Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  Now she knew that Jessup had something to hide. She hadn’t expected him to tell her anything. She’d just wanted to see how sensitive he was to her questions. Had he chuckled, grinned, and dismissed it, had he shaken his big head and flapped a fat hand in her direction and told a whopper of a tale about how Stark was looking into some land to purchase for him—to build an orphanage, no doubt, or maybe a hospice or an animal shelter, something wondrously noble and shimmeringly selfless and ready-made for the TV cameras—then Bell would have backed off, satisfied that whatever it was, no matter how sneaky and shady, it most likely didn’t concern the recent events on her patch of West Virginia.

  But he’d reacted. Overreacted, in fact. Revealed himself. Gotten angry. And he’d given her even more reason to keep poking around.

  She stood up. Jessup didn’t.

  “Well, if that’s your attitude, Governor,” she said, “there’s no point in continuing this conversation. I may as well head back home. This place is a long, long way from Raythune County. But you already know that, don’t you?”

  “Hold on.” He still didn’t rise. “I got a question for you, lady.”

  She waited.

  “My question,” he said, “is as follows. Why’d you run for public office in the first place? Tell me that.” The good ole boy tone, the one he’d deployed so expertly on that flatbed truck the other day at the hospital, the one that was like honey drizzled on a biscuit, still hadn’t returned. His voice was hard. All business.

  Bell said nothing. She could see that he didn’t really care if she answered or not. This was about him, not her.

  “Let me tell you why I ran,” Jessup said. “I ran because I’d figured out a few things in my life, okay? I finally got it. See, I grew up poor. Dirt poor.” Shook his head, jowls flapping in response like a Greek chorus backing up his point. “No—we were poorer than dirt. Dirt would’ve been a step up. Well, it didn’t take me too damned long to notice that you gotta have money in this ole world. You can do without a lot of things, but you gotta have money. Lots of it. After you get it—and get it howsoever you can—then you can be nice to folks. Sweet. Polite. But without money, all that sweetness is about as useful as a big ole sack of shit.”

  He shifted his large bottom on the couch. A bitter frown cut across his face, like a surgical scar slashing an ample belly.

  “You gotta rise up, Mrs. Elkins.” Sounding canny now. And confident. Setting her straight, giving her the benefit of his wisdom. “You gotta rise up and up. And that’s what I did. I did what the money boys done told me to do—so’s I could rise up. You know ’bout the money boys, doncha? Everybody in any kind of public office anywhere knows about the money boys. Always hanging around. Always ready to lend a helping hand, once they can see that you’re going places. Well, I used what they give me and I rose up high—higher than anybody from Raythune County ever did or ever will. You know what, though? Them money boys—they don’t forget. They come calling one day. And they want what they want. You follow? So—yeah. Yeah. I made some deals. No question. Did some things I ain’t rightly proud of. But in the end, if you look at it fair and square, Mrs. Elkins, I think you’ll see that it all works out. Works out just like it oughta. I helped some folks. Still helping ’em. You were there the other day, right? At the hospital? Sure you were. You have to meet the folks, just like I do. All part of keeping your job, right? Yeah, you were there.” He squinted at her, as if trying to imagine her face in the context of a sweltering parking lot and a rowdy crowd in T-shirts and flip-flops. “Sure. Musta been. And you heard all about that MRI machine, the one I’m paying for. The one that Raythune County wouldn’t have, ’cept for me. And so—”

  “Your charitable activities are a credit to you, Governor,” Bell said, interrupting him. “But I think you did all right for yourself along the way. More than all right, it looks like.” She didn’t bother pointing to any of the lush furnishings that surrounded them. She didn’t have to.

  “God’s been good to me,” Jessup said. Piety oozed back into his tone. “Like I told you earlier, I ain’t complaining. Which is why,” he went on, dipping his head with courtly humility, “I want to make things right. Want to be a positive force in this ole world. Want leave my mark on this here state before I go off to my heavenly re—”

  “Bullshit.”

  Jessup flinched as if poked with a stick. Nobody talked to him this way. Anger started to form in his face.

  But Bell had heard enough. She was tired of being the one-woman audience for his platitudinous twaddle. “What I want to know,” she went on, “is why Jed Stark got a payoff from Rhododendron Associates. That’s it.”

  Now the anger moved from his face to his fists. He kneaded them fiercely, as if he were cracking walnuts in his palms. “I thought we could talk,” he said. “One public servant to another. I thought we had some common ground.”

  “Just answer my question and leave the speechifying for another day.”

  Jessup stopped grinding his fists and looked her squarely in the eye. “Go to hell,” he said.

  Bell laughed. She’d been on the receiving end of that particular directive on many occasions—it was a standard line flung at prosecutors by disgruntled defendants. Still, she’d never managed to come up with a reply that satisfied her. You, too seemed childish. Meet you halfway was unimaginative.

  So she nodded, as if that settled things between them, and turned and walked away. Headed back through the trio of expansive rooms toward the foyer and the ornate front door waiting at one end of it, acutely conscious with each step of how deeply her heels seemed to sink into the voluptuous carpet. Jessup’s life, she reflected, had been just this cushioned for many years now, just this extravagantly padded with money and power and adulation. Whatever he was hiding was similarly swaddled, similarly buried under layers and layers of pretty things. Was it worth the effort to dig it out? She wasn’t sure. Sometimes, she knew, when you finished a treasure hunt, the thing you held in your hand at day’s end was worth far less than what you’d given up to get it.

  * * *

  Bell was almost to her car when she heard her name.

  “Mrs. Elkins.”

  It was Sharon. She’d emerged from the side of the voluminous house, following the long, shrub-bordered, serpentine curve of the brick lane, trying to get to Bell before she reached the Explorer. A security guard had spotted the governor’s daughter and now began his own rapid trek up the driveway from the other direction, but Sharon waved him off.

  “I’ve got this, Leo,” Sharon said.

  The guard paused. With close-cropped gray hair and a deep vertical curve on either side of his mouth, he looked older than the other guard by a good three decades, but he was still fit, the tight black shirt stretching across the massive pack of muscle on his chest and shoulders.

  “Hell of a security team,” Bell murmured.

  “Only what’s necessary.” Sharon gestured toward the house. “You’d be surprised at the trouble we have around here. People trying to break in and steal something. Or just wanting to get at my father to beg him for money. Won’t leave us in peace.”

  Bell obligingly looked at the house once more. Sharon seemed to want her to, as if the scope and beauty of the place would make an argument more compelling than mere words, answering every question and deflecting every judgment. In a window on the second floor, on the far right-hand side, Bell saw it: a boy’s face. The features were fuzzy—he was too distant, the window was too high—but she could make out a fringe of pale brown hair, thin face, jug ears. Was he smiling? Maybe. Had to be Montgomery Henner. From even that fleeting and faraway glimpse, she sensed a kind of quiet yearning in the boy’s face, in the way that face was tilted toward the front gate, as if he spent his days dreaming of what it might be like to rove beyond this place, unencumbered by illness and frailty and constant caution. To travel. To have adventures, like any other sixteen-year-old. To see the world—to see, Bell thought, recalling Carla’s excitement, places s
uch as London.

  To be free.

  “You know what?” Sharon said. Her voice implied that Bell had raised some moral objection to all of it, to the house and the grounds, to this blunt and forthright expression of wealth, even though Bell hadn’t spoken. “My father worked like a dog for every dime he’s got.” A hard crust of defensiveness—belligerence, really—had formed around Sharon’s voice. “And he gave up a hell of a lot, too. Sacrificed. Put himself on the line, over and over again.” She recovered herself. Her tone softened. “Look. I don’t know why you needed to speak with my father today, but it’s clear that your conversation was cut short. I’m just asking you to remember what he’s been through. Which is why he gets a little worked up sometimes. Kind of intense. Even rude.”

  “You’re wrong,” Bell said mildly. “Our conversation was over.” She was sure that Sharon had been secretly listening to every word.

  “It’s changed us, you know? All of us,” Sharon went on, as if Bell hadn’t spoken. “Monty being so sick, I mean.” She bit her bottom lip, then released it. “I don’t know if you have any children, Mrs. Elkins, but to have a sick child—it’s the worst—I can’t describe—” She stopped. When she spoke again, her tone was gentle and confiding; this was one friend talking to another. All defenses down. “Look, I came out here to level with you. Woman to woman. I caused Daddy a lot of pain when I was younger. Did everything I could to embarrass him. Ran around and made a damned fool of myself. I was a selfish bitch. Drank too much. Screwed every guy in sight. I hated the fact that he was in politics and we all had to be so good all the time. So goddamned holy. So I went running just as fast as I could in the other direction. I was a slut, okay? No other word for it. Wanted to embarrass him. Wanted him to suffer—and he did. He did. But no matter how bad I was, no matter how much I put Daddy through back then, it’s nothing compared to what he’s dealing with now.” Her chin quivered. “Watching his grandson get sicker, day by day.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Just needed to say it. So that you won’t judge Daddy too harshly. About—about whatever it is you came to see him for.”

  “Understood,” Bell said. Sharon’s speech, like portions of her father’s, felt prerecorded, maybe even poll-tested. Riley Jessup was a politician—and Sharon was a politician’s daughter. Slight variation of the same species.

  Sharon backed away a step or two. The security guard moved forward. There was a steady, avuncular protectiveness in his bearing.

  “Everything okay?” he asked Sharon.

  She nodded. Gave him a brief smile. Then she turned again to Bell. “I need you to know something else. You called these men a security team. Well, that’s not exactly right. Leo here is like family. I mean—yes, he protects us, but he’s not just an employee. Leo’s been working for my father since—well, how long has it been now, Leo?”

  “Forty-six years,” he said. Bell heard the glint of pride in an otherwise bland and stolid voice.

  “Leo here knows me,” Sharon said. “Knows all of us—me, my father, Montgomery. And Whit, of course.” Her husband’s name sounded like an afterthought. “We’ve added to the staff over the years,” she went on, “but Leo—and Bob over there, and Rufus and Carl, who’re out back—have been with us forever. In fact, Leo was the one who found me and brought me back, all those years ago. When I was running wild. It was Leo here who talked me into coming home.” She patted his forearm. He had no apparent reaction—no smile, no confirming nod. He didn’t look at her. Yet Bell thought she detected a slight quiver in Leo’s body when Sharon touched him. A faint, subtle vibration.

  Opening the door of the Explorer, Bell let her eyes slide up for another glimpse at the second-floor window, toward the place where she’d seen the boy. He was gone now. The drapes were shut. She could imagine a hand—not the boy’s hand, but someone else’s, someone charged with keeping him safe—grabbing the fabric and giving it a hard tug, pulling it across the rod, sealing off the inside of the house the way you’d twist on the lid of a jar, securing it, making it airtight.

  * * *

  Bell was three-quarters of the way back to Acker’s Gap. She drove very fast and the mountains—steep walls of green rising away from her at a dizzy pitch—flashed by. She relished the freedom and the silence.

  It didn’t last long. Her cell rang. She slapped the phone against her ear.

  “Elkins.”

  Heavy breathing. It wasn’t an obscene phone call. She knew what it was: the husky aftermath of weeping. A man’s weeping. Men cried differently from women; they tried to hold it back, fighting it, walling it off, and the effort ironically made the tears go on that much longer, fortified by having weathered the initial resistance. For a woman, tears came and went like a spring shower. For a man, it was more serious; a bout of weeping was like a tornado, wrecking everything he’d believed about himself and his ability to take a punch.

  “Elkins,” she repeated.

  The voice was laden with pain and embarrassment: “Ma’am—I’m sorry, ma’am, sorry to bother you—I oughta call Nick Fogelsong and I know that, but I—I don’t want him to—I’m ashamed, I’m—”

  Bell let the caller collect himself.

  “Ma’am,” he started again. “This’s Wally Frank. My brother Charlie—he was—he was—”

  “I know,” she said. She had picked up something else in his voice, the longer he talked. His words were slightly slurred. He’d been drinking. In these parts, grief and whiskey were like best friends in elementary school: You rarely saw one without the other.

  “I miss him,” Wally said. “All the time. He was a strange man, no doubt about that, and lotsa folks thought he was—well, not right in his head—but he was my brother.” A series of wet-sounding coughs. A muffled belch. “Listen, Mrs. Elkins, I can’t say this to Nickie—we’ve known each other too damned long and I’m too ashamed of myself—but I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do. I just—”

  She let his broken-off sentence hang there in space. She thought about the autopsy photos of Charlie Frank. The ghastly wounds. Until Charlie’s killer was caught, she’d be getting these kinds of calls. Technically, a prosecutor didn’t solve crimes; that was the sheriff’s job. But in a small county, the reality was different: She was at the center of the wheel. No way out. She didn’t want a way out.

  “Thing is,” Wally said, and his voice sounded tinny and faraway now, as if he’d dropped the phone and picked it up again by the wrong end, “I’m no good for anybody these days. No good at work. No good for my kids. My mother looks at me with them big eyes of hers—and I don’t know what the hell to say. Don’t know how we’re gonna take care of her. Can you—what am I gonna do, Mrs. Elkins? What am I gonna do?” She heard a sob and a click.

  He’d hung up without waiting for an answer. Which was a good thing, because she didn’t have one.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “And so I said, ‘Hey, no! Shut up! You’ll jinx it!’ And Annie said, ‘Jinx what?’ And I said, ‘The whole summer. Duh.’” Carla took a breath. She’d needed one at least three sentences ago but banged right on, talking in that headlong way she did when she was happy. It was the opposite of how she acted—taciturn, the quiet closed up in her—when she was mad at Bell, or upset at the world. There was no middle ground with Carla Jean Elkins, her mother knew; she was loquacious or mute, a chatterbox or a sphinx.

  They’d set up the time for the Skype chat the day before and at 4 P.M., Bell made sure she was seated at her desk in her courthouse office, laptop arranged so that it didn’t catch the glare from the window. The image on the computer screen satisfied Bell that Carla was doing fine. Her daughter’s eyes were bright, and she was as excited as Bell had ever seen her.

  “So weird that it’s still light there,” Carla said. She was lying on her stomach on a bed covered with a white chenille bedspread, chin propped in her palm, bare feet waving in the air behind her. Beyond her daughter’s toes, Bell could make out a tall
leaded window and tidy stacked squares of fuzzy darkness. It was 9 P.M. in London. When she contemplated just how far away Carla really was—across an ocean, for God’s sake, even though her presence on the screen made her seem close enough to be hanging out in the next room—Bell felt awe, followed by a wave of immense and overwhelming sadness. She had to swallow hard to keep it out of her voice.

  Bell had asked her about Annie Carpenter, the other summer intern in the London office of Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe. That was the firm for which Sam Elkins made obscene amounts of money as a terrifyingly effective lobbyist. She’s okay, Carla had replied, which was a signal to Bell that the two of them were already close. In Carla’s world, “okay” was synonymous with intensely, unbelievably, eternally fabulous. Annie’s only flaw, Carla added, was that she persisted in predicting that this summer would be the very best one of their entire lives—which, as Carla had quickly scolded her, officially constituted a jinx.

  “How’s the neighborhood where you’re living?” Bell asked.

  “Oh my God, Mom, it’s amazing. I mean, the houses all look like they’re right out of Mary Poppins or something. So they’ve got these little fences with little spikes on top and these fancy front doors. Oh, and yesterday we went to King’s Cross—the train station where Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts, right? They’ve got this platform that’s like the one he goes through. And the brick wall. Check out my Facebook page—you can see me there. Annie took the picture.”

  Bell didn’t want to tell Carla that she’d already seen it, that she’d been to her daughter’s Facebook page dozens of times in the past few days. She didn’t want to seem overprotective, like some crazy stalker mom. At the words “Harry Potter,” Bell had felt one of those acute pangs just below her rib cage that always assailed her at the moment her desperation at missing Carla reached a particularly intense pitch. Back when Carla was in middle school, Bell had read the entire Harry Potter series aloud to her, book by book, divvying up the adventures across many bedtimes. Bell could remember how it felt to have Carla nestled in the crook of her arm, while both lay in the big bed in Bell’s room, as Bell opened Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to the spot where they’d left off the night before.