by Julia Keller
Brenda lurched away without looking back, head down, thick boots hitting the hardwood floor with the flailing stamp of wild sorrow. She was returning to the husband who waited for her in the lobby, and who loved her without knowing her at all. Her secrets were simple ones, ordinary ones, but they were hers, and they would follow her forever, like the echoes of her heavy steps through the emptied-out courthouse.
Chapter Thirty-seven
“Royce,” Bell said. “It’s time. Cards on the table, okay? I know what Hackel threatened you with.”
He wanted to look up at her, but he couldn’t, and so he moved his head sideways instead of up. She could feel the stubbornness in his stare, even though she couldn’t see his eyes.
Dillard sat on the edge of his cot in the narrow jail cell. His legs vibrated. The motion seemed to be outside of his control, a force that had overtaken him long ago and would keep on running until somebody somewhere—not him—was finally able to pull the plug.
In front of him stood three women: Bell, Serena, and Rhonda. Just outside the cell, slouching against the cinder block wall, was Chess Rader, night supervisor of the jail. It was dinnertime, and the other prisoners were busy with their pudding cups. Chess had delivered the last plastic tray to the last cell in line and then returned here.
“He was going to pay Vera to change her story,” Bell said. “Isn’t that right? That’s what Hackel held over your head. We know what he told you—that if you didn’t sell the land, he’d give the signal. Set it all into motion.” She made her voice a tick gentler. “Your whole life would look like a lie. A fraud. Everything people have always believed about your family—twisted, torn up, destroyed. It’s no wonder you attacked him. Lots of people would’ve done the same. He’d hit you with something a lot worse than a shovel.” She held up a manila folder. “I’ve got the paperwork ready. You change your plea to guilty. We explain it all to Judge Barbour. It’ll work out a lot better for you, Royce, if you just admit what you did, and we can go from there.”
Serena reached down and touched the top of his shoulder. Dillard didn’t pull away this time. He seemed unaware that her hand was even there.
“Royce,” Serena said. She spoke quickly. “It’s your decision. If you’d like to think about this, I can ask Judge Barbour for a delay—and then we’ll talk about it, just you and me, and—”
“Wait,” Dillard said. He pointed at Bell, without looking at her. “Yeah. What you’re sayin’. That’s it. That’s what happened.”
Bell felt a flutter in her stomach. Hearing it confirmed, hearing him say it out loud, made this a moment she had both sought and dreaded. She’d thought she was prepared for his confession, but now that he was making it, she realized that she wasn’t. Yes, she had wanted to win this case. She wanted it badly. But some small part of her—the human part, not the prosecutor part—had secretly held out a fragment of hope that maybe they were wrong. Sheriff Harrison was wrong. The town was wrong. All of them were wrong—except for Rhonda Lovejoy.
And now, this.
“Okay, then,” Bell said. All business. The jail cell had gone quiet. Bone quiet, Nick used to call this kind of intense stillness, by which he meant the quiet of bones in a coffin, locked into position for eternity. “Here’s how it’s going to work. When we go back into court tomorrow,” she said, snapping off the words, “you’ll notify Judge Barbour that you want to change your plea to guilty. Then we’ll ask for a recess and meet back here to start working on a plea deal once we’ve looked at—”
“No. No. Wait. Whoa, there,” Dillard said. His voice was jittery with alarm. “I never did it. I never killed him.”
Serena spoke before Bell could. “But you just said—”
“NO.” It sounded more like a punch of thunder than a simple word. Seconds after he had spoken, Dillard’s body seemed to recoil from the press of their accumulated stares. “When I said, ‘Yeah,’ I meant you had it right about that asshole,” he added, talking so fast that it verged on a kind of gravelly babble. “It was blackmail, plain and simple. He was gonna call me a liar. Me and my family. Said he’d gotten hold of Vera. Made a deal with her.” His head whipped around, his eyes landing on and then sweeping past the individual cinder blocks in the wall. “But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t do it. No way.”
Bell’s sympathy was quickly turning into annoyance. She’d done what she could. She’d explored alternative scenarios, she’d considered other culprits, but everything ended up in the same place: the small dirt clearing in front of Royce Dillard’s barn, with a shovel being thrust over and over again at the back of a man’s neck.
“Best thing you can do for yourself now,” she declared, “is to change your plea to guilty. Let your lawyer here work out a deal. Now that we have a motive, we can look at possible mitigating—”
“I never did it,” Dillard cried out. Spit bubbled up in the corners of his mouth, and when he wrenched his head from side to side, some of the spit flew out and landed on his shirt. He looked like a man in intense, searing pain, the kind of pain that was far worse than a physical wound. “I hated him—I hated his miserable stinking guts—but I never hit him with no shovel and I never killed him,” Dillard said. His next words came out as a sort of primitive incantation: “Never, never, never, never, never.”
This was not some swaggering defendant, trying to con them with lies and evasions. This was a man turning himself inside out, exposing his soul. He was vulnerable now, Bell thought. If she could push him just a little more, she could get him to admit his guilt. Then she could agree to a more lenient sentence—lenient only in comparison to spending the rest of his days in prison.
“Royce,” Bell said. “I’m going to ask you one more time. On the lives of your dogs—on the life of Goldie and the rest, and please don’t ask me to name them all, because frankly, I don’t think I can—do you swear to me, right here and right now, that you did not kill Edward Hackel? On your mother’s memory—do you swear you didn’t do it?”
He was breathing hard. The breaths were husky and slow, swimming in phlegm. He shook his head back and forth. His face was somber and filled with pain, but his eyes were bright. Bell had been so certain that he was about to confess—she had named the things most sacred to him, his mother and his dogs—that when he didn’t confess, she felt as if someone had yanked out a chair just before she sat down in it.
“On my mother’s memory,” he intoned, “and on the lives of my dogs, I swear I didn’t kill that sonofabitch.”
A moment passed. The only sounds came from prisoners in the other cells up and down the line. One man hummed, then stopped. Another bounced a single time on his cot, making it squeak.
She had tried, and failed. He wouldn’t budge.
“Okay, Royce,” Bell said. She was weary, and resigned to what would happen next. She’d given him his chance. “That’s it. I’ll leave you be. Big day tomorrow. Get yourself a good night’s sleep. Don’t imagine you’ll be having any more company.”
He lowered his sleeve, with which he’d wiped the spittle from his lip. He was settling himself down. “Nope. Not unless that lady comes by again.”
“What lady?”
“Owner of that company that’s puttin’ in the resort.”
“Carolyn Runyon.”
“Yeah,” Royce said. “She’s come by here a coupla times to see me.”
Bell looked at Chess. “I’ve never seen her name in the log.”
Chess shrugged. “Can’t say. She hasn’t been here when I was on duty. But some of the other guys aren’t exactly vigilant about logging in visitors’ names. Especially if you wave a ten-dollar bill under their nose.”
Bell’s eyes consulted Serena, who shook her head. “News to me, too.”
She turned back to Dillard. “So Runyon came to see you.”
“Yeah. Doesn’t stay long. Just long enough to say that if things don’t go my way in the trial, she knows some real good lawyers for the appeal. Said everybody deserves a fair shot.”
All at once it was clear to Bell. It had not been clear to her earlier because there was too much in the way—too much history, too much fog, too many mountains.
Bell finally understood what had happened in the last few minutes of Ed Hackel’s life as he stood in the gray twilight by Royce Dillard’s barn. She knew who had killed him, and she knew why. All she had to do now was figure out how to prove it—and do it before the case went to the jury tomorrow.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Sometimes Nick Fogelsong thought about Carlene’s two little girls—not so little anymore, but he remembered them that way, and so no matter how old they grew, he would always see in them the three-year-old and seven-year-old they once had been, running around the backyard when they visited him and Mary Sue, hair streaming behind them, moving in and out of the shadow of Smithson’s Rock—and he wondered what it would have been like.
Having his own children. His and Mary Sue’s.
He’d been thinking about it tonight. He only let himself go there when he was alone. The night sounds of the hospital wound themselves around his thoughts until everything dissolved into one thing: the sounds and his thoughts, neither conscious of the other.
It was a natural thing to wonder about—would they have been boys or girls, dark or fair? But it carried a hurtfulness inside it, too, that kind of speculation, like something shiny and pretty you see on the sidewalk and so you reach down and pick it up, and then discover that it’s a piece of glass. Before you know it, you’re bleeding.
He lay back in his hospital bed and he remembered. Early on, they had talked about it. Mary Sue, after all, was still a third-grade teacher then. She loved kids; she was relaxed and happy around them. And him? Well, he could try. He was a serious man. Too serious, a lot of people said. He’d been in law enforcement many years, even before he met and married Mary Sue. But by God, he could try. He’d loosen up. Kids could do that to a man. He’d let himself be soft and vulnerable around his kids. He’d never raise his voice in anger when his children were present. Never be moody or preoccupied.
There had been no children.
Mary Sue had gotten sick. She got sicker. And somewhere along the way, the idea was lost. It fell away like a cliff face into the sea, not in a single shearing-off crash but in a slow crumble. They never discussed it. He wanted to protect her; he was afraid that children would be too much for her. Already, she herself was almost too much for him.
A noise. He looked up.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
Mary Sue stepped into the room. She looked marginally better. Her color was coming back. So much depended on the mix of medication. The right balance.
“Hi,” she said. “I—I’m so sorry about not being here the past few nights, Nick. I had to—”
“Not a problem,” he said, interrupting her. “Come on. Sit.”
“Good God. You’re the one who got shot in the heart, and I’m the crybaby.” She wiped at her eyes. “Every time I see you, I think about losing you. And I can’t stand it.”
“You didn’t lose me.”
“Close enough.” She shook her head. “Really. I’m okay now.”
“You don’t have to be okay. You just have to be here.”
She touched the rail on the hospital bed. He put his hand on top of hers. His good hand. The other one, the right hand, was still weak and unresponsive. Like a dead thing he was forced to haul around. Something had happened to the nerves; that’s what they told him. Vague about it. Well, he wanted the vagueness right now. He didn’t want definitive information. Vagueness, after all, meant hope. No one could say if he’d ever get the full function back. Odds were, not. But hope still scratched at the door.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
Black dread drenched his heart. No. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t—No. She would not leave him. No. That couldn’t be what she was about to say to him. No.
Most people didn’t understand. In the wake of her mental illness, in the wake of all the lost dreams, they thought he’d be the one to get weary of taking care of her. If anybody left, it would be him. Right?
Wrong. He needed her. She told him, by her life, who he was.
“I made a call,” Mary Sue went on. “Night before last. I had to do something, Nick. Because you’re not getting any better. When they caught the people who did this to you, I thought that might help you snap out of it. But no. You’re still wounded.” He started to argue. She stopped him with a frown, a shake of her head. “I don’t mean physically. I mean—in your soul. You want to be sheriff—but you’re not. And you can’t be. Ever again. You’re depressed. You’ve given up. I see it, Nick. I see it in your eyes.” She leaned forward. Put the back of her hand on his cheek. “So I called the one person who can relate. Who’s been right where you are. The one person you might listen to. And guess what? He’s coming. He’s on his way here right now. He needed a few semesters off, anyway. That’s what he told me. He said—and I quote—‘You tell Nick Fogelsong that I’m going to kick his butt all the way to Charleston and back unless he stops feeling sorry for himself and gets out of that damned bed.’”
“Clay Meckling.” He was pleased. Very pleased. It would be, among other things, a chance to apologize to the man for being such an insufferable know-it-all, a smug jackass, back when it was Clay in the hospital bed and Nick Fogelsong the one standing over him, solid and whole, fat with platitudes. And clueless about what it really feels like to lose everything—your purpose, your ability to do the work you were born to do, your sense of who you are. Your story.
He thought about the last time he’d seen Clay. Loading his father’s truck, getting ready to head to Boston. If you didn’t know, you’d never have guessed he had a prosthetic leg. After a bad spell, Clay had worked hard on his physical therapy. Damned hard.
“So he needed to take a few semesters off?” Nick said. “Come on, Mary Sue. Who believes that?”
“I don’t have to believe it,” she said. “I only know that’s what he said. He’s coming. I didn’t argue.”
Nick grinned. Couldn’t help himself. Clay was coming home. Dang. Well, if a man like Clay thought he was worth that kind of effort—
Maybe I need to reconsider a few things, Nick told himself. Maybe I do. There was a time when he’d envied anyone who left Acker’s Gap, when he watched them go and felt a kind of wild yearning, when he wondered why Bell Elkins had ever wanted to come back here—but something was shifting inside him. There was a certain solace to knowing a world this well. You knew its flaws, its shortcomings, just as you knew its beauties. And you learned to love it all. You loved the abundance of it, the sweep and immensity of the land, and you loved the sadness and the lack, too.
To walk each day on ground that had given rise to you: that was a privilege. Not a curse.
“Have you told Belfa?” he asked.
Mary Sue shook her head. “All happened too fast. And she’s been a little busy, to say the least.”
Another thought came to him: Bell hated surprises. Well, maybe it was time she learned to like them.
“Good.” Nick slid his feet around under the sheet; he was restless, and for the first time he found himself looking forward to the next day’s physical therapy session. “Good.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Diana Hackel sat in the gray metal chair, fingers linked in her lap, clearly peeved but trying to be agreeable. On the table in front of her—also gray—she had carefully placed the items she’d brought along: water bottle (Aquafina), package of peanut butter crackers (Lance) and candy bar (Twix, king size). She kept her coat on, as much to drive home the point that she didn’t expect to be here long as to keep herself warm.
“I’m hungry pretty much all the time now,” she said to Bell, indicating the snacks with a rueful nod. “Always happens when I’m pregnant. You ought to see me on court days. The judge calls for the lunch recess and—wham! I’m outta there. I go tearing off in search of a sandwich.”
> She smiled. She was being friendly. She had nothing to hide. They wanted to talk to her? Fine. No problem. Anything she could do to help.
Deputy Mathers had brought her from the motel to the courthouse. Yes, she’d been surprised by his request. Who wouldn’t be? It was well past 10 P.M. She was in her nightgown and robe. She’d had to get dressed again. But—okay. Okay, fine.
Bell sat across from her, face impassive. “Mrs. Hackel,” she said, “I have some additional questions for you about the day your husband died. You don’t have to answer them. If you like, you can wait until your attorney gets here.”
Diana looked confused, but still affable. “Why in heaven’s name would I refuse to answer your questions? I want Ed’s killer to pay for what he did. I’m happy to help.” She picked up the Twix bar, waved it around. “As long as the snacks hold out.” Another smile.
Bell didn’t return it. “Just to be clear,” she said, “you have the right to remain silent.” She rattled through the rest of the warning, the one made familiar by innumerable TV shows, books, and movies.
“Okay, I get it,” Diana said. “But why would I need a lawyer?”
“Because approximately ten minutes ago,” Bell said, “Carolyn Runyon told us that you killed your husband.”
* * *
In the second of the two interrogation rooms in the Raythune County Courthouse, Carolyn Runyon maintained a tense and rigid pose in yet another gray metal chair. She was alone in the room, but the closed-circuit camera kept tabs on her. She was aware of that; she lifted her eyes and looked at the small black box mounted high up in the corner, a steady red light in the center of it. She didn’t stick out her tongue—some people did that, usually young men filled with booze and bravado—or give the middle finger to whomever was monitoring the feed, another common reaction. Her arms were wrapped around her chest, her knees pressed tightly together. After looking at the camera for a while she decided to look straight ahead. The gray wall across from her absorbed her stare as automatically as a sponge does a spill. That was its job.