The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,94

after finally reading the email, Sam had hesitated. She had paced the apartment, her leg so weak that she had started to limp. She had taken a hot shower. She had steeped tea in her mug, tried to do her stretches, attempted to meditate, but a niggling inquisitiveness had chewed at the margins of all her procrastinations.

Charlie had never needed Sam before.

Instead of texting Ben the obvious questions—Why? What’s wrong?—Sam had turned on the news. Half an hour had passed before MSNBC reported the stabbing. They had very little information to offer. Rusty had been found by a neighbor. He was lying prone at the end of the driveway. Mail was scattered on the ground. The neighbor had called the police. The police had called an ambulance. The ambulance had called a helicopter, and now, Sam was returning to the one place to which she had promised her mother she would never return.

Sam reminded herself that, technically, she was not going to be in Pikeville. The Dickerson County Hospital was thirty minutes away, in a town called Bridge Gap. When Sam was a teenager, Bridge Gap was the big city, the place you’d go to if your boyfriend or a friend had a car and your parents were lenient.

Perhaps, when Charlie was younger, she had gone to Bridge Gap with a boy or a group of friends. Rusty had certainly been lenient; Gamma had always been the disciplinarian. Sam knew that without Gamma’s balancing check, Charlie had turned wild. College saw the worst of it. There had been several late-night calls from Athens, where Charlie was doing her undergrad at UGA. She needed money for food, for rent, for the health clinic, and once, for what had turned out to be a false pregnancy scare.

“Are you going to help me or not?” Charlie had demanded, her aggressive tone cutting off Sam’s as yet unuttered recriminations.

Judging by Ben, Charlie had managed to right herself. The transition would not have been an actual change so much as a reversion to type. Charlie had never been a rebel. She was one of those easy-going, popular girls, the sort who got invited to everything, who effortlessly mixed with the crowd. She had a kind of natural affability that had always eluded Sam, even before the accident.

What was Charlie’s life like now?

Sam didn’t even know if her sister had children. She assumed so. Charlie had always loved babies. She had babysat for half the neighborhood before the red-brick house had burned down. She was always taking care of stray animals, leaving pecans outside for the squirrels, building bird feeders at Brownie meetings and once erecting a rabbit hutch in the backyard, though, to Charlie’s utter disappointment, the rabbits seemed to prefer the neighbor’s abandoned doghouse.

What did Charlie look like now? Was her hair gray like Sam’s? Was she still thin, muscular, from the perpetual motion of her life? Would Sam even recognize her own sister if she saw her?

When she saw her.

A sign welcoming them to Dickerson County flashed outside the window.

She should have told Stanislav to drive more slowly.

Sam thumbed to the browser on her phone. She re-loaded the MSNBC homepage and found an updated story about Rusty. Guarded condition. Sam, even after a lifetime in and out of hospitals, had no idea what that meant. Better than critical? Worse than stable?

At the end of Anton’s life, when he was finally hospitalized, there had been no updates on his condition, just the understanding that he was comfortable today, that he was in discomfort the next day, and then the solemn, unspoken understanding between them all that there would be no tomorrow.

Sam swiped up the Huffington Post in her browser to see if they had more details. Her breath caught in surprise when a recent photograph of Rusty appeared.

For reasons unknown, whenever she listened to her father’s voicemails, Sam conjured an image of Burl Ives from the Luzianne Tea commercials: a robust, round man in a white hat and suit, a black string tie held together by some sort of gaudy silver medallion.

Her father was nothing like that. Not before, and certainly not today.

Rusty’s thick black hair was mostly gray. His face had the texture if not color of beef jerky. He still had that lean look about him, as if he’d finally made his way out of a jungle. His cheeks were hollow. His eyes sunken. Photos had never done Rusty justice. In person, he was perpetually in motion, always fidgeting, gesturing with his