The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,188

but then she turned serious. “I’m glad Dad didn’t tell us about Mason. I think I could handle it now, but back then?” She shook her head. “I know this sounds horrible, because the decision obviously haunted Dad, but when I consider where my mind was eight years after being shot, I think that making me come back here to testify would have killed me. How’s that for hyperbole?”

“Pretty accurate, if you include me.” Charlie knew that a trial would have accelerated her own downward trajectory. She would not have gone to law school. She would not have met Ben. Neither she nor Sam would be here talking to each other. She asked, “Why do I feel like I can handle it better now? What’s changed?”

“That is a complicated question with an equally complicated answer.”

Charlie laughed. This was Rusty’s real legacy. They were going to sit around quoting a dead man quoting dead people for the rest of their lives.

Sam said, “Dad must have known that we would find the confession in the safe.”

Charlie easily spotted one of Rusty’s high-stakes gambles. “I bet he thought he’d outlive Zachariah Culpepper’s execution date.”

“I bet he thought he’d figure out how to fix it on his own.”

Charlie thought they were probably both right. There was not a plate that Rusty would not try to spin. “When I was little, I thought Dad was driven to help people because he had this burning sense of justice. And then I got older and I thought it was because he loved the idea of himself as the scrappy, asshole hero fighting the good fight.”

“And now?”

“I think he knew that bad people did bad things, but he still believed that they deserved a chance.”

“That’s a very romanticized way to look at the world.”

“I was talking about Dad, not me.” Charlie felt sad that they were talking about Rusty in the past tense. “He was always searching for his unicorn.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” Sam said. “I think he found one.”

19

Charlie stood with her nose a few inches from the television screen. She scrutinized the right-hand corner of the paused school security footage for so long that her eyes started blurring in and out. She took a step back. She blinked to clear her vision. She studied the entirety of the image. The long, empty hallway. The vivid blue lockers rendered navy by the ancient camera. The lens was angled down, capturing the hallway roughly to the middle point. Her eyes went back to the corner. There was a door, possibly closed, a millimeter out of frame, but clearly there. The light from the window cast a shadow onto something that was reaching into the hallway.

Charlie asked, “Is it Kelly’s shadow?” She pointed past the TV, as if they were both standing in the hallway rather than Rusty’s living room. “She would’ve been standing here, right?”

Sam kept her own counsel. She had her head turned, using her good eye to view the image. “What do you see?”

“This.” Charlie pointed to the shadow reaching into the hall. “It’s a blurry, hairy line, like a spider’s leg.”

“There’s something strange about it.” Sam narrowed her eyes, clearly seeing something that Charlie could not. “Don’t you think there’s something strange?”

“I can try to make it bigger.” Charlie went to Ben’s laptop, but then remembered she had no idea what she was doing. She hit random keys. There had to be a way to do this.

Sam said, “Let’s get Ben to help.”

“I don’t want Ben to help.” Charlie leaned down to read the menu icons. “We left it in a really good—”

“Ben!” Sam called.

“Don’t you have a flight to catch?”

“The plane won’t leave without me.” Sam used her hands to frame the upper-right section of the footage. “It’s not right. The angle doesn’t work.”

“What angle?” Ben asked.

“This.” Charlie pointed to the shadow. “It looks like a spider’s leg to me, but Sherlock Holmes over here sees a hound in the Baskerville.”

“More like a Study in Scarlet,” Sam said, but still did not explain herself. “Ben, can you make this upper-right corner larger?”

Ben performed some magic on the laptop and the corner of the frame was isolated, then enlarged to fill the television. Because her husband was not a tech wizard in a Jason Bourne movie, the image did not sharpen, but became more blurred.

“Oh, I see it.” Ben pointed to the furry spider’s leg. “I thought it was a shadow, but—”

“There wouldn’t be one,” Sam said. “The lights are on in the