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Rusty chuckled. “Well, I appreciate you holding that back as long as you did.” His lighter clicked into the phone. Apparently, her father had forgotten about swearing on a stack of Bibles that he would quit smoking. “Now, listen, hon, tell Gamma when she gets out of the tub that I’m gonna have the sheriff send a car over.”
“The sheriff?” Samantha tried to convey her panic to Gamma, but her mother kept her back turned. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, sugar. It’s just that they never caught that bad old fella who burned down the house, and today, another innocent man has gone free, and some people don’t like that, either.”
“You mean the man who raped that girl who killed herself?”
“The only people who know what happened to that girl are her, whoever committed the crime, and the Lord God in heaven. I don’t presume to be any of these people and I don’t opine that you should, either.”
Samantha hated when her father put on his country-lawyer-making-a-closing-argument voice. “Daddy, she hanged herself in a barn. That’s a proven fact.”
“Why is my life is riddled with contrary females?” Rusty put his hand over the phone and spoke to someone else. Samantha could hear a woman’s husky laugh. Lenore, her father’s secretary. Gamma had never liked her.
“All right now.” Rusty was back on the line. “You still there, honey?”
“Where else would I be?”
Gamma said, “Hang up the phone.”
“Baby.” Rusty blew out some smoke. “Tell me what you need me to do to make this better and I will do it immediately.”
An old lawyer’s trick; make the other person solve the problem. “Daddy, I—”
Gamma slammed her fingers down on the hook, ending the call.
“Mama, we were talking.”
Gamma’s fingers stayed hooked on the phone. Instead of explaining herself, she said, “Consider the etymology of the phrase ‘hang up the phone.’” She pulled the receiver from Samantha’s hand and hung it on the hook. “So, ‘pick up the phone’ even ‘off the hook,’ start to make sense. And of course you know the hook is a lever that, when depressed, opens up the circuit, indicating a call can be received.”
“The sheriff’s sending a car,” Samantha said. “Or, I mean, Daddy’s going to ask him to.”
Gamma looked skeptical. The sheriff was no fan of the Quinns. “You need to wash your hands for dinner.”
Samantha knew that there was no sense in trying to force further conversation. Not unless she wanted her mother to find a screwdriver and open the phone to explain the circuitry, which had happened with countless small appliances in the past. Gamma was the only mother on the block who changed the oil in her own car.
Not that they lived on a block anymore.
Samantha tripped on a box in the hallway. She grabbed her toes, holding onto them like she could squeeze out the pain. She had to limp the rest of the way to the bathroom. She passed her sister in the hallway. Charlotte punched her in the arm because that was the kind of thing Charlotte did.
The brat had closed the door, so Samantha had a false start before she found the bathroom. The toilet was low to the ground, installed back when people were shorter than they were now. The shower was a plastic corner unit with black mold growing inside the seams. A ball-peen hammer rested inside the sink. Black cast iron showed where the hammer had been repeatedly dropped into the bowl. Gamma had been the one to figure out why. The faucet was so old and rusted that you had to whack the tap handle to keep it from dripping.
“I’ll fix that this weekend,” Gamma had said, setting a reward for herself at the end of what would clearly be a difficult week.
As usual, Charlotte had left a mess in the tiny bathroom. Water pooled on the floor and flecked the mirror. Even the toilet seat was wet. Samantha reached for the roll of paper towels hanging on the wall, then changed her mind. From the beginning, the house had felt temporary, but now that her father had pretty much said he was sending the sheriff because it might get firebombed like the last one, cleaning seemed like a waste of time.
“Dinner!” Gamma called from the kitchen.
Samantha splashed water on her face. Her hair felt gritty. Streaks of red coated her calves and arms where clay had mixed in with her sweat. She wanted to soak in a hot bath, but there was only one bathtub in the house, claw-footed with a dark rust-colored ring around the lip from where the previous occupant had for decades sloughed the earth from his skin. Even Charlotte wouldn’t get in the tub, and Charlotte was a pig.
“It feels too sad in here,” her sister had said, slowly backing out of the upstairs bathroom.
The tub was not the only thing that Charlotte found unsettling. The spooky, damp basement. The creepy, bat-filled attic. The creaky closet doors. The bedroom where the bachelor farmer had died.
There was a photo of the bachelor farmer in the bottom drawer of the chiffarobe. They had found it this morning on the pretense of cleaning. Neither dared to touch it. They had stared down at the lonesome, round face of the bachelor farmer and felt overwhelmed by something sinister, though the photo was just a typical depression-era farm scene with a tractor and a mule. Samantha felt haunted by the sight of the farmer’s yellow teeth, though how something could look yellow in a black-and-white photo was a mystery.
“Sam?” Gamma stood in the bathroom doorway, looking at their reflections in the mirror.
No one had ever mistaken them for sisters, but they were clearly mother and child. They shared the same strong jawline and high cheekbones, the same arch to their eyebrows that most people took for aloofness. Gamma wasn’t beautiful, but she was striking, with dark, almost black hair and light blue eyes that sparkled with delight when she found something particularly funny or ridiculous. Samantha was old enough to remember a time when her mother took life a lot less seriously.
Gamma said, “You’re wasting water.”
Samantha tapped the faucet closed with the small hammer and dropped it back into the sink. She heard a car pulling up the driveway. The sheriff’s man, which was surprising because Rusty rarely followed through on his promises.
Gamma stood behind her. “Are you still sad about Peter?”
The boy whose leather jacket had burned in the fire. The boy who had written Samantha a love letter, but would no longer look her in the eye when they passed each other in the school hallway.
Gamma said, “You’re pretty. Do you know that?”
Samantha saw her cheeks blush in the mirror.
“Prettier than I ever was.” Gamma stroked Samantha’s hair back with her fingers. “I wish that my mother had lived long enough to meet you.”
Samantha rarely heard about her grandparents. From what she could gather, they had never forgiven Gamma for moving away to go to college. “What was Grandma like?”
Gamma smiled, her mouth awkwardly navigating the expression. “Pretty like Charlie. Very clever. Relentlessly happy. Always bubbling up with something to do. The kind of person that people just liked.” She shook her head. With all of her degrees, Gamma still had not deciphered the science of likability. “She had streaks of gray in her hair before she turned thirty. She said it was because her brain worked so hard, but you know of course that all hair is originally white. It gets melanin through specialized cells called melanocytes that pump pigment into the hair follicles.”
Samantha leaned back into her mother’s arms. She closed her eyes, enjoying the familiar melody of Gamma’s voice.
“Stress and hormones can leech pigmentation, but her life at the time was fairly simple—mother, wife, Sunday school teacher—so we can assume that the gray was due to a genetic trait, which means that either you or Charlie, or both, could have the same thing happen.”
Samantha opened her eyes. “Your hair isn’t gray.”
“Because I go to the beauty parlor once a month.” Her laughter tapered off too quickly. “Promise me you’ll always take care of Charlie.”
“Charlotte can take care of herself.”
“I’m serious, Sam.”
Samantha felt her heart tremble at Gamma’s insistent tone. “Why?”
“Because you’re her big sister and that’s your job.” She gripped both of Samantha’s hands in her own. Her gaze was steady in the mirror. “We’ve had a rough patch, my girl. I won’t lie and say it’s going to get better. Charlie needs to know that she can depend on you. You have to put that baton firmly in her hand every time, no matter where she is. You find her. Don’t expect her to find you.”
Samantha felt her throat clench. Gamma was talking about something else now, something more serious than a relay race. “Are you going away?”
“Of course not.” Gamma scowled. “I’m only telling you that you need to be a useful person, Sam. I really thought you were past that silly, dramatic teenager stage.”
“I’m not—”
“Mama!” Charlotte yelled.
Gamma turned Samantha around. She put her calloused hands on either side of her daughter’s face. “I’m not going anywhere, kiddo. You can’t get rid of me that easily.” She kissed her nose. “Give that faucet another whack before you come to supper.”
“Mom!” Charlotte screamed.
“Good Lord,” Gamma complained as she walked out of the bathroom. “Charlie Quinn, do not shriek at me like a street urchin.”
Samantha picked up the little hammer. The slim wooden handle was perpetually wet, like a dense sponge. The round head was rusted the same red as the front yard. She tapped the faucet and waited to make sure no more water dripped out.
Gamma called, “Samantha?”
Samantha felt her brow furrow. She turned toward the open door. Her mother never called her by her full name. Even Charlotte had to suffer through being called Charlie. Gamma had told them that one day they would appreciate being able to pass. She’d gotten more papers published and funding approved by signing her name as Harry than she’d ever gotten by signing it as Harriet.
“Samantha.” Gamma’s tone was cold, more like a warning. “Please ensure the faucet valve is closed and quickly make your way into the kitchen.”
Samantha looked back at the mirror, as if her reflection could explain to her what was going on. This was not how her mother spoke to them. Not even when she was explaining the difference between a Marcel handle and the spring-loaded lever on her curling iron.
Without thinking, Samantha reached into the sink and wrapped her hand around the small hammer. She held it behind her back as she walked up the long hall toward the kitchen.
All of the lights were on. The sky had grown dark outside. She pictured her running shoes alongside Charlotte’s on the kitchen stoop, the plastic baton left somewhere in the yard. The kitchen table laid with paper plates. Plastic forks and knives.
There was a cough, deep, maybe a man’s. Maybe Gamma’s, because she coughed that way lately, like the smoke from the fire had somehow made its way into her lungs.
Another cough.
The hair on the back of Samantha’s neck prickled to attention.
The back door was at the opposite end of the hall, a halo of dim light encircling the frosted glass. Samantha glanced behind her as she continued up the hall. She could see the doorknob. She pictured herself turning it even as she walked farther away. Every step she took, she asked herself if she was being foolish, or if she should be concerned, or if this was a joke because her mother used to love to play jokes on them, like sticking plastic googly eyes on the milk jug in the fridge or writing “help me, I’m trapped inside a toilet paper factory!” on the inside of the toilet paper roll.
There was only one phone in the house, the rotary dial in the kitchen.
Her father’s pistol was in the kitchen drawer.
The bullets were somewhere in a cardboard box.
Charlotte would laugh at her if she saw the hammer. Samantha tucked it down the back of her running shorts. The metal was cold against the small of her back, the wet handle like a curling tongue. She lifted her shirt to cover the hammer as she walked into the kitchen.
Samantha felt her body go rigid.
This wasn’t a joke.
Two men stood in the kitchen. They smelled of sweat and beer and nicotine. They wore black gloves. Black ski masks covered their faces.
Samantha opened her mouth. The air had thickened like cotton, closing her throat.
One was taller than the other. The short one was heavier. Bulkier. Dressed in jeans and a black button-up shirt. The tall one wore a faded white concert T-shirt, jeans and blue hightop sneakers with the red laces untied. The short one felt more dangerous but it was hard to tell because the only thing Samantha could see behind the masks was their mouths and eyes.
Not that she was looking at their eyes.
Hightop had a revolver.
Black Shirt had a shotgun that was pointed directly at Gamma’s head.
Her hands were raised in the air. She told Samantha, “It’s okay.”
“No it ain’t.” Black Shirt’s voice had the gravelly shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. “Who else is in the house?”
Gamma shook her head. “Nobody.”
“Don’t lie to me, bitch.”
There was a tapping noise. Charlotte was seated at the table, trembling so hard that the chair legs thumped against the floor like a woodpecker tapping a tree.
Samantha looked back down the hall, to the door, the dim halo of light.
“Here.” The man in the blue hightops motioned for Samantha to sit beside Charlotte. She moved slowly, carefully bending her knees, keeping her hands above the table. The wooden handle of the hammer thunked against the seat of the chair.
“What’s that?” Black Shirt’s eyes jerked in her direction.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte whispered. Urine puddled onto the floor. She kept her head down, rocking back and forth. “I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry.”
Samantha took her sister’s hand.
“Tell us what you want,” Gamma said. “We’ll give it to you and then you can leave.”
“What if I want that?” Black Shirt’s beady eyes were trained on Charlotte.
“Please,” Gamma said. “I will do whatever you want. Anything.”
“Anything?” Black Shirt said it in a way that they all understood what was being offered.
“No,” Hightop said. His voice was younger-sounding, nervous or maybe afraid. “We didn’t come for that.” His Adam’s apple jogged beneath the ski mask as he tried to clear his throat. “Where’s your husband?”
Something flashed in Gamma’s eyes. Anger. “He’s at work.”
“Then why’s his car outside?”
Gamma said, “We only have one car because—”
“The sheriff …” Samantha swallowed the last word, realizing too late that she shouldn’t have said it.
Black Shirt was looking at her again. “What’s that, girl?”
Samantha put down her head. Charlotte squeezed her hand. The sheriff, she had started to say. The sheriff’s man would be here soon. Rusty had said they were sending a car, but Rusty said a lot of things that turned out to be wrong.
Gamma said, “She’s just scared. Why don’t we go into the other room? We can talk this out, figure out what you boys want.”
Samantha felt something hard bang against her skull. She tasted the metal fillings in her teeth. Her ears were ringing. The shotgun. He was pressing the barrel to the top of her head. “You said something about the sheriff, girl. I heard you.”
“She didn’t,” Gamma said. “She meant to—”
“Shut up.”
“She just—”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
Samantha looked up as the shotgun swiveled toward Gamma.
Gamma reached out, but slowly, as if she was pushing her hands through sand. They were all suddenly trapped in stop-motion, their movements jerky, their bodies turned to clay. Samantha watched as one by one, her mother’s fingers wrapped around the sawed-off shotgun. Neatly trimmed fingernails. A thick callous on her thumb from holding a pencil.
There was an almost imperceptible click.
A second hand on a watch.
A door latching closed.
A firing pin tapping against the primer in a shotgun shell.
Maybe Samantha heard the click or maybe she intuited the sound because she was staring at Black Shirt’s finger when he pulled back the trigger.
An explosion of red misted the air.
Blood jetted onto the ceiling. Gushed onto the floor. Hot, ropey red tendrils splashed across the top of Charlotte’s head and splattered onto the side of Samantha’s neck and face.
Gamma fell to the floor.
Charlotte screamed.
Samantha felt her own mouth open, but the sound was trapped inside of her chest. She was frozen now. Charlotte’s screams turned into a distant echo. Everything drained of color. They were suspended in black and white, like the bachelor farmer’s picture. Black blood had aerosoled onto the grille of the white air conditioner. Tiny flecks of black mottled the glass in the window. Outside, the night sky was a charcoal gray with a lone pinlight of a tiny, distant star.
Samantha reached up with her fingers to touch her neck. Grit. Bone. More blood because everything was stained with blood. She felt a pulse in her throat. Was it her own heart or pieces of her mother’s heart beating underneath her trembling fingers?
Charlotte’s screams amplified into a piercing siren. The black blood turned crimson on Samantha’s fingers. The gray room blossomed back into vivid, blinding, furious color.
Dead. Gamma was dead. She was never again going to tell Samantha to get away from Pikeville, to yell at her for missing an obvious question on a test, for not pushing herself harder in track, for not being patient with Charlotte, for not being useful in her life.
Samantha rubbed together her fingers. She held a shard of Gamma’s tooth in her hand. Vomit rushed into her mouth. She was blinded by tears. Grief vibrated like a harp string inside her body.
In the blink of an eye, the world had turned upside down.
“Shut up!” Black Shirt slapped Charlotte so hard that she nearly fell out of the chair. Samantha caught her, clinging to her. They were both sobbing, shaking, screaming. This couldn’t be happening. Their mother couldn’t be dead. She was going to open her eyes. She was going to explain to them the workings of the cardiovascular system as she slowly put her body back together.
Did you know that the average heart pumps five liters of blood per minute?
“Gamma,” Samantha whispered. The shotgun blast had opened up her chest, her neck, her face. The left side of her jaw was gone. Part of her skull. Her beautiful, complicated brain. Her arched, aloof eyebrow. No one would explain things to Samantha anymore. No one would care whether or not she understood. “Gamma.”
“Jesus!” Hightop furiously slapped at his chest, trying to brush off the chunks of bone and tissue. “Jesus Christ, Zach!”
Samantha’s head snapped around.
Zachariah Culpepper.
The two words flashed neon in her mind. Then: Grand theft auto. Animal cruelty. Public indecency. Inappropriate contact with a minor.
Charlotte wasn’t the only one who read their father’s case files. For years, Rusty Quinn had saved Zach Culpepper from doing serious time. The man’s unpaid legal bills were a constant source of tension between Gamma and Rusty, especially since the house had burned down. Over twenty thousand dollars was owed, but Rusty refused to go after him.
“Fuck!” Zach had clearly seen Samantha’s flash of recognition. “Fuck!”
“Mama …” Charlotte hadn’t realized that everything had changed. She could only stare at Gamma, her body shaking so hard that her teeth chattered. “Mama, Mama, Mama …”
“It’s all right.” Samantha tried to stroke her sister’s hair but her fingers snagged in the braids of blood and bone.
“It ain’t all right.” Zach wrenched off his gloves and mask. He was a hard-looking man. Acne scars pocked his skin. A spray of red circled his mouth and eyes where the blowback from the shotgun had painted his face. “God dammit! What’d you have to use my name for, boy?”
“I d-didn’t—” Hightop stammered. “I’m sorry.”
“We won’t tell.” Samantha looked down, as if she could pretend she hadn’t seen his face. “We won’t say anything. I promise.”
“Girl, I just blew your mama to bits. You really think you’re walking out of here alive?”
“No,” Hightop said. “That’s not what we came for.”
“I came here to erase some bills, boy.” Zach’s steely gray eyes turreted around the room like a machine gun. “Now I’m thinking it’s me that Rusty Quinn’s gotta pay.”
“No,” Hightop said. “I told you—”
Zach shut him up by jamming the shotgun into his face. “You ain’t seein’ the big picture here. We gotta get outta town, and that takes a hell of a lot of money. Everybody knows Rusty Quinn keeps cash in his house.”
“The house burned down.” Samantha heard the words before she registered that they were coming from her own mouth. “Everything burned down.”
“Fuck!” Zach screamed. “Fuck!” He grabbed Hightop by the arm and dragged him into the hallway. He kept the shotgun pointed in their direction, his finger on the trigger. There was furious whispering back and forth that Samantha could clearly hear, but her brain refused to process the words.
“No!” Charlotte fell to the floor. A trembling hand reached down to hold their mother’s. “Don’t be dead, Mama. Please. I love you. I love you so much.”
Samantha looked up at the ceiling. Red lines criss-crossed the plaster like silly string. Tears flooded down her face, soaked into the collar of her only shirt that had been saved from the fire. She let the grief roll through her body before she forced it back out. Gamma was gone. They were alone in the house with her murderer and the sheriff’s man was not going to come.
Promise me you’ll always take care of Charlie.
“Charlie, get up.” Samantha pulled at her sister’s arm, eyes averted because she couldn’t look at Gamma’s ripped-open chest, the broken ribs that stuck out like teeth.
Did you know that shark teeth are made of scales?
Sam whispered, “Charlie, get up.”
“I can’t. I can’t let—”
Sam wrenched her sister back into the chair. She pressed her mouth to Charlie’s ear and said, “Run when you can.” Her voice was so quiet that it caught in her throat. “Don’t look back. Just run.”
“What’re you two saying?” Zach jammed the shotgun against Sam’s forehead. The metal was hot. Pieces of Gamma’s flesh had seared onto the barrel. She could smell it like meat on the grill. “What did you tell her to do? Make a run for it? Try to get away?”
Charlotte squeaked. Her hand went to her mouth.
Zach asked, “What’d she tell you to do, baby doll?”
Sam’s stomach roiled at the way his tone softened when he talked to her sister.
“Come on, honey.” Zach’s gaze slithered down to Charlie’s small chest, her thin waist. “Ain’t we gonna be friends?”
Sam stuttered out, “S-stop.” She was sweating, shaking. Like Charlie, she was going to lose control of her bladder. The round barrel of the gun felt like a drill burrowing into her skull.
Still, she said, “Leave her alone.”
“Was I talking to you, bitch?” Zach pressed the shotgun against Sam’s head until her chin pointed up. “Was I?”
Sam gripped her hands into tight fists. She had to stop this. She had to protect Charlotte. “You leave us alone, Zachariah Culpepper.” She was shocked by her own defiance. She was terrified, but every ounce of terror was tinged with an overwhelming rage. He had murdered her mother. He was leering at her sister. He had told them both that they weren’t walking out of here. She thought of the hammer tucked in the back of her shorts, pictured it lodging into Zach’s brain. “I know exactly who you are, you fucking pervert.”
He flinched at the word. Anger contorted his features. His hands gripped the shotgun so hard that his knuckles turned white, but his voice was calm when he told her, “I’m gonna peel off your eyelids so you can watch me slice out your sister’s cherry with my knife.”