by Julia Keller
Jake snickered. “Home to hubby, right?”
Rhonda gave him an admonishing look. “As a matter of fact, Mister Smart Ass—no. I’m meeting Lee Ann Frickie over at Evening Street Clinic. It’s her first time volunteering there. Bell arranged it with Glenna Stavros. She’s the head nurse. Bell suggested that that might be a more constructive way for Lee Ann to spend her time than arguing with me about church and state. And Lee Ann, bless her heart, agreed.”
The prosecutor winked at Jake. “And then I’m going home to ‘hubby,’ as you so quaintly put it,” she declared. “Damned happy about it, too.”
* * *
Bell caught Nick at the courthouse door. She’d agreed to give Jake a lift home, but he needed to stop in the bathroom. So Bell used the time for a quick word with her new partner.
Or was it her old partner?
Never mind. They’d figure it out.
“You think this’ll work?” she asked him.
“Time will tell.”
“Kind of a shock. Finding out that you’re coming back.”
“It was a shock to me, too, Belfa. I hadn’t had a chance to tell you. Sorry about that. Just got the call from Mary Sue last night. I had to notify the courthouse first thing. Address change for my pension checks.” He swallowed hard. “She wants a divorce.”
“Nick—I’m so—”
He held up a hand. He was never comfortable with sympathy. “I knew it might be on the way—just not this fast. Truth is, it’s good news. She’s doing so much better. Really thriving down there. But she says our relationship dynamic—that’s the phrase she used, which makes me think she’s been sitting on a couch in some fancy office and pouring out her heart to somebody she pays by the hour—our ‘relationship dynamic’ is way out of whack. Apparently I can’t see her as anything but a patient. As somebody dependent on me. So, fine. I’ll let her go. If she’s happy, then I’m happy.”
You don’t look very happy, Nick, Bell thought.
“By the way,” she said, “you were right.”
He waited for her to elaborate.
“About me and my need to go charging into the Next Big Thing,” she continued. “I’ve decided to hold off on Utley Pharmaceuticals for a while. Need to figure out first what I want for my life and how I can get it.” She grinned. She couldn’t resist. “Maybe I’ll spend a little time on one of those couches in a fancy office.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said. “I’m not opposed to psychiatrists—you know that. Just don’t go around talking damned nonsense about ‘relationship dynamics.’”
“Promise.”
I’m going to tell him, she suddenly thought. Someday soon, I’m going to tell him why I confessed and went to prison.
No wonder he didn’t confide in me about his marriage, about coming back to Acker’s Gap. I don’t confide in him anymore, either.
They heard Jake’s approach, the squinchsquinch sound of wheels on the old wooden floor of the courthouse corridor.
“You know what, Nick?” she said, hurrying her words so she could get them out before Jake joined them. This was private. “Working together again—it’ll feel good.”
“That it will.”
He waved at Jake and took his leave.
* * *
Bell and Jake had almost reached her car when they heard it: the heavy, plaintive wail of a siren, growing steadily more distant as the emergency vehicle raced away from the downtown area toward the unknown catastrophe.
Her cell rang.
She answered. Jake watched her face.
“My God,” she said, after listening for several minutes. “My God, Tyler—I’m so sorry. I’ll be right there.”
She ended the call. She stared at the phone as she spoke.
“He went over to his mom’s house,” Bell said. “No lights on, no sounds from anywhere—nothing. He was concerned. He ran up the stairs to the attic room. And he found her. Overdose. She’d used the pills they gave her at the hospital that night after the shooting. She’d been saving them up.”
Jake winced, dropped his head. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured. “Jesus Christ.”
Chapter Forty
Bell and Tyler sat side by side on the steps leading to the attic room.
The EMTs had taken Ellie’s body twenty minutes ago. When it was over, and the ambulance had cleared the driveway, Tyler asked Bell to stay with him for a little while.
The first thing Bell had done, after Tyler shared his mother’s letter, was to call the caretaker at the cemetery in Charleston. She told him to check the flower basket on the grave of Henry Combs. She didn’t want to risk anyone else finding the gun and being injured.
The caretaker—his name was Rafe Hensley—called Bell back in eight minutes. He’d found it, he told her in a shaky voice.
Bell advised him to put it in a safe place. Her next call was to the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy would retrieve the gun within the hour.
That made Tyler feel a bit better. But he was still troubled, he told Bell, by the fact that they had never found the file.
“My dad gave everything he had to put together that file,” he said. “He ended up dying because of it. And we don’t even know where the hell it is.”
“Sheriff Harrison and her deputies will keep looking,“Bell assured him. “But some things, Tyler—some things, you can’t do anything about. You just have to learn to live with them.” She felt like looking around to see who’d said those words. Didn’t sound like Bell Elkins. “Hey,” she added. “Can I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“When we picked up Sara, she said it was the town’s fault. That so many kids around here get involved with drugs, I mean. What do you think?”
“I think one excuse is as good as another.” Tyler shook his head. “She also said that it was too late. For anything to change. Well, I can’t believe that. If I do, I’m totally screwed. Might as well go back to using.”
Restless, the shock of his mother’s passing still moving through him like waves of fever, Tyler abruptly stood up. “Can we go into the doll room? One more time? I don’t think I’ll ever come up here again. Without my mom, it’s—it’s just a room.”
They stood in the middle of the small space. The EMTs had shoved the chair and the table against the wall as they did their work. In all the haste and tumult, some of the books had been knocked off the shelves.
The room was filled with a soft golden light. Bell could see why Ellie Topping had spent so much time up here.
“She loved it, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “And because of that, my dad never bothered her up here. He always paid attention to what she loved. And speaking of love…” He touched a purple paperback spine that he’d spotted on the bookshelf. “This was my absolute favorite when I was a kid.”
Bell turned her head sideways to read the title: My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.
Tyler smiled. “I know the first line by heart: ‘I am on a mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever knowing that I am here.’ My mom read that book aloud to me all the time when I was a kid.”
It hit them both at the same moment.
Brett knew what Ellie loved. Ellie loved Tyler. And Tyler loved My Side of the Mountain.
Bell let him be the one to pull the book off the shelf. He immediately felt the slight bulge in the back.
Taped to the final page was a thumb drive.
“Where’s your laptop?” Bell asked, trying to keep her excitement at a reasonable level.
“Living room.”
“Let’s go.”
Thirty seconds later, Tyler thrust in the thumb drive. The small symbol appeared on the screen. He clicked on it.
Nothing.
“It’s password-protected,” Tyler said with a groan. “That was my dad—Mister Security. Comes from working in a bank, I guess.”
“Our forensics people can probably crack it,” Bell said.
; “Bet they can.” Tyler was still disconsolate. “But you know what? I kinda wanted to do it first. Because it would mean I knew my dad well enough to guess the password.” It was a tiny point of pride, he explained. It was a last link to his parents, proof that he was part of them, proof that he hadn’t been the total selfish bastard that everyone thought he was—proof, in fact, that their love for him was justified, even though they would never know it.
“I bet it’s a name,” Tyler said. “Somebody important to Dad.”
“Give it a try.”
He nodded and typed: ELLIE
Nothing.
He tried again: TYLER
Nothing.
And then he made his way through a flurry of other way-too-obvious guesses, words he knew wouldn’t work but that he had to try, anyway, just to eliminate them:
ELLIETOPPOING
TYLERTOPPING
BRETT
BRETTTOPPING
TYLERBRETT
BRETTTYLER
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And nothing.
“Okay. Let me think,” Tyler said. “I remember getting this dog when I was seven. Only had him a year, though, before he died. We really loved that dog. So maybe…”
He typed in the dog’s name: WINIFRED
Another try: WINNIE
Nothing.
Now he was officially out of ideas.
He reached up to close the lid, slowly running his thumb along the top edge of the screen. Reluctant to give up. “I keep thinking of all the things he loved,” Tyler said. “It’s like this long, long chain. If you start with me—the most recent thing he loved—you can work your way back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like I said, first there’s me. Before that, there was Mom.” He took a deep breath. “My God—he loved her so much.”
Bell sensed that he was letting his thoughts unspool a little more, the thread traveling back and back and back. “My mom told me once about going to a doctor for this knee pain she was having,” he said. “The orthopedist explained to her that when the cartilage wears away, it leaves one bone rubbing against another bone. That’s what creates the pain. But my mom didn’t see it that way. ‘You know, Tyler,’ she said when she got home, ‘to me that sounds like family. Bone on bone. It’s like the very core of us, the essence, is rubbing up next to the people who matter most. Who are as close to us as our own bones. And sometimes that can be painful. Painful and wonderful, both.’”
“Your mom came from a big family, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Back in Briney Hollow. After her mom died, she helped take care of her brothers and sisters. It was total chaos, all the time. A real circus. But she loved it, too. Loved the craziness. All of them packed inside this little house.” Tyler grinned. “Man, the stories she used to tell me about those days!” He looked at the laptop screen, and then he looked at Bell. “You know what? There was one person she loved way before I was born. And way before she even met my dad. A long time before. And my dad knew that. Because he loved us, he paid attention to what we loved. That’s how he knew about My Side of the Mountain. And that’s how he knew how much she loved her brother.”
Bell remembered the thought she’d had at Rhonda’s wedding. If you love someone, you know what they love best in all the world.
“Then maybe…” she said.
“Yeah.” His eyes were bright. “Maybe.”
He typed in: HENRY
The file leaped to life.
ALSO BY JULIA KELLER
A Killing in the Hills
Bitter River
Summer of the Dead
Last Ragged Breath
Sorrow Road
Fast Falls the Night
About the Author
JULIA KELLER spent twelve years as a reporter and editor for the Chicago Tribune, where she won a Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, she was born in West Virginia and lives in Chicago and Ohio. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Also by Julia Keller
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BONE ON BONE. Copyright © 2018 by Julia Keller. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs by Robert Jones / Arcangel
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-19092-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-19094-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250190949
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: August 2018