Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  “Show doesn’t start till nine,” Shirley said. “Band has to get here early, though. To make sure everything’s right. Microphones and lighting and whatnot.”

  Bell took a few steps across the floor in her direction.

  “I told you, Shirley. I can’t stay for the show. I just came by because you said—”

  “I know. I know.” Shirley’s voice was eager. There was a lift in it that Bell hadn’t heard before. Or at least not recently. “Wanted you to meet Bobo. Before he starts working. When he’s working, there’ll be a bunch of people around him. Fans and whatnot. He’ll be here soon.”

  Bell took another step toward the stage area. She bumped into a chair, nearly knocking it over. She hadn’t seen the chair; the dark wood blended seamlessly into the darkness of this windowless space.

  “You okay?” Shirley said.

  “Fine.”

  “Kinda hard to see in here. Gotta keep it dark for atmosphere. People expect that.”

  Bell nodded, then realized Shirley might not have noticed the nod, given the darkness and the distance—two kinds of distance, really—between them, and so she said, “Yeah. Bet they do.”

  The side door opened. A pie-slice of light showed up on the floor, quickly vanishing as soon as the newcomer pulled the door shut behind him.

  “Belfa,” Shirley said, “this here’s Bobo Bolland. Bobo, I want you to meet my sister, Belfa Elkins. Everybody calls her Bell, though.”

  Bell had fully expected to have a strong negative reaction to the man. He was exploiting her sister, wasn’t he? Stringing her along, giving her false hope about making a career out of “managing” some half-assed bar band that played for drinks and tips? Bell didn’t know for sure, but she wondered, as well, if there might be a personal issue here—wondered, that is, if Bobo was screwing her sister in the cruder, more literal sense of the term. Leading her on in that way, too. Pledging a future that didn’t exist. Taking advantage of Shirley’s vulnerability and neediness. And—most appallingly—her hope.

  To Bell’s surprise, though, she didn’t feel her default hostility when shaking Bolland’s hand and taking a quick measure of him. He was tall and lanky, except for his belly, which bumped unstoppably over the top of his belt buckle as if his stomach had recently been pumped full of helium. He had silver hair that he wore long, gathered into a ponytail that neatly bisected his back—Bell glimpsed it when he turned to say hello to Shirley—and his face, a lined and pouchy one dominated by a large hooked nose, had a serenity to it, a settled quality that was somehow discernible even in this shadowy place.

  “Hey,” he said. “Good to finally meet you. Shirley talks about you all the time. I was starting to think she was making the whole thing up—this sister of hers, a prosecuting attorney and all.”

  “Bobo,” Shirley said, trying to sound admonishing, but Bell could hear the blush in her voice, could sense her pleasure in being teased.

  “Oh, I’m real, all right,” Bell said. “And I wanted to meet you, too. Hear your music.” That wasn’t true; Bell was present only because Shirley had insisted. This was a favor to her sister. Nothing more. And while she hadn’t had the instantaneous bad reaction to Bolland that she anticipated, neither did she trust him or have any interest in his songs—beyond the fact that he’d managed to ensnare Shirley in his ludicrous, frankly pathetic dreams of show-business glory.

  “As I was just telling Shirley,” Bell went on, “I’m sorry I can’t stay for your performance tonight, but I thought I could at least sit in on the sound check.”

  “Great.” Bolland took the guitar case from Shirley. His hand was big and stringy, the knuckles sticking up like marbles thrust under the skin. Still looking at Shirley, he spoke again, aiming his words at Bell. “You probably already know this, but Shirley here’s a natural-born manager. She’s doubled our bookings in just the past few weeks. Been putting together a YouTube video. And she got me to look into copyrighting my songs. Ain’t never done that. Know I should’ve.”

  “Yeah,” Shirley said. “Folks’ll steal them, Bobo. I’ve been telling you.”

  While Bolland tuned his guitar, his bandmates—a bass guitar player named Leroy and a drummer named Calvin, also middle-aged, also tall with skinny legs, and similarly afflicted with bellies that appeared to have been strapped on that morning along with belts, boots, and ball caps—arrived through the side door and began setting up their gear. Shirley checked out the electrical receptacles, angled the amplifiers, used her fingernail to scrape at a small blob of gum on the paneled wall behind the stage. In the meantime, a few customers wandered into the bar. The waitress drifted amid their tables, offering up her round bottom for swipes and smacks and then feigning outrage when they obliged.

  “Bell’s heard you play before,” Shirley said.

  Bolland looked up from the strings he was fiddling with. “That right?”

  “Yeah,” Bell said. “At Tommy’s.”

  He winced. “Real tragedy. Man losing his life like that.”

  No more wisdom seemed forthcoming from Bolland, so Bell dragged a chair to the center of the room to await the commencement of their warm-up numbers. She looked around. A nearly-empty bar during the gray indeterminate twilight of late afternoon and early evening was a peculiar thing. Even without windows, you could always tell day from night in a bar. And a bar needed the night. Needed the romance and mystery of the darkness outside, crowding all around the building, matching the darkness inside. Otherwise it was just a wood-paneled box where people congregated to waste their time and their money. She’d never felt the lure of such places, not even in D.C., where the bars were very different—fancier, of course, and more expensive—from an establishment such as Crazy Dave’s but which served the same basic human needs: company and diversion. Anything to deflect or delay the painful truths brought on by solitude—namely, that the world’s a rigged game, start to finish, and that everyone dies in the end.

  “Here goes,” Bolland said. He nodded to Calvin and Leroy, tapped his foot three times and then they started a song. An original. Bell knew because Shirley had been humming it a few days ago, while she folded her laundry, and Bell had said, “What’s that? Sounds pretty,” and Shirley had replied, “It’s one of Bobo’s. Told you that you’d like his songs—if I could ever get you to hold still long enough to listen.”

  “Train’s heading down the track, don’t think it’s coming back; like the love I had, it makes me sad, that lonesome clickety-clack.” The trite words weren’t the part that affected Bell; it was the melody, a haunting one that dipped into its minor chords like a hawk lowering a wing as it soars alongside the face of the mountain, then rights itself and aims for a higher part of the sky.

  Bell listened as the song unspooled and damned if she didn’t feel a lump forming in her throat. She fought against it. She hated emotional reactions—her own or anybody else’s—to anything; emotions caused more trouble in the world than guns and knives. Guns and knives were just accessories after the fact. Emotions were the instigators. Love and hate and greed and lust. Jealousy. Frustration. Despair. Name an emotion, and she could point to a crime it had provoked. To hell with shotguns. Feelings were the real troublemakers.

  But she couldn’t help herself. Bolland’s voice was a sandpapery tenor that featured something fixed and firm at its center, a flinty, hard-earned wisdom, and as that voice sang of train wrecks and tragic love affairs—the latter being really just another kind of train wreck, Bell thought—she had to fight to hold on to her emotional equilibrium. She was wildly annoyed with herself—Jesus, she seethed, this is like Country Music Cliché 101—even as she admired his talent.

  Shirley stood at the edge of the stage area, arms crossed, head tilted, frowning with concentration. She was doing her job. Listening for sound levels, for the right blend of the instruments and of Bolland’s voice.

  And Bell, as well as she could manage in the swarthy gloom, studied her sister’s face. It was different from the face Bell had seen
the other night, when Shirley sat slumped at the kitchen table, angry and distraught. To be sure, Shirley’s face was still leathery and lined, still worn, but now it was also alert and focused. Engaged.

  Bell stood up. She hoped Shirley wouldn’t see her slip out. She’d done what she promised to do. She’d met Bolland. Shaken his hand. Heard his music. Given him the benefit of the doubt.

  Which was not to say that all doubt was erased. Not on your freakin’ life, mister, Bell thought, and the incompleteness gnawed at her. The only solid information she had about Bolland at this point, she reminded herself as she drove back toward Acker’s Gap, was that, as Shirley had insisted, he was one hell of a musician. Bell still knew nothing about his past—but that, of course, could be easily remedied. Especially by someone who had Rhonda Lovejoy’s number on her speed-dial.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The voice on the phone was too loud, too fast, too aggressive, and the East Coast accent scraped against his sentences like a rock rubbed relentlessly up and down on a cheese grater.

  “You got three minutes, which is more than I ought to give you,” the voice said, although to Bell it sounded like maw den I otter gev yo. “Go.”

  She had picked up her cell in a rush, absolutely sure that it would be Carla calling her back. Needing her. It was 10:30 P.M. in Acker’s Gap—just a little over six hours since they’d Skyped—and 3:30 A.M. in London, but maybe Carla couldn’t sleep. Maybe she was nervous. Upset. Scared. Or maybe she just wanted to talk.

  It wasn’t Carla. It was, in fact, about as far from Carla as you could go and still remain within the limits of the human species. The man’s voice had a macho swagger to it that reminded Bell of every gangster movie she’d ever seen. She half expected to hear a phrase such as “sleep with da fishes” in his next breath.

  She had no earthly idea who the caller was or what the hell he was talking about.

  Bell was sitting in her favorite chair in sweats and a T-shirt, an unread book in her lap, an almost-gone Rolling Rock on the small table beside her. She’d decided to wait up for Shirley, hoping her sister might come home tonight after the gig at Crazy Dave’s. Now that things were better between them—weren’t they?—it was a reasonable expectation.

  “Who’s this?” Bell said.

  “Sam Voorhees.” The voice was prickly with impatience. “Now you’re down to two minutes and forty-five seconds, lady. Better talk fast.”

  Bell sat up straighter in her chair. She could figure out the incidentals—such as why the mysterious Mr. Voorhees suddenly had decided to call—later. Right now, she followed his instructions. “Okay,” she said hurriedly. “Why was Jed Stark carrying your business card?”

  “Who?”

  “Jed Stark.” Bell waited. She had the distinct impression that Voorhees wasn’t playing a game, that he really had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Tell me more,” Voorhees said. “Like—where the hell am I calling?”

  “Acker’s Gap, West Virginia.”

  He laughed. His laughter sounded like a box of wrenches dropped on a concrete floor. It stopped abruptly. “God,” he said. Bored and irritated at the same time. “West Virginia. Okay, yeah. Gotcha. Jed Stark. Lemme look.”

  Bell could envision a master file displayed on a glowing laptop screen, through which he did a quick key word search.

  “Okay,” Voorhees said. “Yeah. He was a subcontractor. I hired Stark to do some confidential work for a client of mine.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “What is it about the word ‘confidential’ that you don’t understand?”

  “Stark’s dead,” Bell countered. “So what does it matter now?”

  “Can’t discuss the nature of his assignment. Clock’s ticking, lady.”

  “So who’s the client?”

  More silence. Finally Voorhees said, “You’re coming up to your last thirty seconds.”

  “It’s Riley Jessup, right? The client? Rhododendron Associates is paying your tab.”

  “Twenty seconds. Better ask me something I can answer.”

  “You’re based in New York City, right?”

  “Yeah.” He grunted. “Good choice of question. Nice one to end on.”

  “If you’re in New York—how’d your business card end up in West Virginia? And why did Jed Stark write the name ‘Odell Crabtree’ on it?”

  Voorhees grunted again. “Time’s up, lady. I don’t talk about my clients and I don’t return phone calls from people who aren’t clients. Except this once. Oh—and next time you talk to Sammy Elkins, you tell him we’re all square now, okay? This was the favor. I owed him one and now we’re even.”

  After his slam-bang hang-up, Bell kept the cell pressed to her ear for another few seconds, contemplating the fact that her ex-husband, that deal-maker extraordinaire, had tried to balance the scale in the only way he knew: calling in a marker. She was bereft about Carla’s going to London; she’d made that clear enough with her profane one-word text to Sam. To assuage his guilt, he’d reached out to Voorhees. Induced him to call.

  Voorhees had revealed nothing. Except, Bell thought, he actually had.

  Chapter Thirty

  Lindy was thrilled with this new piece of information: Her mother had once had a best friend named Maybelle. A friend so important to her that she’d kept her letters. The letters had been simmering in that box for all the hard years since Margaret Crabtree died, letters locked away, silent and invisible, but still exerting an influence on Lindy’s life—because they had mattered so much to her mother.

  Lindy’s thoughts had kept her company during the overnight shift at the station. That shift was winding down now—it was almost 6 A.M.—and the building’s glass walls continued to trend seamlessly from black to gray to the pink of the approaching sunrise. Heat seemed to lurk just behind that sunrise, waiting for its cue to pounce.

  What a long, slow night it had been, without Jason to talk to. Or even to ignore, which was another form of communication. Jason had taken the night off; he and his brother had driven their father to Charleston the day before for an appointment with a cardiologist. Jason hadn’t been sure he would make it back in time, so he took a personal day. Or night, in this case. The replacement was a woman named Bonnie Skinner. Lindy had no opinion about Bonnie Skinner. There wasn’t anything, really, upon which to hang an opinion: Bonnie was medium-sized, with medium brown hair and medium brown eyes and cautious, middle-of-the-road opinions about everything. She usually worked in Drummond, at the Lester station over there.

  “How do you guys do the coffee for the morning rush?” Bonnie asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The coffee.” Bonnie stood by the FILL ’ER UP sign, holding aloft an empty carafe to help make her point, its glass sides stained with the distastefully brown residue of Dark Colombian Roast. “Like, do you all do ’em all at the same time or one at a time? Brewing new pots, I mean. We do ’em all at once, over in Drummond. Dump out what’s in there and start fresh.”

  Lindy was rearranging the items on the front counter: the cardboard container with the tiny red 5-hour Energy bottles; the tall four-sided plastic stand with sunglasses stacked up in it, their dark lenses smudged with the fingerprints of people who just couldn’t keep their hands off them, who had to try on every single freakin’ pair while waiting for Lindy to give them their change.

  “One at a time,” Lindy replied, but the tone of her voice said something else: Whatever.

  She missed Jason. The realization surprised her, but it was true. They were a good team. They worked well together, with the natural synchronicity that comes from an accumulation of hours in each other’s company. But it wasn’t just a work thing, Lindy thought; she was used to Jason, period. Used to his moods and his gestures. She knew by now that when he preened and he bragged, it was to cover up a secret inferiority, and when he acted like he didn’t care about anybody else but himself, it was to deflect attention from the fact that he was deeply and habitually empath
etic.

  In the wide-open prairie of the hours between midnight and 6 A.M., hours that Bonnie Skinner mostly spent sitting on a stool by the cooler, pencil diving at intervals toward a ratty paperback filled with page after page of jumbled-word puzzles, Lindy thought about Jason and the noises he’d make, trying to sound like a rapper. The way he’d move casually toward the front counter whenever a customer came in to pay. Backing her up. Sending a silent message: There’s two of us here. I’m watching you. Just in case.

  “Okay,” Bonnie said.

  Lindy looked up. She hadn’t realized that her temporary assistant was waiting for her to say something else about the protocol for brewing the morning coffee supply, and that when she didn’t, Bonnie just decided to tie off the conversation with the all-purpose “Okay.”

  Finally the day shift personnel arrived. Time for Lindy and Bonnie to go home. They barely said good-bye to each other in the parking lot; it wasn’t hostility, just indifference and fatigue. Lindy nodded and Bonnie gave her a weak smile as they split off, each heading to her own vehicle. The sky was already gray and hazy, which meant that the heat, as it intensified throughout the day, would probably hang stubbornly in the mountain valley like a wool blanket tossed over a clothesline.

  As she drove home, Lindy thought about how she’d answer Jason when he asked her—and she knew he’d ask right away, eager for a compliment—about how she’d fared without him. Lindy planned to tease him as long as she could, stringing him along: Oh, man, she was terrific. Pitched right in. Better watch it, Jace. Might ask ’em to trade you for her. Permanent, I mean.