Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  There were times when Bell wasn’t sure she could make it to the next moment of her life. It sounded melodramatic, but it was true; she missed Carla so much that she seemed to lose the knack of breathing. The trick of it. She had to remind herself how it was done. And the way it was done, of course, was to stop trying to do it, to let the body go about its business without any interference from conscious thought. She had to settle herself down. Carla’s fine, Bell told herself. She’s fine and I’ll see her again. She’s having a great time and that’s what’s important. Not my neediness. Not my utter desolation because I want her here right now, right beside me.

  “So we’ll be doing Stonehenge next weekend,” Carla was saying. She’d gone on talking—babbling, really—oblivious to Bell’s distress. Which was precisely how Bell wanted it. Carla didn’t need any extra guilt to carry around with her. She already blamed herself for the death of her best friend last fall, a death that wasn’t her fault but that came as the result of events she’d set into motion.

  “That’s great, sweetie,” Bell said, determined to keep her voice light and cheerful. “And how about the job itself? I mean, what do you do all day in the office?”

  Carla shrugged. Transferred via Skype, the shrug looked like a wavy glitch on the screen.

  “So I answer the phone, run errands, get lunch for the senior staff. Stuff like that. But, Mom—it really doesn’t matter, because this is London. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “How’re things there?” Carla asked. “How’s Aunt Shirley getting along?”

  There was a stretch of silence, and so Carla spoke again. “Mom? Still there? Is the connection still—?”

  “Right here.” Bell was trying to figure out how to answer. “Frankly, it’s been kind of rough.”

  “What do you mean? Is Shirley okay?”

  Her mother had been honest with Carla about some of Shirley’s problems; you don’t just walk out of prison and back into the world with no residual effects.

  “It’s not only that,” Bell said. “We’ve had some serious crimes this summer. Two murders. An old man and then another man.”

  “Yeah.” Carla’s voice was serious now. “Dad told me. Wow, Mom—it sounds bad.”

  Damn you, Sam Elkins, Bell thought savagely. Damn you straight to hell. She had decided not to tell Carla until now. She didn’t want her to worry. Her daughter had been through too much already in her young life—the violence she had witnessed, the emotional cataclysm of the divorce. She had wanted Carla to enjoy her summer.

  “So what’s the deal?” Carla was asking. “Are the cases related to each other?”

  “We don’t know. Nick and his deputies are doing their best, but there’s not a lot to go on.”

  “I bet everybody’s scared to death.” Carla’s face was somber now. She wasn’t giddy anymore about being in London; she was thinking about Acker’s Gap. And Bell silently cursed her ex-husband all over again.

  “Listen,” Bell said. She had promised herself she would be casual with Carla, smiling and upbeat. But now that her daughter knew the truth about what was happening here, Bell didn’t have to pretend anymore. She didn’t have to hide her anxiety. Bell’s next words came in a rush. “I want you to be very careful. All the time. If you’re out at night, make sure somebody knows where you’re going and who you’re with and what time you’re supposed to be back. And—”

  “Mom. Come on.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll stop. But there are bad things in this world, sweetie. Bad things and bad people. And you’ve got to be on the lookout for—”

  “Hey.” Carla’s voice was playful but pointed. “You said you’d stop, okay?”

  “Okay. But just be careful. I mean—really, really careful.”

  Carla smiled. Cocked her head. Offered a waggle-fingered wave. “Love you, too, Mom.”

  * * *

  Bell was still looking at the computer screen, even though there was nothing to see anymore. Carla had disconnected a good three minutes ago. Bell, though, had barely moved in her seat. She wanted to let the conversation with her daughter wash over her, soaking into her bones so that she’d be able to recall it in the days ahead, when the ache of missing Carla—an ache that only intensified or receded, but never went away entirely—grew unbearable.

  She was startled by the shrill warble of the office phone. If Lee Ann were here, Bell could ignore it, knowing her secretary would take care of it; Lee Ann, though, wouldn’t be back for another week. Bell let the thing go on for six full rings. The day’s business was pressing, and she knew that; still, she gave herself the luxury of a last, restorative thought about her child. Carla was doing well. Carla didn’t need her. Carla could take care of herself—which was a kind of double-edged truth, Bell realized, in that it made her both happy and sad.

  She reached for the phone. “Elkins.” With her other hand, Bell slapped shut the lid of her laptop. Time to focus.

  “Bundy Barnes here.”

  She didn’t need the ID. The raspy, crackling, screw you tone was a dead giveaway.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes.” Bell always tried to be polite, even when—as was definitely the case at present—the person on the other end of the line was a sworn enemy, an eighty-six-year-old county commissioner who had tried repeatedly to have her removed from office by means of electoral recall or legislative fiat. No matter what charges Barnes concocted, his real beef with Bell came down to a simple fact: She was female. And women had no business being prosecutors—or anything, for that matter, other than wives and mothers.

  “Ain’t nothin’ good about it,” he said with a snarl. “I want to know what you and Nick Fogelsong intend to do about the fact that we’ve had two murders this summer with no end in sight. Folks’re too jumpy to leave their houses at night. We’re under siege. And what do I see? I see a prosecutor and a sheriff who spend a whole lot of time doin’ a whole lot of nothin.’”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Barnes, that the sheriff and I are—”

  “Don’t want no fancy promises, Mrs. Elkins,” he said, interrupting her doggedly. “Not from you and not from Nick Fogelsong. We’ve had enough promises already, dammit. We need action.”

  Bell waited. Whatever she said next, and howsoever she said it, she’d be cut off yet again by Barnes; he was notorious for monopolizing conversations, for stomping right in the middle of other people’s sentences like a kid racing through a row of fresh mud puddles. He was a crude fool and an unrepentant bully.

  But he was also, in this instance, quite right. The violence was unusual and unsettling, and it added another serious and prolonged aggravation to the summer, beyond the heat and the slow-motion deterioration egged on by the sagging economy. Bell could roll her eyes at the sour cantankerousness of Bundy Barnes all she wanted, but the truth was, he had a point.

  “We’re pursuing several new lines of inquiry, sir,” she said, “and I really think that soon we’ll have—”

  “Do your job!” Barnes thundered. The interruption came a little later than Bell had expected. She’d gotten through almost a full sentence before he jumped in.

  “Do your job!” he repeated, louder this time, and then she heard the angry crash of his receiver as it was slammed down in the two-pronged slot—Barnes, like a lot of older residents of Raythune County, still relied on a landline and a clunky rotary-dial phone—followed shortly by the bland meditative hum of a dial tone.

  Bell returned to her work. She had a two-inch-high stack of transcripts of depositions to review and a warrant to prepare for a burglary case, and so when she heard the door to the outer office open and close, she didn’t lift her head; it had to be another busybody, determined to tell her and Nick how to do their jobs.

  Well, hell. Take a number.

  “Yes?” she said, eyes still on the paperwork that spilled out across her desk.

  “Hey.”

  The voice went through her like a beam of light running under the surface of a clear stream, leaving a ph
osphorescent glow in its wake. She looked up. Clay Meckling stood in the threshold between the outer and inner office. The last time she’d seen him, he was mired in a wheelchair, defeated and depressed, with a flat, lost look to his hooded eyes. Now, however, he stood straight and tall again. His face was too thin, but she forgot about that as soon as he smiled. She knew that smile.

  “Clay. My God.” She rose and rounded her desk. They embraced, but there was a reserve about him. A formality. She felt it right away and backed off.

  “Clay,” she said. “When did you—”

  “Last night. My dad and I drove back from Chicago.”

  “How is—?” She didn’t know how to ask. How to say, How is your leg? It sounded clinical and crass, as if the first thing anybody needed to know about him had to be his disability.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Really. Had some top-flight physical and occupational therapists at the Rehab Institute in Chicago. Amazing place. Got fitted with a better prosthetic. Makes all the difference.”

  “Glad to hear that, Clay. I’m so happy for you.” Bell wanted to slap herself. Or sew her own mouth shut. Jesus. She was coming out with platitudes, with greeting card lines, when what she wanted to do was talk to him. Really talk to him—the way they’d talked before, honestly and forthrightly, or lovingly and playfully. The way they’d talked before the events of the horrific morning in the early spring that had resulted in the amputation of his leg. They were lovers, and that had given even their daylight conversations that special frisson rooted in sexual intimacy, an electric thrill born of what you knew about the other person that no one else knew, such as how he expressed himself during moments of intense and enveloping physical rapture. Or how he took his coffee. It was all information, all part of the complex joy of knowing someone right down to the core. Despite the difference in their ages, Bell had felt comfortable with Clay—more comfortable than she had ever felt with any other man. But after the accident, everything changed; it changed not in a single moment, which was rarely how such things occurred, but in an incremental way, as he pulled away from her, refusing her access to his deepest grief and most secret fears.

  Or had she been the one to pull away from him? She wasn’t sure. And maybe, in the end, it didn’t matter, anyway. The point was this: They couldn’t recover what they’d had. He clearly didn’t want to. And she didn’t want to, either.

  Did she?

  “Bet you’ve got your hands full these days,” he said. “My dad’s been keeping me up to date. Pretty scary stuff—the murders. Sounds more like Chicago than Acker’s Gap.”

  She batted away the bad news. “We can talk about all that later. Come on in and sit down,” she said eagerly. “I wanted to call—I wanted to—well, I thought I’d wait to hear from you first, I wasn’t sure—” She was flailing, she didn’t know what to say or how to be, and her only consolation was the thought that it would get easier in the days and months ahead. Less awkward. She’d see him on the street, at the store, in JP’s, and they’d ease into each other’s lives again, and one day … maybe …

  She looked at him. He hadn’t yet accepted her offer to sit down, so she had to look up; he was that much taller than she was. There was a quiet peace in his gray eyes. And there was something else in those eyes, too: A seriousness. A gravity. She noticed it seconds before he spoke again, which at least gave her some semblance of warning as to what he was about to say, so that she could prepare herself.

  “Belfa,” he said. Her given name. Used sparingly, kept for special occasions. Another signal that this wasn’t just a casual visit. His cockeyed smile—that was another thing she loved about him, that rascally grin—had faded now.

  “Don’t really have time to linger,” he went on. “Just back for a day or so. I’ve been in contact with the graduate admissions office at MIT and they said I could enroll this fall, just like I planned.” Clay’s dream was to study urban design; after the amputation, sunk deep in despondency about his condition, he’d turned down his fellowship. Now, apparently, he’d changed his mind.

  “Really?” she said. “This late? They’re letting you—?”

  “Yeah. They kept my spot. It might be a little rough at first, but there’s a lot of help available. They’ve got a really good disability services program. Anyway, I need to head up there right away. Get settled. I just wanted to come over and say good-bye.”

  “That’s great, Clay. It’s what you’ve always wanted.” There she was again, dispensing clichés like after-dinner mints. Stop it, Bell told herself. Just stop it. But she didn’t know what else to say except clichés. At least they filled up space with sound.

  “Yeah,” he said. A moment passed, as if he were waiting for something else from her. Did he want to be talked out of it? Asked to stay? She couldn’t do that. This was his dream. But she remembered what it had felt like when they kissed, back when they were lovers. The memory almost knocked her over with longing. She had to get hold of herself. Couldn’t let him see how much she wanted—

  “Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Better get going. Dad’s outside in the truck. Gonna hit the mall. Gotta stock up.” He paused. “I hear Shirley’s back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That’s good. I know what that means to you. Working out okay?”

  “It’ll take time.” Bell was surprised at how casual she sounded now. Just a few seconds ago, she’d been afraid she might topple over from the dizziness of being so close to him. Well, she’d had plenty of practice in the fine art of hiding her feelings.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Bound to.”

  Why was this moment so fraught and awkward? Why did she feel the urge to shake him until something real came out—something that wasn’t part of a regular, sedate, polite conversation, something that would prove what they’d been to each other, how much they’d shared, the passion they’d known? And why, if that was how she felt about him, hadn’t she reached out, kept in contact, told him so over these past few months? Why hadn’t she tried? And why wasn’t she trying now? Long-distance relationships weren’t unheard of. They were difficult, yes, but a lot of people managed to—

  “Thanks for stopping by,” Bell said. “Good luck, Clay.”

  He looked at her as if he wanted more. But maybe that was her imagination. Wishful thinking. And she had to protect herself, didn’t she? What if she capitulated and told him how she really felt and it turned out that he now regarded their relationship as a mistake? One he was glad to be rid of? He didn’t need a damned thing from her. He was going to grad school. He’d wanted that for a long time. And she knew that desire—the itch that tormented you day and night, the one that insisted you try for a life outside these mountains at least once before you died, that called to you. She knew what he was feeling: He was thrilled to escape. Thrilled to be leaving Acker’s Gap—and her—behind. It was obvious.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Okay,” he said. His eyes were unreadable now. “Well, take care of yourself.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Bell had made a promise to Shirley, and so she would go. She cursed the timing; the encounter with Clay an hour ago had left her anxious and frayed. But—well, here she was. For Shirley’s sake.

  The bar was located just outside the city limits of Alesburg, a town about twenty-five minutes from Acker’s Gap. It was small and dark and seedy. The darkness hid some of the seediness, but not all of it. Nothing could hide all of it. There was a dirt-sealed hardwood floor and a low stained ceiling. Four wooden booths were linked up along one wall. A random scatter of round tables and wobbly chairs constituted the rest of the seating. Makeshift stage at one end. At the other, a dark bar with a variety of mismatched stools. Behind the bar was a shelf featuring the liquor selections. The high-end choices—the bottles of Johnnie Walker Red and Grey Goose and anything else that rose above the informal designation “rotgut”—were furred by dust, so infrequently were they called into service. The people who came into this place, Bell
knew, weren’t likely to order name-brand liquor. The point was to get drunk as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and for that, the piss-water beer on tap did the trick. Behind the row of bottles was a long cracked mirror that reflected the dimness back on itself, like a perpetual echo of something murky and furtive.

  The place was called Crazy Dave’s. Familiar to Bell by its reputation. The original owner had indeed been a man named Dave, but he’d died five years ago in an explosion in a dingy basement across town that doubled as a meth lab, and the subsequent series of owners had not bothered to change the name or the sign. If they had, it would have necessarily shifted from Crazy Dave’s to Crazy Nelson’s to Crazy Billy’s to Crazy Suellen’s to Crazy Frank’s, and the clientele might have been confused. Or maybe not. Looking around, Bell decided that the people who frequented this place surely didn’t give a damn about what it was called. Crazy Dave was dead, but Crazy Dave’s would live forever.

  “Hey, Belfa. Over here.”

  Bell turned. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she was able to spot Shirley; her sister was near the stage area, holding the handle of a guitar case.

  “Hey,” Bell called back.

  “You made it.”

  “I made it.”

  At that moment they seemed to be the only two people in the bar. And no wonder: It was still daylight outside, just after 6 P.M. This place wouldn’t get going for another few hours. On her way in, Bell had passed a man she assumed to be the owner, and then a woman she figured was a waitress, but the two were moving constantly in and out of the room, embarked on various obscure errands. Bell couldn’t have picked either one out of a lineup, and not just because the bar was so infernally dark. The owner looked like dozens of other middle-aged losers with whom she had to deal routinely in the course of her work: overweight, with a limp that was most likely the result of a motorcycle accident a while back, with a bad comb-over and a sour expression. The waitress, too, was middle-aged, but skinny. Funny, Bell thought. Most of the men in these parts get fatter as they age, but the women get skinnier.