Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  She leaned forward in her seat for a better look. The cars didn’t pause in the lot but made a smooth synchronous arc directly to the front entrance. The parade stopped with pinpoint abruptness; the second car was lined up perfectly with the wide walk leading to the glass double doors.

  Bell squinted. The just-risen sun was in her eyes, its reflection skittering off the massive black flanks of the Escalades. What the hell—?

  She blinked. Squirmed in her seat, searching for a better angle.

  The ID wouldn’t have held up in a courtroom, because Bell was too far away and because she saw only the back of a well-coiffed head of cinnamon-colored hair, but she was fairly certain that the woman who emerged from the second Escalade—and who glided into the facility without so much as a glance at her surroundings—was Sharon Henner. And the presence of the extra vehicles surely meant that whatever her mission here might be, the governor’s daughter hadn’t come alone.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Bell sometimes called them the In-Between People. It wasn’t an original thought; she’d heard Nick Fogelsong talk about it, about how some families in Acker’s Gap resisted easy categorization by economic status. They weren’t rich, God knows, but neither were they poor—at least not the kind of poor that spread across the area like a leaf blight, infecting houses instead of plants, and human destinies instead of root systems, and that left a constant swath of parts-scavenged cars, mangy animals, scrawny children with stares as deep as graves and twice as final, and elderly relatives who sat all day long on the front porch until they, too, were subsumed by the ravening misfortune.

  The Brinkermans weren’t that kind of poor. Not yet, anyway. Bell realized it as soon as she pulled up in front of the house on Bonecutter Road just north of Acker’s Gap. Rhonda had called her back with the address. After waiting until 8 A.M.—and finishing off three criminally weak cups of coffee at the Hardee’s out on the interstate while she did so—Bell opened her car door and took a long look at the place Jason Brinkerman called home. It was one of a half-dozen houses thrown up along this stretch of road a century or so ago, rote one-story structures with tiny front yards and dirt driveways. The sidewalk stopped after the last house on either end. The Brinkerman place had the small touches that meant somebody at this address still tried, at least a little bit: The mailbox was firmly attached to the creosote-black fence post that served as its pedestal. Hosta had been planted here and there, and measures had been taken to keep kids from trampling the drowsy, big-faced leaves during violent and prolonged chases across the small yard. The grass itself wasn’t so lucky.

  So they were In-Between People. Not wipeout poor—but late more often than on time with the mortgage payment, and always running thirty days behind. They had jobs, but knew full well that those jobs could—and generally did—go away any minute, on account of a mistake or a misunderstanding or the need to stay home with a sick child. They couldn’t let down their guard. Ever.

  “Help you?”

  The kid’s voice intercepted Bell before she’d shut the car door behind her. He looked to be maybe eight years old, with buzz-cut blond hair, beady eyes, enough dirt on his face to darken it by a shade and a half, and a sneer that looked as if it had taken root. He blended so thoroughly with his surroundings that at first she hadn’t seen him, standing on the sidewalk in front of the Brinkerman house, bare feet spread wide, fists on his hips, as if he might just take a mind to block her progress.

  “Hi,” she said. Played a hunch. “Looking for Jason. He’s your brother, right?”

  The kid’s lip twitched, and the sneer rose and fell in a high fleshy arch.

  “Well,” she went on, “could you ask him to come out and talk to me? My name is Belfa Elkins. I’m the county prosecutor.”

  The kid stared at her. “The what?”

  “Prosecutor. For the county. Somebody does something wrong—I try to make sure they pay for it.”

  “My brother done something wrong?”

  “Don’t know. Won’t know until I talk to him.”

  With that, the kid’s sneer went a little crazy, rabbiting up and down as if it were rigged to his toe with a long string and he’d heard music from afar and decided to tap his foot accordingly. Bell noticed the peeling red skateboard on the sidewalk in front of him. The kid lifted a bare foot and stepped down hard on the edge of the board, flipping it up and into his waiting right hand as if he’d summoned it there with a silent command, like a magic carpet. Everything happened quickly, with a grace so casual and natural and fluid as to mask the fact that it was, indeed, grace. Bell was often astonished at the physical agility of children who grew up in mountain towns—or tough inner-city neighborhoods, come to that. They seemed to have a special relationship with gravity, a secret bargain: Gravity let them have a few good years of leaping and climbing—openly defying it—before it pulled them down for keeps.

  The boy thrust the board under his arm, the way a businessman would a portfolio. “I’ll git him,” he said.

  Bell waited. It was going to be another hot day; the sun was clear about its intentions, even at this early hour. She remembered days like this when she was a kid. Hot days, when not even the vast shadow of the mountain could cool things down. She and Shirley never went to a swimming pool—their father would’ve ridiculed the idea, to cover up his shame that he didn’t have the money for them to go—and so Shirley would unkink the shiny green hose and hook it up and spray her with it, and Bell would close her eyes and wiggle all over and squeal for her to stop, although she didn’t want her to stop, and somehow Shirley knew that, knew that the squealing and the pleas to cut it out were insincere, and after a while Shirley would conveniently drop the hose and Bell would pick it up and spray Shirley right back, and Shirley, too, would scream and fuss and wave her arms over her head, and they’d both be giggling so hard that they were gasping for breath. They had a wonderful time. A wonderful time, that is, until their father heard the commotion and ripped open the screen door of the trailer and yelled at them: The fuck you two up to? Gonna whup you both, is what I’m gonna do.

  “Hey.”

  Bell realized that another kid, an older one this time, had come out of the house and now spoke to her from the driveway. Bad skin, visible even at a distance. Medium build, with the beginnings of the roly-poly paunch that afflicted even the skinniest kids in these valleys. Black Converse sneakers, oversized denim shorts that hid his kneecaps, and a black T-shirt swallowed up by an unbuttoned red-and-black-checked flannel shirt that hung down his back like a cape.

  “You’re Jason.”

  “Yeah.” Wary but not unfriendly.

  “Just want a quick word with you. I’m Belfa Elkins. Prosecutor for Raythune County.”

  “I ain’t done nothing. Been home all night, lady. You can check with my mom and dad. And my brothers. Most of them are at work right now, but I can give your their num—”

  “Relax,” Bell said. “Wanted to make sure you’d heard about your friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “Lindy Crabtree.” Bell watched him, ready to take in every nuance of his reaction. “She was attacked yesterday. In her home.”

  Jason looked as if he’d grabbed a live electrical wire. His body shook and then righted itself. He stared at Bell, moving a few quick steps in her direction. Words came in an agitated pack: “What—? Jesus, lady, what the hell happened? Is she okay? Is she—?” Jason swallowed hard. He was breathing through his nose, fast shallow breaths, his mouth a grim line except when he talked. He pulled his hands in and out of the loose pockets of his baggy shorts. “Was it her dad? He’s crazy, you know. I told her and told her to watch out. He’s out of his head. If he hurt her—if he—” He took a big breath. “I swear, lady, if that bastard touched her, I’m gonna—I don’t care—I’m gonna make sure he never—” He broke off the sentence. “Is she okay? Tell me. Please.”

  “Yes,” Bell said. “She’s okay. And we don’t know who did it.”

  Jason
looked down at the driveway. By this time, his little brother had come outside on the porch again. The kid cocked a foot between two balusters of porch railing, skateboard still wedged under his arm. Jason suddenly noticed him. “Get lost, Jimmy,” he snapped. “Go. Now.”

  The kid sneered, yanked out his foot, and went back inside the house. The screen door closed behind him with a single forlorn smack.

  “Can I see her?” Jason said. His voice had a quaver in it.

  “Later, maybe. She’s in intensive care.”

  “But she’s okay, right?”

  “She’s alive.” Bell watched him closely, trying to read his face.

  During her first years as a prosecutor, she had depended upon her instincts, certain that she could sense when someone was lying to her; she could, she thought, visualize crime scenes and the participants thereof with an uncanny degree of accuracy. But last spring she’d had a case that destroyed her confidence. She’d been wrong. Wrong about many particulars of the crime, including the identity of the perpetrator. Thus she had no faith anymore in her intuition, her hunches. All she had were the stark and paltry facts.

  And so she couldn’t tell if Jason’s reaction was authentic or trumped up. She didn’t know if he was truly aggrieved by Lindy’s injury—or just indulging in some quick theatrics to divert Bell’s suspicions. Rhonda Lovejoy had already texted Bell a few preliminary details about the Brinkermans and the news wasn’t promising: One of Jason’s brothers, Levi Brinkerman, was a meth addict awaiting trial on a burglary charge. A sister had been arrested last year for shoplifting at the Dollar Store in Blythesburg. And Jason’s father, Dustin Brinkerman, had served five years on an aggravated assault conviction before he was paroled in 2005. Jason’s record was clean—so far.

  Bell had an idea. A way, perhaps, to rattle the truth out of him, without the tedious ritual of a formal interrogation after reading him his rights. A sort of prosecutorial shortcut. Doing things by the book would waste too much time.

  “Look,” she said. “I’ll be running out to Lindy’s house later to get a few things she’s asked for. Care to come along? I can pick you up.”

  Jason’s face betrayed an interest so ravenous that Bell nearly stepped back in the wake of it.

  “Yeah. Yeah,” he said. “Please. Yeah. I’d appreciate that. Anything I can do to help. Really.”

  “Okay. Text you when I’m on my way. What’s your number?”

  Confronted with the scene of the crime, maybe Jason would slip and reveal himself. The blood from Lindy’s wound was still visible on the living room floor and would stay there, Bell knew, until the crime-scene techs finished their work. If Jason was guilty, maybe he’d react to the sight of that stain on the old wood. Maybe he’d reveal, with just a slight tremor of a hand or too-rapid eye blink, his culpability when confronted by the gruesome proof that he’d attacked his friend and nearly killed her.

  Starting up the Explorer, Bell glanced at the front porch again. Jason had gone back inside the house; his kid brother, the Skateboard King, hadn’t come back out. But there was someone else on the porch now: A skinny, squint-eyed, bent-over figure in a wrinkled gray raincoat that was about four sizes too big for him, rubbing his red nose with hard upward strokes of his shaky palm. When he wasn’t rubbing, he was taking violent sucks from a cigarette that wobbled in his other hand. A long hot raincoat in the middle of summer. Jesus, Bell thought. Gotta be Levi Brinkerman. Every meth addict she’d ever encountered was cold all the time. Came with the territory.

  Long raincoat. She let the words turn a few times in her mind. She knew she needed to talk to Nick Fogelsong.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Shirley was waiting in the living room. Bell didn’t see her at first; the shades had not been lifted from the night before, and her sister had arranged herself in a corner of the couch, black jeans and dark flannel shirt blending with the brown fabric like camouflage in a forest.

  “Jesus. Nearly scared the hell out of me,” Bell said. She’d charged directly from the front door into the living room, searching for her briefcase. She needed to find some files that Hickey Leonard would require for a sentencing hearing that afternoon. It was Bell’s case, but Hick was doing the mop-up work for her. She’d cleared the decks of her day. Needed to find out who had attacked Lindy Crabtree.

  “Sorry,” Shirley said.

  “My fault. I’m kind of scattered right now.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just work.” Moving past the couch, spotting her favorite chair, Bell made an executive decision: Time for a break. Just a short one, but still.

  She flopped down in the chair, reveling in the familiarity of its spent springs and stained fabric and broken-down back. She wouldn’t trade it for a jewel-studded throne in a palace. She had a million things to do today—but she could take a moment just now. Yes, she could.

  This chair had seen her through so many emergencies and disappointments and joys and confusions, so many all-nighters and early mornings and heat-glazed afternoons, that she owed it, she supposed, a little more attention than she’d given it of late. This was the chair, after all, in which she’d been sitting on her first day home from the hospital after giving birth to Carla, when Sam put the impossibly small and impossibly beautiful girl in her arms and said, “She’s got your eyes and your chin, Belfa.” Then Carla had let out a piercing howl, prompting Sam to add, “And your temper, too.” When this chair was located in the living room of their house on Capitol Hill, it was the place in which Bell sat on the somber day that Sam had explained to her how the divorce settlement would proceed, and the arrangements made—if she approved—for moving her things back to West Virginia. Bell had looked at the list of items and looked at Sam, and then she said, “The chair’s not on here. My chair.” Sam’s expression had instantly grown as wistful and wan as Bell had ever known it to be, and he replied, “Oh, Belfa. Goes without saying.” It did, of course. It was her chair, no question. For one thing, Sam wouldn’t have wanted the mildly hideous monstrosity, with its mismatched fabric and torn fringe. For another, she had bought it long before their marriage. She’d found it at a thrift store.

  No: It had found her.

  Bell eased off her loafers. She rubbed the back of her neck, pinching a hunk of the flesh between her thumb and two fingers and kneading it.

  “So?” Shirley said.

  Bell looked at her.

  “So what did you think of Bobo?” Shirley added.

  “Haven’t had much time to devote to forming an opinion,” Bell said, sounding—on purpose—slightly testy. “Somebody else was attacked and we don’t know if it’s related to the other two or if—”

  “Never mind.” Now it was her sister’s turn to sound testy. “But let me know, okay? When you can? I mean, he’s important to me.”

  “I know that.” Bell closed her eyes and sank back against the lumpy cushion.

  “Do you?”

  Bell opened her eyes. “Christ, Shirley—no fights today, okay? No arguments? I’ve been up half the night with an assault victim and I’ve got the day from hell ahead of me. We’ve had two homicides so far this summer and we’re not even close to solving them. I won’t see Carla for months. And three-quarters of the people I deal with every damned day are losing their jobs or their houses or both. So can I just sit here for one goddamned minute? In peace? Can I? Please?”

  Shirley shifted her position on the couch. “Sure, Belfa,” she said quietly. “Fine.”

  Bell looked across the dim room at her sister’s face, which was placid now. Bell was struck by how they’d switched roles—she was the angry one, Shirley the soothing voice of calm.

  A minute went by. Another. “How’ve you been?” Bell said. She had settled herself down. Let the fury subside. “You and Bolland, I mean. And the band. The job.”

  Shirley nodded. There was, Bell saw, a shine to her. Bell hadn’t noticed that shine when she first came in the room; the room was too dark and she was too preoccupied w
ith her own woes. Now it was evident. She hadn’t often seen that kind of radiance in her sister’s face. Maybe long ago—she couldn’t really remember—but not recently. Life had taken a lot of the shine out of both of them.

  Except that maybe it hadn’t. Not in Shirley’s case. Maybe it had just gone away temporarily.

  “What is it?” Bell said, prodding her gently. “You’ve got something to say. I can tell.”

  In a rush, Shirley declared, “Me and Bobo. We’re gonna move in together. Been wanting to tell you, Belfa. Real bad. But I was afraid—I thought you’d—” She broke off her sentence.

  “You thought I’d rip you a new asshole,” Bell said gently, and despite the crudity of her language, her tone was arch, bemused. Not hostile. “You thought I’d take your head off. Thought I’d tell you that you’re making a terrible mistake and that you’ll regret it for the rest of your natural life and that he’s a no-good bum and you’re a goddamned fool for trusting him.”

  “Yeah. Something like that.” Shirley laughed, and then Bell laughed, too.

  A few seconds passed.

  “So,” Bell said.

  Shirley looked at her expectantly.

  “How’s this going to work?” Bell went on. “You’ll have to check in with your parole officer and get permission and then report your new address, right?”

  “Right. Doing it step by step. By the book. Swear.”

  “Know you will.”

  “And Belfa.” Shirley licked her lips. She’d gone a long time without a cigarette, which she knew Bell appreciated; on humid days, the smoke tended to linger in the house, hanging near the ceiling in a smelly yellow mist.

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t like him much—I’m fully aware—but listen, I can tell you, he’s really—”

  “No matter, Shirley. None of my business.”

  “It is. It’s always gonna be your business.” Shirley ducked her head. Her tone had grown earnest, too earnest, and it embarrassed her. “We’re family, Belfa. Plain and simple.”