Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  The chair had been here for her on the painful day two and a half years ago when Carla decided to go live with her father, Bell’s ex-husband, Sam, and finish high school there. And on the morning last year when Bell’s sister Shirley showed up. Shirley, paroled from prison, had lived with Bell for a few months before moving in with her boyfriend, a musician named Bobo Bolland. Things had settled down now for Shirley; she was holding her own in the world.

  Bell had been sitting in this very chair six months ago—with her feet tucked under her, same as now—when she received the call from Sammy Burdette, a county commissioner, telling her that Nick Fogelsong had just announced he wasn’t running for reelection. Can’t be, she’d said, stunned and blindsided. Bet me, had been Burdette’s saucy reply. His chuckle of superiority had very nearly put her over the edge.

  “Mom? You there?”

  “Sorry, sweetie. I’m here. Just distracted. How’s the job? You’re working out in Bethesda, right? I hope the commute’s not too bad.”

  “You’re changing the subject. I want to hear about Goldie.”

  Goldie. Jesus, yes. She had a pet now. Another living creature here in the house.

  Bell stood up. She’d left the dog in the kitchen, eating the chow that Bell had slung into a plastic mixing bowl. She had picked up a small bag of dog food at Lymon’s that afternoon. She didn’t go so far as to buy an actual dog dish, being as how Goldie’s days around here were numbered. A mixing bowl would do. She could sterilize it with bleach after Goldie had moved on.

  She didn’t know much about dogs, but she knew enough to realize you weren’t supposed to leave a strange animal unattended in your kitchen just a few hours after you’d brought it home. “I’m checking on her right now,” Bell said hastily into the phone as she hurried through the hall toward the kitchen. She was envisioning chewed-up chairs, an upended table, and multiple piles of excrement dotting the linoleum like exhibits at an avant-garde art gallery. Bell realized the irrationality of her apprehension—surely she would’ve heard the commotion of clattering furniture?—but still had persuaded herself that the amiable Goldie might suddenly turn into a demon of destructiveness.

  She rounded the corner. Goldie was lying on her side in the middle of the floor, her slightly rounder belly rising and falling contentedly. The bowl was empty. Spotting Bell, Goldie lifted her big head. Her tail thumped on the floor. Chairs, table, linoleum—everything was fine.

  “Good girl,” Bell said. It was the only thing she could think of to say.

  Carla laughed. “Unless that was directed at me, it sounds like you two are getting along great. So what’s she like? Text me a picture, okay? I’d love to see her.”

  “Sure.” Bell pulled out one of the dinette chairs and sat down. To her surprise, Goldie hoisted herself up and trotted over to sit alongside her, pushing a soft yellow head into Bell’s lap. The tail softly brushed the floor. “But remember, sweetie—I’m not keeping her very long,” Bell said. “She’s just here for a little while, until Rhonda can find her another home. And anyway, she belongs to Royce Dillard.”

  “But he’s in big trouble. Right?”

  “We’re not going to talk about that.” When Carla had decided to move back in with Sam, Bell made a pact with her: They would avoid discussion of Bell’s cases. Carla already knew too much about the dark side of life, from the days when she resided here in Acker’s Gap, daughter of a prosecutor; Bell wanted her to have a chance to forget all that. Carla lived in a different place now. A place that wasn’t shadowed as massively and relentlessly by tragedy as it was by mountains.

  “Too late, Mom. Kayleigh Crocker already told me all about it. We’ve been texting a lot. She says Dillard’s gonna hang for murdering some guy who worked for the resort.”

  Bell was instantly annoyed. She knew Carla kept up with a few of her old friends from Acker’s Gap High School, but did that have to include Kayleigh Crocker? Kayleigh was Rusty Blevins’s granddaughter, which meant she was privy to every scrap and rag of gossip that the old man pilfered and scavenged on his daily rounds.

  “Okay,” Bell said. Testiness turned her voice into a blunt instrument. “To begin with, no one’s going to ‘hang’ for anything. West Virginia doesn’t have the death penalty anymore.”

  “Geez, Mom. It’s just a figure of speech. Kayleigh just meant that—”

  “She ought to keep her mouth shut,” Bell declared, interrupting her. “And that goes for that meddling grandfather of hers, too. They’ve got no right to be talking about Royce Dillard or anybody else brought in for questioning. Or about the Hackel murder in general. It’s none of their business.”

  Silence.

  When Carla spoke again, her tone was respectful but determined. “None of their business, Mom? They live there. It’s their town, too. I think it is their business. Definitely. And just for the record, I asked Kayleigh about it, okay? I saw a thing on the local news here about that guy—the one who was murdered. He’s from Falls Church, so they covered it. I heard them say ‘Raythune County’ and I knew I had to check with Kayleigh.” She paused, and then plunged forward. “I like to know what’s going on in your life, Mom. Everything. Not just the stuff you want me to know about. The hard stuff, too. Like with Nick Fogelsong. You didn’t even tell me he wasn’t sheriff anymore. Remember? I didn’t know for a month. I found out from Kayleigh.” Carla’s voice dropped a notch lower. On the way, it became more emphatic. “I want to know those things, okay? All of them. I want to know. The cases you’re working on and the really terrible stuff that happens there and the good stuff—all of it. I want to know about your life. Your whole life.”

  Now it was Bell’s turn to be silent for a moment. Her daughter was right. Bell thought she was trying to shield her, but she was really just keeping her on the outside of her life. And was that for Carla’s protection—or her own?

  Sometimes she forgot that Carla was not a little girl anymore. She was a young woman. Bright, resourceful. Trustworthy—with a few spectacular lapses now and again, the kind you expected from teenagers, the kind that revealed a fierce desire for independence more than any serious character flaws.

  She did keep Carla separated from the deepest, truest part of her life—which happened to be her work. Her elected office. And maybe she was wrong to do that. She couldn’t tell Carla everything, but she could confide selectively. Bell could draw her closer toward the things that mattered to her, the way you invite someone to share your campfire.

  “Listen up, sweetie. Okay? I want to tell you a little bit about Royce Dillard,” Bell said. “You only lived in Acker’s Gap a few years, and that’s not long enough to really know. Rusty Blevins knows, and I bet Kayleigh does, too—pretty much anyone who’s been born and raised here knows—but they’re all caught up in the murder right now. That’s all they can see. A murder has a way of doing that. It gets in the way. You can’t see around it or over it. But for now, I want you to hear a story.”

  “A story.” Carla’s voice was fringed with skepticism. She was nineteen years old, and she didn’t need her mother to read to her at bedtime anymore.

  “Yeah,” Bell said. “A story.” She leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table, so that she could hold the cell against her ear more comfortably. “You’ve heard about Buffalo Creek, right?”

  “Sure. We talked about it in tenth grade. In West Virginia History class. It’s sort of like West Virginia’s 9/11. It happened, like, a thousand years ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Nineteen seventy-two.”

  “Like I said. A thousand years ago.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “There was a flood. The coal companies had dumped this crap—the waste material from when they wash the junk from the coal, this black sludgy stuff—until it made this ginormous pile. And then it rained really hard and the pile collapsed and all the water just went tearing through the valley. And a lot of people died. Old people and little kids—just a ton of people. It was terrible. One of the worst
days in West Virginia history.”

  “Yes,” Bell somberly confirmed. “And Royce Dillard was right in the middle of it.”

  Bell knew her daughter, and she knew how to interpret her quiet spells on the phone, such as the one that had just descended. Sometimes the silent patches meant that Carla was preoccupied—she was texting a friend, checking the Internet, watching TV on Mute—but sometimes, like now, they meant she was too startled to know what to say. And deeply curious, so curious that she didn’t want her own lame questions to get in the way of Bell’s explanation.

  “So you know the basics,” Bell went on. “On February twenty-sixth, 1972, a little after eight A.M., a slurry dam burst. Millions of gallons of water were released into the Buffalo Creek Valley. One hundred and twenty-five people died. Over four thousand were left homeless. Royce Dillard was just a baby. Two years old. He lived in Lundale, one of the little towns in the valley. Lived there in a little one-room house with his mother and father—Mike and Ellie Dillard.

  “When the water hit, it just smashed that house all to hell. Ellie only had seconds to grab her child and make it out the front door. She was holding him in one hand, and with the other hand, trying to make it out of the way of the water. There was a ridge behind the house. A high spot. That’s what she was aiming for—that ridge. To get out of the house and up to that ridge.

  “You have to understand how fast the water was coming. Seven feet per second, they say. A wall of water thirty feet high. There was no time to think, no time to plan. You just had to move. There were houses and trailers and dead bodies being swept right along, and cars and telephone poles—things that turned into weapons themselves, coming that fast, with that much force.” Bell paused. She closed her eyes and then she opened them again. “Ellie Dillard was gone. In seconds, she was just—gone. They never found her body. But somehow, Royce survived. Somehow, his father was able to get hold of the little boy and he got him to the edge of that ridge. Mike Dillard had a second or so to decide what to do. And instead of saving himself, he threw Royce to safety. There were people up on the ridge and they called to him, telling him they’d catch his boy, and Mike used the last bits of his strength to throw Royce as high as he could. Then Mike was swept away in that terrible black water. They never found his body, either.”

  “Oh my God,” Carla said. It came out as a solemn whisper.

  “Royce was raised by his mother’s aunt here in Raythune County. When he came of age, he used the money from the settlement the coal company gave to survivors to buy two parcels of land. Put up a cabin on the one out past Sawyer Fork. He’s been living there ever since. And the other one—”

  “—is the one they want for the resort,” Carla said, finishing the sentence for her. “Kayleigh told me all about it. That’s why Royce Dillard killed that guy, right? Because the guy wouldn’t stop pestering him to sell his land? Seems pretty skimpy for a motive, Mom, if you don’t mind me saying so. Kayleigh thinks so, too. And so does her granddad.”

  Bell rolled her eyes, knowing that Carla couldn’t see her do it, but hoping that the eye-roll would somehow be evident in the tone of her voice. “You know what? Kayleigh and Rusty Blevins are welcome to their opinions. But in a prosecutor’s office we have to deal with facts, not opinions.” What she didn’t want to tell Carla was that part of her tended to agree with the girl and her grandfather. It was a skimpy motive. There had to be more to the story. And more, certainly, to Royce Dillard.

  Bell stood up from the dinette chair, needing to stretch her limbs. She looked around. Uh-oh, she thought. No Goldie.

  Keenly focused on her conversation with Carla, Bell again had lost track of the dog. She wasn’t in the kitchen anymore. Had Goldie slipped upstairs to one of the bedrooms? Or was she wreaking havoc in the living room? Same as last time, Bell had visions of canine-engineered chaos: a torn-up couch, claw marks on the maple staircase, puddles of urine lurking in the corners.

  “Oh, hell,” Bell said as she scooted back through the hall, her bare feet making a rapid slapping sound on the hardwood floor.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just hope that damned mutt didn’t mess things up out here in the—”

  Bell brought her sentence to an abrupt end. She stood in the threshold between the hall and the living room, surveying things.

  “Mom?” said Carla, anxious in the wake of the silence. “Mom? How bad is it?”

  Bell watched as Goldie, having wound herself in a tight furry circle so that she could fit between the armrests, quivered and then settled herself more firmly in the easy chair, nudging her nose deep into the soft, giving fabric. Her snores had a faint raspy edge, like an old man’s snores. Bell felt a sudden sympathy for this creature who, after all, had been jerked unceremoniously out of her life and deposited here, with no say in the matter, no right of refusal. Despite all that upheaval, the dog still was trusting and good-natured and well behaved.

  Maybe, Bell thought, I ought to be a little more accommodating, while she’s here. A little nicer.

  “Mom?”

  “Everything’s fine. Just realized that I need to do some shopping.”

  “For what?”

  “A dog dish.”

  * * *

  Some two hours later, as Bell worked on the unseemly amount of paperwork that she had scattered on the floor around the easy chair, her cell rang. At the sound of the phone, Goldie raised her head; she’d been sleeping on the couch, her snores light and regular now, lacking the raspy edge. Bell had relocated the obliging dog over there and reclaimed her seat.

  It was Sheriff Harrison.

  “State crime lab just called. All I can say, Bell, is that Carolyn Runyon must have a ton of pull with the big boys in Charleston. We’ve never had forensic results this fast. I kind of wish I didn’t know it was possible. Now I’m pissed off about all the times we had to wait for weeks and weeks.”

  “Know what you mean. So what did they find?”

  “The blood on the shovel is definitely Hackel’s. Coroner says the blow came from behind, with the sharp edge of that shovel. At least three very powerful jabs. Took a hell of a lot of strength. Damn near severed the victim’s head. He probably bled out in minutes. The lab also analyzed the interior of that wagon of Dillard’s—the one he brings to town every now and again—and found fibers from the victim’s coat and more of his blood on the bottom and sides. Someone had tried to wipe it down, but they did a piss-poor job of it. Looks like Hackel was assaulted with the shovel, then his body was loaded into the wagon and dumped in Old Man’s Creek. They found soil from the creek bank on the wagon wheels.” Harrison took a breath. She was pleased with the deluge of information, and had delivered it rapidly. “I gave Dillard another shot at coming up with an alibi. Or an explanation for Hackel’s blood on his shovel. Didn’t say a word.”

  “Granted, that’s all pretty incriminating,” Bell said. “But how did Hackel get out to Dillard’s property? His car was still at his motel. And Dillard doesn’t own a car, so he couldn’t have given him a ride.”

  “Good question.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Weapon was wiped clean. So was the wagon. But that’s typical. Everybody knows about cleaning off fingerprints. Blood and fiber evidence—that’s a lot harder to get rid of.”

  “The motive still troubles me. Would Royce Dillard kill a man just because he was mad at him? Because the guy made a pest of himself? Surely there’s something else going on here.”

  “Maybe so. But the evidence against Dillard is strong, Bell. You’ve gone to trial with a lot less.”

  It was a fair point. Bell waited before speaking again. She was perplexed by the unanswered questions, and reluctant to charge Royce Dillard until she’d at least tried to get to the bottom of them. But the clock was ticking. They had to either charge him or let him go. And she had seen, in previous cases, the price of hesitation and delay. She’d seen what happened in Acker’s Gap when a murder occurred and the prosecutor’s office wa
s slow to charge a suspect. People grew nervous and afraid. A curtain of dread settled over the streets. Wild rumors reared up and were difficult to swat down.

  “I know Dillard rejected an attorney initially,” Bell said. “Has he changed his mind?”

  “No, ma’am. Says he doesn’t need—and I’m quoting here—any ‘goddamned bloodsucking lawyer.’ I’ve put in a call to Serena Crumpler, though.” Crumpler was a criminal defense attorney in Acker’s Gap against whom Bell had fought in several cases. She was young and tough, and often served as a court-appointed attorney for indigent defendants. Bell respected her immensely.

  “Good. Maybe she can talk some sense into him.”

  “Maybe. But I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before, and so have you,” the sheriff said. “A man loses his temper and commits an act of violence. He doesn’t want a lawyer because he knows he’s to blame. He wants to be punished. Craves it, even.”

  “Dillard says he didn’t do it.”

  “He says that now. Just wait till he sees the evidence we’ve got. And his guilty conscience kicks in.”

  Bell let a few seconds tick by. “So you think Dillard is our man. No question.”

  “I do. No question.”

  A prosecutor and a sheriff had to work together. Sometimes the prosecutor was more certain about a suspect’s guilt, and had to talk the sheriff into supporting the arrest; other times, it was the sheriff who believed they’d definitely tracked down the culprit. Either way, they had to respect each other’s instincts. Rarely if ever did they see a case exactly the same way. If she and Pam Harrison were going to be an effective team, she had to start trusting this woman the way she had trusted Nick.