The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,57

thinking if they knew Ben at all, they would know that he would never walk out without a reason.

“Keep poking at him. I bet it’s nothing.”

It wasn’t nothing.

“He’s too sensitive for his own good. Did I ever tell you about the time at Disneyland when—”

“All we can do is work on it.”

“Y’all need to work harder,” she said. “Nine months is too long, Charlie. Peggy was saying the other day how she grew a whole baby in nine months so why can’t y’all figure out—shit.”

Charlie felt her hand tighten around the phone.

“Shit,” Terri repeated. “You know I don’t think before I speak. That’s just how I am.”

“It’s fine, really. Don’t worry about it. But, look, I’ve got a client calling on the other line.” Charlie spoke too fast to let her get a word in. “Thanks so much for calling. Please send my best to the others and I’ll talk to you later.”

Charlie slammed down the phone.

She put her head in her hands. The worst part about that phone call was that she wasn’t going to be able to climb into bed with Ben tonight, put her head on his chest and tell him what an awful fucking bitch his sister was.

Charlie slumped back in her chair. She saw that Lenore had kept her part of the bargain. A brand new iPhone was plugged into the back of her computer. Charlie pressed the home button. She tried 1-2-3-4 for the password, but it didn’t take. She put in her birthday, and the phone unlocked.

The first thing she pulled up was her list of voicemails. One message from Rusty this morning. Several messages from friends after the shooting.

Nothing from Ben.

The distinct rumble of Rusty’s voice echoed through the building. He was leading Ava Wilson back to his office. Charlie could guess what he was saying by the cadence of his voice. He was giving his usual speech: “You don’t have to tell me the whole truth, but you do have to tell me the truth.”

Charlie wondered if Ava was capable of grasping the subtlety. And she prayed that Rusty wouldn’t float his unicorn theory past the woman. Ava was already drowning in her own version of false hope. She didn’t need Rusty to weigh her down with more.

Charlie tapped her computer awake. The browser was still open on huckleberries. She did a new search: “Mindy Zowada Pikeville.”

The girl who had called Kelly Wilson a fucking whore in her yearbook had a Facebook page. Mindy’s setting was private, but Charlie could see her banner, which was heavy on the Justin Bieber. The account photo of Mindy showed her dressed as a Rebel cheerleader. She looked exactly the way Charlie thought she’d look: pretty and nasty and smug.

Charlie skimmed Mindy’s list of likes and dislikes, annoyed that she was too old to understand half of what the teenager was into.

She tapped her finger on the mouse again.

Charlie had two Facebook accounts: one in her own name, and another in a fake name. She had created the second account as a joke. Or at least she’d initially let herself believe it was a joke. After creating an email address for the account and a profile picture of a pig wearing a bow tie, she had finally accepted that she was going to use it to spy on the Culpepper girls who had tormented her in high school. That they had all accepted a friend request from Iona Trayler proved correct a lot of stereotypes that Charlie had about their intelligence. Weirdly, she had also been friended by an extended family of Traylers who sent her greetings on her made-up birthday and were always asking her to pray for ailing aunts and distant cousins.

Charlie logged in to the Trayler account and sent out a friend request to Mindy Zowada. It was a shot in the dark, but she wanted to know what the girl who’d been so vile to Kelly Wilson was saying about her now. That Charlie had extended her catfishing from the Culpeppers to another girl’s tormentors would be a neurosis to analyze at a later date.

Charlie collapsed the browser. The blank Word document was on her desktop. There was nothing else she could do to procrastinate, so she started typing up her statement for Rusty. She relayed the events in as dry a manner as possible, thinking about the morning the way she might think about a story she had read in the newspaper. This happened, then this happened, then this happened.

Horrible