The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,49

didn’t move at first. She stared at the back of the seat in front of her, hands resting on her knees.

Ava said, “This is real, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It is.”

The woman turned slowly. Her legs looked like two twigs underneath the pajama pants. Her skin was so pale as to be almost transparent in the harsh daylight.

Lenore shut the driver’s side door quietly, but the look on her face said she wanted to slam it off the car. She had been pissed off at Charlie from the moment she’d spotted her in the front bedroom of the Wilson house. But for Ava Wilson, she would’ve taken off Charlie’s head and thrown it out the window on the drive back.

Lenore mumbled, “This isn’t finished.”

“Super!” Charlie smiled brightly, because why not pour more fuel onto the fire? There was nothing Lenore could say about Charlie’s foolish actions that Charlie had not already said to herself. If there was one thing she excelled at, it was being her own inner mean girl.

She handed Ava Wilson the plastic bag of clothes so she could look for her keys.

“I’ve got it.” Lenore unlocked the steel security screen and accordioned it back. The heavy metal door required a code and another key to engage the bar lock that went straight across the inside of the door and bolted into either side of the steel jamb. Lenore had to put some muscle into turning the latch. There was a deep cha-chunk before she could open the door.

Ava asked, “Y’all keep money in here or something?”

Charlie shivered at the question. She let Lenore and Ava enter first.

The familiar odor of cigarettes managed to make its way into Charlie’s broken nose. She had banned Rusty from smoking in the building, but the order had come thirty years too late. He brought the stink in with him like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comics. No matter how many times she cleaned or painted the walls or even replaced the carpet, the odor lingered.

“This way.” Lenore gave Charlie another sharp look before escorting Ava to the reception area, a depressingly dark room with a metal roller shade that blocked the view to the street.

Charlie headed toward her office. Her first priority was to call her father and tell him to get his ass down here. Ava Wilson shouldn’t be relegated to sitting on their lumpy couch, getting all of her information about her daughter from cable news.

Just in case, Charlie took the long way by Rusty’s office to make sure he hadn’t parked in the front. The white paint on his door had bled yellow from nicotine. Stains radiated into the Sheetrock and clouded the ceiling. Even the knob had a film around it. She pulled down the sleeve of her shirt to cover her hand and made sure the door was locked.

He wasn’t there.

Charlie let out a long breath as she walked toward her office. She had purposefully staked her claim on the opposite side of the building, which in its previous life had housed the back offices of a chain of stationery supply stores. The architecture of the one-story structure was similar in higgledy-pigglediness to the farmhouse. She shared the reception area with her father, but her practice was completely separate from his. Other lawyers came and went, renting space by the month. UGA, Georgia State, Morehouse and Emory sporadically sent interns who needed desks and phones. Rusty’s investigator, Jimmy Jack Little, had set up shop in a former supply closet. As far as Charlie could tell, Jimmy Jack used it to store his files, possibly hoping that the police would think twice before raiding an office inside a building filled with lawyers.

The carpet was thicker, the décor nicer, on Charlie’s side. Rusty had hung a sign over her door that read “Dewey, Pleadem & Howe,” a joke on the fact that she kept most of her clients out of the courtroom. Charlie didn’t mind arguing a case, but the majority of her clients were too poor to afford a trial, and too familiar with the Pikeville judges to waste their time fighting the system.

Rusty, on the other hand, would argue a parking ticket in front of the United States Supreme Court if they’d let him get that far.

Charlie searched her purse for her office keys. The bag slipped off her shoulder. The mouth gaped open. Kelly Wilson’s yearbook had a cartoon General Lee on the front because the school mascot was the Rebel.

Defense counsel who possesses a