The Devil's Stepdaughter: A Bell Elkins Story (Bell Elkins Novels)

by Julia Keller

  Belfa stood by the creek, hands hanging at her sides. This creek was very similar to Comer Creek. It was muddier than Comer Creek, she decided, and Comer Creek was probably a bit wider, but in general, this creek reminded her of the water next to which she’d grown up. All around her, the complicated noise that rises symphonically at the close of a summer day—that thick hum, a thatched weave of sound comprised of furious insect wings and running water and the tick-tick-tick release of the accumulated heat as it floats away from the landscape—continued its upward, spreading-out journey. She thought about her father, whom she did not miss, not for one minute, and she thought about her sister Shirley, whom she missed very much, every minute, and she thought about her mother, gone so long now that Belfa hardly remembered her. Could you miss someone you did not remember? Yes, you could.

  She turned.

  The slap came hard and fast, making her face sing with pain. Belfa wobbled and nearly fell over. Crystal’s nose was almost touching hers, so close that Belfa could see the acne speckled across her cheeks, each sore a brazen pink with an oozing white center. Belfa had not realized that Crystal was right there behind her; the shock, coupled with the fact that Crystal was so much taller and heavier, gave the other girl a crushing advantage.

  Suddenly Crystal’s hands were joined around Belfa’s neck.

  “The fuck you doing,” Crystal said, squeezing. “Talking to a cop. What the fuck.”

  Belfa groped and dug at Crystal’s hands—it felt like a hot iron ring around her neck—as she fought to breath.

  “The fuck,” Crystal repeated. She dropped her hands and pushed Belfa away from her. Belfa, free now but still stunned, stumbled backward, gasping and frantic. She fell to her knees but scrambled right back to her feet again, afraid of giving Crystal that kind of edge.

  “He’s not—he’s—” Belfa’s voice came out in spastic little rags of sounds. “He’s my friend.” She didn’t know she was going to say that until she’d said it.

  “Yeah. Right.” Crystal poked a stubby finger in Belfa’s face. “Don’t care who the fuck he is. Don’t want him around here, okay? You tell him to stay away. You tell him.” She leaned close. “You tell him or next time, little girl, I won’t be lettin’ go. Okay? They’re gonna find you in that creek, you hear me? And you ain’t gonna be takin’ no swim.”

  ____

  Crystal could have done a lot worse to her. They’d been alone at the creek that day, just the two of them—yet even if the other McCluskey children had been present, Belfa knew, they wouldn’t have intervened, they wouldn’t have come to her rescue, they wouldn’t have stood up to Crystal, because nobody stood up to Crystal—and Crystal had spared her. Let her off with a warning. So now she owed Crystal. An unspoken but very obvious and particular bargain had been struck, involving Bell’s transgression and Crystal’s forgiveness. Belfa had known bullies before—her own father, Donnie Dolan, was the king of that kind—and that meant she knew about bullies and bargains. You did business with bullies because you were forced to; you had no choice in the matter. But you did do business with them.

  “Hey,” Crystal said.

  Three days had passed since the confrontation at the creek, and Crystal was still watching her. Every time Belfa turned around—or so it felt—there was Crystal, bottom lip jutting out, an appraising look in her low-lidded eyes.

  It was midafternoon. Belfa was hunting for a pink plastic barrette she believed she might have lost in the sleeping couch in the girls’ area when Crystal abruptly came up to her, smirk on her face. Belfa and Crystal were alone in the trailer, which almost never happened. Abigail and Tina had gone into Acker’s Gap with Herb McCluskey; it was time to apply for an extension to his unemployment benefits. The boys were outside somewhere. Lois McCluskey was … well, Belfa didn’t know. Mrs. McCluskey never said. She answered only to Herb. Not to anybody else. Not, certainly, to her children.

  “What?” Belfa said.

  Crystal lifted a fist to waist-level and opened it. Lying crossways on her broad white palm was Steve’s Swiss Army knife. Belfa looked at it, and then she looked up at Crystal. She didn’t know what was going on. How was she supposed to react?

  “Found this,” Crystal said. She gave a little snort of derision. “Guess where.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess.”

  Belfa shrugged.

  “I said,” Crystal pressed her, “you gotta guess.”

  Belfa hunched her shoulders and crossed her arms, trying to make herself small, because if she could make herself small, then maybe she could take the next step and make herself invisible.

  “Just guess,” Crystal said again. Her tone had grown hectoring, aggressive. “Do it.”

  The trailer was very hot. The air was like a solid block of something old and yellow, through which you had to carve your way if you wanted to move. The area was messy and crowded; the clothes thrown across the couch tended to dribble onto the floor like lolling tongues. Blouses and shorts and belts and bras and panties. Everything in this place melted into everything else, like a steep hill down which things rolled until they congregated in the crease at the bottom.

  Belfa took another look at the knife. “Maybe in a drawer somewhere. Maybe Steve put it there and forgot.”

  “Maybe Steve put it there and forgot,” Crystal said, in her mocking, snippy tone. She snorted. “Guess again.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Crystal closed her fist around the knife. Sly grin. “In your stuff. I found it in your stuff. You’re a damned thief, you hear me, little girl? Nothing but a sneaky thief.”

  “No.” Belfa shook her head. “I didn’t—”

  “Wait’ll I tell him,” Crystal said. “Just wait. He’ll kick your ass. You wait and see.”

  Fear bloomed in Belfa’s brain. Fear of Steve, yes, but also fear of Herb and Lois McCluskey and what they’d do to her for stealing. Which she hadn’t done, of course, but that didn’t matter. If Crystal accused her, they would side with Crystal.

  “No,” Belfa said. It came in a whisper. “No. I never.”

  That was all she could manage to say. Terror was choking off the words at their source.

  Crystal laughed. “Yeah. Right. Like Steve’ll listen to you. Shit, little girl, he’s gonna kill you. You know that.” Her tone instantly shifted from derisive to canny. “But I won’t tell him, okay?”

  “You won’t?”

  “Not if you do what I tell you to.”

  Relief poured over Belfa, drenching her. Here it was again: Bullies and bargains.

  “Okay,” Belfa said. “Sure.”

  ____

  They stood at the side of Gladys Goheen’s trailer. The walk here had been brief but strenuous, owing to thick woods and the lack of a discernible path. When Gladys visited the McCluskeys, she took the long way, first looping over to the hard road. Crystal, though, had taken the shortcut, leading Belfa through the high grass, lurching across the baked ground with its divots and its ditches, thrashing and cursing and hitting at flies and bees.

  The woods marched right up to the edge of the place, threatening to engulf it in the very next second. A rust-smeared propane tank squatted on two cinder blocks next to the trailer. Insects were having a field day with Belfa’s bare legs. She was afraid to scratch the itch, though, in case the gesture caught Crystal’s eye and annoyed her. You never knew what might set her off.

  “Listen, shithead,” Crystal said. “I want you to keep an eye out, okay? While I go in and talk to Gladys. Anybody comes, you holler.”

  Crystal looked around. She mounted the front stoop of the trailer. She looked around a second time and then, without knocking, pulled open the door and just walked right on in.

  A long time went by. To occupy herself, Belfa found a strip of thin metal that was sticking out from underneath Gladys Goheen’s trailer and she played with it, watching out for the rusty tacks that perforated it at intervals, twisting the strip this way and that, rolling it up, unroll
ing it.

  All at once she heard, from somewhere in the woods behind her, a swishing noise joined by a crackling noise, as if someone moving rapidly through the high grass was drawing closer and closer. The sudden nausea in her belly spread. She had no plan, no idea for evasive action. Desperate, frantic, Belfa repeatedly beat her fist against the side of the trailer. “Hey!” she said, as loud as she dared, hoping Crystal could hear. “Hey! Hey!”

  Crystal popped out onto the stoop, scowling. “What the—”

  Belfa’s voice was a strangled gasp as she pointed. “Something’s out there—I heard—”

  The tops of the tall grasses rattled and swayed. Down near the ground, the grasses parted. Gladys Goheen’s fat gray cat, improbably named Pretty, skulked her way out of the woods. She passed them without breaking stride or acknowledging their existence, and moved into another section of the dense undergrowth.

  “You shithead,” Crystal said. “ ‘Bout scared the crap out of me.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought—and you said—”

  “Forget it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “What did Gladys say?”

  Crystal glared at her. “About what?”

  Bell, confused, said, “About—about whatever you were going to talk to her about.” She was just making conversation, trying to distract Crystal from the error she’d made.

  “Nothing.” Crystal slapped hard at a fly that had landed on her forearm. “Let’s go.”

  ____

  Had Gladys Goheen’s daughter not decided to visit, her first trip back to West Virginia in four years, the body might have remained undiscovered for weeks.

  Leonard brought them the news. He had returned from his job—on weekday afternoons he rode along with Dewey Peevey, flinging plastic bags stuffed with ads out the passenger-side window of Dewey’s Gremlin, aiming vaguely at front porches and trailer stoops—and the family was gathered, as usual, in front of the TV set, Herb and Lois on the couch, the girls stretched out on the floor, Steve sitting with his back propped up against the wall, his knees raised, his bent arms squared across them. Six days had passed since the afternoon when Crystal and Belfa visited Gladys Goheen’s trailer.

  “She’s dead,” Leonard said, before the door had even closed behind him. He was breathing hard, excited by the idea of death, and by his chance to lay it before them in all of its gruesomeness. “She was covered with flies. Just covered. They was all in her eyes and whatnot.”

  “Who? Who’s dead?”

  It was Lois who had spoken.

  “Gladys Goheen,” Leonard said. He gulped for air, his thin shoulders heaving, before he went on. “Face all smashed in with a bat. Looked like a mess of hamburger. Her daughter got there and found her dead in her bed like she’d been taking a nap or something when she got clobbered. Never knew what hit her, most likely. Never saw it coming. Daughter called the sheriff. Them flies was terrible. Dewey knew all about it. Them flies didn’t want to move on, Dewey says, even when they tried to swat ‘em away. Real disgusting, is what it was.”

  By this time all of the excitement had leaked out of Leonard. He paused, waiting for someone to react to his information.

  “Jesus,” Mrs. McCluskey said. The shock seemed to instantly diminish her, Belfa saw. She shrank back against the couch cushion, a hand to her mouth. The other hand was wrapped tightly around her torso, as if she was, quite literally, trying to hold herself together. “Oh, Jesus. Oh. God rest her soul.”

  Tina offered a small gasp that might have been a sob, but also might not have been. Abigail’s face quivered, as if she might be about to start crying. She didn’t. Belfa wanted to look at Crystal, to see her reaction. Just one quick look. But she knew she couldn’t take the chance, in case Crystal was looking at her at the very same moment. Instead, Belfa stared hard on the TV screen.

  “When’d it happen?” Mrs. McCluskey asked.

  “While back,” Leonard said. “They don’t know for sure. She musta been sleeping, they say. She didn’t fight back or nothin’. Sheriff Rucker thinks somebody sneaked in and done it. Used her own bat. The one she kept under her bed. Probably over in a minute or two.”

  “Old lady like that?” Steve said. He didn’t look as if he’d been paying attention, but he had; his gaze swung up at Leonard with a kind of challenging ferocity. “Shit. Who’d bother?”

  Leonard licked his lips, savoring the thought of the ace still burning in his deck of fresh information. “Well, they searched that trailer and guess what.” No one ventured a guess—he was clearly disappointed at that, but had to keep going—and he said, “That money she won. Over two thousand dollars from the Lucky Stars. It was gone, Dewey says. All gone. She’d had it in cash. Her daughter’s pissed as hell. Was gonna get her mama to hand it over—that’s why she come back up here.”

  Herb McCluskey didn’t shift his eyes from the TV screen. “Kept her door unlocked, I bet,” he muttered. “Dumbest damned thing you can do. Some folks around here act like it’s still the 1950s. Well, I’m here to tell you, it ain’t.” He shook his head, and then waved a hand in Leonard’s direction. “Shut up, okay? Trying to watch my show. You want to talk, you go outside.” His voice was testy, impatient. Herb was a man who loved his comforts, and his keenest irritations came when they were disrupted or delayed.

  “They find anything else?”

  Crystal had asked the question. Her tone was flat, ordinary, unruffled by sorrow or any real curiosity; it sounded as if she was just making conversation.

  “Still looking,” Leonard said, lowering his voice so as not to rile Herb McCluskey, although it was unlikely that Herb would call down Crystal the way he’d admonished Leonard. “For clues and whatnot.”

  Crystal nodded. Her attention swiveled back to the TV screen. Just like that, she had used up her shallow reservoir of interest in the old lady. There was a sort of bovine blankness in Crystal’s low-lidded expression, an absence of affect that Belfa somehow found more menacing than a sneer or a glare or a cruel remark. Recalling that expression many years later, Belfa would sometimes feel an odd prickling sensation along her spine, like a couple of fingers touching the business end of a baseball bat, measuring, calculating force and speed and trajectory.

  _____

  Twelve days later, just before the school year began, Belfa was sent to live with another family: Hank and Shirlene Sherber and their twelve-year-old son, Travis, in Atherton County. All at once, it was over. The knowledge she had carefully honed about the McCluskeys, the shifting and intricate strategy she had devised to cope with each of them individually and all of them collectively, now was rendered moot. She would be starting again with another family—although life in the Sherber house would prove to be very different from what it had been in the McCluskey trailer. Hank taught her to hunt and to fish, and she and Travis would discover that they liked the same books. Shirlene Sherber worked at the Atherton County Public Library, and she let Travis and Belfa check out as many books as they wanted, all at the same time—not just the four books to which patrons under the age of sixteen were officially restricted. It was Belfa’s first taste of privilege, and of the responsibilities that went along with it.

  As far as she knew, no one was ever arrested for the murder of Gladys Goheen. Before Mrs. Perkins came that day and took her away, Belfa was aware of the fact that several people were interviewed about the crime—Herb and Lois McCluskey; Steve and Leonard McCluskey; a married couple who lived in a trailer located even closer to Gladys’s trailer; a drifter who went by the nickname Blackjack, who had been spotted along the highway that night; and, as a group, Abigail, Crystal and Tina McCluskey. Yet the interviews yielded nothing: No clues, no hints, no leads. Gladys’s daughter, still angry over the loss of the lottery winnings, still fuming, wildly threatening legal action against unspecified parties, finally returned to North Carolina. Gladys’s trailer was a rental, and the owner moved it to a spot in another county, leaving a small lozenge of bare, yellowish-brown ground.
/>   Almost thirty years later, Belfa ran into Tina McCluskey. It was a Saturday night, summer again, and the air carried a heavy-handed heat that made noses and foreheads shine and caused shirts to stick to wide backs in corrugated rumples. Belfa was coming out of a Reba McEntire concert at the Charleston Civic Center, accompanied by a man named Clay Meckling, when a chubby woman in a sparkly maroon T-shirt and tight jeans, her short hair dyed bright red, earrings long and clanking, glanced at her, looked away, looked back. “Belfa?” the woman said. “Belfa Dolan?” A few awkward seconds passed before Belfa recognized her in return.

  “Tina? My God—Tina McCluskey.”

  They clasped hands but they didn’t hug; they were grown women now, self-conscious, and other people were pushing past them, impatient to get to the parking lot.

  “Clay,” Belfa said, “this is Tina. I lived with her family when I was a kid.”

  He nodded, dropping back to let the two of them talk. They had moved off to the side now, out of the way of the surging crowd. Belfa thought she ought to ask questions: How was Lois? And Leonard, Steve, Abigail? She didn’t ask about Herb. Nor did she ask—for the moment—about Crystal. Lois was fine, Tina said, although rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her fingers so severely that they looked broken; Leonard had moved to Texas; Steve lived in Kentucky with his wife and four children, Abigail in Ohio with her three.

  They talked about a few other things, shaking their heads at the memory of how damned small that trailer had been—all those people, and the heat that summer!—and then it was time for Belfa to ask about Crystal.

  Tina’s smile vanished. “Yeah, well,” she said. “Listen, I didn’t really stay in touch with her. None of us did.”

  “You didn’t— ?” Belfa started again. “But she’s your sister.”

  “Nope. She was a foster kid, just like you. She was supposed to leave when you got there. But she wouldn’t. Got real nasty about it and Daddy just said, ‘Okay, fine, let her stay.’ He was afraid of her, I think. And so was the social worker. Crystal’d gotten kicked out of the last place because she set a fire and almost burned down the whole damned house. She denied it, but nobody believed her. And before that, she’d come at a Sunday school teacher with a screwdriver.” Tina squinted at Bell. “You really thought she was related to us? Jesus.”