by Julia Keller
Which was both good and bad.
She wrestled the gearshift into second. The engine put its protest on the record, making a low throaty grumble.
The higher Bell climbed, the more the world thickened and dimmed. To her left and right, the woods seemed to push headlong, bunching closer and closer to the road, as if these woods had definite plans to reclaim the space one day, no matter who had the upper hand for now. Even without its flamboyant summer foliage the woods felt immense and solid, the tree branches making a natural latticework, forthright, impenetrable. At sporadic intervals the overhanging limbs scratched hard at the roof of Bell’s Explorer, startling her. Fingernails dragged across a front door would’ve been less menacing.
The road’s pitch was so severe that occasionally it felt almost vertical. Bell had the sensation that her Explorer could just slip off the blacktop – not skidding sideways, as it might do if the road was iced up in winter, but flipping backward, end over end, like an animal losing its grip as it shimmies up a tree, winding up a thousand feet down in a makeshift grave of sticks and leaves and dirt and fog. Lost forever.
The morning had gotten off to a rocky start.
She’d tried to awaken Carla before she left, just to say good-bye.
Bad mistake.
When Bell leaned over the couch, gently jostling the swirl of blankets and dark hair and warm flesh that constituted her sleeping daughter, Carla had twitched, cried out, and shot straight up off the couch.
‘Jesus, Mom! What the fuck—’
Flustered, startled by the jab of profanity, Bell had backed away. ‘I’m – I’m heading out now, sweetie. I have some work to do for a case,’ she said. ‘Just wanted to tell you that when you’re ready, there’s milk and cereal, or oatmeal if you’d like, and in the freezer, there’s some waff—’
‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Carla said in a foggy, seriously annoyed voice. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. She rubbed at the side of her head with the heel of her hand, breathed through her nose, coughed, then slumped back down on the couch. Her body instantly curled up again in a tight little ball, like a paramecium on a microscope slide reacting to the light.
Bell stood there for another minute. She was engaged in a furious internal debate. She wanted to ask Carla how she was doing, how she was feeling, if she’d had bad dreams, if she needed—
No. Not now.
She walked back to the foyer. A pale blue cardigan was hanging over the banister. Bell grabbed it and arranged it across the shoulders of her white oxford-cloth blouse. She smoothed down the pleated front of her black flannel trousers. Fall in West Virginia was a hard season to dress for; the day could start out crisp but end up sweltering. Fashion advice for this time of the year generally came down to one word: layers. It was critical to have options. To not commit to anything you can’t shed the instant it doesn’t work anymore.
Not such bad advice for a marriage, either, she thought.
Bell had plucked up her cell from the charging stand on the hall table. Then she took a last appraising look at herself in the mirror over the table. She frowned. She fluffed her hair with her fingertips. She used her palm to rub at a spot on her chin that ended up being a shadow. She fluffed her hair one more time. Squared her shoulders. Like every woman she’d ever known, Bell spent most of her time basically hating the way she looked, and then hating herself for hating it.
Well. It was what it was.
Thirty-nine years old. Divorced mother of a teenage daughter. Not what she had planned for. Not what she had expected.
But who got what they expected?
Bell lifted her briefcase. She opened the big front door, jiggled the knob back and forth to make sure the lock would engage when she pulled it shut behind her, jiggled it again – just making sure – and departed.
She had called Sheriff Fogelsong from the road. She knew she had to do that before she hit Route 6 and started the steep climb up the mountain. At that point, she’d need to keep her full attention on something other than a phone call: the attempt to maintain control of her SUV so that it didn’t go skittering over the narrow berm, not to be seen again until the spring thaw revealed a flattened car and her half-mummified remains.
Maybe not even then. It was a long way down.
‘Mornin’, Miss Belfa,’ Fogelsong had said, putting a lilt in his voice when he pronounced her formal name, the one guaranteed to piss her off. He’d picked up after half a ring.
Good sign. If Nick had the energy to be ornery, it meant he wasn’t slumped in a chair after an all-nighter at the office, brooding about the state of the town for which he’d felt too much responsibility for too many years.
‘Mornin’, Nicholas,’ she replied. Two could play at that game. ‘Any news?’
‘Now, Bell, you know good and well that if there’d been any news, I would’ve called you before now – no matter what time it was.’
‘True.’
‘But I do have to say—’ Fogelsong had paused, and Bell could hear him take a long satisfying slurp of his coffee. ‘– that things are moving along.’
She pressed the phone tighter against her ear.
‘That right?’
‘Yeah. We got the comprehensive ballistics report back from the state police crime lab. Nine-millimeter slugs, just like we thought. We’re going over it right now. Which is a start. Plus, a couple of my deputies worked all night and came up with some good leads. They went over the reports of some gun-related violence in adjacent counties over the past few months and pulled out some similarities in the incidents.’
‘Any idea why somebody would want to kill those three people in particular?’
‘Nothing yet. We’re going to be talking to their families again. Trying to shake something loose. We’ve got to go easy, though. Their loved ones are pretty broken up. Just like you’d figure they’d be.’
‘Yes,’ Bell said. ‘Of course.’
She was driving past the post office and saw, in the small parking lot, an enormous TV news van surrounded by a bobbing, shifting mass of people in baseball caps and flannel coats. Still eager, no doubt, for the chance to be interviewed for a newscast. Bell figured she ought to be disdainful of these people and their fierce hunger to see themselves on television, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t be.
A lot of the people in Raythune County felt invisible. They felt marginalized, forgotten. The world paid them no mind. This might be the one time in their lives – just one measly time, a few seconds, tops – that the spotlight would swing their way, and they would feel its welcome heat on their weathered, used-up faces. Being on television, even if it was only to say, Yessir, we’re all pretty darned scared ’round here after that awful shootin’, no question ’bout it, might be the high point of their lives. Thus Bell couldn’t begrudge them their determination to stand in a parking lot, first thing Sunday morning, and jostle and bump and elbow each other out of the way for the chance to look into a TV camera and give opinions. They weren’t used to anybody caring about their opinions.
Which was not to say Bell herself wanted any part of the publicity. She’d had to deal with the press on a few of her cases, and she found herself wishing that the big fat van that was now safely in her rearview mirror might somehow wind up with four flat tires and a snapped-off antenna.
She was coming to the intersection of Route 6. She had to wind up the call.
‘Nick,’ she said. ‘I know you know this, but let me say it anyway. You’ve got a lot going on, too, what with Mary Sue’s illness. You need a hand with anything, you need to talk anything over—’
‘You bet, Bell,’ he said, cutting her off in just the way she’d expected him to. They were two of a kind. ‘How’s Carla this morning?’
Bell was at a loss about how to answer. She felt exiled from her daughter’s emotional state. Even if Carla hadn’t been a witness just the day before to an act of grotesque, unfathomable brutality, she still would have been a mystery to her mother. Bell knew from her own teenage
years – singed, as her daughter’s now were, by a flash of violence – that there were some things you could not talk about, no matter how much the people who loved you wanted you to.
‘Doing okay for now,’ Bell said. ‘Thanks, Nick. Gotta run. On my way out to the Sheets place.’
The sheriff, she knew, wasn’t terribly interested in the Sheets case. It was, to his mind, over. The perpetrator had been immediately apprehended. There was no mystery to it, no crime to solve. Albie Sheets was guilty. He was locked up. Now it was up to the courts; it was none of his lookout. Nick Fogelsong was a man of action, and his attention stayed fixed on cases in which he had to hunt down the culprit.
He liked to focus on the chase. To stay in motion.
For Bell, though, the murder of Tyler Bevins wasn’t over at all. Not even close. Albie Sheets was guilty – but guilty of what? There was plenty of motion in the Sheets case, but it wasn’t the sheriff’s kind of motion. It wasn’t about high-speed car chases or gun battles. It was the kind of activity that took place in a prosecutor’s head.
Could someone with an IQ as low as Albie Sheets possessed even know what murder was? And if he didn’t – by what right did the state punish him?
‘Well,’ Fogelsong said, ‘if you’re heading out to the Sheets home, you be sure and watch the curves going up and down that mountain – they’re pretty damn treacherous.’ He made a harrumphing sound in the back of his throat. ‘Like you don’t know that already,’ he added testily, scolding himself. Sometimes, Bell knew, he could forget that she’d been born and raised here, just like him.
She’d lived away from Acker’s Gap for a few years, and to some folks – Nick Fogelsong was not usually among them, but occasionally he slipped – that was almost enough to mark her as an outsider. A spectator. Not a native.
‘Will do.’ Bell flipped her cell shut and dropped it onto the seat beside her. The mountain loomed dead ahead.
9
Lori Sheets and her two children, Albie and Deanna, lived in a trailer that was permanently marooned on a patch of land right next to the road.
‘Next to’ the road wasn’t quite right. It was virtually in the road. When the state widened Route 6 in the late 1980s, it had tried to buy out the landowners whose lots bordered the road. Most sold willingly, but Curtis Sheets, Lori’s late husband, said no. Actually, he said, ‘Hell, no,’ and then spit out a chaw of Red Man with enough vigor to knock over a tin can perched on a fence post.
So the state widened the road anyway, and their front yard – only a small portion of which was their legal property, but as long as the road had been narrow, that didn’t much matter – vanished. The dirty gray ocean of road now lapped right up to the bottom step of the thin concrete slab that Curtis Sheets had installed as a front porch. When the coal trucks went pounding by, the trailer swayed and bounced like an out-of-balance washing machine. Dishes shimmied off the kitchen table and collectibles popped off the shelves. The family’s mailbox had been repeatedly sacrificed to nasty sideswipes by lurching sixteen-wheelers.
Curtis Sheets had died in 1994 in a single-car crash, leaving his wife Lori to deal with their son Albie. Their daughter Deanna, twenty-two, also lived at home.
On the afternoon of October 14, Tyler Bevins’s mother had checked on the boys in the basement of the Bevins home, which was located in a subdivision about a mile away. Despite the age discrepancy – Tyler was only six – they often played together, building LEGO forts or watching Scooby Doo videos.
Linda Bevins found her son with a bright green garden hose tied around his neck.
Bell parked on the left side of the trailer, pulling the Explorer as far off the road as she possibly could. She hoped that when she returned to it, the vehicle’s rear end would still be attached to the front. Your average coal truck, she knew, lacked a certain subtlety when it came to sucking in its gut and staying inside the white lines on mountain roads.
As Bell opened the car door, she heard a voice calling out. ‘Hey there, Mrs Elkins.’
Up on the porch, Lori Sheets was pulling a brown cloth jacket around her wide shoulders. It was cold up here in the mountains, although it was still early in the fall. The sun, on account of the topography, had a hard job on its hands. And the heavy canopy of twisting trees thwarted the sun’s best intentions.
‘Good morning,’ Bell said, retrieving her briefcase from behind the driver’s seat.
The trailer had once been white, but the dirt flung up by the constant churn of the coal trucks had stained its aluminum sides a brownish yellow. There were red plastic flowerpots set in each corner of the porch, filled with artificial flowers. A dusty film coated each plastic petal, so that what had started out as blue and yellow and pink was now a uniform gray.
Lori smiled a please-like-me smile. She had crossed her plump arms in front of her large bosom. She wore faded Levi’s and heavy black boots. The trousers were too long; the extra material bunched across the tops of her boots in twin blue crinkles.
Lori Sheets drove a school bus for a living. That was difficult work, especially in these mountains. Keeping control of a big vehicle required power and savvy. And many times, the drivers had to perform their own emergency maintenance. Bell had expected Lori Sheets to be a beefy woman, and she was. The only aspect of her appearance that had surprised Bell was the hairdo. The frosting was done well, and the styling was expert; her hair was arranged in soft winsome scallops that added an improbable touch of delicacy to her large face. Where would Lori Sheets find the time or the money for such a high-maintenance hairstyle?
Instead of reaching out to shake Bell’s hand, Lori leaned forward and dipped her head in an odd little gesture that was half nod, half bow. She kept her arms crossed in front of her chest.
‘Mrs Elkins,’ she said, ‘we’re just so grateful you come up to see us like this. We know you didn’t have to.’
‘I wanted to make sure I had all the information I needed. Can we go inside?’
‘Oh, sure. Sure.’
The moment they walked in the front door of the trailer, Bell understood how Lori Sheets kept up her hairstyle. The living room had been tricked up to look like a miniature salon. Three kitchen chairs were arranged side by side along one wall, like seats in a waiting area. Hanging over a fourth chair was a hair dryer with a lime green, hard plastic shell. There was also, on a series of plank shelves that scaled a dark-paneled wall, a variety of plastic containers and aerosol cans that Bell recognized as sample shampoos, conditioners, sprays, and gels, the kind supplied in hotel bathrooms, and in another corner, a wooden crate filled with glossy, oversized magazines, on the covers of which emaciated young women struck poses of complicated physical geometry. The regular furniture – couch, coffee table, TV cabinet – had all been shoved into a sharp-edged conglomeration at the far end of the room to make space for the beauty equipment.
As Bell looked around, Deanna Sheets walked into the room from the kitchen. A dark gold sweatshirt hung from her high, angular shoulders; her sticklike legs were encased in a pair of black tights, and she wore her honey-colored hair in a series of fluffy, tousled layers that artfully framed her small face.
Bell reached out her hand to Deanna. ‘I know this is a really hard time for your family, but I’m here to find out a little bit more about Albie.’
The fingers that Deanna offered back to Bell were limp. Bell had to do all the work of the handshake.
‘So.’ Bell turned around, taking in the room. ‘What’s all this?’
Deanna opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again. Her gaze drifted toward the orange shag carpet.
Lori Sheets stepped forward, patting her daughter’s petite shoulder. Lori hadn’t taken off her jacket and didn’t ask Bell to take off her sweater, either; there didn’t seem to be any heat on in the trailer, and the air was cold.
‘Deanna wants to be a stylist,’ Lori said, ‘and she needs a place to practice. So I let her set up in here. This is all hers, all the things she’s collected
and put together.’
‘I see.’
The room was too small for three people plus all of the hairdressing equipment, which made Bell wonder how it had worked when Albie was here, too. Albie was a big man, a tick over six feet tall and at least 275 pounds.
‘Well,’ Bell said. ‘I just wanted to have a brief chat. I’m not going to ask you about the facts of the case, mind you. We won’t be discussing the day it all happened. That’s for the trial. I want to know about Albie.’
Lori nodded.
‘You want to sit down?’ she asked dubiously. The couch was turned sideways and crammed at the other end of the room, definitely a challenge to reach, and if they all chose to sit, they’d be bunched too close together, like helpless siblings in the back of a station wagon on a long car trip.
‘No. This won’t take long.’
Lori was visibly relieved. ‘How about some coffee, then?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Bell had brought in her briefcase but didn’t really need it. She set it down on the carpet, perched against her left leg. ‘Lori,’ Bell said, ‘Albie never went to school, is that right? You kept him here at home?’
‘That’s right. I knew he wouldn’t fit in. Other kids’d tease him.’
‘How does he spend his time?’
‘Well, he does his chores. He gets the wood for the stove. He can sweep the floors. Dust some, too. It takes him a while sometimes, but he can do it.’
Bell looked at Deanna. ‘It must be hard for you. Having your brother here, when you bring friends home. Needing to explain about him.’
Deanna’s gaze flashed from the carpet to her mother. Then to Bell.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Deanna said.
‘So it’s been hard?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Deanna’s eyes disengaged again. Bell had to fight off the urge to take the young woman’s chin in her hand and force her to keep her head up.
Looking past Deanna into the kitchen, Bell saw a long particleboard shelf slotted onto aluminum brackets on the wall. It was crammed with snow globes. Looks like at least thirty, Bell guessed. I’d sure hate to have dusting duty in this place. The plastic bubbles bumped up against each other, some large, some very tiny; some were round bubbles, others were tall, skinny tubes.