by Julia Keller
“You got that right,” Mathers declared. “But it’s not all bad news, you know? Folks’re already talking about Friday. Plenty excited. Might take our minds off our troubles.”
Bell, her back to the deputy, nodded. Friday was the day former West Virginia Governor Riley Jessup was scheduled to show up at the Raythune County Medical Center and—with substantial assistance close at hand, Bell hoped, given the fact that Jessup was eighty-nine years old and possessed not only a pacemaker but also two artificial hips and a catheter bag and at least a hundred more pounds than a man with his frame ought to be hauling around—climb on the back of a flatbed truck to speak at the dedication of a new MRI machine. Jessup had written the check to buy it. A great many people in town were thrilled about the visit because he was a local boy, born and raised in Raythune County. Jessup had left office decades ago and rarely returned to his homeplace, but he was still revered in these parts.
To Mathers and Bell, though, and to anyone with any connection to public safety, the governor’s visit meant only one thing: extra hassle. He would have to be met, escorted, monitored, protected, catered to, fed, watered, waited on, hoisted up, helped down, ferried about, and generally fussed over. Sheriff Fogelsong would be back by then, and he’d coordinate everything, but still.
“Wouldn’t it just figure,” Mathers went on, “that we’d have the governor coming by for his little visit right in the middle of a homicide investigation? I mean—any other time, I’d be looking forward to shaking his hand, same as everybody else. But things being what they are right now—well, we’re bound to be a little skittish.”
Neither Mathers nor Bell spoke for a moment; neither wanted to acknowledge out loud the bad luck that seemed like a permanent resident around here, instead of an occasional visitor. Unlike Collier County, where the civic fortunes were boosted by the presence of a metal fabrication plant just outside the county seat of Donnerton and a wholesale beauty supply shop in Swanville that shipped products to three states, Raythune County faced a bleak economic future. It had no manufacturing plants left, no industry. The men—and it was all men back then, Bell liked to remind people—who had ruled Raythune County throughout the twentieth century rarely spent any time wooing businesses; they’d been satisfied with the coal mines that kept the taxes rolling in and the trucks rolling out, staggering happily under their high-peaked loads.
Now most of those mines were shut down: Brassy-Waltham, Acer, Milltown Limited. West Virginia coal was not nearly so coveted as it once had been. The region had settled into serious decline, a decline made worse by the bad habits people developed to distract themselves from it: violence and alcohol and drugs. Bell and her two assistant prosecutors had more cases than they could comfortably handle.
“My grandpa knew Riley Jessup pretty well,” Mathers added. “Knew him before he got so danged rich and famous, that is. Lots of folks around here remember Jessup. Look up to him, too. I’ve heard it said that politicians are the new celebrities. Hard to think of Riley Jessup in the same picture frame with Brad Pitt, but maybe so. Maybe so. What do you think, Mrs. Elkins?”
Bell didn’t answer. She reclaimed her seat at the desk. Her mind had been circling back to the events at Tommy’s, and to the single nagging detail that made them interesting. “The victim in the bar,” she said. “Jed Stark. He had a business card on him. Deputy Sturm put anything about that in her report?”
Now Mathers pulled out his other thumb from the other side of his belt. He used the hand to which it was attached as a curved tool, answering a scratch on the back of his neck. “Nope. Once she got the confession, she just moved on, I guess. I’ll make sure I follow up, though.” He paused. “Got a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Well.” Suddenly he felt like a daredevil, given the degree of risk. When it came to personal questions, Bell’s temper was infamous. “None of my business, Mrs. Elkins—but I gotta ask. What in the world were you doing at a place like Tommy’s on a Saturday night? Don’t strike me as your kinda hangout.”
“It’s not.”
He waited for more. Most everyone knew about Shirley Dolan’s return to Acker’s Gap and the problems thereof. Smart lawyer would’ve gotten her off, a lot of people said, a lot of years later. Right advice, she would’ve walked away, free as a bird, they liked to add. Plainly justifiable. Self-defense. Bastard had it coming. Good Lord, she shouldn’t have served one damned hour, much less thirty years. Fat lot of good those opinions did Shirley now, Bell always thought when she heard the murmurs.
Mathers had already guessed the reason for Bell’s improbable presence at Tommy’s, and that guess came down to one word: Shirley. Had to be. But he’d said as much as he could, daredevil or no. There was a boundary with Bell Elkins.
“Thanks for the information, Deputy,” she said. Her meaning was unmistakable: Back off. And so he did.
Chapter Five
Between 3 and 5 A.M. on Sunday morning, the Lester station on Route 7 might as well have been the surface of Mars, for all the human activity it hosted. Two gas pumps, huddled under a yellow cone of flickering, bug-studded light, looked positively forlorn. Before three, the station could sometimes be a wild circus of action and noise, of stretched-out honking and cranked-up bass beats throbbing from open car windows; after three, there was a steep drop-off. Nobody came by.
Or almost nobody. At 3:12 A.M., a drunk woman in yellow short-shorts, red halter top, flip-flops, and a sparkly pink scarf knotted around her scrawny neck tried to walk headfirst into the glass double doors of the store that came with the station. She backpedaled, then rammed the door again with her forehead. Confusion scrambled her features. Her hands remained at her sides; apparently she had forgotten that doors commonly had handles, and that handles required pulling.
From inside the store, standing behind the high green counter where the cash register was, backed by a towering metal rack of cigarette cartons sorted and stacked by brand, Lindy watched with dispassionate curiosity, as if the whole thing were a reality TV show. The woman’s forehead bounced off the glass one more time. She raised both fists above her head and shook them in impotent fury, then mouthed two words through the glass. Lindy couldn’t be sure what they were. Odds, of course, favored Fuck you! or Screw you! but the woman’s lips were as loose and wobbly as the rest of her, so it was hard to say.
Jason Brinkerman, the assistant manager, was coming out of the employees-only bathroom in the back. He caught sight of the woman as she attacked the glass doors for a fourth time—she still hadn’t recollected their method of operation—and he laughed.
“Don’t laugh, okay?” Lindy said. “It’s not funny.”
“What a skank.” Jason grinned and waved at the woman, and stuck out his tongue, all of which infuriated their would-be visitor. She stomped her feet and glared. She looked as if she might be ready to bull her way right through the glass. Anything to get at him.
“She’s drunk. Big deal,” Lindy said. They usually dealt with three or four drunks during the overnight shift. Weekends, that number could double or triple.
“Don’t think she came in a car,” Jason said. The woman had wandered away now, to his disappointment. It was time to get back to work. “Bet somebody dropped her off along the road to let her puke and then just drove away. Good riddance.”
“Get the coffee started, will you?” Lindy said. She was tired of talking about the silly woman. Her first month on the job, she’d dutifully called the sheriff’s department when drunks showed up; she worried they might hurt themselves, wander out into the road, or—if they blundered into the woods—trip and roll down a ravine.
But the 911 dispatcher had set her straight: The county couldn’t send out a deputy every time a resident got herself shit-faced. Forget it was the advice Lindy received from the dispatcher. Not meanly, just firmly. Have a nice evening, hon.
Lindy and Jason got along fine. He was a year younger than she was, and he hid his admiration and affection for her behind a wall of co
ol. Toward the end of the shift, though, they both had a tendency to get testy and short with each other. The last hour or two seemed to last twice as long as the previous seven, Lindy often said, and Jason always agreed, shaking his head up and down so vigorously that his long brown hair flapped like a dish towel on a clothesline. Summer or winter, Jason favored an XXL flannel shirt, unbuttoned and untucked and worn over a T-shirt, plus baggy khaki shorts, and sneakers with no laces or socks. Sometimes he wore a backward Yankees cap, a blue one with the interlocking white letters NY.
It was Jason’s job to keep the coffeepots filled. The station offered regular roast, dark roast, hazelnut, and decaf, and the four round-bottomed glass pots lived in a row of hot plates in a section set off from the rest of the store by an overhead sign: FILL ’ER UP. He also was responsible for keeping the cardboard cups in a tidy tower next to the pots. People were astonishingly sloppy with those cups, knocking over the whole stack when they tried to grab the top one and then just walking away and leaving the mess. And the lids? Don’t get me started on what those fuckers do with the lids, Jason would say to Lindy. It was his standard lament. Been picking them lids up off the floor for, like, my whole damned life, feels like. Lindy knew what he meant. People were slobs. Most of them, anyway. They just didn’t pay attention.
In another fifteen minutes or so, the guy who dropped off the Sunday papers would park his lopsided orange Dodge Dart in the fire lane directly in front of the building and hoist himself up and out. It was always the same guy, but Lindy didn’t know his name. He’d turn his back to the glass double doors and push open one side with his butt, because he was lugging two twine-wrapped bundles, one in each hand, and then he’d turn around and fling the bundles at the front counter, not caring where they landed or what they knocked over. Just before the fling, he’d yell, “Incoming!” and then add a spidery cackle of a laugh. Once, he knocked over a whole rack of smokeless tobacco tins and shiny foil packets. Lindy couldn’t tell how old he was, but he was old. Lots older than her and Jason, for sure. No matter what the weather was like, he wore a long greasy raincoat. The acne scars on his face looked as if they’d been made with a hammer and chisel. He had the careless swagger of a teenager, the standard You talkin’ to ME? smirk, but he also had wrinkles in his face and a sagging gut and—Lindy had spotted this right off—he walked as if his knees and his hips hurt. She knew that walk. You couldn’t disguise it. It was one of the first things she’d noticed about her father, long before he retired; he walked like a man in pain—who was trying not to walk like a man in pain. Same for Newspaper Guy.
“Incoming!”
He was early. As the glass door closed behind him, Lindy moved away from the counter, in case his aim was off, as usual. The two stacks came sailing her way. He was supposed to cut the twine himself, and leave the papers in an enticing pile in front of the cash register so that when people were paying for their unleaded or buying their cigarettes or their Jack Link’s jerky, they’d maybe pick up a copy and drop it in front of her. This, too.
Typically, though, he didn’t cut the twine. He’d fling and flee, barely looking at Lindy and Jason.
Which was why his behavior tonight—odd, unprecedented—put Lindy on alert. She used her Leatherman to saw through the twine, and then she put the stack of papers, headline on the top copy facing out so the customers could see it, on the counter, but she was well aware that Newspaper Guy still stood there, hands hanging at his sides. The sleeves of his raincoat, she saw, were unraveling; it was the kind of coat that even the Goodwill store over in Blythesburg would probably reject. He let his eyes take a little trip around the store. His nose was drawn to the direction of the coffeepots, where Jason was pouring the leftover regular into the decaf pot.
Like anybody’ll notice the damned difference, Jason had snapped back at Lindy, the first time she caught him doing that. All the same shit, anyway.
Newspaper Guy twisted up his face as if he might be thinking hard about something—and it wasn’t coffee. He pointed a short soiled finger at her. “They got a way for you to contact the cops or the home office, right?” he said. “Some kinda panic button? In case of trouble in the middle of the night? I mean, you ain’t out here with no backup, right?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t elaborate, because she didn’t trust his sudden concern. Could be some kind of trick. She was used to fending off the clumsy advances of men like Newspaper Guy. She’d had to develop a strategy. Because—despite the fact that she thought about her looks only every six weeks or so, when she got her reddish-blond hair cut over in Swanville and had to stare in the stupid mirror—Lindy was an attractive young woman. She’d had to come to terms with it. She was slender, with small hands and feet, but she had large, high-riding breasts. So unlike her mother’s small bustline.
One of the last conversations she’d had with her mother embarrassed them both, but it had been necessary: “Men’ll be after you, my girl,” Margaret Crabtree said to Lindy on her fourteenth birthday. “Don’t mean to make you self-conscious, but you’re growing up now, and you gotta face it. They’ll stare at your chest. Some’ll make rude comments. You’ll have to reckon with that. Way of the world, sorry to say.” A few days later, her mother died from the ovarian cancer that had been diagnosed only two months before.
Lindy made a habit of wearing loose-fitting men’s shirts and no makeup. She kept her hair cut short and she acted the part of a hard-ass, never speaking if a bored shrug or a quick noncommittal laugh would suffice. Mostly, it worked. The men who came into the station to pay for their gas or their six-packs rarely looked at her long enough to get an inkling of what might exist beneath that billowing flannel shirt. One rainy night, it was true, Jason had given her a sideways stare of peculiar intensity; she’d had to check on a pump and she came racing back inside, shirt sticking to her skin, revealing the full and perfect outline of her breasts. Jason had started to say something, and then didn’t. Just looked at her. Lindy’s return glare had been enough to enforce his silence. Still, she’d felt his attraction to her. She didn’t want any part of it, but it was there. So far, it hadn’t interfered with their working relationship.
“Okay, then,” Newspaper Guy said. He sneezed. It made Lindy want to laugh, but she didn’t. He even sneezed like an old guy: His whole face wrinkled up like a used washrag, his nose scrunched to a button as he bent over at the waist, catching the residue in two scaly hands. Gross, Lindy thought. She wondered why he didn’t just use the sleeve of his raincoat. Surely wouldn’t have been the first time.
“Okay,” Newspaper Guy repeated. Looked over toward the coffee section. Jason hadn’t even turned around to acknowledge his presence. “Hey, kid. You there. I’m talking to you, too.”
Jason continued to fuss with the cups. Still didn’t turn around. “Yeah. What.”
“Just making sure you can protect this girl here,” Newspaper Guy said. “It’s important. You know what’s going on, right? Out there in the dark?”
Jason made a sound, a combination of “huh” and “yeah” and a snickering noise in the back of his throat. Now he was playing with the little plastic tubs of nondairy creamer, building a pyramid on the coffee counter.
“I’m talking to you, fuckface,” Newspaper Guy went on. The agitation in his voice had ratcheted up several degrees. “Least you can do is look me in the eye.”
Right before Lindy started to intervene—she didn’t want any trouble—Jason turned. “Okay,” he said. “I’m looking.”
“Good.” Newspaper Guy settled down. “Listen to me. Both of you kids. There’s trouble out there. Bad trouble. Things’re happening. You heard, right? Old man got attacked. His head was split wide open. Right in his own driveway. So you two better watch out.”
Jason grinned. “Oh, yeah. We’ll watch out, all right.”
Newspaper Guy’s head whipped around. He glared at Jason. The glare was packed with such pure and earnest hate that Lindy was rattled by it, even though it wasn’t directed at her.
Newspaper Guy took a few hectic shallow breaths. “Okay, then,” he said. “Long as you got a way to get help out here. You watch yourselves, hear me?”
He pushed at the glass door and departed. As soon as his decrepit orange car had coughed and swayed and grumbled away, Jason laughed. “Crazy bastard. Yeah, we’ll keep a lookout—we’ll be looking out for assholes like you.” He laughed again.
Lindy didn’t comment. From her outpost behind the counter she rose up on tiptoes, in order to see over the cardboard ramparts of Diet Pepsi and Mountain Dew twelve-packs that were stacked on both sides of the doorway. She needed to keep an eye on the customer out at the pumps. This building, though, featured glass walls, so that when she looked out into the darkness from the lighted spot, the thing she always saw first was her own reflection.
Chapter Six
Deputy Mathers finally left her office. Bell looked at her watch. It was still far too early to disturb anyone for whom you had the slightest shred of affection or respect—which made it the ideal moment to call her ex-husband.
She had tried to reach him twice yesterday and once the day before. Her calls went straight to voice mail. No return call. Which wasn’t a surprise: Sam Elkins believed that only losers made themselves accessible. Winners should be perennially hard to reach.
This time, he answered after three rings. “I was getting ready to call you back, Belfa,” he said.
“Sure you were. How’s Carla?”
“Not packed yet, if that’s what you mean.” Sam sounded touchy and defensive, as always. “She’ll be ready by Saturday, though.”
“Are you driving her over?”
“No. Can’t get away. I got her a flight into Charleston, then booked a limo from there over to Acker’s Gap.”
“A limo? Jesus, Sam, I could’ve picked her up.”