of the small towns in America. Ben had once said that all they had to do was wait for racist, sexist old bastards like Newton to die. What he hadn’t realized was that they kept making new ones.

Newton said, “I saw your father at a Rotary breakfast last week. Virile as ever, but he said the most humorous thing.”

“That’s Dad. Humorous.” Charlie pretended to listen to the man’s stupid Rotary story as she looked for her sister.

Sam was trapped, too, by Mrs. Duncan, her eighth-grade English teacher. Sam was nodding and smiling, but Charlie could not imagine her sister having much patience for idle conversation. Sam’s sense of otherness was more pronounced in the crowd. Not because of her disabilities, but because she was clearly not of this place, or maybe not even of this time. The dark glasses. The regal tilt to her head. The way Sam dressed did not exactly help her blend in, even at a funeral. She was dressed in all black, but the wrong black. The kind of black that was only available to the one percent. Standing next to her ancient teacher, Sam looked like a silk bag of money by the proverbial sow’s ear.

“It’s like watching your mother.” Lenore was wearing a tight black dress and heels that were higher than Charlie’s. She smiled at Newton. “Mr. Palmer.”

Newton blanched. “Charlotte, if you’ll excuse me.”

Lenore ignored him, so Charlie did, too. She pressed her shoulder into Lenore’s as they both watched Sam. Mrs. Duncan was still talking her ear off.

Lenore said, “Harriet wanted so badly to connect with people, but she never quite solved the equation.”

“She connected with Dad.”

“Your father was an aberration. They were two singular people who functioned best when they were together.”

Charlie leaned closer into her arm. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I couldn’t resist taunting these hateful bastards one last time. Listen—” Lenore took a deep breath, as if