The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,52

the landing page, typing in different departments, teachers’ names, even the school newspaper. They all brought back the same message. The Pikeville Department of Education servers didn’t have the capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of curiosity-seekers trying to access their website.

She clicked open a fresh search page. She typed “Huckabee Pikeville.”

“Crap,” Charlie mumbled. Google had asked, Do you mean huckleberry?

The first site listed was a wiki entry saying that the huckleberry was the state fruit of Idaho. Then there were several stories about school boards trying to ban Huckleberry Finn. At the bottom of the page was an Urban Dictionary entry that claimed “I’m your huckleberry” was nineteenth-century slang for “I’m your man.”

Charlie tapped her finger on the mouse. She should look at CNN or MSNBC or even Fox, but she couldn’t bring herself to type in the news sites. An entire hour had passed without the slideshow coming back into her head. She didn’t want to invite the flood of bad memories.

Besides, this was Rusty’s case. Charlie was likely going to be called as a witness for the prosecution. She would corroborate Huck’s story, but that would only give the jury a small piece of the puzzle.

If anyone knew more, it was Mrs. Pinkman. Her room was directly across from where Kelly had most likely stood when she began shooting. Judith Pinkman would’ve been first on the scene. She would have found her husband dead. Lucy dying.

“Please, help us!”

Charlie could still hear the woman’s screams echoing in her ears. The four shots had already been fired. Huck had dragged Charlie behind the filing cabinet. He was calling the police when she heard two more shots.

Charlie was astonished by the sudden vividness of the memory.

Six gunshots. Six bullets in the revolver.

Otherwise Judith Pinkman would’ve been shot in the face when she opened the door to her classroom.

Charlie looked up at the ceiling. The thought had teased out an old image that she did not want to see.

She had to get out of this office.

She picked up the plastic bowl with the second PB&J and went to find Ava Wilson. Charlie knew that Lenore had already offered Ava food—she had that typically southern impulse to feed everyone she met—just as Charlie was sure Ava was too stressed out to eat, but she didn’t want the woman to be alone for too long.

In the reception area, Charlie found a familiar scene: Ava Wilson on the couch in front of the television, the sound up too loud.

She asked Ava, “Would you like my other sandwich?”

Ava did not answer. Charlie was about to repeat the question when she realized that Ava’s eyes were closed. Her lips were slightly parted, a soft whistle passing between a gap where one of her teeth was missing.

Charlie didn’t wake her. Stress had a way of shutting down your body when it couldn’t take any more. If Ava Wilson had a moment’s peace today, this would be it.

The remote control was on the coffee table. Charlie never asked why it was always sticky. Most of the buttons didn’t work. The others got stuck. The power button was unresponsive. The mute had evaporated—there was an open rectangle where the button had been. She went to the set to see if there was another way to turn it off.

On screen, the news was in that lull period where there was no real information to report, so they’d brought on a panel of pundits and psychiatrists to speculate what might have happened, what Kelly possibly had been thinking, why she could have done the things that she did.

“And there is precedent,” a pretty blonde said. “If you remember the Boomtown Rats song from—”

Charlie was about to yank the cord out of the wall when the main anchor interrupted the shrink. “We’ve got breaking news. I’ll send you live to a press conference going on now in Pikeville, Georgia.”

The image changed again, this time to a podium set up in a familiar-looking space. The lunchroom at the police station. They had cleared the tables away and stuck a blue flag with a City of Pikeville logo on the wall.

A chubby man wearing pleated tan Dockers and a white button-down shirt stood behind the podium. He looked to his left, and the camera panned to Ken Coin, who seemed irritated when he waved for the man to go ahead.

Coin had clearly wanted to take the stage first.

The man moved the microphone down, then up, then down again. He leaned over, his lips too