Kitabı oku: «The Good Daughter: The gripping new bestselling thriller from a No. 1 author», sayfa 6
“I’d like to go now.” Charlie didn’t know that she was going to say the words until she heard them come out of her mouth. “I’m leaving.”
“You should finish your statement.” Delia smiled. “I’ll only need a few more minutes.”
“I’d like to finish it at a later date.” Charlie gripped the table so she could stand. “You said that I’m free to go.”
“Absolutely.” Delia Wofford again proved unflappable. She handed Charlie one of her business cards. “I look forward to speaking with you again soon.”
Charlie took the card. Her vision was still out of focus. Her stomach sloshed acid up into her throat.
Ben said, “I’ll take you out the back way. Are you okay to walk to your office?”
Charlie wasn’t sure about anything except that she had to get out of here. The walls were closing in. She couldn’t breathe through her nose. She was going to suffocate if she didn’t get out of this room.
Ben tucked her water bottle into his jacket pocket. He opened the door. Charlie practically fell into the hallway. She braced her hands against the wall opposite the door. Forty years of paint had turned the cinder blocks smooth. She pressed her cheek against the cold surface. She took a few deep breaths and waited for the nausea to pass.
“Charlie?” Ben said.
She turned back around. There was suddenly a river of people between them. The building was teeming with law enforcement. Muscle-bound men and women with big rifles strapped to their wide chests rushed back and forth. State troopers. Sheriff’s deputies. Highway patrol. Ben was right; they had all shown up. She saw letters on the backs of their shirts. GBI. FBI. ATF. SWAT. ICE. BOMB SQUAD.
When the hall finally cleared, Ben had his phone in his hands. He was silent as his thumbs moved across the screen.
She leaned against the wall and waited for him to finish texting whoever he was texting. Maybe the twenty-six-year-old from his office. Kaylee Collins. The girl was Ben’s type. Charlie knew this because, at that age, she had been her husband’s type, too.
“Shit.” Ben’s thumbs swiped across the screen. “Gimme another second.”
Charlie could’ve walked herself out of the police station. She could’ve walked the six blocks to her office.
But she didn’t.
She studied the top of Ben’s head, the way his hair grew from the crown like a spiral ham. She wanted to fold herself into his body. To lose herself in him.
Instead, Charlie silently repeated the phrases she had practiced in her car, in the kitchen, sometimes in front of the bathroom mirror:
I can’t live without you.
The last nine months have been the loneliest of my life.
Please come home because I can’t take it anymore.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
“Plea deal on another case went south.” Ben dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. It clinked against Charlie’s half-empty water bottle. “Ready?”
She had no choice but to walk. She kept her fingertips to the wall, turning sideways as more cops in black tactical gear passed by. Their expressions were cold, unreadable. They were either going somewhere or coming back from something, their collective jaws set against the world.
This was a school shooting.
Charlie had been so focused on the what that she had forgotten the where.
She wasn’t an expert, but she knew enough about these investigations to understand that every school shooting informed the next one. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook. Law enforcement agencies studied these tragedies in an effort to prevent, or at the very least understand, the next one.
The ATF would comb the middle school for bombs because others had used bombs before. The GBI would look for accomplices because sometimes, rarely, there were accomplices. Canine officers would hunt for suspicious backpacks in the halls. They would check every locker, every teacher’s desk, every closet for explosives. Investigators would look for Kelly’s diary or a hit list, diagrams of the school, stashes of weaponry, a plan of assault. Tech people would look at computers, phones, Facebook pages, Snapchat accounts. Everyone would search for a motive, but what motive could they find? What answer could an eighteen-year-old offer to explain why she had decided to commit cold-blooded murder?
That was Rusty’s problem now. Exactly the kind of thorny, moral and legal issue that got him out of bed in the morning.
Exactly the kind of law that Charlie had never wanted to practice.
“Come on.” Ben walked ahead of her. He had a long, loping stride because he always put too much weight on the balls of his feet.
Was Kelly Wilson being abused? That would be Rusty’s first line of inquiry. Was there some sort of mitigating circumstance that would keep her off death row? She had been held back at least one year in school. Did that indicate a low IQ? Diminished capacity? Was Kelly Wilson capable of telling right from wrong? Could she participate in her own defense, as required by law?
Ben pushed open the exit door.
Was Kelly Wilson a bad seed? Was the explanation here the only explanation that would never make sense? Would Delia Wofford tell Lucy Alexander’s parents and Mrs. Pinkman that the reason they lost their loved ones was because Kelly Wilson was bad?
“Charlie,” Ben said. He was holding open the door. His iPhone was back in his hand.
Charlie shielded her eyes as she walked outside. The sunlight was as sharp as a blade. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Here.” Ben handed her a pair of sunglasses. They belonged to her. He must have gotten them out of her car.
Charlie took the glasses but couldn’t put them on her tender nose. She opened her mouth for air. The sudden heat was too much. She leaned down, hand braced on her knee.
“Are you going to be sick?”
“No,” she said, then “maybe,” then she threw up just enough to make a splatter.
Ben didn’t step back. He managed to gather her hair away from her face without touching her skin. Charlie retched two more times before he asked, “All right?”
“Maybe.” Charlie opened her mouth. She waited for more. A line of spit came out, but nothing else. “Okay.”
He let her hair drop back around her shoulders. “The paramedic told me that you have a concussion.”
Charlie couldn’t lift her head, but she told him, “There’s nothing they can do about it.”
“They can monitor you for symptoms like nausea and blurred vision and headaches and forgetting names and not tracking when you’re asked a simple question.”
“They wouldn’t know the names I was forgetting,” she said. “I don’t want to spend the night in a hospital.”
“Stay at the HP.” The higgledy-piggledy. Sam’s name for the meandering farmhouse had stuck. Ben said, “Rusty can watch you.”
“So I die from second-hand smoke instead of a brain aneurysm?”
“That’s not funny.”
Head still down, Charlie reached back for the wall. The feel of the solid concrete block gave her enough steadiness to risk standing up straight. She cupped her hand to her eyes. She remembered cupping her hand to the window of the front office this morning.
Ben handed her the water bottle. He had already taken the top off for her. She took a few slow sips and tried not to read too much into his thoughtfulness. Her husband was thoughtful with everybody.
She asked, “Where was Mrs. Jenkins when the shooting started?”
“In the file room.”
“Did she see anything?”
“Rusty will find out everything during discovery.”
“Everything,” Charlie repeated. In the coming months, Ken Coin would be required by law to turn over any material in the investigation that could be reasonably interpreted as evidence. Coin’s idea of “reasonable” was as fixed as a spider’s web.
She asked Ben, “Is Mrs. Pinkman okay?”
He didn’t bring up her “Heller” slip because that wasn’t his way. “She’s at the hospital. They had to sedate her.”
Charlie should visit her, but she knew that she would find an excuse not to. “You let me think Kelly Wilson was sixteen years old.”
“I thought you could figure it out by holding a sphere in your hand and pulling apart time.”
Charlie laughed. “That was some next-level bullshit I laid down in there.”
“There’s some out here, too.”
Charlie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She smelled dried blood again. Like everything else, she remembered the smell from before. She remembered the dark flecks falling like ash from her hair. She remembered that even after she’d bathed, even after she’d scrubbed herself raw, the odor of death had lingered.
She said, “You called me this morning.”
Ben shrugged like it didn’t matter.
Charlie poured the rest of the water onto her hands to clean them. “Have you talked to your mom and your sisters? They’ll be worried.”
“We talked.” He did that shrug again. “I should go back in.”
Charlie waited, but he didn’t go back in. She grappled for a reason to make him stay. “How’s Barkzilla?”
“Barky.” Ben took the empty bottle. He screwed on the cap. He dropped it back into his jacket pocket. “How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”
“Quiet.”
He tucked his chin into his chest, returning to silence. This was nothing new. Her normally articulate husband had not articulated much to her in the past nine months.
But he wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t nodding her along, urging her to go. He wasn’t telling her that the only reason he wasn’t asking her if she was okay was because she would say that she was okay even if she wasn’t. Especially if she wasn’t.
She asked, “Why did you call me this morning?”
Ben groaned. He leaned his head back against the wall.
Charlie leaned her head back against the wall, too.
She studied the sharp line of his jaw. This was her type—a lanky, laid-back nerd who could quote Monty Python as easily as the United States constitution. He read graphic novels. He drank a glass of milk every night before he went to bed. He loved potato salad, and Lord of the Rings, and model trains. He preferred fantasy football to the real kind. He could not put on weight if you force-fed him butter. He was six feet tall when he stood up straight, which didn’t happen often.
She loved him so much that her heart literally hurt at the thought of never holding him again.
Ben said, “Peggy had this friend when she was fourteen. Her name was Violet.”
Peggy was the bossiest of his three older sisters.
“She was killed in a car crash. She was on her bicycle. We went to the funeral. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, taking me. I was too young to see that kind of thing. It was open casket. Carla held me up so I could see her.” His throat worked. “I, like, lost my shit. Mom had to take me out into the parking lot. It gave me nightmares. I thought that was the worst thing that I would ever see. A dead kid. A dead little girl. But she was cleaned up. You couldn’t see what had happened, that the car had hit her in the back. That she had bled to death, but inside. Not like the girl today. Not like what I saw at the school.”
There were tears in his eyes. Each word out of his mouth broke another piece of Charlie’s heart. She had to clench her fists to keep from reaching out to him.
Ben said, “Murder is murder. I can deal with that. Dealers. Gangbangers. Even domestic violence. But a kid? A little girl?” He kept shaking his head. “She didn’t look like she was sleeping, did she?”
“No.”
“She looked like she had been murdered. Like someone had fired a gun at her throat and the bullet ripped it open and she died a horrible, violent death.”
Charlie looked up into the sun because she didn’t want to see Lucy Alexander dying all over again.
Ben said, “The guy’s a war hero. Did you know that?”
He was talking about Huck.
“He saved a platoon or something, but he won’t talk about it because he’s like fucking Batman or something.” Ben pushed himself away from the wall, away from Charlie. “And this morning, he took a bullet in his arm. To save a murderer, whom he kept from getting murdered. And then he stood up for the guy who almost killed him. He lied in a sworn statement to keep another guy out of trouble. He’s so fucking handsome, right?” Ben was angry now, but his voice was low, shrunken by the humiliation that came courtesy of his bitch wife. “A guy like that, you see him walking down the street, you don’t know whether you want to fuck him or have a beer with him.”
Charlie looked down at the ground. They knew she had done both.
“Lenore’s here.”
Rusty’s secretary had pulled up to the gate in her red Mazda.
Charlie said, “Ben, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. An awful, awful mistake.”
“Did you let him on top?”
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Lenore tapped the horn. She rolled down her window and waved. Charlie waved back, her hand splayed, trying to let Lenore know that she needed a minute.
“Ben—”
It was too late. Ben was already pulling the door closed behind him.
4
Charlie sniffed her sunglasses as she walked toward Lenore’s car. She knew she was acting like a foolish girl in a teen romance, but she wanted to smell Ben. What she got instead was a whiff of her own sweat tinged with vomit.
Lenore leaned across the car to push open the door. “You put those on your nose, sweetheart, not in front of it.”
Charlie couldn’t put anything on her nose. She tossed the cheap glasses onto the dashboard as she got in. “Did Daddy send you?”
“Ben texted me, but, listen, your dad wants us to fetch the Wilsons and bring them back to the office. Coin’s trying to execute a search warrant. I brought your court clothes to change into.”
Charlie had started shaking her head as soon as she heard the words “your dad wants.” She asked, “Where’s Rusty?”
“At the hospital with the Wilson girl.”
Charlie huffed a laugh. Ben had really honed his deception skills. “How long before Dad figured out she wasn’t being held at the station?”
“Over an hour.”
Charlie put on her seat belt. “I was thinking how much Coin loves to play his games.” She had no doubt the district attorney had put Kelly Wilson in the back of an ambulance for the trip to the hospital. By maintaining the illusion that she wasn’t in police custody, he could argue that any statement she made absent counsel was voluntary. “She’s eighteen years old.”
“Rusty told me. The girl was practically catatonic at the hospital. He barely got her mama’s phone number out of her.”
“That’s how she was when I saw her. Almost in a fugue state.” Charlie hoped Kelly Wilson snapped out of it soon. At the moment, she was Rusty’s most vital source of information. Until he received the discovery materials from Ken Coin—witness lists, police statements, investigators’ notes, forensics—her father would be flying blind.
Lenore put her hand on the gear. “Where am I taking you?”
Charlie pictured herself at home, standing under a hot shower, surrounding herself with pillows in bed. And then she remembered that Ben wouldn’t be there and said, “I guess to the Wilsons.”
“They live on the backside of the Holler.” Lenore put the car in gear. She made a wide U-turn and drove up the street. “There’s no street address. Your dad sent me country directions—take a left at the old white dog, take a right at the crooked oak tree.”
“That’s good news for Kelly, I guess.” Rusty could break a search warrant that didn’t have the right address or at least a proper description of the house. The odds were against Ken Coin to come up with either. There were hundreds of rental houses and trailers up and down the Holler. No one knew exactly how many people lived there, what their names were or whether or not their children were attending school. The slumlords didn’t bother with leases or background checks so long as the right amount of cash showed up every week.
Charlie asked, “How long do you think we have before Ken locates the house?”
“No idea. They brought in a helicopter from Atlanta an hour ago, but from what I can tell, it’s on the other side of the mountain.”
Charlie knew that she could find the Wilson house. She was in the Holler at least twice a month chasing down past-due legal bills. Ben had been horrified when she’d casually mentioned her night-time excursions. Sixty percent of the crime in Pikeville was committed in or near Sadie’s Holler.
Lenore said, “I packed a sandwich for you.”
“I’m not hungry.” Charlie looked at the clock on the dash: 11:52 AM. Less than five hours ago, she’d been looking inside the darkened front office at the middle school. Less than ten minutes after that, two people were dead, another was shot, and Charlie was about to get her nose broken.
Lenore said, “You should eat.”
“I will.” Charlie stared out the window. Sunlight strobed through the tall trees behind the buildings. The flickering light flashed images into her mind like an old-timey slideshow. Charlie allowed herself the rare indulgence of lingering on the ones of Gamma and Sam—running down the long driveway to the farmhouse, giggling over a thrown plastic fork. She knew what came later, so she fast-forwarded until Sam and Gamma were firmly back in the past and all that remained was the aftermath of this morning.
Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman.
A little girl. A middle-school principal.
The victims didn’t seem to have much in common except that they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Charlie had to guess, she would assume that Kelly Wilson’s plan was to stand in the middle of the hall, revolver out in front of her, and wait for the bell to ring.
Then little Lucy Alexander rounded the corner.
Pop.
Then Mr. Pinkman rushed out of his office.
Pop-pop-pop.
Then the bell had rung and, but for some quick-thinking staff, a sea of fresh victims would have rushed down that same hallway.
Goth. Loner. Held back a grade.
Kelly Wilson was the exact type of girl who got bullied. Alone at the lunch table, last to get picked during gym, attending the school dance with a boy who only wanted one thing.
Why had Kelly picked up a gun when Charlie hadn’t?
Lenore said, “At least drink that Coke in the cooler. It’ll help with the shock.”
“I’m not in shock.”
“I bet you think your nose isn’t broken, either.”
“Actually, I do think it’s broken.” Lenore’s persistent mentions of Charlie’s health finally made Charlie aware that her health wasn’t that great. Her head was in a vise. Her nose had its own heartbeat. Her eyelids felt like they were weighed down with honey. She gave in for a few seconds, letting them close, welcoming the blankness.
Over the hum of the engine, she could hear Lenore’s feet working the pedals as she shifted gears. She always drove barefooted with her high heels on the floor beside her. She tended toward short skirts and colored stockings. The look was too young for a seventy-year-old woman, but considering that Charlie currently had more hair on her legs than Lenore, she couldn’t sit in judgment.
“You need to drink some of that Coke,” Lenore said.
Charlie opened her eyes. The world was still there.
“Now.”
Charlie was too exhausted to argue. She found the cooler wedged against the seat. She took out the Coke but left the sandwich. Instead of opening the bottle, she held it to the back of her neck. “Can I have some aspirin?”
“Nope. Raises the risk of bleeding.”
Charlie would’ve welcomed a coma over the pain. There was something about the bright sun that had turned her head into a giant, ringing bell. “What’s that thing you get in your ears?”
“Tinnitus,” Lenore said. “I’ll stop the car if you don’t start drinking that Coke right now.”
“And let the police get to the Wilson house before we do?”
“They’d have to leave out on this road, for one, and for two, even if they find the location of the house, and even if they have a judge standing by, it’ll take at least half an hour to put the warrant together and three, shut the hell up and do what I tell you before I pop you on the leg.”
Charlie used her T-shirt to twist off the cap. She sipped the Coke and watched downtown slip into the side mirror.
Lenore asked, “Did you throw up?”
“Pass.” Charlie felt her stomach clench again. The world outside was too disorienting. She had to close her eyes to regain her equilibrium.
The slideshow popped into her head again: Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Gamma. Sam. Charlie clicked through the images quickly like she was searching for a file on her computer.
What had she said to special agent Delia Wofford that might hurt Kelly Wilson’s defense? Rusty would want to know. He would also want to know about the number and sequence of gunshots, the capacity of the revolver, what Kelly had whispered when Huck was begging her to give him the gun.
That last part would be crucial to Kelly Wilson’s defense. If she had made an admission, if she had offered a glib comment or stated a grim motive for her crimes, then no amount of oratory flourish on Rusty’s part would save her from the needle. Ken Coin would never turn such a high-profile prosecution over to the state. He had argued two capital cases before. No jury in Pikeville would refuse his request for death by lethal injection. Coin spoke with a particular authority. Back when he was a police officer, he’d executed a man with his own hands.
Twenty-eight years ago, Daniel Culpepper, Zachariah Culpepper’s brother, had been sitting in his trailer watching television when Officer Ken Coin had rolled up in his squad car. It was eight thirty in the evening. Gamma’s body had already been found at the farmhouse. Sam was bleeding her life away in the shallow stream that ran under the weather tower. Thirteen-year-old Charlie was sitting in the back of an ambulance begging the paramedics to let her go home. Officer Coin had kicked down the front door to Daniel Culpepper’s trailer. The suspect had grabbed his gun. Coin had shot the nineteen-year-old seven times in the chest.
To this day, the majority of the Culpepper clan insisted on Daniel’s innocence, but the evidence against the kid was incontrovertible. The revolver found in Daniel’s hand was later identified as the same weapon that had been used to shoot Sam in the head. Daniel’s blood-covered jeans and distinctive blue hightops were found smoldering in a burn barrel behind the trailer. Even his own brother said they both went to the HP to kill Rusty. They were worried they would lose their home over some stupid legal bill they assumed would come due after the Quinns lost everything in the fire. Charlie was left to survive the ordeal with the knowledge that her family’s life had been reduced to the price of a used trailer.
Lenore said, “We’re going past the school.”
Charlie opened her eyes. Pikeville Middle School had been Pikeville Junior High when Charlie was a student. The building had sprawled over the years, hastily overbuilt to accommodate the twelve hundred students pulled in from the neighboring communities. The high school beside it was even larger, meant to house almost two thousand kids.
She saw the empty space where her car had been parked. Police tape cordoned off the lot. There were other cars that belonged to teachers scattered among the police cruisers, government sedans, ambulances, fire trucks, crime scene buses, the coroner’s van. A news helicopter was flying low over the gymnasium. The scene felt surreal, like a director would yell “cut” and everyone would take lunch.
Charlie said, “Mrs. Pinkman had to be sedated.”
“She’s a good woman. She doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does.”
Charlie nodded because she couldn’t talk past the glass in her throat. Judith Heller Pinkman had been a weird touchstone to Charlie over the years. They would see each other in the hall when Charlie finally went back to school. Miss Heller always smiled, but she didn’t push Charlie, didn’t force her to talk about the tragedy behind their connection. She kept her distance, which in retrospect, took a kind of discipline that most people didn’t possess.
Lenore asked, “I wonder how long the media attention will last?” She was looking up at the helicopter. “Two victims. That’s quaint compared to most mass shootings.”
“Girls don’t kill. At least, not like this.”
“‘I Don’t Like Mondays.’”
“In general, or do you mean the Boomtown Rats’ song?”
“The song.” Lenore said, “It’s based on a shooting. 1979. A sixteen-year-old girl took a sniper rifle to a playground. I forget how many she killed. When the cops asked her why she did it, she said, ‘I don’t like Mondays.’”
“Jesus,” Charlie whispered, hoping like hell that Kelly Wilson hadn’t been that callous when she had whispered whatever she’d said in the hallway.
And then Charlie wondered why she cared about Kelly Wilson, because the girl was a murderer.
Charlie was jarred by the sudden clarity of thought.
Take away all that had happened this morning—the fear, the deaths, the memories, the heartache—and Charlie was left with one simple truth: Kelly Wilson had murdered two people in cold blood.
Unbidden, Rusty’s voice intruded: So what?
Kelly still had a right to a trial. She still had a right to the best defense she could find. Charlie had said as much to the angry group of cops who had wanted to beat the girl to death, but now, sitting in the car with Lenore, Charlie wondered if she had come to the girl’s defense simply because no one else would.
Another personality flaw that had become a sore point in her marriage.
She reached into the back seat, this time for her court clothes. She found what Ben called her Amish shirt and what Charlie considered one step up from a burka. The Pikeville judges, all of them cranky old men, were an aggressively conservative lot. Female lawyers had to choose between wearing long skirts and chaste blouses or having every objection, every motion, every word out of their mouth overruled.
Lenore asked, “Are you okay?”
“No, not really.” Letting out the truth took some of the pressure off of her chest. Charlie had always told Lenore things that she would never admit to anyone else. Lenore had known Rusty for over fifty years. She was a black hole into which all of the Quinn family secrets disappeared. “My head is killing me. My nose is broken. I feel like I threw up a lung. I can’t even see to read, and none of that matters because I cheated on Ben last night.”
Lenore silently shifted gears as she pulled onto the two-lane highway.
Charlie said, “It was okay while it lasted. I mean, he got the job done.” She carefully peeled off her Duke T-shirt, trying not to bump her nose. “I woke up crying this morning. I couldn’t stop. I just lay in bed for half an hour staring up at the ceiling and wanting to kill myself. And then the phone rang.”
Lenore shifted again. They were leaving the Pikeville city limits. The wind off the mountains buffeted the compact sedan.
“I shouldn’t have picked up the stupid phone. I couldn’t even remember his name. He couldn’t remember mine. At least he pretended not to. It was embarrassing and sordid and now Ben knows. The GBI knows. Everyone in his office knows.”
Charlie said, “That’s why I was at the school this morning, to meet the guy because he took my phone by mistake and he called and …” She put on her court shirt, a starched button-up with ruffles down the front to assure the judges that she was taking this woman thing seriously. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Lenore shifted into sixth. “That you were lonely.”
Charlie laughed, though there was nothing funny about the truth. She watched her fingers as she buttoned the shirt. The buttons were suddenly too small. Or maybe it was that her hands were sweating. Or maybe it was that the tremble was back in her fingers, the vibration of bone that felt like a tuning fork had been struck against her chest.
“Baby,” Lenore said. “Let it out.”
Charlie shook her head. She didn’t want to let it out. She wanted to hold it back, to put all the horrible images in their box, shove it onto a shelf, and never open it ever again.
But then a teardrop fell.
Then another.
Then Charlie was crying, then she was sobbing so hard that she doubled over, her head in her hands, because the grief was too much to carry.
Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Miss Heller. Gamma. Sam. Ben.
The car slowed. The tires bumped against gravel as Lenore pulled to the side of the road. She rubbed Charlie’s back. “It’s okay, baby.”
It wasn’t okay. She wanted her husband. She wanted her useless asshole of a father. Where was Rusty? Why was he never there when she needed him?
“It’s okay.” Lenore kept rubbing Charlie’s back and Charlie kept crying because it was never going to be all right.
From the moment Charlie had heard those first gunshots in Huck’s room, the entirety of the most violent hour of her life had snapped back into her waking memory. She kept hearing the same words over and over again. Keep running. Don’t look back. Into the woods. To Miss Heller’s house. Up the school hallway. Toward the gunshots. But she was too late. Charlie was always too fucking late.
Lenore stroked back Charlie’s hair. “Deep breaths, sweetheart.”
Charlie realized she was starting to hyperventilate. Her vision blurred. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She made herself breathe until her lungs could take in more than a teaspoonful of air at a time.
“Take your time,” Lenore said.
Charlie took a few more deep breaths. Her vision cleared, at least as much as it was going to. She took another series of breaths, holding them for a second, maybe two, to prove to herself that she could.
“Better?”
Charlie whispered, “Was that a panic attack?”
“Might still be one.”
“Help me up.” Charlie reached for Lenore’s hand. The blood rushed from her head. Instinctively, she touched her aching nose, and the pain intensified.
