by Julia Keller
She didn’t see any people. Only two of the houses even had mailboxes. She could hear, coming from the backyard of one of the houses, the constant barking of a dog. The animal just kept barking, with no variation in frequency or tone. And no letup. Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark. She thought it just might be the loneliest sound she’d ever heard.
This, she knew, was what most of Raythune County – and surrounding counties, too – looked like. This was what her mother was talking about when she said that parts of West Virginia were so depressing that you couldn’t think about them too much. Unless you’re planning to do something about it, her mother always added. Unless you’re going to help.
If you just stare, her mother told her, it becomes another kind of pornography. Poverty porn.
‘This is where we were? This is where that party was?’ Carla said.
She peered at the last house on the road, a small brown one squared off by a rusty chain-link fence. The house had a peculiar tilt to it, almost as if somebody had tried to shove it over but quit halfway through the chore, out of boredom. Most of the windows were covered with newspapers. The top half of the front door was taken up by a storebought NO TRESPASSING sign, black with orange fluorescent letters. A black car with no rear fender and a smashed back window was parked in the side yard.
‘Yeah.’
Lonnie switched off the engine. It shuddered and shimmied and then emitted a final fart-like pop! like it always did when he shut down the Sebring. Carla had long thought it was pretty weird that, as much as Lonnie knew about cars, as many hours as he spent fiddling with other people’s cars, he drove such a rattletrap mess himself. He wouldn’t take the time to fix it up.
‘I don’t remember it being this – well, you know, this crappy,’ Carla said.
‘Hey,’ Lonnie said. ‘It was, like, one A.M. when we got here that night. Pitch black. You couldn’t see the neighborhood or nothing. But, hell, Eddie’s okay. He’s good people. Don’t matter what his zip code is, ain’t that right?’
Lonnie checked his face in the rearview mirror – that was the last thing he did before he left his car, every time – and then he wiped at both sides of his head, licked his lips, and opened his door.
‘Let’s go, girl,’ he said, calling to her through the driver’s-side window. ‘Come on, now.’
It was Lonnie’s fake-casual voice. She knew it well. Like when he called her sometimes and asked if she wanted to hang out, and when she said no, he acted as if it didn’t matter, as if it had just been a whim, anyway, when the truth was, she knew, he’d been counting on it. Had planned his whole night around it.
‘Eddie’s waiting for us,’ Lonnie went on, still in his fake-casual voice. ‘If anybody knows who that guy is, the one you’re so hot to find, it’s Eddie Briscoe. You can tell Eddie what he looks like. Maybe draw a picture of his face or something, like them police sketch artists. You know. Anyway, Eddie’ll fix you right up.’
Carla hesitated, her hand on the knob. She was starting to feel funny about this. Not scared, just a little funny. Tingly, even.
Like this was a place she’d been destined to see just one more time, before she left West Virginia for good. Like in some strange way it had been waiting for her to return, this house that sort of heaved to one side, this house that was all pinched-looking and half-pushed-over and dilapidated.
It was a dump. No question. But she’d spent time here, according to Lonnie. She’d been to a party here. She’d danced here. Hell, she’d probably thrown up in the woods over there, in that crooked mess of stumps and brush she’d just noticed, off to the side.
‘Come on,’ Lonnie said. The fake-casual thing was gone now. ‘Let’s go, okay? Can we, like, go inside now? Since we’re here and all?’
She had a thought that made her feel a little softer toward Lonnie, but also made her pity him even more: He wanted to help. He got off on the idea that he was helping her. They were, like, partners. Solving mysteries. Like Sherlock Holmes and that other guy. The Jude Law guy.
Her cell rang. Carla rooted through her skirt pocket, pulled it out, looked at the caller ID.
Not now, Mom.
She stuffed it back in her pocket.
The weather had been warm the night of the party, almost sultry, and Carla also seemed to remember that she and her friends – drunk, laughing, happy, God I love you guys you’re the best I really really mean it – had stumbled out of the house when they got so woozy from dancing that they knew they were going to hurl.
Her cell rang again, interrupting her memories of party night. Mom, Carla thought with a wince, there’s a reason they invented voice mail, okay? Kinda busy right now.
When her mother found out why she was here, she’d forgive Carla for every single lame thing she’d ever done.
Once again, she let the call go.
If things worked out today, if this Eddie guy talked to her, told her how to find the guy, the guy who might be the killer, then she’d be helping her mom big-time. She’d get that name. Her mom and Sheriff Fogelsong would track him down. Arrest him.
And Carla wouldn’t feel like such a loser, such a flake.
Everything would be okay again. She’d make it okay.
She opened the car door.
Part Three
39
When Bell returned from her late breakfast at Ike’s, Lee Ann Frickie was waiting in the hall outside her office. Bell could tell by how she looked – eyebrows arched expectantly, one tiny fist perched on the narrow hip of her wool skirt – that her secretary wanted a private word before Bell went into the office.
‘You have a visitor.’
‘Who?’
‘Deanna Sheets.’
Because the door between their offices was almost always left open, Lee Ann knew what Rhonda Lovejoy had reported that morning. About Deanna Sheets and Bob Bevins.
‘Been here about fifteen minutes,’ Lee Ann said. ‘I told her you’d be right back.’
‘She just showed up?’
Lee Ann nodded. She was wearing a white sweater with pink piping along the collar and cuffs and a plaid navy skirt. Dangling between her small breasts was a dime-sized silver pendant hanging on a silver chain. Lee Ann touched the chain, sliding her thumb and index finger up and down the tiny linked segments.
There was something she wanted to say.
‘Lee Ann,’ Bell said, ‘what’s going on?’
The secretary glanced around with scrupulous care, to make sure no passersby were close enough to overhear. She had a habit of looking at the world across the top of her silver-rimmed glasses, imbuing her gaze with an air of judgment, along with a faint air of droll amusement. While she fingered the necklace, her eyes continued to rove up and down the short corridor.
‘What is it?’ Bell repeated. She tried to keep the push out of her tone, but she had a lot to do today. She had a lot to do every day – and Lee Ann, of all people, knew that.
‘Well,’ Lee Ann said, ‘she’s pretty wrought up. That’s all.’
‘Did she say what she wanted?’
‘No. Except to talk to you.’ Lee Ann stopped looking around the courthouse corridor and swung her gaze back over to Bell. ‘Something’s not right.’
Bell knew what she meant, but she wanted to hear it from Lee Ann. Her secretary had superb instincts about people – about their motives, their moods, their secrets. About when they were telling the truth. And when they weren’t.
‘Can’t quite define it,’ Lee Ann added, ‘but this whole Sheets case, start to finish, just bothers me. All this conversation about knowing right from wrong. About actions and consequences and such.’
‘You don’t think Albie Sheets should stand trial for murder?’
‘That’s not the part that bothers me.’
Bell waited.
Lee Ann shook her head and waved her hand in front of her face, as if the gesture might clear away the troubling thoughts that had stalled there like a wad of fog. ‘Oh, heavens. Ignore me. I’m just an old bu
sybody.’
‘No, you’re not. You’ve been working in a county prosecutor’s office for a hell of a long time. You know when things feel right – and when they don’t.’
‘I appreciate that, Belfa.’ Her secretary was one of only a few people who could call Bell by her given name and not receive a scowl in return. The scowl was so severe that most people probably would’ve preferred a slap.
‘Okay, then,’ Bell said. ‘Let’s go see what’s on Deanna’s mind.’
Deanna had perched herself on the edge of the couch, knees locked, long-fingered hands clasped on top of those knees, purse tucked at her side. She wore a powder blue cotton sweater and black polyester trousers, and even in those ordinary clothes, she was a knockout.
The sweater stretched across the swell of her substantial breasts. Her face had a startling beauty to it, a combination of pale delicate skin and vivid features – full lips, high cheekbones, and deep-set, dark blue eyes – and it brimmed with a kind of energy, like an interesting substance in a glass vase you might hold in your hand, turning it slowly, slowly, so that it catches the light at different angles.
Back in the trailer, Deanna’s beauty had not been so readily apparent. Her beauty first had to detach itself from its surroundings, work its way forward. It had a journey to make. Here, though, Deanna Sheets looked luminous.
What is it like, Bell wondered as she sat down behind her desk, to possess this kind of beauty and to live in a trailer in Raythune County, West Virginia? Did Deanna Sheets ever feel as if she was trapped inside one of those snow globes she collected, separated from the real world by a scrap of plastic on a tiny red pedestal, stuck in a scene that never changed?
‘This is highly unusual,’ Bell said. ‘I assume you know that, Ms Sheets. I’m prosecuting the case against your brother. Nothing you say to me is privileged – that is, unlike your conversations with your brother’s attorney, Ms Crumpler, whatever you say to me is not necessarily confidential. I can’t guarantee that I won’t—’
‘No, Mrs Elkins.’ Deanna shook her head. ‘That’s not it. No lawyer stuff. That’s not why I’m here.’
Bell waited. She had decided not to bring up Bob Bevins just yet. She didn’t want Deanna to know what they knew.
‘I was wondering—’ Deanna faltered. She turned her head to the side, toward the big window. The drapes were closed, however, so there was nothing to see.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t want nothing bad to happen to Albie.’ Deanna added a few kittenish sniffles. Her chin trembled.
Bell handed her a tissue. Then she sat back in her chair again. She was careful not to be too consoling, too soon; when people felt better, they stopped talking.
‘Something bad is going to happen to Albie,’ Bell said. ‘Chances are, he’ll be in prison for the rest of his life.’ She paused. ‘Does that seem unfair to you?’
‘What do you mean, Mrs Elkins?’
Deanna blew her nose. Bell waited until she’d finished to reply.
‘I mean, is there some aspect of this case – some fact about what happened that day in the basement of the Bevins home, when Tyler was killed – that you want to talk about?’
Deanna looked surprised. She blinked and shook her head.
‘You know all about it,’ Deanna said. ‘Albie was just playing around. Him and Tyler. It was an accident. Two boys in the basement.’
‘Is that the truth, Deanna? Is that what really happened?’
‘Why’d you say that?’ Deanna said, her voice rising. ‘What are you talking about? We told you! We did! Over and over again! It was Albie and Tyler. Albie and Tyler, playing in that basement.’ The young woman stared at Bell with big eyes. ‘You know what happened that day.’
Bell didn’t hand her another tissue. She had no desire to be reassuring. Her question had been a shot in the dark. A hunch. She and Lee Ann had been thinking along the same lines.
‘I know what we were told,’ Bell said.
Deanna’s delicate jaw muscles twitched, ever so slightly.
‘Mrs Elkins,’ she said, after a pause during which she seemed to compose herself, ‘let me tell you. I never thought it would come to this. Never thought Albie would still be in jail. They said it wouldn’t happen that way. Because Albie was simple. They said he wouldn’t be punished. They said folks’d understand.’
‘Who gave you that information?’ Bell said.
Deanna shook her head. She lowered her face.
When she raised it again, Bell saw, to her dismay, that a stubbornness had set in. Bell knew what that meant. She wouldn’t get any more information out of Deanna Sheets right now. The door had closed.
‘Deanna, why did you come here today?’
‘To ask you not to hurt my big brother.’ The reply was quick. ‘Albie didn’t know what he was doing. He wouldn’t know when he was going too far. He and Tyler always played rough-like. They’d wrestle around like that. Albie just got too rough that day. That’s what everybody’s told you and it’s the truth, Mrs Elkins. It’s the God’s honest truth.’
When there was no response from Bell, Deanna reached for her purse. ‘Well, okay, then. I gotta go. I was just downtown to pick up some things for my mama. Thought I’d stop in and talk to you about Albie. He’s a good boy. He didn’t mean to hurt nobody.’
Bell decided to make one last try.
‘Deanna, we’re going to find out what happened in that basement. I promise you that we will. Whoever you think you’re protecting – it’s not worth it.’
Something flashed in Deanna’s eyes – whether fear, guilt, apprehension, or confusion, Bell couldn’t tell – but then the bravado reasserted itself. The defiance. Deanna stood up and arranged her purse strap on her shoulder.
‘Only person I’m trying to protect, Mrs Elkins, is my brother Albie. I just want him to get a fair shake. I gotta look out for Albie.’
‘Is that why you and your mother made him eat soap the other day? So we’d have to postpone the trial? Is that the kind of protection you mean?’
That one stung. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Deanna snapped. ‘Nobody made Albie do nothin’ like that. That’s crazy. That’s just—’
‘Never mind, Deanna.’ Bell began dividing files on her desk, turning two tall stacks into four shorter ones. ‘Thanks for stopping by. When it comes to delaying tactics, I suppose this is better than feeding Albie another bar of soap.’
In a mellower tone, Deanna said, ‘I love my brother, Mrs Elkins. He’s like a little baby. And babies need to be looked out for, don’t they? They need somebody on their side?’
‘We all do,’ Bell said, but her eyes stayed on her files. She was finished with Deanna Sheets. For now.
40
Lee Ann Frickie had started the day’s third pot of coffee. She stood by the small table, watching the liquid twist into the glass carafe in a thin dark stream. Her fists were curled against her hips, a favorite posture for cogitation. She was peering over the top of her glasses, another mind-clearing technique.
Observing the process by which dry brown crumbles in a paper filter are transformed into a life-enhancing libation was, Lee Ann often told Bell, better than a Zen garden for meditation purposes. Lee Ann was an expert at keeping her spirit calm through idiosyncratic ways. She didn’t knit or do needlepoint. She didn’t pray or read self-help books. She didn’t go to yoga classes, even though they were offered for senior citizens on Tuesday nights over at the RC, in the same cavernous space in which Carla Elkins’s Teen Anger Management workshop was held on Saturday mornings.
Instead, she made a ritual out of carefully watching certain processes: coffee being made, leaves skittering in front of a frantic push of wind, the sun dropping behind the western edge of the mountains at day’s end, a variety of vehicles rolling fitfully past the courthouse toward the four-way stop at the corner.
‘Hey, Lee Ann,’ Bell said. She’d been sitting at her desk ever since Deanna left, flicking her pencil again
st a stack of files, resulting in the infliction of several random gray dashes on the edge of those files.
‘Yes?’
‘Need to call the Bevins home,’ Bell said.
Lee Ann went back to her desk in the outer office. With a slight shift of her mouse and a few keystrokes, she fetched up a directory and found the number. A moment later she called out to Bell, ‘It’s ringing. Line three.’
Bell picked up her phone and pushed the lighted button on the console. The ringing was interrupted by the voice of Linda Bevins.
‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Bevins, this is Belfa Elkins. I’m the prosecuting attorney.’
‘Yes? Yes, what is it?’
Linda Bevins sounded slightly flustered. But then again, who wouldn’t be? Her six-year-old son had recently died. And she surely knew about her husband and Deanna Sheets.
Wives always know. That was Bell’s philosophy. They know, even if they don’t know they know. Wives, husbands – and the parents of teenagers – had a knowledge that went beyond verifiable fact and time-stamped photos. When you loved someone, you could read them, sense their emotions, feel when things had changed in their hearts.
‘Mrs Bevins, I need to reach your husband.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘I’d let you talk to him if he was here. But he’s working. He had to take a lot of time off just after—’ She stopped. ‘After Tyler died. There was so much to do. All the arrangements. So much. So much to do. So now he works double-hard.’
Bell waited. She assumed Linda Bevins would ask her about the case, about when Albie Sheets would go to trial for killing her son.
She didn’t. The silence widened.
Finally, Bell said, ‘Well, I really do need to speak with him, Mrs Bevins, so if you could just give me a number at which your husband can be contacted, I’ll take it from there.’
‘He’s out of town. On business. He travels, you know. These days, more than ever. He’s a salesman for Bellwood Plastics and they’re trying to get some business in other regions. Out west, mainly. Since things have been so slow around here. He’s been going to the same place once or twice a month for a good little while now.’