by Julia Keller
Dot frowned, to show she understood the gravity of the situation, to demonstrate that naturally she was distraught, but it was also clear that, like everybody else in town, she was titillated by the morning’s crisis.
Spotting Bell’s SUV back in its regular slot in front of the courthouse, she’d come straight over from Mountaineer Community Bank two doors down, a beige cotton raincoat flung over the shoulders of her suit, quivering like a cocker spaniel who’d just heard the jingle of the leash.
‘Saw the crawl,’ Dot repeated. This time, she leaned forward and enunciated each word, same as she’d do for a regrettably dim-witted child.
Bell was confused. Was this a strange new language, some kind of hasty shorthand communication that had replaced normal discourse during the two hours she’d been away, taking Carla home and getting her settled? Or had the whole county gone insane, as might very well be the case, given the morning they’d endured?
‘Saw the crawl,’ Dot snapped for the fourth time, only now she added, ‘on CNN.’
The light dawned. Bell nodded. The crawl. Got it. Dot meant the endless unspooling of sentences at the bottom of the TV screen when the set was tuned to cable news channels, the perpetual roll call of lurid crimes and celebrity breakups, the kind of information that nobody needed – but everybody wanted – to know.
‘“Triple homicide at West Virginia eatery. Suspect still at large,”’ Dot said, reciting the words she’d seen on the screen, the ones she’d instantly memorized, in a low, enthralled voice. ‘How’d they find out so fast? How’d they do that?’
Bell shrugged. Damned if she knew. Driving back to the courthouse, she’d had to weave her exasperated way around the slow-moving, antenna-topped, wide-bodied white news vans from TV stations in Charleston and Huntington and Pittsburgh. The vans were cruising around the small downtown, just as they’d probably cruised through some other tragedy-stunned downtown the day before, drawn inexorably to the world’s open wounds. Camera crews and reporters were eagerly prowling the smattering of streets in Acker’s Gap, hunting for scared-looking people to interview.
Many of those people, of course, were thrilled to oblige. Making a left turn onto Jackson Boulevard and then a quick right onto Main, Bell had seen entire families – moms, dads, grandparents, teenagers, little kids – grouped in front of Fontaine’s Funeral Home or Ike’s Diner or Cash X-Press Payday Loans, leaning into microphones wielded by pretty young women. They’d look suspiciously down at the microphone, as if half fearful that it might bite, and then shyly up at the reporter’s face and finally back down at the microphone again, after which, suddenly and mysteriously emboldened, they’d start talking, and as they did so, the older ones would pull at a pleat of loose skin hanging from their necks, a habit that seemed to enhance the thought process. The younger ones would sway back and forth as they talked, hands jammed in their pockets.
Just about everybody, Bell knew, would be insisting that they’d either left the Salty Dawg seconds before the shooting or had definitely planned on stopping by in a minute or so. I coulda been gunned down, I woulda been right there in the line of fire when that murderin’ sumbitch come in, and that woulda been it, period, end of story.
‘Look, I have to go,’ Bell said. ‘Meeting with the sheriff. Lots to do. Hell of a morning.’ She touched Dot’s forearm, throwing in a brief, tight frown.
They had known each other since high school. They hadn’t been friends, exactly; Bell didn’t have friends back then. Throughout her youth and adolescence Bell had lived with a series of foster families, and it was always made exquisitely clear to her that she was being done a favor, and she’d better not forget it, and thus any free time she had should go to chores. Not a social life. Dot Burdette was part of a group of giggling, straight-haired girls in pastel sweater sets whom Bell would pass each morning in the halls of Acker’s Gap High School, and while they weren’t mean or rude to her, they weren’t friendly either. Their eyes never exactly matched up with her eyes, not even when they spoke to her. Bell had a strange history, and everybody knew it, and nobody wanted any part of it. The rules were clear.
Now Dot was a bank vice president, and Bell, too, had a responsible position in town; they were two professional women with a lot in common, and thus a kind of fiction had grown up between them, the fiction that they were old friends. Bell went along with it. It made things easier.
She glanced at Dot and saw that she was, as always, doggedly stylish in a navy blue suit, dark hose, and black heels, her lipstick a conservative shade of muted coral instead of the come-hither red favored by some of her younger female tellers. Dot had a chin that seemed to merge directly into her neck without encountering a jawline, a pointy nose, and black eyes that sat just a shade too close together. It was the Burdette Curse. Dot’s little brother Sammy, one of three Raythune County commissioners as well as a proud representative of the Mountaintop Mutual Insurance Company, was similarly marked by a disappearing chin and too little distance between the eyes.
‘Sure,’ Dot said. ‘Just keep me posted, will you? One of my tellers said that Carla—’
‘Yeah. She was there.’ Bell read the next question right off Dot’s face; she didn’t have to wait for the words. ‘She’s okay,’ Bell said. ‘She wasn’t hurt. Shaken up, of course, but okay. Now I really do have to go, Dot. Really.’
‘Does she need anything? I can stop by, if it’ll help. Bring some food, maybe.’
Here we go, Bell thought, but not unkindly. A trauma in Acker’s Gap always brought forth an avalanche of casseroles for the affected parties, with each offering – simple, solid dishes such as macaroni and cheese, chicken and rice, baked spaghetti, beans and wieners – delivered in a Tupperware container with the cook’s last name and the reheating instructions carefully printed on an index card taped to the blue plastic lid. The name wasn’t there for the cook to get a pat on the back; it was to ensure the eventual return of the Tupperware.
‘Not right now,’ Bell said. ‘Later, maybe. But thanks.’
Dot leaned in close enough for Bell to smell the gruffly sweet odor of tobacco that lived in the folds of her clothing, no matter how well or how often Dot did her laundry. ‘It was somebody on drugs, right? Trying to rob the place?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘And the guy who did it – he’s still out there somewhere?’
‘Yes.’ Bell couldn’t think of any way to make it sound better, to pretty it up.
‘Those poor old fellas,’ Dot said, shaking her head. ‘Two of them are bank customers. I know them, Bell, real well – I mean I knew them – and I heard it was a terrible scene, just terrible. Sickening, really.’
‘It was.’
Dot waited for Bell to say more, to offer up a fact or two. An insider’s tidbit. When she didn’t, Dot still didn’t step aside. She was wearing her raincoat like a little cape, using her fingers to pinch at the parts of the fabric that peeked over her narrow shoulders. She wasn’t carrying a purse, which meant, Bell knew, that she’d left her office in a hurry, determined to find her friend and get the real story.
‘It’s awful. Just awful,’ Dot said, finally moving over. She wasn’t excited anymore. She was earnest, troubled. ‘What’re we going to do, Bell? What’s happening to this town?’
But Bell had already swept past her and said nothing, either because she didn’t hear the questions or, more likely, because she didn’t have the answers.
In a slow and solemn voice, Sheriff Fogelsong read from a series of rough pencil marks he’d made on the first page of a spiral-bound notebook.
‘Daniel Dean Streeter. Sixty-seven years old. Paul Arnold McClurg, seventy-seven.’ Fogelsong paused. He used the tip of his tongue to moisten the length of his top lip, then his bottom lip, before continuing. ‘Ralph Leroy Rader. Eighty-two years old.’
Bell nodded at the names, like this was all news to her, but naturally it wasn’t. Acker’s Gap was a small town. People – even people who weren’t involved in the justice
system – knew within minutes who had died that morning, and they didn’t need any crawl on any TV screen to find out: Dean Streeter, Shorty McClurg, Lee Rader.
Fogelsong had planted himself in the decrepit-looking swivel chair behind his dented black metal desk, while Bell tried to get comfortable in the straight-backed wooden chair that faced the desk head on. The sheriff had spent the past several hours coordinating searches throughout the county for the gunman, sending his deputies down one unpaved road after another, nosing into abandoned barns, thrashing across fields of waist-high weeds, but he’d finally been forced to hand off supervision of the manhunt and return to what Bell knew was his least-favorite spot in the known universe: sitting behind a desk, performing the tedious bureaucratic chores that always accompanied violent deaths and that, as he’d told her privately, almost made him envy the victims. At least they didn’t have to handle the paperwork necessitated by their demise.
‘Those old guys,’ Fogelsong went on, still staring at the notebook page, as if the scribbles might nip at his fingers if he didn’t keep an eye on them, ‘had been friends for more’n forty years. Been having coffee at the Salty Dawg every Saturday morning for about the last two or three. Before that, they’d meet over at Ike’s Diner. Hell, I’ve sat down with ’em a few times myself – chewed the fat, solved all the world’s problems. Shorty was a hunting buddy of my dad’s. Rader was a county commissioner a while back – maybe fifteen years ago, maybe closer to twenty.’
He rubbed a palm across the top of his scalp. Fogelsong kept his gone-to-gray hair in a brutally short crew cut. Even the little bit of hair he had, though, seemed to irritate him today. He frowned, and the frown dragged at the outside corners of his eyes, making them look even squintier than usual.
‘They were minding their business, Bell,’ he said. ‘Just a regular Saturday morning. Same as any other. Until it wasn’t.’
The notebook that preoccupied him was a narrow one with cardboard covers, the kind with a row of coils across the top to cinch the pages. For every major incident, Sheriff Fogelsong bought a new notebook at the Walgreens across the street from the courthouse. He knew how to use a computer, and kept his formal files there, but he still bought a notebook at the start of each new case. When Bell kidded him about it, calling him an old-school throwback, he’d nod and say, ‘Guilty.’ He didn’t even give her the satisfaction of denying it.
‘That’s all I got,’ Fogelsong added. ‘Just three old guys passing the time of day. And they end up with their damned heads blown off. And then the killer just disappears.’
The sheriff finally abandoned his notebook page and looked up at her. For a moment, nobody spoke. Bell was recalling how many afternoons she’d sat here just like this, going over a case with Nick Fogelsong, the air thick with facts and frustration.
His office was right down the hall from hers, in an annex that had been built onto the courthouse seventeen years ago. Yet it felt like a different world. Unlike Bell’s domain, this room was absent any soft details. There was no sofa or coffee table, no small yellow vase on the bookshelf, no paintings on the walls, and no carpeting, just a speckled salmon-colored linoleum so cheap and drab and ugly that Bell always swore it must’ve come pre-scuffed, to save him the trouble.
Fogelsong wasn’t offended when she’d first made that observation to him four years ago, right after Bell was elected prosecuting attorney. He was, he told her, downright pleased by the wisecrack. He often said – preached was a better word for it – that austerity was the only true virtue, that thriftiness was an aspect of character that out-weighed even honesty and loyalty.
Other people thought it was less lofty than all that. Nick Fogelsong, they noted, was a notorious skinflint. And the fact that he was so protective of county funds – in effect, their money – only endeared him to them. He’d been reelected sheriff seven times, after starting out as a deputy under Sheriff Larry Rucker.
This office had institutional-white walls, two grimy leaded windows through which dismal sunlight struggled to shove its way, and an old-fashioned transom over the door. There was a chill in the air. Not a metaphorical chill, owing to the fact that a triple homicide had occurred just up the street only a few hours ago, but a bracing, honest-to-goodness, permanent cold snap. Many people swore that Fogelsong had rigged the office thermostat so that it wouldn’t go above single digits, to save on the county’s heating bill. Bell had learned early on to bring a sweater if she intended a lengthy visit.
She didn’t mind his quirks. She admired Nick Fogelsong just as much today as she had on the night she’d first met him, twenty-nine years ago, when she was ten years old. He was one of the chief reasons she’d wanted to be prosecuting attorney of Raythune County, to come to work each morning in the scruffy, run-down courthouse and face a punishing case load armed only with an inadequate staff and a budget that was like worn-out underwear: It covered what it absolutely had to, but just barely, and sooner or later, your luck was going to run out. At the most inopportune moment, most likely.
Bell knew she could learn a lot from Nick Fogelsong. Not just about administering justice. About administering justice in a place like Acker’s Gap.
It was a shabby afterthought of a town tucked in the notch between two peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, like the last letter stuck in a mail slot after the post office has closed down for keeps. Acker’s Gap was situated within sight of the Bitter River, just over the ridge from the CSX Railroad tracks. It consisted of a half-dozen dusty, slanting downtown streets surrounded by several neighborhoods of older homes, two trailer parks, a tannery, a junkyard specializing in domestic auto parts, and a shut-down shoe factory ringed by a black-topped parking lot against which the weeds and the wadded-up Doritos bags and the crushed Camel packs were staging a hostile takeover. The county courthouse, built under a massive rocky outcropping that left a good portion of the town in shadow except at high noon, was stone-wrapped, high-windowed, fronted by a wide sweep of gray concrete steps and four white pillars, and capped by a theoretically gold dome that had silently begged for a new paint job since about 1967. Just outside the city limits was a handful of played-out coal mines and, beyond and above them, the corrugated foothills of the Appalachians, their sides dense with sweet birch trees and scarlet oaks, the ground crowded with mountain laurel and black huckleberry.
It was a beautiful place, especially in the late spring and throughout the long summer, when the hawks wrote slow, wordless stories across the pale blue parchment of the sky, when the tree-lined valleys exploded in a green so vivid and yet so predictable that it was like a hallelujah shout at a tent revival. You always knew it was coming, but it could still knock you clean off your feet.
It was also an ugly place, a place riddled with violence – the special kind of violence that follows poverty, the way a mean dog slinks along behind its master. A thoughtless, automatic, knee-jerk violence, a what-the-hell kind of violence that was, Bell had often heard Sheriff Fogelsong say, nearly impossible to stop.
Each year for the past two years the number of first-degree murder cases handled by Bell and the sheriff had risen. Same was true of involuntary manslaughters and aggravated assaults. She and the sheriff were plenty familiar with violence; they’d seen lots of it, quelled some of it, lived with the consequences of all of it.
What had happened that morning, though, felt different to her.
And if it felt different to Bell, then she was sure it felt different to Fogelsong, too – not because he’d said so out loud, but because she’d known him long enough to be able to extrapolate from his gestures and his expressions, from the way he rubbed the back of his neck, the way he gripped the small notebook in which he’d recorded the details, from the short vertical line between his eyebrows that seemed to cut slightly deeper each time she saw him.
Life was changing at whip-crack speed in the small towns in the mountains of West Virginia. Changing dramatically. Illegal drugs – prescription medications such as OxyContin and Vicodin, and
lately an especially vicious commodity known as black tar heroin – had, for the past several years, been roaring across the state like a wildfire in a high wind, sweeping up and down the mountainsides and reaching deep in the hollows, leaving in its wake only dead-hearted towns and dead-eyed people.
As Sheriff Fogelsong and Bell had discussed many, many times, it had gotten ahead of them. They weren’t able to tell the residents of Raythune County, as Nick had told them for the first half of his career, to relax and leave it to the people whose job it was to handle such things – because the truth was, he didn’t think they should relax at all.
Not for one minute.
There had been a terrible crime just hours ago, right in broad daylight, in the middle of Acker’s Gap. Three men were dead. The shooter had walked in, did what he’d done, and then walked right back out again. Nobody saw him coming or going. Nobody remembered what he looked like. Even the people who said they did remember turned in such contradictory accounts as to be all but useless, the sheriff had told Bell with a grunt of annoyance.
The shooter’d been short, tall, young, old, fat, thin, black, white, bald, bushy-haired.
He was clean-shaven and he had a beard.
He drove a truck or a van or a four-door sedan. Or maybe it was a compact car.
Fogelsong would not have been too surprised, he added with a sour little grimace, if somebody had claimed he’d been purple and riding a tricycle.
‘Truth is,’ he went on, ‘we’re still at square one.’
His face slumped with what Bell liked to call its sack-of-concrete look: gray, pulpy, every pore visible. It tended to get that way when he was tired, she knew. Beat-down. The small wallets of flesh under his eyes broadened, grew puffier. The sheriff was fifty-two. Right now, you’d guess at least sixty.