by Julia Keller
“Nothing simple about it,” Bell said. She saw Shirley’s hand tremble. “Go ahead and have a cigarette, will you? Making me nervous.”
Shirley laughed. She used two fingers to fish out the crinkly pack from the breast pocket of her shirt.
During the pause in their conversation, Bell thought about the information she’d received on her way home from the Brinkerman house. It came in a text from Rhonda Lovejoy. At Bell’s request, Rhonda had done a criminal background check on Harold Bolland. The results were depressing, but not surprising: A DUI in 1989; a felony conviction in 2002 for passing bad checks, for which he’d served eight months in the Toller County Jail; an acquittal on a fraud charge the next year; and a sprinkling of charges such as pot possession and driving with a suspended license, for which he’d been duly punished. It was the usual dirtball litany, a list drearily reflective of the kind of people with whom Bell dealt every day down at the courthouse. Not vicious criminal masterminds—but people who let a little bad luck and a long streak of laziness push them into places and behaviors that, had the ball bounced a slightly different way, they might never have strayed.
She had wanted something different for Shirley. Something better. Something cleaner. She always would. But it was Shirley’s life. And Shirley’s decision.
“I can’t say that I understand, but I’m happy for you,” Bell said. “I am.” If Bolland hadn’t yet revealed his past transgressions to Shirley, he would. He might. Someday. Anyway, his business. Their business.
That hadn’t been Bell’s initial impulse. When she first asked Rhonda to run down his record, her intention had been to confront her sister with every bad scrap of information she’d dug up on the man, to pass along every single piece of evidence she came across to prove he was a lazy, shiftless loser.
Now it didn’t seem to matter. Shirley had the right to make her own mistakes. Lord knows Bell had made plenty.
“Ever think about it?” Shirley said.
“Think about what?”
“How things would’ve been.” Shirley took a long look at one of her fingernails. “If Daddy hadn’t been a sonofabitch. If Mama had been around.”
“No. I don’t. No percentage in it. That kind of speculation, I mean. It is what it is.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Shirley abandoned the fingernail and looked at her sister. “You know, right? You get why I couldn’t let you come around. While I was locked up.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t even try to make it sound convincing.
“It’s important to me, Belfa. That you understand why I did it. Least I could do was not drag you down. Let you have a shot at a different kind of life. And look. You did great. Real great.” Shirley grinned. “I mean—damn, girl, you went to law school! And now you’re a prosecutor. Just look at you.”
“You shut me out.” Bell had promised herself not to talk about this with her sister. It went too deep. She was afraid of the emotions it would ignite in her—emotions that, once aflame, would just keep on burning. But here she was, doing it anyway. Shirley had pushed her into it. “You decided what you thought was best for me—and that was it. Period. I couldn’t do a thing about it. And you know what, Shirley? I missed you. I missed you every single day. Don’t think I didn’t—just because I made it through. Don’t you dare think that.”
Bell’s cell went off. The ring tone told her it was Sheriff Fogelsong. She glanced at Shirley. Her sister’s expression meant it was all right to take the call, to get back to work. They both needed a break. Both were relieved at the interruption. They’d said what they needed to say to each other. For now.
Nick’s voice was cordial. No emergency, then. “Got a minute, Bell?” he said. “I think I need to see a familiar face. Somebody who’s not accusing me of sitting on my fat ass while a serial killer’s out running the roads. If you’re available—”
“I’m available.” She understood. He was at the end of his rope. When she was in the same position, he always came through for her. “Courthouse?”
“JP’s sounds better,” he said.
“On my way.”
Chapter Thirty-six
They settled into a booth. By now it was almost 11:30 A.M., and everything—people, sidewalks, cars, buildings—looked heat-slammed, wilted past any hope of resurrection. The air-conditioning in JP’s had a fight on its hands.
The seat of the booth was moist with somebody else’s sweat. Bell tried not to think about that as she scooted in. Jackie caught her eye from across the room; Bell nodded, a signal to Jackie that they were just having coffee. Jackie gave her a thumbs-up sign and headed toward the big stainless steel urn. She’d add two glasses of water to their order without being asked.
“You get any sleep?” Fogelsong asked. He removed his hat and used it to fan himself for a second before putting it on the seat beside him. “You look a little ragged.”
“Well,” she replied, “it’s about two hundred degrees out there, give or take. Nobody’s gonna be fresh as a daisy today. Plus, I went to the ICU in the middle of the night to see the Crabtree girl.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Better. Once they move her into a regular room, my guess is that she’ll be released pretty soon. Anything turn up to help us catch the bastard who clocked her?”
The sheriff shook his head. Then he lifted his elbows and leaned back; Jackie had arrived with two cups of coffee and two waters, and Fogelsong wanted to make room on the tabletop.
As soon as Jackie had cleared their airspace, Bell spoke. “Anything new on the Arnett and Frank cases?”
“No. Not a single lead worth a damn.”
“Well, I might have one for you.”
Fogelsong reacted with a surprised twitch of his big head. “Hell, Belfa, let’s hear it. I swear I’m more parched for good news than I am for a drink of water.”
“Levi Brinkerman.”
“Who?”
“He’s the brother of one of Lindy’s friends. Well, coworker, really.”
“What’s the link?”
“Might be a coincidence,” Bell said, “but remember how your witness mentioned a long coat?”
“Not much to go on.”
“For the moment, let’s say it is. I went out to the Brinkerman house this morning to have a chat with Lindy Crabtree’s colleague—and got a look at his brother, Levi. Longtime tweaker and certified waste of space. And given to wearing a big heavy raincoat, no matter what the temperature.”
“Worth checking out,” Nick said, nodding. “I’ll send a deputy over there today.”
Bell stirred her coffee with the spoon that Jackie had brought along with their beverages. She always took her coffee black, but there was something satisfying about stirring a cup of coffee. Something that seemed conducive to thinking.
Fogelsong settled himself against the back of the booth. The lunch rush at JP’s was just getting under way; Wanda was speeding up her route between the tables and the booths. Jackie was arranging bright pink ground beef patties on the griddle, three rows of four apiece. The door opened and closed every few minutes or so; gusts of hot air came in along with the customers.
“So we’ve got a man attacked and killed in a driveway,” Bell said. “And a man knifed to death on the side of the road. And now Lindy Crabtree. Related?”
Nick took a long swallow of his coffee. Let it settle. “Hard to say. Deputy Harrison spent all day yesterday going over all three crime scenes. She’s done it about fifty times already but wanted to try a fifty-first. Found some things.”
“Do tell.”
“Truth is, it’s what Harrison didn’t find that’s got me puzzled.”
Bell waited.
“At all three,” he continued, “there’s no evidence of a vehicle coming or going. The assailant had to’ve come through the woods. Which means the escapes were probably made on foot. Which means they were done by somebody who knows the area. Somebody local. And somebody capable of spontaneous and irrational violence.”
“S
omebody like Odell Crabtree.”
Nick shrugged.
“But you’re still skeptical,” Bell said. “Even with the new information.”
“I am.” Fogelsong scratched his left shoulder while he spoke. “Had a chance to observe Crabtree while he’s been in our custody.” He stopped scratching. Looked a little sheepish. “And it’s not just my opinion.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hold on. Got to back up a minute.” His sheepishness hadn’t gone away; if anything, Bell noted, it had intensified. “This involves Mary Sue.” After he said his wife’s name, Nick took another drink of his coffee, forcing Bell to wait until he’d finished with it. “Ever since you had her work for you, she’s been coming down to the courthouse.”
“That a problem?”
“Let me finish. Sometime she rides in with me, and sometimes she comes over later, on her own. Goes to different offices. Figures out who’s shorthanded. Guess where I found her today? Turns out that Deputy Mathers needed some help at the jail.”
“The jail.”
“Yeah. The jail.” His voice was suffused with a burnished, rough-hewn affection. He had a way of talking about his wife—through her illness, through all the sorrows and all the troubles, he always talked about her the same way, with respect, and with love, and with a mild astonishment that she’d consented to spend her life with him—that touched Bell deeply, although they’d never discussed it. They never would.
“So what was she doing there, Nick?”
“Talking to Odell Crabtree. Just talking to him. Not about anything special. Just keeping him company, you know? So that he didn’t get riled up. Sat on a chair in his cell and just chatted with him. Charlie Mathers said she made that old man relax like nobody’s business. Crabtree’d been yelling and screaming and throwing himself around, and Mathers was afraid he was going to hurt himself—but Mary Sue gentled him right quick. They had some real conversations. Sometimes the fog lifts, I guess, and he’s his old self again. No telling when it’ll happen, but it does. Now and again.” He paused. He’d raised his cup an inch off the table and now he moved it around in a quick little circle, watching the agitation of the liquid inside it. “Don’t know if Crabtree’s our assailant or not, or what he’s done or not done—we’ll be figuring all that out—but it sure as hell makes things a lot easier to have him calm instead of raving.”
“Imagine so.”
“Anyway,” he said, pushing the mug to one side so that he could fold his big hands on the table in front of him, “for the record, Mary Sue is pretty well convinced that Odell Crabtree couldn’t do those things. To begin with, she says, his health is fading fast. And he wouldn’t just go out and attack folks like that. Especially not his daughter.”
“That’s interesting, Nick. But let me quote a certain sheriff I know: ‘Opinions aren’t evidence. And it’s not what we believe that counts. It’s what we can prove.’”
Fogelsong grinned. “Sounds like a damned smart fella, that sheriff.”
“He is. Kind of hard to deal with, though. Irascible and headstrong.”
“You don’t say.” He waited a second or two after his grin had gone away, to put some distance between the raillery and what he needed to say next. “Speaking of Mary Sue, I wanted to tell you that I’ve changed my mind a little bit. I think I’ve been a little misguided, okay? Holding on too tight. Discouraging her from getting out of the house and trying things. I was just afraid she’d get herself hurt. Afraid she’d fail. I know she’s capable of a lot more than what she’s doing, but I—I just didn’t want to risk it.”
“She will fail, Nick. Hell—we all fail. And she’ll get hurt. Guaranteed. Can’t stop that.” She was thinking about Shirley, but didn’t say so. Chances were Nick had figured that out for himself.
He nodded. “Yeah.” He was finished with the personal topic. “Anyway, that’s where we stand. Don’t know a damned thing more than we knew a day ago. More questions than answers.”
“Always the case, seems like.”
“Refill? I can flag Jackie down,” he said.
Bell was already sliding out of the booth. She was thinking about all the office work she had to finish before she’d be free to go back out to the Crabtree house later in the day, to pick up the letters for Lindy. “Wish I could,” she said, “Gotta run.”
“Get some rest, willya?”
She eyed him. “You first.”
* * *
By late afternoon a line of lumpy clouds the color of coal dust had barged into the sky over Acker’s Gap. Within minutes the rain started up, a heavy, drubbing rain that fell on the dry-packed roads and heat-baked sidewalks with a frantic sizzle, releasing a thick, sour-smelling steam that instantly fogged windows and made the backs of people’s necks feel clammy and unpleasant. The rain brought no relief from the heat. It made for a different kind of heat; that was all.
Bell picked up Jason Brinkerman. They drove through the rain toward the Crabtree house. In the dusk of a wet day, the beleaguered old place looked just as bad as it had in full sunlight. Even more sinister, if that was possible. The crooked trees seemed to be crumpling from the weight of their waterlogged foliage. Rain slid off the leaves and the trunks like ointment being hosed off the skin of a prehistoric animal. Bell parked in the driveway behind Lindy’s car and turned to Jason.
“We’ll just go in for a minute,” she said. “Lindy wants a few things from the bedroom.” She squinted at the front windshield; it was streaked and grayed by the steady headlong rain. “Sorry I don’t have an umbrella. Hot as it’s been lately, I clean forgot that such a thing as rain even existed.”
Jason nodded. He had said very little on the drive over, grunting or nodding in response to Bell’s sporadic attempts at conversation. He’d asked her for an update on Lindy’s condition and Bell wondered: Is he asking because he cares about her—or because he fears she might have recovered enough to identify him as her attacker?
Bell opened the front door of the house. The air inside was muggy and malodorous. She took a step forward, and the bloodstain on the pitted wood seemed to jump right up, a grim tattoo that was much larger than she had remembered. She watched Jason. He glanced at the stain. Quickly turned away. Did his expression indicate anguish or guilt or—as was sometimes the case—a bit of both? Perpetrators could sometimes wail louder than anybody else when in the midst of unmistakable evidence of what they’d done.
“Gather up some of Lindy’s books, will you?” Bell said. “We’ll take them to the hospital. I have to get something else. Back in a sec.”
Jason nodded. He moved amid the piles of books on the living room floor in a sort of daze, picking up one after another, then setting each book back on the stack without really looking at it. The rain was audible on the roof, a dismal irregular rhythm. It sounded as if it might break through the flimsy ceiling any second.
In the crowded bedroom, Bell spotted the dresser that Lindy had told her about. She kneeled down. Reached under. Felt around. The small tin box was exactly where the young woman had said it would be. Bell secured it and stood up. Before rejoining Jason, she opened the lid and scanned a few of the letters, feeling their fragility against her fingertips and marveling at the look of the handwriting, the fierce loops and quick slashes rendered in blue ink that had faded over the years to brown—just as the emotions, too, had surely faded, the way emotions do. Some of them, anyway.
The living room was unoccupied. Had Jason gone into the kitchen?
“Hey,” she called out, moving in that direction, “let’s hit the road, okay? Want to get these things to Lindy as soon as possible.”
He wasn’t in the kitchen, either. Bell was baffled. She hadn’t heard the back door open. She looked around, her gaze taking in the gray sink jammed with soiled dishes and the one-step-from-the-rag-bag curtains and the spindly dinette whose surface was overwhelmed by books. She recalled the last time she’d stood in this kitchen—with Odell Crabtree staring at her—and she shivered.
The thump sounded like a dropped sack of laundry. It came from the basement. Bell was sure of it. Definitely. The basement. But why would Jason have gone down there? What was he trying to pull?
She felt a flicker of fear. Just a small, quick spike of panic. She pushed it back down again, refusing to let it get a foothold in her thoughts, but it had made its point. What if he jumped her? She didn’t know this kid. Knew nothing about him—except that his brother was a drug addict who might have murdered two people, his father was a convicted felon, and he himself might very well have attacked Lindy Crabtree.
Why the hell am I here? What made me think I’d be able to shock Jason Brinkerman into telling me the truth? Jesus. She didn’t have a weapon. This house was a good mile and a half from any other human habitation. Tucked back behind thick woods. Screened off from the main road. Why did I ever—?
Another thump. Louder this time.
“Jason?” she said.
No answer.
Could it be Odell Crabtree? Maybe he’d been released and had blundered his way back home. Legally, they were on shaky ground every minute they held the old man; soon they’d have to either charge him or release him, even though his detention was actually a matter of kindness, not jurisprudence. Maybe the sheriff had let him go.
No. Nick would’ve contacted me. Asked my advice.
But who else would be down there? If it was Jason, then why wasn’t he answering her call?
She’d have to check out the basement. No choice. She put the tin box on the table, nudging aside a short stack of books to make a space for it. Then she reached for the battered old two-paneled door, so warped and twisted that she had to yank phenomenally hard on the metal knob to get it to budge. Sonofabitch, Bell thought, using all her strength to wrench at the thing, knowing her arm would be sore in the morning—If I live that long, she thought ruefully, teasing herself, or maybe not—and then she stepped into darkness.