by Julia Keller
“Oh, come on.”
“Really. You were older than me, and you had a handsome husband and a cute little girl and a life—a real life. You know what I had? I had a studio apartment and a rusty bike and a debt load that was rising so high and so fast, I couldn’t see over it anymore.” Her voice shifted, lost its bitterness. “And my dad. I had my dad.” She smiled. It was a real smile, not a fake one. “He believed in me, Bell. As little as he had, he gave it to me. So that I could make something of myself. He’d send me these amazing letters twice, three times a week. That’s what kept me going back then. Seeing that West Virginia postmark. I’d run home after class and I’d tear open those letters and I’d read every word. Just standing there, holding my books, hungry and tired—I’d still just stand there, reading every damned word. I couldn’t wait. I needed those letters. Turns out that’s what I was really hungry for.”
“Just takes one.”
“One what?”
“One person who believes in you,” Bell said. “The rest of the world can go to hell—as long as you’ve got one person in your corner.” Darlene didn’t ask, but for Bell, the one person had been Nick Fogelsong, former sheriff of Raythune County. He’d known her since she was ten years old. He’d seen her through all the major phases of her life, good and bad. Without him, her life would’ve been … Well, she didn’t want to finish that sentence. “Your dad must’ve been pretty special.”
“He was. Anyone who knew him will tell you that. He’d never been out of Barr County in his life, and then—boom. The day after Pearl Harbor, he runs down and he enlists. Him and his two best friends. He was only fifteen, so he had to lie about his age. Served in the navy. He was part of the D-Day landing. Never talked about it, but I got the story once from his buddies. He was a great man. A truly great man.” Darlene swallowed hard. “Which is why you’re going to be surprised at what I came here to tell you tonight.”
“What’s that?”
Darlene leaned across the table. Her face had changed. The look in her eye was unsettling to Bell. There was a sudden wildness in it, a desperation, the hectic gleam of unreason.
“I killed him,” she said.
“You—”
“I didn’t pull a trigger. But I saw things. I knew things. I had my suspicions, but I didn’t act on them. I held back. I’ll regret that for the rest of my life.” Her jaw tightened. When she spoke again, her voice had a lost and pleading quality to it. “If you don’t help me, Bell—if you don’t get involved—someone’s going to get away with murder.”
* * *
Bell stood alongside her Ford Explorer in the dark parking lot. She watched the snow come down in a furious, wind-driven swirl, the millions of bits briefly illuminated as they intersected with the triangle of light provided by the single bulb hanging on a pole over the lot.
The snow completely covered the gravel. It piled up in sugary little peaks and tufts against the tires of the cars. It smothered windshields like grave blankets.
She had listened to the rest of Darlene’s story. They had discussed options, strategies, possibilities. Then Darlene settled their bill. They had looped thick scarves around their necks and buttoned up their heavy coats and tugged on gloves and left the low-slung, cinder block building, exchanging the crunch of peanut shells for the crunch of snow in the parking lot.
Because they had arrived here almost simultaneously, their vehicles were parked side by side. Darlene paused at the driver’s door of her midnight blue Audi. She brushed the snow off the shoulders of her coat, and then she opened the door, slid in, and pulled it shut. Bell waved. She said the thing she always said when anyone departed in winter, when snow added yet another treacherous element to mountain roads that were pretty damned perilous to begin with: “Be careful.”
Darlene’s window was rolled up, so she couldn’t hear the words, but Bell hadn’t really meant them for her. The words were aimed at the universe, at whatever distant, brooding force controlled the destinies of people forced to live in dangerous circumstances. “Be careful” meant: Be careful with the souls in your care. They’ve suffered enough, most of them.
Hell. All of them.
As Bell watched, Darlene backed the Audi out of its spot and then pulled forward, leaving the lot in a wide, slow, wary turn. The snow was thickening so quickly that her tire tracks instantly disappeared.
Bell was consoled by the fact that Darlene knew these roads as well as she did, including the switchback halfway down that had caused more deaths than a serial killer. Yes, Darlene had moved away a long time ago—but some things, you never forgot. Mountain roads in winter definitely made the list.
She continued to stand by the Explorer. She didn’t want to leave right away. As cold and dark as it was, as furiously as the snow was falling, Bell wanted to wait here for just a few minutes more and contemplate what Darlene had told her. She needed to figure out what—if anything—she should do in response to it. The snow boxed in her thoughts, sealing them off. It temporarily kept distractions at bay. Soon, of course, the snow would be its own distraction; Bell would have to negotiate the switchback, too, and trust the Explorer to get her safely down the mountain.
But for the next few minutes, she wanted to watch the snow as it faithfully coated every object, obscuring edges and differences, making everything look the same. Simplifying the world. She felt the flakes melting in her hair.
Darlene was still grieving her father’s death. Bell didn’t know her well, but she didn’t need to know her well to know that. Darlene was stunned, angry, turned inside out with the kind of despair for which there was no antidote. Grief was something you just had to get through, howsoever you could. Grief was brutal, and it was cruel, and it lasted as long as it lasted. Grief could turn even the calmest, most poised and rational person into an emotional mess. And when grief was mixed with guilt—the guilt that burned and surged and twisted inside you because you so futilely wished you’d done more for your loved one, wished you’d stopped in more often and paid better attention when you did, wished you’d hugged him just once more during that last visit, and told him just one more time that you loved him, although, God help you, you didn’t know it was going to be your final chance to do that, to do anything—then you were in for trouble.
Bell had listened to Darlene. She had heard the pain in her voice. She had nodded. But she’d made no promises to her old acquaintance, beyond an agreement to look into the matter. Informally. Discreetly.
In some ways—and Bell knew she didn’t have to explain this to Darlene—a prosecutor had less power than an average citizen, not more. When a prosecutor made a casual inquiry, it wasn’t casual anymore. It couldn’t be. A clanking, wheezing, cumbersome bureaucracy always came along for the ride. Unless she was prepared to initiate a full-scale investigation on the basis of what seemed to Bell to be fairly skimpy evidence—or, more accurately, to persuade Muth County Prosecutor Steve Black to do so, being as how Thornapple Terrace was on his patch—she had to tread very, very lightly. She’d probably have to let a surrogate do the gentle probing.
“Surrogate” was a euphemism for Rhonda Lovejoy, the assistant prosecutor, who specialized in just this sort of quasi-official, nonchalant assistance. Rhonda’s roots in the region ran so deep that when she asked questions, people just assumed she was collecting contact information for a family reunion. It was easy to forget that she worked in the Raythune County prosecutor’s office.
Didn’t Rhonda have a cousin or two up in Muth County? Bell was almost sure of it. She recalled Rhonda talking about a branch of the Lovejoy clan that had shifted northward, following a rumor of jobs, as prospects in Acker’s Gap had steadily dwindled. Maybe Rhonda could, under the guise of visiting her relatives, stop in at Thornapple Terrace and have a look around. No big deal. And then maybe, if the opportunity presented itself, Rhonda could find a chatty employee and hang out long enough to ask about—
A cell ringtone sliced into Bell’s thoughts. It was the ring assigned to her
twenty-three-year-old daughter, Carla—Adele’s “Rumour Has It”—and so, with fingers that felt frozen despite the presence of gloves, Bell fished the phone out of her purse with an extra urgency.
“Sweetie?”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Is everything—?”
“Fine. It’s all fine. Why do you always ask me that, first thing? It’s like you’re expecting to hear that I’ve screwed up.”
“No, I—” The conversation needed a reset. Bell changed directions. “It’s snowing like crazy here.”
“Here, too. Has been for hours. CNN says they might shut down Reagan National. Dulles, too.”
Carla lived with five roommates—and an untold number of mice and various other anonymous freeloaders—in a tilting, ramshackle three-story house in Arlington, Virginia, where the rock-bottom rent was the chief lure. Before that, she had lived with her father, Bell’s ex-husband, Sam Elkins, in a condo in Alexandria. She’d spent her senior year at a nearby private school, transferring from Acker’s Gap High School after the terrifying night when she almost died at the hands of a killer whose real target was Bell. Carla had decided to postpone college for a few years, a decision that Bell found disappointing, but she capitulated after sensing Carla’s resolve. Pick your battles, was the advice everyone had given her. Made sense—for moms as well as for prosecutors.
“Are you home?” Bell asked.
“Yeah. Just watching the snow from my bedroom window. Can’t even see the pavement anymore. How about you?”
“Actually, I’m standing in the parking lot of a bar in Blythesburg. Getting ready to head home. Met an old friend for a drink.”
“Mom, come on—hang up and start driving. That’s what you’d be saying to me.”
“You’re right. I would.” Bell turned around and opened the driver’s-side door of the Explorer. “Kind of nice, though. Being out in it. Peaceful.” She scooted in and pulled the door shut behind her.
“Peaceful, my ass. Go home, Mom. It’s a long way from there back to Acker’s Gap. With the snow, you’re looking at an hour or more.”
“Surprised you remember.” Bell started her engine, wanting it to warm up before she headed out. She’d have to wait, anyway, for the wipers to shove aside the snow that had congregated on the windshield.
“Oh, I remember, all right. And I also remember almost skidding down the mountain when I was driving back home once with Kayleigh Crocker,” Carla said, naming one of her best friends from Acker’s Gap High School, a young woman whose wildness had continued into adulthood. Bell knew that because, as a prosecutor, she’d had several encounters in court with Kayleigh Crocker and a revolving cast of worthless boyfriends bound for much more significant trouble. “Trash magnet” was the category in which Bell placed Kayleigh Crocker.
“We went to a party in Blythesburg,” Carla added. “Winter of our junior year.”
“Stop right there. Retroactive worry is a mother’s prerogative—even though it’s totally pointless.”
She waited. There had to be more. Her daughter didn’t need a specific reason to reach out—Bell loved their casual, spontaneous conversations, and had told Carla so, many times—but she could feel the looming weight of whatever it was that Carla had called her to talk about.
“Sweetie?” Bell said. “What’s going on?”
A pause, a brief throat-clearing, and then a flying wedge of words: “I need to come home, Mom. Right away. To Acker’s Gap. For good. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“But this weather—can’t you wait until Monday or Tues—?”
“You’re not listening to me. I have to come now. Roads’ll be clear by late morning. Promise I’ll be careful.”
“One day can’t make that much diff—”
“See you tomorrow, Mom.”
Chapter Two
Snow fell throughout the night. Behind it came a ferocious cold, which set in with a vengeance, sealing the snow in place.
The sun rose on a motionless world.
Bell stood at her living room window, awestruck by the transformation. She’d seen it before, of course, having lived through many winters—too many, she thought, feeling a stiffness in her right knee and a tweak in her left shoulder that testified to her four and a half decades on the planet—but a total whiteout like this one was always a spectacular surprise.
She was dressed in a pair of red plaid flannel sweatpants and a gargantuan gray sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was rubbed clear through at both elbows, one sleeve was ripped, and the collar was unraveling. It was a look she didn’t even like to share with her mirror. But it was warm, dammit. And comfortable.
It was just after 7 A.M. She had a mug of coffee nestled in her cupped palms like a battered chalice in a low-rent religious ceremony. She tried a sip. Too hot—and so she blew on it, and then sipped again. Still too hot.
Well, no matter. Throats could heal, right? Sure they could. She needed the coffee, and she needed it now.
Down the hatch.
She winced, instantly repenting of her decision to face the pain and drink it anyway, and then, as the bitter black coffee branched through her body like a liquid wake-up call, she repented of her repentance. She was ready now. Ready to face whatever the day might bring.
She took another drink. She didn’t notice the heat anymore. She had a lot on her mind, and snow was the perfect backdrop for thinking. It was the original blank canvas.
Carla would be arriving today.
Today.
The idea made Bell feel a little dizzy. There was still a slightly dreamlike quality to the idea of her daughter’s return, a gauzy, Can it really be so? sense of unreality. The fact that the picture spreading out in front of her was so altered from its usual state—it was a tidy, homogenized wash of white sameness, not a tangled, unruly mess of brown yards and gray street and broken sidewalks—added to the surreal feeling, the feeling of a life and a landscape unplugged from their usual sources of color and noise.
Bell had yearned for Carla’s return for so long now that she had forgotten what it felt like to live without that fierce desire, that ache in the very center of her being. She’d never told Carla how deeply she missed her, because she didn’t want her daughter to feel guilty about her choice. Bell never discussed it with her ex-husband, either, or with her best friend, Nick Fogelsong, or even with Clay. It was the most profound truth of her life, and she had kept it hidden, as if it were a guilty secret.
And so the sadness had tunneled deeper inside her. Life closed back over it.
Carla was coming home to reassess things. Okay, not just “things”—everything. That’s what she had told her mother last night at the tail end of their phone conversation, after announcing that she simply had to drive there Sunday. No delay. She needed new skies. Well, new-old, anyway. She’d quit her job. Found someone to sublet her room in the Arlington house. Her car was already packed. She would hit the road first thing tomorrow—which meant today—and point her Kia Soul in the direction of Acker’s Gap. She knew all about driving in heavy snow, she said. She’d checked her tires, had all the fluids topped off. She’d be fine.
Bell was thrilled by the prospect of Carla’s return. Of course. Of course she was.
But part of her wondered—she had to wonder, it was her responsibility to wonder—if a small, fading, isolated, and economically depressed town in West Virginia, a place from which a lot of people seemed to run screaming the second they had the chance, was really where Carla belonged, long-term.
Clearly there was a lot more to this abrupt homecoming than Carla had let on; something had happened in her daughter’s life, something that Bell would have to question her about, slowly and carefully, once the young woman was settled in. It wasn’t the kind of detective work that Bell relished. But it was necessary.
Carla’s bombshell had shoved everything else out of her mind, including Darlene Strayer’s request. Now it came back to her. She felt a touch of guilt about having forgotten so easily. She’d call Rhonda lat
er today. Ask her to spend a few days poking around, asking questions.
Done.
Back to Carla.
She pictured her daughter’s long, narrow face and short dark hair. The set of her chin. The sound of her voice. Carla had a lot of Bell in her, but she had a lot of her father in her, too. She had Bell’s stubbornness and grit, but she had Sam’s analytical skills. And his sense of humor. And his charm—that wondrous golden charm that accounted for so much of his success. Carla had her mother’s eyes, and she had her father’s chin. She had parts of both of them. The combination was mysterious and wonderful and slightly daffy and exasperating and—well, it just was. It was.
Her love for Carla was like an underground river, sweeping along so fast and so deep inside her that she took the slight humming sound in the background of her life for granted. It was always, always running.
Another swallow of coffee. Her throat, she hoped, had built up enough scar tissue in the last minute or so to handle the heat. Bell realized that she’d been looking at the snow without actually seeing it. Now she squinted out the window, exploring the particulars.
Not a single tire track had yet marred the street’s frozen perfection. She gauged the snow’s depth to be about fifteen to eighteen inches. Not impenetrable, especially not for the heavy-duty, four-wheel-drive vehicles favored by people who lived in the midst of mountains—but something you had to consider, to factor into your plans, before leaving your house. A county road crew would come along eventually. The slowpoke snowplow would do what it could. But the crew, quite rightly, would focus on the main arteries first. They might not reach the residential streets until late this afternoon.
Now there was action. Bell watched as a black Chevy Blazer fought its way through the thick drifts that striped Shelton Avenue like nature’s speed bumps. Every few feet, the Blazer stalled out and fell back, stymied by ridge after ridge of frozen snow. The driver was forced to put it briefly in reverse and then attack from another angle. The sound of the engine—the chopped-up vrrrr vrrrr vrrrr of its constant revving—had a kind of seething exasperation embedded in it, and an Are you freakin’ kidding me? weariness, too. Bell assumed it was just channeling the feelings of the driver.