by Julia Keller
Neither spoke during the drive from Tommy’s back to Acker’s Gap. The silence continued—in fact, it seemed to spread out and calcify—as Bell reached her destination and made an abrupt right-angle turn into the driveway, punished the gearshift into Park, doused the headlights, shushed the engine, slid out. Squinting in the strong porch light, she worked the key, flinging open the front door. Only then did she turn around to address Shirley, who’d kept her distance during the climb up the porch steps.
Bell was fuming. Her jaw was set so tight that she’d resigned herself to maybe grinding down a molar or two on account of it. She stepped to one side of the threshold.
“Get in,” she said. “Now.”
Shirley had hesitated, looking down at the scuffed and discolored wood on the porch floor, working the toe of her boot into an especially large knothole.
“Go on,” Bell said. “I’m in a hurry. Got to get back to the courthouse.”
Surprised, Shirley lifted her head. “Not even daylight yet.”
“Yeah. But you know what?” Bell’s voice was hard and sharp. “I’m a prosecutor. You know what that means? It means that at any given time, I’ve got about a dozen or so open cases. Right now we’re trying to find out who murdered an old man in his driveway. And you know what else? I’m an officer of the court. And because I was present during the commission of a felony tonight, I’ve got to file about ten million forms, give or take.”
“Didn’t have nothin’ to do with you,” Shirley said, but she’d mumbled and Bell couldn’t make it out.
“What?” Bell was on high alert for defiance.
“Just sayin’ that what happened at Tommy’s tonight didn’t have nothin’ to do with you. Or me, neither. That fella comes in the bar all the time and starts trouble. Seen him lots. Somebody had to set him straight.”
“So that’s where you’ve been keeping yourself? Tommy’s? You sleeping there, too?”
Shirley didn’t look at her. “Staying with friends.”
“Friends.” Bell put a sneer in the word. “Friends who hang out at places like Tommy’s.”
“It’s not so bad. Things just got outa hand.”
“Yeah,” Bell said. “I’d say they got outa hand, all right. A man’s dead.”
Shirley didn’t answer. Bell shook her head, trying to clear away the last few seconds and get a fresh start on the conversation. She didn’t much care about the dirtball who’d gotten himself killed in a seedy bar in Collier County—as long as the death was unrelated to her murder case here in Acker’s Gap, which seemed likely. She cared about her sister, toward whom she felt an immense and solemn weight of obligation.
Bell peered at her. Shirley would be forty-seven years old next month. She could pass for sixty, what with the long, spindly gray hair that was rapidly thinning on top, just like an old man’s hair. The bones in her face looked as if they were thrusting forward, pushing the flesh away, and soon would take over the space entirely. Her eyes had no shine; they were flat, and the papery skin around them was dry and crosshatched with brief lines.
Yet when Bell looked at Shirley as she was doing right now—looked at her intensely, letting the resentment and disappointment slide away—she felt an unruly rush of raw emotions: pity and love and guilt and abject tenderness. Shirley had given up so much for Bell that the debt was past all reckoning. Their father had molested Shirley for years, and when Donnie Dolan seemed to be turning his attention to ten-year-old Belfa, Shirley had protected her. She’d protected her the only way she knew how: Shirley had stabbed their father in the throat and then used gasoline and matches to destroy the trailer in which they lived. Destroyed the dread and the fear and the menace. Destroyed all the monsters, the living kind and the memory kind. Or tried to, anyway.
Thirty years had passed since that night. Yet even now, when Bell contemplated her sister’s sacrifice, a sacrifice that had consumed so much of Shirley’s life—the prison sentence had been extended again and again by Shirley’s fighting and insubordination and by an escape attempt—Bell was overwhelmed. Shirley had made Bell’s life possible. College, law school, motherhood, public office—none of it could have happened without Shirley. None of it.
Thus even when Bell’s irritation with her sister rose to a high jagged peak, just as it had this evening, she would consider the slack-skinned, sad-eyed woman in front of her. And Bell would find herself wishing that she could simply forget the whole damned world for a moment and sink wearily to the porch floor, taking Shirley with her, whereupon the two of them could just stay there in a clumsy embrace, fused by sorrow and long regret, not crying, not talking, just breathing, swaying back and forth as if this spot were an island of light on the darkest and scariest of nights, and each little girl was rocking the other one back to sleep.
But Bell couldn’t do that. She was a grown woman. She had things to do. Enormous and ongoing responsibilities. Along with her duties as prosecutor, and the gruesome reality of Freddie Arnett’s unsolved murder, there was also the fact that her daughter would be arriving next week. Bell winced at the thought that Carla might see her aunt Shirley in this shape: furtive, simmering with rebelliousness, reeking of alcohol and cigarettes and self-pity.
The anger surged back into the picture. It never seemed to stay away for very long.
“I told you to go inside,” Bell declared. “Get some sleep. I’ll be back later. We’ll talk then.” Shirley, head down, hands rammed in jeans pockets, started to shuffle past her into the house.
Bell abruptly clamped a hand on her sister’s upper arm, the same way she’d shepherded her out of Tommy’s. Bell’s tone was firm but also earnest, searching. “So what’s going on, Shirley? For God’s sake—what the hell do you want? I mean, I’ve done everything I can. Every damned thing I can think of. But you just keep screwing up. So what is it? What do you want? What?”
A bleak smile briefly lifted the skin on Shirley’s face. “I want the last thirty years back,” she said. “Can you do that?”
Chapter Four
“Got an ID on that stabbing victim at Tommy’s.”
Deputy Mathers had to repeat it twice before Bell looked up. Even then, his sentence didn’t fully register. Her elbows were balanced on twin stacks of file folders that appeared to have replicated themselves at will across the broad top of her desk. She’d been making notes on a yellow legal pad, compiling an urgent to-do list for Assistant Prosecutors Hickey Leonard and Rhonda Lovejoy. The investigation into the killing of Freddie Arnett hadn’t progressed beyond what Bell called the OMG stage—characterized by shock, panic, and hand-wringing in virtually everyone she encountered, all of which was understandable, but none of which would do a damned thing toward actually tracking down the bastard who had bludgeoned the old man to death. Time to get creative. Time to do something—anything—that might lead them to the perpetrator of one of the most vicious crimes anyone around here could remember. And this was a place of long memories.
It was just after sunrise. Bell had left Shirley at home and then driven straight to the Raythune County Courthouse, a stolid, dome-topped, three-story limestone structure on Main Street that dated back to 1867 and had the plumbing to prove it. A soft lemony light filled the tall leaded windows in her office. Dust turned in the air. No matter how well or how often her office was cleaned, the dust rose up; the courthouse was so old that the dust, Bell believed, had more right to the place than the people did.
“What are you talking about?” she snapped back at him. She’d been startled, so totally was she focused on the details of the Arnett case, and that made her sound meaner than she’d intended to.
Charlie Mathers didn’t mind. He understood. They were both under the same intense pressure. Both felt the weight of the faith and trust of the people of Acker’s Gap—faith that they’d find Freddie Arnett’s killer, trust that they’d see to it the case was airtight and error-free and culminated in a sentence stretching into the next millennium or so. West Virginia had eliminated the death pena
lty in 1965, and cases such as this one caused a lot of townspeople to openly regret it.
The deputy stood in front of her desk with his booted feet spread and his thumbs tucked in his belt, a belt creased and folded almost double beneath his overlapping gut. When Bell had called him fifteen minutes ago—he was on weekend jail duty—and asked him to check with his colleagues in Collier County about a homicide in a bar reported a few hours ago, she had added, almost as an afterthought, that she’d been present at the scene. He knew there had to be more to the story, but he’d have to scavenge the details later.
“No connection to Freddie Arnett,” Mathers said. “Leastways, that’s how it looks so far. Collier County gave me IDs on the victim and the perpetrator. Dead guy was a fella named Jed Stark. From over in Steppe County. Twenty-six years old. Been getting into trouble ever since he was old enough to say, ‘Hell no—weren’t me that done it.’ But it always was.” Mathers tilted his head philosophically. “He was married. Had a three-year-old girl named—Lord help me—Guinivere. Imagine having to live your life in Steppe County with a name like Guinivere. Might as well paste a ‘Kick Me’ sign on the kid’s backside right now and be done with it.”
“Alleged assailant?”
“Local dirtball named Larry McCoy. Seems Stark was messin’ with his woman.”
Bell’s interest level dropped to near zero. Two liquored-up rednecks fighting over the same over-perfumed jailbait: She heard that story, with only the names changed, a dozen times a month. About as romantic a scenario, Bell thought, as a couple of pigs rooting around in the same trough.
“Okay,” she said to Mathers. Waved her hand dismissively. “Not our lookout.” Except for the contents of his pocket—the out-of-town lawyer’s card—there was nothing remarkable about the fate of Jed Stark. She’d make some inquiries about the business card later. If she had a moment, which wasn’t likely. “There was a deputy present,” Bell added, “and I gave a statement at the scene. Just finished faxing my report to Mason Dittmer’s office.” Dittmer was the Collier County prosecutor. “Can’t think there’s anything else they’ll need.” She tapped the tip of her pencil on the legal pad. Thinking. “Make sure you follow up with Deputy Sturm about McCoy. We need to verify his whereabouts on Thursday night—when Freddie Arnett was attacked. Just in case.” If there was any kind of link between the two homicides, they’d better find it fast.
“You got it,” Mathers said.
Had this been a typical weekend morning, he might have been surprised to see Bell Elkins in her office. It was true that the prosecutor and Sheriff Fogelsong rarely confined themselves to the parameters of a normal workweek. But on Saturdays and Sundays, they tended to be out on the road interviewing witnesses or going over case notes while they compromised their insides with endless cups of black coffee at a diner just down the block called JP’s—short for Joyce’s Place. They weren’t office-sitters.
But here she was, stationed at her desk in the otherwise-deserted courthouse on a summer Sunday morning. And Mathers didn’t have to ask why.
Sometime late Thursday night or early Friday morning, Freddie Arnett had been putting the final touches on the cream-colored 1967 Ford Thunderbird convertible with red leather upholstery that he’d intended to give to his grandson when the boy started community college in the fall. The car was unscathed. Nothing was stolen. Nobody’d had a beef with Arnett, at least not according to the reports from the initial canvas of friends and neighbors. Freddie Arnett was just a sweet old guy with a broken-toothed grin and a magical way with a carburetor, and he’d ended up dead in his own driveway, his skull cracked open and a goodly portion of his brain matter smeared across the concrete, while his wife, Annie, slept in their bedroom not twenty feet away. A neighbor leaving for work on Friday morning found him. The neighbor’s screams—high-pitched, sharp-edged as broken glass—tailed off into one long shrieking howl, slaughtering the peace of a region across which the sun had just begun its gradual daily passage. That animal howl still echoed in the heads of many people who lived up and down the street. Mathers knew it to be true because he’d done the interviews. House by house. Person by person. Story by story.
Mathers also knew how such a crime affected Bell Elkins, tormenting her, living in her skin like a bad case of shingles. He was eager to help, but his work had turned up nothing. Yesterday he’d gone back and reinterviewed the people with whom he and Acting Sheriff Harrison had already spoken—plus a couple of hitchhikers spotted along the interstate that night and tracked down early Saturday morning in Beckley—and he had e-mailed his notes to Bell. But no one had seen or heard a thing. The killer apparently knew his way around Acker’s Gap, at least well enough to sneak up on Arnett, smash him in the back of the head with the old man’s own rust-ravaged sledgehammer, and then drift away again, leaving not so much as a whisper of evidence.
Bell’s cell rang. She looked at Mathers and he nodded, meaning that he had more he needed to say to her, and so she held up an index finger, indicating that he should stick around. She checked the caller ID. “Dammit,” she said, then answered the call. “Elkins.” She paused. “No comment. Okay? Just like I told you yesterday. We’re not ready to—” Another pause. “I understand. But any information I give you right now would be speculative and premature and could compromise the investigation.” Another pause. “No. No connection. The homicide in Collier County last night appears unrelated to the murder of Freddie Arnett.” Pause. “Yes. You can quote me.” Pause. “No problem. It wasn’t too early. Already at my desk.” Pause. “No.” Pause. “One more time. No.” She ended the call.
Mathers grinned. “Lemme guess. Donnie Frazey.” Frazey was the managing editor of the Acker’s Gap Gazette, a weekly newspaper that serviced Raythune, Collier, Steppe, and Atherton counties. His full title was longer—managing editor, sole reporter, advertising sales director, and circulation supervisor—but Frazey had a hard time fitting all that into his byline, so he didn’t mind if people just referred to him as the editor. He was a gangling, sandy-haired fifty-four-year-old veteran of three marriages and father of six children spread evenly amongst those relationships, a recovering alcoholic whose occasional lapses were easily charted by subscribers—the paper’s usually reliable publication day would be pushed back for at least twenty-four hours, a period of time referred to as the “hangover delay”—and he operated out of a cramped storefront that served as the Gazette’s office.
“Just doing his job,” Bell said, frowning at her cell, “but still a damned nuisance. Can’t wait till Nick’s back in town. He’s got a lot more patience with Donnie Frazey than I do.”
A month ago, Sheriff Fogelsong had taken his wife to a psychiatric facility in Chicago, where doctors sought to find a combination of medications to stabilize her, to help her deal with the symptoms of her schizophrenia. Nick and Mary Sue would be returning to Acker’s Gap on Tuesday.
Bell put a hand flat on the yellow legal pad and looked up at Mathers, hoping he would take her meaning: She had work to do. “Anything else?”
The deputy moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth as if he were searching for a lost kernel of last night’s popcorn. “Well,” he said, “I thought maybe you’d want a few more details about that stabbing at Tommy’s.” Mathers was a born storyteller, and Bell’s lack of interest in his harvest of data had disappointed him.
“Okay,” she said. It came out as more of a sigh than a word. “Sure, Charlie.” She sat back in her chair. She needed a break, anyway.
“So it happens like this.” The deputy untucked one of his thumbs from his belt and used the thumbnail to scratch the top of his left ear. “Mandy Sturm questions this McCoy character in the bar for an hour or so this morning. Knows what she’s doing, too. She’s a damned good deputy. So McCoy confesses. Says he just got sick and tired of Jed Stark bothering his lady, and so he goes out to his pickup in the parking lot and he gets in the Craftsman toolbox that he keeps in the truck bed and he lightens the load by the weight of
one Phillips-head screwdriver. Barges back in and sits right down beside Stark and strikes up a conversation. Bides his time. Right after the band plays the first chorus of “Sweet Home Alabama,” seeing that Stark’s relaxed and all, McCoy leans over and takes care of our little redneck Romeo, good and proper. Now, soon as he comes clean to Deputy Sturm about what he did, nine-tenths of the folks who’ve been sitting at the surrounding tables are suddenly able to verify it. When it first happened, nobody said a word. Not even the gal who’d started the whole fuss in the first place. Everybody just sat there, tapping their feet to the damned music while Jed Stark’s life was dripping out of him like gas from a leaky fuel line.”
“Must be nice,” Bell muttered, “to have friends like that.” She pushed her chair away from the desk and stood up.
Mathers gave a little snicker. “Guys like Stark don’t have friends. Oh, they may think they do—they might run with some other bad boys from time to time, raising hell and sharing a bottle or a joint or both—but in the end, nobody cares about ’em. They’re alone, really.” He shrugged. “No telling how long Stark was propped up there in his seat, dead as a post, until he just tumbled out of that chair onto the floor—which musta happened shortly after you and Deputy Sturm got there.
“McCoy’s being held in the Collier County Jail,” Mathers added, winding up his narrative with a Don’t that beat all nod. “This one’ll be easy. No muss, no fuss.”
“Good. Enough on our plates around here as it is.” Bell wandered over to the window. The brown drapes were tied off on either side. She looked out through the clear glass but didn’t see a thing; she was too preoccupied. How was it that you could look out a window and not see beyond your own thoughts?