at Ben, then Sam, then Charlie. Finally, he answered, “I hired Zach to help me take care of Rusty. I gave him everything I’d saved up for college. I knew that he owed Rusty money, but—” He stopped, his voice cracking. “You guys were supposed to be at track practice. We were gonna take Rusty, drive him down the access road, and get rid of him. Zach would get three grand on top of wiping away his legal bills. I would get my revenge …” He looked at Sam again, then Charlie. “I tried to stop Zach when your dad wasn’t here, but he—”
“You don’t have to tell us what he did.” Sam’s words were so strained that they were almost inaudible in the open space.
Mason covered his face again. He started to cry.
Charlie listened to his dry sobs and wanted to punch him in the throat.
Mason said, “I was going to take the fall for your mom. I said that out in the woods. Five times, at least. You both heard me. I never wanted any of it to happen.” His voice cracked again. “When your mom was shot, it was like I was numb, like, I couldn’t believe it. I just felt sick, and shaky, and I wanted to do something but I was scared of Zach. You know what he’s like. We were all scared of him.”
Charlie felt rage pumping through every artery in her body. “Don’t you we any of this, you pathetic prick. There was no we in the kitchen except me and Sam. We were forced out of our house. We were led into the woods at gunpoint. We were terrified for our lives. You shot my sister in the head. You buried her alive. You let that monster chase me through the woods, rape me, beat me, take away everything—everything—from me. That was you, Mason. That was all you.”
“I tried—”
“Shut up.” Charlie clenched her fists as she stood over him. “You might tell yourself that you tried to stop it, but you didn’t. You let it happen. You helped it happen. You pulled that trigger.” She stopped, trying to catch her breath. “Why? Why did you do it? What did we ever do to you?”
“His sister,” Sam said. Her voice had a deathly kind of calmness. “That’s what he meant about getting his revenge. Mason and Zachariah showed up the same day Kevin Mitchell walked on the rape charge. We assumed it was about Culpepper’s legal bills when it was really about Mason Huckabee being mad enough to kill but too scared to do it with his own hands.”
Charlie’s tongue turned into lead. She had to lean against the wall again to keep from falling down.
Mason said, “I was the one who found my sister. She was in the barn. Her neck was—” He shook his head. “She was tortured by what that bastard did to her. She couldn’t get out of bed. She just cried all the time. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that useless, that helpless. I wanted someone to be punished. Someone had to be punished.”
“So you came looking for my father?” Charlie felt the now-familiar vibration in her hands. It spread up her arms, into her chest. “You came here to kill my father, and you—”
“I’m sorry.” Mason started crying again. “I’m sorry.”
Charlie wanted to kick him. “Don’t you fucking cry. You shot my sister in the head.”
“It was an accident.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Charlie yelled. “You shot her! You buried her alive!”
Sam’s arm went out. She blocked Charlie from standing over Mason, beating him the same way Ben had.
Ben.
Charlie looked at her husband. He was sitting on the floor, back to the wall. His glasses were blood-streaked, crooked on his face. He kept flexing his hands, opening the wounds, encouraging more blood to flow.
Sam asked, “Why was Rusty writing checks to Zachariah Culpepper’s son?”
Charlie was so shocked she could not make her mouth form a question.
Sam explained, “The check numbers. Twelve checks a year for twenty-eight years, four months, would be a total of three hundred forty checks.”
“That’s the most recent check number,” Charlie remembered.
“Right,” Sam confirmed. “And then there’s the balance. You started at one million, correct?”
She was asking Mason.
Slowly, reluctantly, Mason nodded.
Sam said, “If you start at one million and subtract two thousand dollars a month for twenty-eight years and change, that leaves you with approximately three hundred twenty thousand dollars.” She told Mason, “Everything began to click into place when you told us