A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  Deanna raised her head and turned it, to see what had caught Bell’s eye.

  ‘Those’re mine,’ Deanna said. ‘Got a lot of ’em.’

  Bell remembered the snow globes she’d seen in truck stops and hotel gift shops, the souvenirs from specific places; a tiny arch for St Louis, a Statue of Liberty for New York, the Alamo for Texas, all doused with white or gold flakes of confetti if you shook the thing back and forth or turned it upside down. Snow globes, Bell found herself musing as she regarded the crowded shelf, were plastic scraps signifying a larger world, the world beyond trailers and coal trucks.

  And disabled brothers.

  Maybe these weren’t just collectibles. Maybe they were things to hope on.

  Most of the snow globes were too small for Bell to be able to make out the figures inside or the labels on the pedestals, but the identity of one of the larger globes was discernible: In big red slanting letters across its base she read VIVA LAS VEGAS!

  ‘Tell me about Albie,’ Bell said, turning back to Lori. ‘When did you first know he was different?’

  ‘Right away. It was the look he had. The look in his eyes. A funny look. Like he wasn’t there or nothing. And he never talked. Didn’t walk, neither, until he was five or six years old. Couldn’t figure it out.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Bell asked. ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘Well, thing is—’ It was Lori’s turn to look down at the carpet. ‘Thing is, we didn’t have no doctor. Albie was born right here at home. Same with Deanna. Curtis had lost his job down at the tire store – weren’t his fault, weren’t their fault, there just weren’t no business coming in – and so we did without. Had my children right here.’

  Bell kept her eyes aimed at Lori’s. In her experience, the more difficult the question, the more important it was to look the other person in the eye when you asked it. It showed that you had a respect for their life, for what they’d been through. If you hesitated, if you looked away, you were doing it for yourself, not for them.

  ‘What happened, Lori? What made Albie different?’

  ‘When he was bein’ born, he didn’t get no oxygen. That’s what they told me later. Lack of oxygen is what done it. That meant his brain wasn’t right. Wasn’t nobody’s fault. Just happened that way.’ She spoke the last two sentences in a singsong way, as if they were part of a catechism. She’d probably had to tell the story over and over again, Bell figured, to various social workers.

  Bell nodded. ‘Okay, Lori. Let me ask you one more thing. And Deanna’ – she turned to include the young woman who was still apparently mesmerized by the carpet fibers – ‘I’d like your input on this, too. Do you think Albie knows right from wrong? When he does something wrong, is he ashamed? Does he understand what he’s done? Does he apologize or try to make it right?’

  Deanna flinched as if she’d been poked with a stick. She looked at her mother as she spoke.

  ‘There was that one time, Mama, ’member that?’ Deanna said, agitation making her words come in a tumbled rush. ‘’Member?’

  ‘Slow down, sweetie,’ Lori said, ‘so’s Mrs Elkins can understand you.’

  Deanna looked at Bell. ‘Once,’ she said, ‘Albie was roughhousing with Tyler here in the living room. I told ’em to stop but they wouldn’t. They was having too much fun. Then Albie knocked over that shelf over there’ – Deanna waved in the appropriate direction – ‘and one of my good shampoo bottles flew off and landed on the floor and got ruint. Albie didn’t pay no attention. Didn’t know what he’d done. Just laughed about it. Him and Tyler.’

  Deanna had spoken in what sounded like a single headlong breath. She looked at her mother. Lori, though, was watching Bell, not her daughter.

  ‘So Albie and Tyler Bevins,’ Bell said, ‘played here at your house, as well? In addition to Tyler’s basement?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Deanna said. ‘Lotsa times.’

  ‘How did Tyler get here? I mean, he was six years old. And the Bevins house is a good mile or so away.’

  Deanna looked at her mother.

  ‘Tyler’s daddy would drive him up,’ Lori said. ‘Usually, that’s how it was.’

  Bell nodded. ‘I see.’

  There was a short spell of quiet, broken by the sudden thunder of two coal trucks going by on the road outside, one right after the other. A furious grinding of gears exploded out of ancient overworked engines. The trailer quivered, shimmied.

  ‘That racket don’t never quit,’ Lori said, ‘even on Sunday mornings. Them coal trucks is always on the go, day or night.’

  Deanna was restless. She didn’t want to talk about coal trucks. ‘You gotta understand,’ Deanna said, ‘how Albie never cared if he messed with my stuff. It didn’t bother him none. He never realized how he ruint things.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Bell said. ‘I thank you both very much.’ She had to be careful. She couldn’t get into the facts of Tyler’s death; that had been her agreement with their attorney. Today’s brief conversation was for background, not to dig out any additional evidence against Albie Sheets.

  She picked up her briefcase. At the door of the trailer, she paused.

  ‘I’m sure this is a difficult and confusing time for both of you,’ Bell said. ‘I should’ve asked earlier, but do you have any questions for me? Any at all?’

  Deanna smiled and lifted her right hand shyly, as if she were in a classroom.

  ‘I got a question,’ she said.

  Bell waited.

  ‘Could I maybe do your hair sometime? No offense, ma’am, but I think I could make it look a lot better. Way it is now, if you don’t mind me saying so, you look kinda like you’re back in olden days.’

  10

  When she stepped off the front stoop of the Sheets trailer, Bell was relieved to see that her Explorer was intact. It hadn’t been sideswiped by a coal truck. Hadn’t rolled off the edge of the mountain. The side mirrors had survived.

  She slid in behind the wheel and slung her briefcase onto the seat beside her. Backing slowly onto the road, looking anxiously and repeatedly over her right and left shoulders to check and double-check for any lurking coal trucks, she finally was able to straighten the wheels and tackle Route 6 again, heading for home.

  Alone at last, and grateful for it, Bell reviewed the final few minutes of her time with Deanna and Lori Sheets. Bell had politely declined Deanna’s request to give her a makeover. But when Lori scolded her daughter – Deanna, honey, you just don’t say such things to people, you’re hurting Mrs Elkins’ feelings, and by the way, Mrs Elkins, Deanna didn’t mean that she’d ask you to pay, it’s all free, ’cause she don’t have no license yet and by law she can’t charge for her services – Bell had assured Lori that she wasn’t offended. Not in the least.

  The answer, though, was still no. She was happy with her hairstyle just the way it was.

  As Bell drove down the mountain, the trees on both sides of the road seemed to do what they’d done on her way up, which was to close in slowly over the top of her SUV, leaning in, branches intersecting. Creating a dark and solemn arch. She loved these mountains, loved their raw beauty, but it was a wary, cautious love, the kind of love you might have for a large animal with a vicious streak. You could love it all you liked, but you couldn’t ever turn your back on it. You had to respect the fact of its wildness. It was a wildness that would outlast your love.

  The steep grade made the Explorer’s brakes work harder than they wanted to. Held back, the engine lapsed into a frantic, incensed grinding that made Bell think of popping neck muscles and snapping hamstrings, as the SUV tangled with one tight curve after another.

  She tried to keep her mind exclusively on the road, but it was difficult. Bell was thinking about parents and kids, about how far a mother would go to protect her child. She remembered the feeling she’d had the day before, when she had barreled her way into the Salty Dawg, knowing only that there had been a shooting and that Carla was in the vicinity. She would’ve done anything to protect
her child.

  Same as any mother.

  So what would Lori Sheets do? How far would she go? Would she lie about Albie’s mental capacities? About his understanding of what happens when you loop a hose around a small boy’s neck and tighten it? Would she try to protect him however she could? And if Albie had acted innocently, how could his actions be considered evil?

  Most people thought a prosecutor’s main workplace was the courtroom. But the bulk of Bell’s labor occurred elsewhere. The meat of it had nothing to do with a judge or jury. It happened when she made decisions – decisions about whom to indict, about what to charge them with, about which crimes she should focus on and how to deploy the resources of her office – just as she was having to make in the Albie Sheets case. Those decisions always came outside the courtroom, before a trial began. Bell liked to compare it to sports. Everybody enjoyed watching the game, but for the athlete, the real moment of truth came on the practice field or in the weight room, in the long afternoons of repetition, of fatigue. By the time the game came around, the outcome was all but assured. The game was only the coda. The shadow of the main event. By the time Bell walked into a courtroom, most of the real drama was long over.

  She had visited Albie Sheets in jail shortly after his arrest. He was clearly terrified. Not of her, not of the justice system, not of the dire punishment that might await him – but of the bug he’d seen that morning in the corner of his cell.

  ‘Big bug,’ Albie had said to her.

  With a thick, wobbling finger, he pointed into the corner. The bug was long gone, but Albie wanted her to know about it. ‘Big, big bug. Bad.’ A tear rolled down one of his round cheeks. It stalled in the rolls of fat that gathered in poofed-out rings around his neck like a flesh-colored muff.

  When he gestured toward the corner, his whole body shook, and greasy black ringlets moved across the massive shelf of his shoulders.

  The cell was a small gray box. There was a bunk, a sink and a toilet, and a tiny barred slit of a window high up on one wall that let in a tantalizing lozenge of light. Because the individual cells were arranged in a straight line down a long corridor, you couldn’t see the other cells, but you could hear the prisoners who occupied them, courtesy of the coughs and the sneezes, and sometimes the singing and the cursing or the simple rhythmic muttering of the men held here. A dense, compacted smell of pure humanness: sweat, feces, and urine, sometimes cut with the astringent odor of an ammonia-based cleaning fluid with which the cells were rinsed out every other day.

  Bell had tried to distract Albie, to talk about other things, but the bug obsessed him. He licked his lips and muttered, ‘Bug, bug.’ His sluglike tongue looked unhealthy to Bell, speckled and scaly, too pale. Albie was a big man – the XXL orange jumpsuit issued to prisoners by the Raythune County Sheriff’s Department was too small, and the inner seam along his left thigh had already split, allowing a wad of white flesh to bulge out of the slit like the stuffing from a ripped mattress – and he rarely stood up straight. He hunched. When he walked around the cell, he obsessively dragged one foot behind him. Prisoners in nearby cells had complained about the scraping sound. All night long, they griped, it goes on. He drags that damned foot behind him. Racket’s killing us.

  Bell had checked with the deputy. A doctor had been summoned to examine Albie’s foot; there was nothing physically wrong with the limb. He just wanted to drag it.

  Maybe, Bell had speculated, the scraping noise was soothing to Albie. Maybe he could fool himself into thinking that somebody was coming up behind him. Maybe – just once – somebody was trying to catch up to him and not the other way around. Somebody wanted to play with him, just as much as he always wanted to play with other kids. Kids like Tyler Bevins.

  Could this man, Bell had asked herself, looking at the crooked figure in the small cell, lips vibrating, eyes empty, have known what he was doing when he tied a garden hose around the neck of a six-year-old?

  Bell rearranged her grip on the steering wheel. Time to stop thinking about the law and start paying attention to the road.

  She was getting ready for the most treacherous curve on the entire stretch. If you overshot this one, your next stop would be the bottom of a tree-spiked canyon some 1,600 feet down. Mountain roads, she’d preached to Carla while teaching her to drive, were like a constant series of tests of character; if you got cocky, if you hadn’t learned from experience, you could be in trouble, fast. On the other hand, if you were too cautious, if you held back, you’d never get up the kind of speed required to make it around these steep and unforgiving angles. You had to be both bold and careful, both spontaneous and calculating. Nothing revealed a person’s psychological weaknesses more thoroughly than a mountain road.

  So focused was Bell on her driving, so preoccupied, that she hadn’t seen the compact car that had waited just off the road a half a mile back, screened by a tightly woven wall of trees and brush and climbing kudzu. Once the Explorer swept by, the gray compact had oozed from its spot and followed.

  She slowed down to prepare for the curve. Without moving her head, her eyes flicked up to check the rearview mirror. Her heart gave a panicky lurch.

  There was now a car right behind her. What the hell? she thought. She checked the mirror again. No mistake. The car wasn’t slowing down. It seemed, in fact, to be speeding up. And it was right on track to smash into the back of the Explorer, just as Bell’s momentum slung her into the nastiest curve on the mountain.

  11

  I gotta tell her. I gotta tell her.

  The sentence rode around in Carla’s head all morning long, like a rock in her shoe, annoying her no end. But it wasn’t just a matter of reaching down and digging it out. It was a lot more complicated than that.

  She hadn’t deliberately lied. Not at first, anyway. When she told the deputies and then her mom that she didn’t recognize the shooter, she was telling the truth. It was only later, when she started putting certain things together – when she thought about being at that party a while back with Lonnie, and about how this weird guy had shown up, a friend of a friend of Lonnie’s, or something like that, and about how the guy had drugs, some pills and stuff, and he was giving the stuff away, and everybody was real happy – that Carla realized: That guy was the shooter.

  The guy at the party.

  Piggy eyes. Turned-up nose. He didn’t go to Acker’s Gap High School. Carla was sure of that. She’d only seen him for, like, minutes at the party. That’s why she hadn’t made the connection right away. The party was crazy-crowded. And sticky with sweaty, pressed-together people. Too many people, shoved too close, and music that was way, way too loud, so you couldn’t really think or focus. The guy was in the center of a mob, with people pushing to get at him, to get what he was handing out, the pills, because they were free.

  Everything was so different that morning at the Salty Dawg. And it happened so fast, and nobody knew what was going on, and the lighting was totally different, it was bright, and there was the screaming, and all the blood.

  ‘No, sir,’ she’d said to the deputy, just like the other witnesses had. ‘Never saw him before.’ And she believed it.

  Until she remembered.

  But how could she tell her mom? If she told her mom that maybe she recognized the guy, Bell would want to know how and from where – her mother always had questions, God, it’s like a regular courtroom around here, Mom, it’s cross-examination time 24/7 – and Carla would be forced to confess she’d been at a party with drugs.

  And that would be it.

  No more parties. No more social life. No more life, period. Her mother would probably restrict her after-school activities to, like, the chess club. Or, God forbid, 4-H. She couldn’t hang out with her friends anymore.

  She’d already lost her car. Now she’d lose everything else.

  Carla checked the clock on the mantel. Almost noon, but she had barely moved from the couch. She was mired here, stalled here, pinned here, by the thought of what a freakin’ mess her
life had suddenly become. She’d gotten up once to pee, but that was it; that was the only move she’d made. All of her energy was fueling the desperation of her thinking.

  I gotta tell her. I mean, it’s the right thing to do. I gotta tell my mom about that guy.

  Don’t I?

  Carla pulled at the cuff of her long-sleeved T-shirt. She yanked restlessly at the blankets that were bunched around her hips. God, she thought. I hate my life. Hate it, hate it, HATE it. She wondered, as she always did when things got complicated, about maybe going to live with her dad in D.C. He’d made the offer. He repeated it in just about every phone call: You know, honey, Sam Elkins had said, this is a big city. A big, beautiful, exciting city. If you come and live here, you’ve seen your last plate of biscuits and gravy. Promise. Carla had laughed at his little dig against West Virginia, as he had intended her to, and then she’d felt guilty about laughing.

  Truth was, her father had grown up here, too. So when he made his cracks, his jokes, Carla always wondered how you could make fun of where you’d come from, and she wondered if she’d end up doing that, too, one day, and if people would see through her as easily as she saw through him. Maybe he picked on West Virginia not because he was certain he’d left it behind – but because he was afraid he hadn’t.

  When her parents had divorced five years ago, Carla returned with her mom to live in Acker’s Gap. She had no choice. She was only twelve. But her mom had promised her that once she turned sixteen, the decision would be hers. Carla could stay in West Virginia with Bell, or she could go back to live with her father in D.C.

  The summer before, when she was visiting him, Sam Elkins had pressed her. The spare room in his condo? It could be her bedroom. And his latest girlfriend, Glenna St Pierre, would be like a big sister, he explained, not like a mom who’d be nagging her all the time, telling her what time she had to come home at night or which friends she could hang out with. And he could probably get Carla a great summer job before she went off to college, he added, at his lobbying firm. All you gotta do, honey, he’d said, smiling, waggling his eyebrows, is figure out how the CEO likes her Starbucks every morning. Then you’re a rock star around that place.