Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  “What are you thinking?.”

  “Maybe the initial blows weren’t intended to be fatal. And if that’s the case, then—”

  Fogelsong cleared his throat. Bell stopped talking. He had spotted Wanda heading their way, order pad in one hand, pen in the other.

  The waitress was a large-boned, middle-aged woman with wavy brown hair that was gradually giving up its fight against gray. Her eyes had a tendency to squint, even when she wasn’t straining to see something, and her left cheek still bore the broad, claw-like scars of a childhood car accident. Her father, Norbert Moore, had been taking Wanda and her younger brother, Cassius, for ice cream when Norbert crossed the centerline and smashed head-on into a coal truck. Norbert was drunk, and so the deaths of two people—the truck driver and three-year-old Cassius—meant that Norbert, only slightly injured, was sentenced to fifteen years in the state penitentiary in Fayette County. When he finally came back home, he met Wanda on the street and said, “I’d know you anywheres, girlie, on account of that scar you got there. Better’n a name tag.”

  Wanda looked at the pad, not at them, as she said, “Whaddayall want?”

  “Cheeseburger,” Fogelsong declared. “No pickle, but everything else.”

  “Fries?” Wanda said.

  “You gotta ask?”

  That made her smile. It also caused her to look up from the pad. “Now, Nick Fogelsong, don’t you be getting smart-alecky. I’m too busy today to keep you in line. Mrs. Elkins?”

  “Chicken salad sounds good.”

  “You got it.”

  They waited for the waitress to hurry away before resuming their conversation. “Okay,” the sheriff said. “What about the knife wounds?”

  Bell didn’t want to overplay her hand. “Well, Buster said the variety in depths probably wasn’t significant. Could be attributed to a lot of factors.”

  “Then I suggest,” he said, “that we talk about something else until our food gets here. To make sure we’re able to enjoy it. What do you say?”

  “Agreed. Got to keep our strength up.”

  So far Nick had avoided any substantive discussion of his leave of absence. Bell understood—he’d returned to a town that had suffered two grievous losses and looked to him to fix things—but she was curious. She was just about to break her rule about personal questions and ask him, when he beat her to it.

  “Okay,” he said. Had he read her mind? Maybe. They’d known each other a very long time. “Figure you’d like an update about Mary Sue. More of one, anyway, than I’ve given you so far.”

  “No,” Bell replied. “Not an ‘update.’ She’s a person, not a weather report. And listen. I have my own relationship with Mary Sue. I can ask her myself how she’s doing, and I will. What I’d like to deal with right now is you.”

  “Me.”

  “Yeah. You.” She shook her head in exasperation. “Come on. You know what I mean. Before you left, you were questioning your whole life and what you’ve done with it. You weren’t even sure you wanted to run for reelection next year, remember? Then you get back here and—Jesus Christ. Two dead bodies. And no leads.” Bell’s voice was bleak. “So—what now? What’s your next move? And just this once, I’m not referring to open cases, okay?”

  He didn’t answer right away, so Bell went on. “You can tell me to go to hell. It’s really none of my damned business. I know that. I just—” She stopped. She didn’t know how to phrase it without sounding weak and needy. Without sounding like the ten-year-old girl she’d been when she first met Nick Fogelsong. On a terrible night. A night that still spilled repeatedly out of her memory unless she kept the lid screwed down tight. A night whose horror had been alleviated, ever so slightly but crucially, by the kindness of a big man in a deputy sheriff’s uniform.

  The same man sat across from her now, three decades older and a great deal grayer and heavier, having ascended to the sheriff’s job himself in that long interval, and having done it through dint of skill and diligence—instead of through politics, the usual route for such a rise.

  “Forget it,” Bell muttered. They were in a public place. And what could she really say, anyway? He wasn’t her father or her brother or her lover. She had no rights here. No claim on him. If she’d been able to speak the truth, if she could’ve somehow moved past the embarrassment and the fear of looking foolish, she would have said: You don’t owe me a thing. But I owe you my life. Even the idea of saying those words, however, caused her to recoil inwardly, as if her thoughts themselves had touched a hot stove. She could no more say that to Nick Foeglsong than she could say it to her sister. And both Nick and Shirley had, in their own ways, rescued her.

  “Belfa,” he said. The casual tone was gone. “When I figure this out, I’ll tell you, okay? Everything. Soon as I know myself. Won’t keep it from you. My word on that.”

  “Sure, Nick, but—”

  Wanda suddenly was back in their field of vision, plates in hand. “Anything else?” the waitress said dutifully, strain visible on her face, her meaning plain: Please don’t need anything else. I’m already getting run right off my damned feet here.

  “We’re good,” Bell said. Nick nodded. The arrival of their food was fortuitous, and not just because they were hungry; it broke the spell, changing the emotional dynamic when things were getting intense, unsettling them both. Funny how they could talk about criminal cases with no hesitation, with boldness and candor, but a personal topic turned them into mute cowards.

  Bell looked around the restaurant. It was more crowded now than when they’d first come in, having filled up quickly with townspeople and with strangers, too. Tourists, most likely, the brave ones willing to reject the Burger King out on the interstate to take a chance on a local eatery.

  She looked over at the cash register, where Jackie LeFevre was running a customer’s credit card. Jackie’s black hair fell straight as a plank down her back; her black eyes were set in a flat, polished-looking face that hinted at Native American ancestry, and she displayed a calm and centered demeanor at all times. Jackie was still a bit of a mystery to people in Acker’s Gap, a mystery they’d not had time yet to tackle. For now, it was enough that the new restaurant she ran featured reasonably priced and decent—if sometimes inexplicably exotic—food.

  “Hey,” Fogelsong said. He knocked on the tabletop with two knuckles, to snatch back her attention. “Did I lose you?”

  Bell turned to him. Mild smile. “Never,” she said.

  * * *

  They finished their lunch in twelve minutes. Not ideal for digestion—but necessary, Bell told herself, when a violent criminal or criminals still threatened the area. And plenty of other cases, too.

  The sheriff walked to the door right behind her, nodding to a number of his constituents on the way, barely slowing his gait as he replied to the repetition of inquires if today was, indeed, hot enough for him.

  “Sure is,” he’d say, as patient and amiable as if he’d never been asked that question before on a summer day.

  Bell and Fogelsong stood beneath the red and white awning that shaded the entrance to JP’s. He settled the big brown sheriff’s hat back on his head.

  “So when’s Carla getting here?” he said. “Thought I might be seeing her around town by this time.”

  Bell hadn’t told him—hell, she’d barely acknowledged the reality to herself—about Carla’s whereabouts. Well, it was time. Past time.

  “Yeah, well, Sam got her an internship in London. Last-minute thing. She’s thrilled. Already on her way over there.” Bell looped her purse strap around her right shoulder.

  She saw Nick’s mouth open and close, as he started to speak and then didn’t. He wasn’t fooled by her matter-of-fact demeanor. He knew how much she’d been looking forward to Carla’s visit this summer. But he was taking his cues from her; if she wanted to be breezy about it, if she wanted to pretend it was all just fine, he’d go along. He respected her enough to let her talk when she was ready to. Maybe I could take few lesson
s from Nick, she thought. Maybe I ought to stop pushing everybody all the damned time, like some fat-assed schoolyard bully. Getting in everybody’s business. Maybe if she stopped doing that, things might go a little better with Shirley. Bell had hurt her sister, wounded her, and Shirley hadn’t come home last night. Again.

  They parted. The sheriff headed toward his Blazer, Bell toward the courthouse. Sunlight was drowning the streets in a bright molten glaze, which meant that when Bell’s cell rang and she peered at it, she couldn’t make out the caller ID. The glare on the screen was too intense.

  “Elkins,” she said warily. When she didn’t know the identity of a caller, Bell always expected it to be an outraged citizen or pissed-off judge or livid defense lawyer. She girded herself for verbal battle.

  “It’s Rhonda.”

  Relief. “What’s up?”

  “Well,” Rhonda said, excitement stirring in her voice, “I used a few connections here and there. Turns out that as of last week, Tiffany Stark is the proud owner of a brand-new house over in Toller County. Purchase price was a hundred seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  Tiffany Stark. Bell was disappointed. She had let herself hope that Rhonda’s news was related to the Arnett or Frank murders.

  “Go on.”

  “So Jed Stark didn’t have an insurance policy. No verifiable income of any kind,” Rhonda continued. “In fact, neither Jed nor Tiffany even had a bank account. He worked strictly for cash—which isn’t surprising, given the fact that his work mainly consisted of selling narcotics or threatening people who’d pissed off other people who were selling narcotics. That trailer was a rental and they’re five months behind on the rent—or at least they were until today. Tiffany settled up with the landlord. Gave her notice, too. And hired a big moving company out of Charleston to get her stuff over to the new place in Toller County.”

  “Where the hell did Tiffany Stark get that kind of money?”

  “Mighty interesting, isn’t it? Like I said, Jed Stark had no bank account—but as of a month ago, he was named an equity partner in a company known as Rhododendron Associates.”

  “Equity partner.” Bell made a noise in the back of her throat that indicated disdain. “Guy like Jed Stark probably couldn’t even spell ‘equity.’ And I’ve never heard of any ‘Rhododendron Associates’—aside from the fact that it’s the state flower of West Virginia.”

  “Nobody’s heard of it. All I can tell you for sure is that it’s got nothing to do with flowers, boss. And everything to do with money. Lots and lots of it. And that’s how Miss Tiffany is financing her life change. She got a big payout from that company.”

  “Other partners?”

  “Well.” With the instinctive flourish of a storyteller, Rhonda lowered her voice dramatically and said, “According to the articles of incorporation, the CEO of Rhododendron Associates happens to be our mystery man—Sampson J. Voorhees.”

  “But how—?”

  “Hold on. I know you’ve got a million questions. I did, too. Like—who is this Voorhees character and what in the world is Rhododendron Associates and where the heck did their money come from?”

  Bell had reached the courthouse steps by now. As Rhonda talked, she had continued walking back to her office, noticing neither the heat nor her surroundings. Did a good number of people wave or nod at her, and had she nodded or waved back? Maybe, although Bell couldn’t have sworn to it. She’d damn near tripped over a fire hydrant.

  “This next little tidbit took me hours and hours to dig up,” Rhonda went on, and then gave a little moan to signify how hard she’d worked. “I must’ve called fifty places. No, make that a hundred. And nothing added up. Rhododendron is listed as an investment company, but they don’t have any investments. They don’t have any clients. They don’t do any work at all, seems like. Gotta be some kind of front for the transfer of money. So I had to track back through the information on their original filings, looking for something—anything—that would give me a clue about who they really are and what they really do. And then I found it.”

  Bell waited. She was tempted to try to goad Rhonda into speeding up, but given her assistant’s personality, felt obliged to resist. To let the story roll along at the pace that Rhonda wanted it to.

  “Finally had a brainstorm and called Charlie Dillon,” Rhonda went on. “Haven’t talked to Charlie since law school. He dropped out after our first year. Now he works for the state commerce commission. Lives in Cross Lanes. He and his wife, Barbara Ann, have the cutest little—”

  “Rhonda, please.” Bell was too antsy to hold back. “The company.”

  “Okay. Right. Well, Charlie came through, just like I figured he would. He looked long and hard—and he broke about a dozen rules for us, so I think it might be a good idea to put him on our Christmas card list this year—and he went through a lot of records that aren’t public and that surely aren’t on any digitized databases because they’re too darned old. But it worked. Turns out that if you go back and back and back—and if you wind your way through about a dozen shell corporations and another dozen businesses that never did any business and then just put your head down and plow right on past a bunch of false leads and phony trails—you finally stumble across the company that funds Rhododendron Associates one hundred percent. A much, much, much older company. And it’s private—no public records, no list of officers or employees. Nothing.”

  “So that’s it.” Bell couldn’t keep the dejection out of her voice. “A dead end.”

  “Oh, Belfa.” Rhonda almost never called her boss by her given name. Elation had prompted her to do so, however, and it also caused her to put a chuckle at the end of the two words. “You know me better’n that!”

  “You found out something about the original company?”

  “Sure did. I came up with the name of the person who started it—way back in 1957. I’d ask for a drum roll here, but I think you’re about ready to skin me alive unless I get to the point, which is what I guess I’d better do.” Rhonda sucked in some air so that she could conclude her story in a single excited breath:

  “Our mystery man, the one who’s behind Rhododendron Associates—and the payoff to Tiffany Stark—is none other than the former governor of West Virginia. The honorable—and I’m using that term loosely here—Riley Jessup.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  She’d spooked herself. That had to be it, right? Yeah. That had to be it. All that talk about how darkness was different in the summer. How it fooled you, made you complacent. Even lazy. Softened you up. All that theorizing in front of Nick Fogelsong. No dark like summer dark.

  Bell stood beside her Explorer in the driveway. It was well past midnight. She’d not intended to work this late at her office. As always, it just happened. She’d suddenly looked up from an endless stack of paperwork, realized the time, then further realized that she was all alone in the courthouse. The lamp on her desk was the only light in the entire building. To find her way out, she’d had to use the tiny flashlight on her key chain. The corridor lights were switched off at nine each night at the main circuit, to save energy. Sheriff Fogelsong’s edict. Once she left the downtown area, she’d not seen another car on the road.

  She pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. The silence was so profound that it startled her. It seemed to have been waiting for her. Worse—it had plans for her.

  Oh, stop, Bell chastised herself. Don’t be such a girl, okay?

  She stood on the blacktop, while the dome light inside the Explorer gradually expired. This was a moment she usually looked forward to: day’s end. Homecoming. Time to shuck off her shoes and—although it wasn’t quite so automatic—her woes, too. Tonight, though, she didn’t feel relieved. She felt apprehensive. She always left the front porch light on; the bulb must have burned out.

  There were no lights on in any other house on Shelton Avenue. Not even in the house belonging to Priscilla Dobbins, across the street and two doors down. Priscilla was seventy-four and sometime
s stayed up late to read. Not tonight, apparently. Her three-story Victorian home looked like a big black trunk propped up on one end, tightly secured with straps and bolts and buckles. Was that to keep something outside from getting in—or to keep something inside from getting out?

  You’re freaking yourself out, Bell thought. Stop it. Just stop it. Shut the hell up.

  She climbed the steps to the front porch. The house was mired in a darkness made more ominous by the fact that she wasn’t expecting it. Hadn’t she left a light on in the living room? She was certain that she had. She always did. A portion of her youth had been spent in a trailer in Comer Creek, way out beyond any other houses or trailers, and she knew how drenching that darkness could be. How it provided a handy place for formless things to hide as they whispered past windows, crept around corners.

  Well, maybe she hadn’t left a light on this time. She couldn’t remember. Or maybe she’d left it on and Shirley had come home during the day to pick up a few things—they barely spoke now, they could pass each other in the upstairs hall without a word, and the hell of it was, it didn’t even feel strange anymore—and maybe Shirley had turned off the light in the living room. Shirley might not have known how important it was, that beacon—although Shirley, too, had grown up in the trailer on Comer Creek. Wouldn’t she have known? She understood darkness as well as Bell did. Better.

  So did I leave a freakin’ light on in the house or didn’t I? She was having trouble finding the house key in her purse. It was so damned dark.

  And if she had indeed left a light on, and Shirley hadn’t been there and thus hadn’t turned it off—but if the light, nonetheless, was turned off now, didn’t that mean someone could very well be waiting for her on the other side of this stone wall? Lurking in the darkness just behind the front door? Weapon raised over his head? His eyes would be adjusted to the dark by now, so he need not hesitate, need not guess, need only wait and aim and strike—

  Goddammit, Bell told herself. Fear was turning her testy, making her disgusted with herself. Find the freakin’ key and go in and look around. Get it over with.