The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,29

stood when she murdered Mr. Pinkman and the little girl. “I’m not sure it was Mrs. Jenkins who entered the office, but it was an older woman who looked like her.”

“And that’s the only person you saw, an older woman entering the office?”

“Yes. The doors were closed to the classrooms. Some teachers were inside, so I guess I saw them, too.” Charlie chewed her lip, trying to get her thoughts together. No wonder her clients talked themselves into trouble. Charlie was a witness, not even a suspect, and she was already leaving out details. “I didn’t recognize any of the teachers behind the doors. I don’t know if they saw me, but it’s possible they did.”

“Okay, so you went to Mr. Huckabee’s classroom next?”

“Yes. I was in his room when I heard the gunshot.”

“A gunshot?”

Charlie wadded the Wet Wipes into a ball on the table. “Four gunshots.”

“Rapid?”

“Yes. No.” She closed her eyes. She tried to remember. Only a handful of hours had passed. Why did everything feel like it had happened an eternity ago? “I heard two shots, then two more? Or three and then one?”

Delia held her pen aloft, waiting.

“I don’t remember the sequence,” Charlie admitted, and she again reminded herself that this was a sworn statement. “To the best of my recollection, there were four shots, total. I remember counting them. And then Huck pulled me down.” Charlie cleared her throat. She resisted the need to look at Ben, to gauge how he was taking this. “Mr. Huckabee pulled me down behind the filing cabinet, I assume for cover.”

“Any more gunshots?”

“I—” She shook her head because again she was unsure. “I don’t know.”

Delia said, “Let’s back up a little. It was only you and Mr. Huckabee in the room?”

“Yes. I didn’t see anyone else in the hall.”

“How long were you in Mr. Huckabee’s room before you heard the shots?”

Again, Charlie shook her head. “Maybe two to three minutes?”

“So, you go into his classroom, two to three minutes pass, you hear these four gunshots, Mr. Huckabee pulls you down behind the filing cabinet, and then?”

Charlie shrugged. “I ran.”

“Toward the exit?”

Charlie’s eyes flicked toward Ben. “Toward the gunshots.”

Ben silently scratched his jaw. This was one of their things, the way Charlie always ran toward danger when everyone else was running away.

“All right.” Delia spoke as she wrote. “Was Mr. Huckabee with you when you ran toward the gunshots?”

“He was behind me.” Charlie remembered sprinting past Kelly, leaping over her extended legs. This time, her memory showed Huck kneeling beside the girl. That made sense. He would’ve seen the gun in Kelly’s hand. He would’ve been trying to talk the teenager into giving him the revolver the entire time that Charlie was watching the little girl die.

She asked Delia, “Can you tell me her name? The little girl?”

“Lucy Alexander. Her mother teaches at the school.”

Charlie saw the girl’s features come into focus. Her pink coat. Her matching backpack. Was her name monogrammed on the inside of her jacket or was that a detail that Charlie was making up?

Delia said, “We haven’t released her name to the press, but her parents have been notified.”

“She didn’t suffer. At least, I don’t think so. She didn’t know she was …” Once again, Charlie shook her head, aware that she was filling in blanks with things that she wanted to be true.

Delia said, “So, you ran toward the gunshots, in the direction of the front office.” She turned to a fresh page in her pad. “Mr. Huckabee was behind you. Who else did you see?”

“I don’t remember seeing Kelly Wilson. I mean, I did remember later that I saw her, when I heard the cops shouting, but when I was running, well, before that, Huck caught up with me, he passed me at the corner, and then I passed him …” Charlie chewed her lip again. This meandering narrative was the kind of thing that drove her crazy when she talked to her clients. “I ran past Kelly. I thought she was a kid. A student.” Kelly Wilson had been both of those things. Even at eighteen, she was tiny, the kind of girl who would always look like a kid, even when she was a grown woman with children of her own.

“I’m getting fuzzy on the timeline,” Delia admitted.

“I’m sorry.” Charlie tried to explain, “It screws with your head when you’re in the middle of this kind of thing. Time turns from a straight line into a sphere, and it’s not until later that