Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  “She’ll enjoy it. Make her feel like a celebrity. Like Miley Cyrus.”

  “Great. Just the role model I was hoping for.” Bell didn’t want to argue with him about the limo. It was a ridiculous, extravagant gesture, but it was also his decision. And he could afford it, so what the hell.

  When Sam spoke again, his voice was different; it had shed a bit of its edge. “Heard about Freddie Arnett. My great-aunt Thelma called and told me. Good God. Totally unbelievable. And no suspects, right?”

  “Not yet.” She didn’t want to discuss it with him. There was a time when she’d looked forward to talking over her cases with Sam Elkins—but not anymore. He didn’t deserve it. He’d demonstrated to her, too many times, his contempt for Acker’s Gap, even though it was his hometown as well as hers.

  “I’m just counting the hours,” Bell added, “until Nick gets back.”

  “Won’t matter, Belfa. You know that. Nobody can stop it. The violence—it’s everywhere now. People are scared as hell.”

  Her ex-husband had a knack for stating the obvious as if it were an original insight. Bell waited, giving her anger a chance to dissipate. Yes, the crime rate in Acker’s Gap and the surrounding vicinity was far worse than it ought to be, given the population; that was due in large part to the thriving trade in illegal prescription drugs. Sam knew the cause as well as she did. He also knew that a great many small towns in Appalachia suffered from a similar blight. But he still hinted that Acker’s Gap was worse somehow, a sad, sick, pitiful little place, filled with danger and mayhem and despair. He seemed to believe that Acker’s Gap was uniquely cursed. It was special, and not in the way that anybody or anything wanted to be special.

  What bothered Bell most of all, of course, was the fact that these days, she was half-inclined to agree with him.

  “Gotta go.” She ended the call before he did, which would, she knew, infuriate him. Sam liked to run things, liked to decide when a conversation was over, liked to be seen as the busy one forced to go because he had another call coming in or somebody waiting in his office or an appointment on tap—something, anything, that would prove his superiority. Bell knew she’d annoyed him by turning the tables; his annoyance, in turn, pleased her unduly. It was petty, sure. Pettiness, she’d discovered, was an occupational hazard when dealing with an ex-spouse. She didn’t fight it anymore.

  She and Sam had grown up together here, but always dreamed of leaving. And they had done just that, moving to the D.C. area after Sam’s graduation from West Virginia University College of Law. Then Bell, going slowly out of her mind with boredom as a stay-at-home mom, had enrolled in law school herself, at Georgetown; shortly before graduation, she began to feel the urgent tug of home. After the divorce, she’d returned here, bought a house, made a successful run for prosecutor. Bell still didn’t know—and frankly had no idea if it was ever something you could know with any certainty, any finality—if coming back to Acker’s Gap had been the right decision. Right for her, right for Carla.

  Right for Shirley.

  Shirley. Bell reached down and retrieved the briefcase at her feet. She had delayed as long as possible, but now she had to go home. Home to deal with her sister. Home to try, one more time, to get Shirley to open up to her, to admit what she was feeling. To talk about all those years in prison. Or to go back even further: to talk about the night three decades ago in the ragtag trailer by Comer Creek, when everything changed. Each time Bell tried to persuade Shirley to confide in her, to have a real conversation about real things, her sister had put her off. Later, Shirley would say. Real tired right now. Gonna take myself a little nap. That okay with you? Which meant that Bell still didn’t know—she could guess, of course, but guessing wasn’t the same as knowing, and she needed to hear Shirley say the words—why her sister had broken off contact with her all those years ago, why she had sent back Bell’s letters without opening them, why she had refused Bell’s visits and phone calls.

  Why. Why. Why. Sometimes it still could drive Bell crazy, her sister’s boarded-up face and silent stare when the conversation turned to the past. But Bell would keep trying. She had to. The past, she’d decided, was like one of those stumbling, dead-eyed creatures in a zombie movie, the kind that Carla and her friends loved and dreaded in equal measure: You could pretend to ignore it, you could try to bury it, but it wouldn’t stay in the grave. It always came back—stronger each time, and in a meaner mood. Aware of its power.

  Bell locked her office door. The courthouse was closed to the public on Sundays; hence, the corridor was empty. Her steps sounded like a series of crisp earnest smacks. Back when Carla still lived in Acker’s Gap, back when she was twelve and thirteen years old, she’d accompany her mother here on weekends, and while Bell worked at her desk, Carla would race up and down the long empty halls, arms outstretched, swooping and turning and relishing the clacking cascade of echoes.

  Bell pushed open one side of the heavy courthouse doors. She paused on the threshold. By now the sun’s face had popped beyond the top of the mountain, a familiar but still spectacular sight.

  Darkness gathered at her back, forming the cool shadows in the long main corridor of the courthouse, but in front of her, the light spread itself evenly across sidewalks and storefronts, across bricks and picture windows and lampposts and rooftops. The same elements that she had been seeing—save for her years away at college and her brief time in D.C.—for her entire life. Forty years. Sometimes that sameness exasperated her, because nothing ever changed around here; other times, it gave her solace. And no matter how it seemed, Acker’s Gap did indeed change. Too much. A terrible explosion in the spring, a drug-related triple homicide the year before, a murder two nights ago and another one just down the road from it: Acker’s Gap had joined the world, and all portions of the world were connected now, the moving parts of a volatile whole. The town Bell saw from the courthouse doorway this morning was sun-glazed, shadow-striped, a cupped hand that offered up an unknown share of future trouble, but right now, it looked calm and drowsy and benign. Heat rapidly stacked up in the deserted blocks.

  Not entirely deserted: Her gaze was caught by a small black dog of indeterminate breed, trotting along on the other side of the street. His graying face wore the wise contemplative expression in which old dogs specialized, that look of universal tolerance and patience. Seeing the rich oily sheen on the dog’s lean flank made Bell feel even hotter.

  She had many things on her mind, but the murder of Freddie Arnett was foremost in the mix. The crime seemed incongruous, coming as it did in summer. Winter seemed by far the more likely season for evil. Winter with its early-onset darkness, its stranglehold grip of cold, its icy malice. Summer was too bright, too amiable, too easygoing for anything mendacious to have dominion. Everything was right out here in the open, simple and guileless.

  But she knew that wasn’t really true. There was nothing innocent about summer. Nothing soft or simple. The notion that summer held no peril had been exposed, two nights ago, as a cruel and dangerous illusion.

  Abruptly, Bell changed her mind. She wouldn’t go home to Shirley just yet. She had one more stop to make first.

  Chapter Seven

  The small living room had a buttoned-up, desert-dry, closed-in feel. The drapes, delicate and diaphanous as pink tissue paper and faintly printed with the repeating shapes of roses, were shut, yet they only marginally impeded the sunlight and its attendant heat. From the clock on the weathered white mantel came a regular series of ticks that sounded less like time passing and more like the work of a small pickax as it tunneled through an impossibly large slab of some impossibly hard material; there was an endlessness embedded in the rhythm, and a hopelessness, too.

  The old woman sat in the straight-backed wooden chair. She wore a gray linen dress that might once have fit, but now swallowed her up. Her vacant eyes were an almost translucent shade of blue; her cheeks were markedly hollow, falling back into her face. Her long white hair was parted in the middle. It broke acro
ss her bony shoulders like water split by a rock.

  “Yes?” she said in a shaky voice. She seemed more befuddled than distraught. After she spoke, her eyes returned to a resting position on the frayed brown carpet. In multiple spots, the carpet had worn almost all the way through to the hardwood beneath.

  Bell introduced herself for the second time. She was sitting on the blue plaid couch across from Annie Arnett, notebook on her lap. Even though it was still early in the morning, Bell could feel the sweat starting up in the crooks of her elbows and behind her knees. Few of the older homes in Acker’s Gap were air-conditioned. They relied on screen doors and open windows and the casual mercy of a cross breeze.

  “I see.” Annie Arnett nodded. She folded and then refolded her hands. The plump blue veins on the tops of them looked like centipedes inserted under the skin. “Well.”

  Bell wondered if the old woman had forgotten the question, the one Bell had asked right after identifying herself when Annie opened the front door: “How much money did you and your husband routinely keep in the house?” If the answer was anything over ten dollars, Bell’s next question would be: And how many people knew about it?

  But Annie was still stuck. She continued to gaze at Bell. “Who did you say you were, dearie?”

  It had to come down to money. Most crimes eventually did—at least if they didn’t come down to sex or jealousy, which seemed unlikely in the case of Freddie and Annie Arnett, both of whom had passed eighty a good while back. And in Acker’s Gap, “money” didn’t have to mean millions. It didn’t even have to mean hundreds. For the desperate people in these parts, twenty dollars was incentive enough to kill.

  There were serious problems with Bell’s theory. For one thing, Rhonda Lovejoy had already come by and asked the old woman the same question. Moreover, the perpetrator hadn’t taken Freddie Arnett’s wallet or tried to enter the house after murdering him, so the robbery motive was implausible. Still, Bell had felt an irresistible impulse—an itch that packed the same kind of fierce drawing power, she speculated, as the promise of a couple of bucks did to an addict—to visit Annie Arnett and ask again. To make sure they weren’t missing something. Or someone.

  “Your grandson,” Bell said. “The one Freddie was fixing the car for. Maybe you told him that you keep money in the house. Just mentioned it in passing a few times. Or maybe just one time. And maybe he told a friend.”

  Annie blinked. “No, I don’t think so, dearie,” she said. “We don’t talk much to Tommy anymore. Not since they all left town. We don’t like to bother him. And we know he’s too busy to call.”

  Bell remembered that from Rhonda’s notes. The rest of the family—Annie’s and Freddie’s son, Luke, and Luke’s sons, Tommy and Mike—had moved away. Better jobs, bigger cities. Different skies. It was just Annie and Freddie, still here in Acker’s Gap.

  Now, it was just Annie.

  “Is your son staying with you?” Bell said. “Luke’s his name, right?”

  Surely someone was helping Annie Arnett get through this. The old woman shouldn’t be alone. Her husband had been savagely attacked just a few days ago, and grisly reminders of his death were everywhere: The crime-scene techs from Charleston had finished their work but the driveway still was cordoned off with plastic yellow tape. An evocative dark stain remained on the concrete, baked into the gray by the fierce unrelenting sunlight. That sun, Bell recalled from Rhonda’s report, was the reason Freddie Arnett had been working on the Thunderbird so late at night; it was too hot during the day. The chrome on a car could raise a blister if you touched it at the wrong time.

  “Oh, Luke was here Friday,” Annie said. “All day, or thereabouts. But he had to go back to Louisville. Couldn’t take any more time off work. He’ll be back next week, he said. To pick up the car for Tommy.”

  Bell looked around. “But somebody’s staying with you, right?”

  “Oh, my, yes.” Before Bell could ask, Annie added, “Rhonda Lovejoy. I’ve known her family for ages. She’s been spending the night. Ain’t that sweet? She came by here to ask me some questions the other day, same as you are now, and when I told her how scared I get at night, with Freddie gone, she said she’d be pleased to keep me company. I’m so happy to have her. Till Freddie gets back.”

  Bell thought about her assistant, whose roots in Raythune County ran deep and true, and who had an everlasting compassion for the people who walked these roads. As an employee, Rhonda could be infuriatingly scatterbrained, and her flamboyant wardrobe carried more than a hint of the bordello with its frills and its flounces, but Bell had come to have a significant appreciation for Rhonda Lovejoy, sequins and all.

  She wouldn’t tell Rhonda that she knew. That wasn’t how things were done around here. A kind gesture wasn’t undertaken to get a pat on the back. Charity that brought you compliments wasn’t charity; it was public relations.

  A thought occurred to Bell. “Excuse me, Mrs. Arnett. Did you say, ‘Till Freddie gets back’?”

  Annie nodded. “Don’t know what’s keeping him. Never been gone this long before.” She sighed, but it was a sigh of affection. “Keeps me guessing, that man of mine. He’s a handful. Gonna give him a good talking-to when he walks through that door, tell you that for sure.”

  * * *

  Bell paused at the end of the driveway. A ribbon of tape had worked itself loose from one of the green metal stakes and fallen across the concrete. Now it lay there, looking as flat and sad and useless as the tail of a grounded kite. There was no breeze to rouse it. There was only heat, the kind of dense, hard-packed heat that presses on the skin everywhere all at once.

  The neighborhood was quiet. Strange for a blue-skied summer Sunday, Bell thought. Where were the kids, the dogs, the bikes, the shouts and the clatter? Maybe it was still too early in the day. Or maybe—and this was a thought that pained her—a lot of people were staying indoors, pinned there by the shock of their neighbor’s fate. Up and down the tattered little street her gaze made its fitful way, seeing closed doors and silent yards and windows across which the curtains had been yanked shut. It was temporary, Bell told herself. Had to be. The street would come to life again.

  She looked back at the driveway. This was where Freddie Arnett had died—here on a strip of concrete next to his small brown stick-frame house. This was the house in which Freddie and Annie Arnett had lived for sixty-two years. Freddie had left here every morning, long before the sun came up, for his shift at the Milltown Mine No. 12. He would return long after that sun had gone down. And he worked underground, so as far as Freddie was concerned, there might as well not have been a sun at all. Until he retired, the single prevailing truth of his world was darkness.

  Freddie’s long white Silverado truck was still parked in front of the house. He always parked it there, leaving the driveway free as a workspace for his loving labors on the Thunderbird, which he kept at the upper end of the concrete slab, next to the house. The high polish on the Thunderbird’s tubular flanks gave it a sleek, missile-like look. You could tell how much Freddie Arnett loved this car, how much he’d fussed over it, gushed over it, pampered it; it had been unconditionally adored. Same was true for his grandson, Bell guessed. She knew how tempting it was to give everything to a beloved child, to make any sacrifice. It wasn’t always the right thing to do—it was almost never the right thing to do—but you did it, anyway. Couldn’t help yourself.

  “Okay, old man,” Bell murmured. Even if someone had been standing right next to her, they couldn’t have made out the words; her voice was soft and filled with grim wonder. “What happened here? Who the hell did this to you—and why?”

  It took her a moment to realize that she was talking to the dead. And another moment to realize that it didn’t bother her one bit.

  Chapter Eight

  Shirley shuffled into the living room. She parked her backside on the couch, the bony knees of her faded Wranglers jutting out in front of her. She’d been up in her room when Bell called her name. Quickly, she lit
a cigarette and took a series of vicious nips at it, as if she’d been warned that somebody might grab it away from her at any minute and so she had to get what she could, while she could.

  “You been gone a long time,” Shirley said.

  Bell shrugged. “Work to do.” She felt an unpleasant twinge of remembrance; Carla had said the very same thing to her, back when her daughter still lived here. On more than a few occasions. Pointed out that, no matter what was going on with her family, Bell’s job came first. And it was usually true.

  She was certain that her sister hadn’t slept since she dropped her off. Shirley was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing when she left the house three days before: same jeans, same flannel shirt. She hadn’t opened the curtains or raised the blinds. In the dim half-light of the dark-walled room, the skin on Shirley’s face and neck and hands was a gray-yellow shade; it was coarse, too, stretched taut in some places, loose-hanging in others.

  “Did you get something to eat?” Bell said. The anger that she’d felt at Tommy’s six hours ago when she first spotted Shirley—anger that consumed her, like fire racing across paper, turning it to ash in an instant—had faded. It happened over and over again, just like that: Time passed, and her fury at her sister’s behavior surged, crested, and then retreated again into a quiet lake of sadness. Bell was slammed back and forth between rage and forgiveness a thousand times a day.

  A thousand and one.

  She sat down across from Shirley in the battered old chair. It was her favorite piece of furniture; its comfort was uncomplicated, utterly reliable. She’d be needing that comfort for this conversation. She could tell from Shirley’s sour face that her sister was still brooding. Like she has any right to be mad at me, Bell thought. Like she’s the injured party here. Go figure.

  “Yeah,” Shirley said. “I’m good.”

  She was lying, and Bell knew it. Her sister ate very little these days. And when she did eat, the meals generally came from McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC. Or consisted of shiny-packaged snacks from convenience stores: Doritos, mini-doughnuts, Little Debbies. Bell was a reluctant cook, but she tried to bring Shirley decent dinners from JP’s: chicken, fish, green beans, steamed broccoli. The next morning, Bell would find the white Styrofoam shell wedged in the kitchen trash, the food inside looking just the way it looked when Jackie LeFevre, owner and operator of JP’s, had put it there with a spatula and two fingers. Shirley had tossed the meal without tasting it. Hell, she probably hadn’t even opened the container.