The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,34

symptoms like nausea and blurred vision and headaches and forgetting names and not tracking when you’re asked a simple question.”

“They wouldn’t know the names I was forgetting,” she said. “I don’t want to spend the night in a hospital.”

“Stay at the HP.” The higgledy-piggledy. Sam’s name for the meandering farmhouse had stuck. Ben said, “Rusty can watch you.”

“So I die from second-hand smoke instead of a brain aneurysm?”

“That’s not funny.”

Head still down, Charlie reached back for the wall. The feel of the solid concrete block gave her enough steadiness to risk standing up straight. She cupped her hand to her eyes. She remembered cupping her hand to the window of the front office this morning.

Ben handed her the water bottle. He had already taken the top off for her. She took a few slow sips and tried not to read too much into his thoughtfulness. Her husband was thoughtful with everybody.

She asked, “Where was Mrs. Jenkins when the shooting started?”

“In the file room.”

“Did she see anything?”

“Rusty will find out everything during discovery.”

“Everything,” Charlie repeated. In the coming months, Ken Coin would be required by law to turn over any material in the investigation that could be reasonably interpreted as evidence. Coin’s idea of “reasonable” was as fixed as a spider’s web.

She asked Ben, “Is Mrs. Pinkman okay?”

He didn’t bring up her “Heller” slip because that wasn’t his way. “She’s at the hospital. They had to sedate her.”

Charlie should visit her, but she knew that she would find an excuse not to. “You let me think Kelly Wilson was sixteen years old.”

“I thought you could figure it out by holding a sphere in your hand and pulling apart time.”

Charlie laughed. “That was some next-level bullshit I laid down in there.”

“There’s some out here, too.”

Charlie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She smelled dried blood again. Like everything else, she remembered the smell from before. She remembered the dark flecks falling like ash from her hair. She remembered that even after she’d bathed, even after she’d scrubbed herself raw, the odor of death had lingered.

She said, “You called me this morning.”

Ben shrugged like it didn’t matter.

Charlie poured the rest of the water onto her hands to clean them. “Have you talked to your mom and your sisters? They’ll be worried.”

“We talked.” He did that shrug again. “I should go back in.”

Charlie waited, but he didn’t go back in. She grappled for a reason to make him stay. “How’s Barkzilla?”

“Barky.” Ben took the empty bottle. He screwed on the cap. He dropped it back into his jacket pocket. “How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“Quiet.”

He tucked his chin into his chest, returning to silence. This was nothing new. Her normally articulate husband had not articulated much to her in the past nine months.

But he wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t nodding her along, urging her to go. He wasn’t telling her that the only reason he wasn’t asking her if she was okay was because she would say that she was okay even if she wasn’t. Especially if she wasn’t.

She asked, “Why did you call me this morning?”

Ben groaned. He leaned his head back against the wall.

Charlie leaned her head back against the wall, too.

She studied the sharp line of his jaw. This was her type—a lanky, laid-back nerd who could quote Monty Python as easily as the United States constitution. He read graphic novels. He drank a glass of milk every night before he went to bed. He loved potato salad, and Lord of the Rings, and model trains. He preferred fantasy football to the real kind. He could not put on weight if you force-fed him butter. He was six feet tall when he stood up straight, which didn’t happen often.

She loved him so much that her heart literally hurt at the thought of never holding him again.

Ben said, “Peggy had this friend when she was fourteen. Her name was Violet.”

Peggy was the bossiest of his three older sisters.

“She was killed in a car crash. She was on her bicycle. We went to the funeral. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, taking me. I was too young to see that kind of thing. It was open casket. Carla held me up so I could see her.” His throat worked. “I, like, lost my shit. Mom had to take me out into the parking lot. It gave me nightmares. I thought that was the worst thing that I would ever see. A dead kid. A dead little girl. But she was cleaned up.