A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  His hand moved between Shirley’s legs, stroking, and at the same time, he took his other hand and he put it on top of Shirley’s hand and he pulled her hand over to his crotch, and they could hear his breathing; his breathing was harder now, almost painful-sounding, like an animal. Harder and faster.

  After he cried out – it was a deep, guttural sound, and it arrived on the back of a tremendous shudder that rocked his whole body like a private earthquake – he would become instantly angry. He’d sputter and cough, still breathing hard, and usually he’d spit out a curse word. It was their fault. Had to be. Once, just after he’d finished, he slapped Shirley across the face. And then, before she could even react to the slap, he’d cupped her head between his huge splayed hands and muttered clumsy apologies – Sorry baby Daddy’s so so sorry Oh baby So sorry Daddy didn’t mean nothing Daddy didn’t – and after that, stroking her head. The stroking motion, though, seemed to excite him all over again.

  Shirley, Belfa wanted to say, What’s wrong? because Shirley now was choking, shivering, as he put his big hands on the back of her small head and pushed, pushed hard, pushing pushing, and Belfa, feeling the vibration, hearing his grunts, closed her eyes again, as tight as they’d go, pinching them shut. She wanted to help her sister but she remembered what Shirley had told her many times before, fiercely, all in a rush Be quiet Don’t help me Don’t move You can’t help It isn’t really happening Pretend you’re asleep Maybe he’ll forget you Maybe

  Sometimes there were long spells when he didn’t come to the couch at night, when he paid no attention to them at all. A lull. It was confusing. Was there something they did to set him off? Rile him? Belfa wished she knew.

  Because if they knew what it was, they could stop doing it.

  At night the trailer was always dark. There weren’t any streetlights out this far. And no neighbors, for God’s sake. It was way, way too far back from the road for any car lights to sweep past. Nothing could penetrate the thick climbing woods. Out here, night fell hard and black and absolute. Morning, with the return of that golden light, always felt like a surprise to the girls. Like a tiny miracle. Each time.

  All night long they would lay on the couch that way, side by side, she and Shirley hooked together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Edge pieces, the kind you could do without if you had to, the kind you wouldn’t miss too much if you lost them. The rest of the picture would be just fine. They didn’t matter.

  They had to sleep that way, folded into rhyming curves. Shirley was always on the outside. If one of them stretched or moved or changed her position, the other one had to move, too.

  It was late, but Belfa was still awake. She could hear Shirley’s breathing – shallow but steady, regular – and she wondered if her sister was dreaming, and what she might be dreaming about. Or were her dreams like so many other things in their lives, just a blank space where the dreams were supposed to be?

  It was him.

  At first, the shape across the room looked like a shadow. Then the shadow detached itself from the other shadows and came forward. Came toward the couch. Said a word. A whispered word.

  Belfa.

  This time, instead of stopping at the edge of the couch and kneeling down to stroke Shirley, he reached across Shirley.

  Belfa felt his big hand. He patted her shoulder. Then he rubbed it, making a small circle with his hand.

  Suddenly, Shirley sat up and lurched off the couch, almost knocking him over. He fell back a few steps, fighting to keep his balance.

  Shirley was kicking him. Screaming at him. She’d fallen down but then she’d scrambled right back up again, and she was wild, fists flying, bare feet punching, jabbing.

  This had never happened before. Before, when he came toward her on the couch, Shirley had stayed very still. She’d let him do what he wanted to do, because it never lasted very long, and you could put up with anything, right? If you knew it would be over soon?

  Belfa was crying. She was pulling at Shirley’s T-shirt, trying to get her to stop fighting him. It was better to give in. Better to ‘ride it out,’ as Shirley had put it to Belfa. If you fought back, you just made things harder for yourself later.

  Because he remembered. He made you pay. You always paid.

  It was better, Shirley had told her, to go along, better to keep quiet, better to let him bother you and then just forget about it. Go back to sleep.

  Shirley had always said that. So why, Belfa thought, was Shirley fighting now? Belfa kept reaching out with both hands for her sister’s thin shirt, grabbing tiny fistfuls of it and then losing it again, trying to get her to stop. Their father was roaring and yelling. Bellowing, like an elephant. That was what it sounded like to Belfa, like an elephant she’d seen on a nature film at school.

  Back when she was going to school regularly.

  Shirley was yelling at him Not her! Not her! but it didn’t make sense to Belfa, the words were crazy. Belfa stopped pulling at Shirley’s T-shirt and fell back on the couch, confused and exhausted, and she closed her eyes, because she didn’t want to see. Pinched them shut. She could hear his terrible breathing. Then Belfa heard the animal noise again, as if he was in pain, but not exactly like pain, either. Something else. And the grunting.

  Shirley did not cry.

  When he was finished with Shirley, he left the living room and went into the kitchen. He did that a lot. He’d fall asleep in a chair in the kitchen. He didn’t go back to his own bedroom; he’d eat something in the kitchen and then fall into a deep quivering slumber in the dinette chair, shirt undone, hands in his lap, head rolled to one side, lips twitching with each big blubbery breath.

  The small rectangle on the front of the stove gave the time in perky digital numbers: 2:34 A.M. You couldn’t see the moon in the small window over the sink, but a little bit of its light made it in, a milky white stripe that crossed the room, illuminating things.

  He was sitting in the chair. Asleep.

  Shirley took a few steps toward the sink. She had left the knife there. The knife she’d used a few days ago, to cut off the top of the detergent bottle. Nobody ever did anything at the sink except Shirley.

  She picked up the knife. She looked at Belfa, then she looked at their father, spread out in the chair, head back, snores bubbling up out of him. His throat looked white and exposed in the frail light, puffed out with fat layers and stippled with black bristles but still somehow tender, soft, a strip of pure vulnerability.

  This was it.

  Belfa knew that, without Shirley having to say anything, without a word being exchanged. This was their chance. They’d had other chances before – but this was the right one.

  The one they’d been waiting for. The one that had been waiting for them.

  Shirley moved closer until she was standing next to him. The knife was in her right hand. She lifted it.

  He stirred, sloshing his tongue around in his mouth, smacking his lips. His body jerked. Shirley jumped back. Belfa, too, twitched, and she felt a warm trickle of pee leaking into her underpants. Belfa was more frightened than she’d ever been before in her life. If he woke up now and found them here, he’d kill them. He hated being looked at when he wasn’t in charge, when he didn’t have the upper hand.

  False alarm. He was still asleep.

  Shirley looked at her sister. Shirley’s face looked different now than it did by daylight. The sharpness was gone. Moonlight made her features soft, dreamy. Her eyes shifted in the direction of the living room. The meaning was clear.

  Leave this room. Go. Go now.

  Belfa followed her sister’s silent instruction. She never saw what happened in the kitchen that night, but she had a clear vision of it, anyway. She could imagine it. She could taste the moment on her tongue, feel it on her flesh. Because they’d wanted it so long, both of them. They’d envisioned it. Longed for it.

  The knife was lifted until it was poised over his throat. The knife descended twice, in two fierce chopping motions, followed by a horizontal sl
ash. He barely had time to clutch at his torn throat, to buck once, twice, in his chair, watery eyes fastening on the face of his older daughter.

  Her eyes were blank. Not triumphant. Not superior. Blank.

  And then, in the kitchen of the trailer on Comer Creek, the monster died.

  They splashed gasoline on the couch, the chairs, the walls. He always kept a filled-up gasoline can under the front stoop of the trailer, in case he needed to top off his truck. Shirley had remembered that.

  ‘Faster,’ she said to Belfa.

  They took turns with the gasoline can. Pitching it toward the kitchen cabinets, the stacks of trash. Sloshing the smelly stuff on their father’s body. The blood was terrible – there was so much of it, it looked like the blood from three or four people, not just one – and they had to be careful not to slip. The kitchen floor was slick with their father’s blood. Soon it was slick with a second liquid, too: gasoline.

  When it was Belfa’s turn with the can, she tilted it forward, trying to fling the gasoline the way Shirley did, with a series of quick confident heaves. But the can was too heavy for her small hands, so she was clumsy with it, awkward.

  It was Shirley’s idea to burn the trailer. No matter what, she said, they needed to burn the place down, to leave no mark. To erase it from the earth.

  ‘Belfa,’ Shirley said.

  They were standing in front of the trailer now. The smell of gasoline was sharp and tangy, a sweetish odor that didn’t seem too bad at first but that quickly turned awful, sickening. A minute ago, before they left the house, Shirley had used the phone to call 911. ‘I need to report a fire,’ she told the operator in a calm voice. ‘And a death.’ The operator had tried to ask questions, but Shirley interrupted her to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and hung up. She knew they would trace the call and be on their way immediately.

  In another minute, Belfa realized, Shirley would set the trailer on fire.

  ‘Belfa,’ her sister said. ‘Listen to me. I did this. Okay? Not you.’ She reached down and touched the top of Belfa’s head. ‘I want you,’ Shirley said, ‘to get away from here, okay? You’re smart, Belfa. You’re a smart girl. You have a good chance. Forget about this place, okay? Go live your life. You’re free now.’

  ‘But Shirley—’

  ‘No.’ Her sister’s voice was raw and urgent. ‘Belfa, listen to me. I’m gonna go to prison for this. I know that, okay? There’s no other way. But you have to promise to leave me there. The only way for this to be over is if you forget about me. Forever.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Belfa, listen. Listen. It’s the only way. You have to turn your back on me. You can’t have anything to do with me or you’ll always be linked to this. And to him. Go live your life, Belfa. Don’t let him follow you. Don’t let him win. Go. Go.’

  ‘But—’

  Shirley lit a book of matches. The mini-torch momentarily illuminated Shirley’s narrow face. It was, Belfa saw, striped with tears. Even with all the bad things that had happened to them over the years, she’d never seen Shirley cry. Her sister was too strong.

  Shirley flipped the matchbook toward the trailer, toward the gasoline puddle on the porch with which they’d finished the job. There was a loud whump-whump-WHOOSH and then a great suck of air, and the trailer was swallowed up by a writhing mass of yellow and blue flames. Flames like visible shrieks.

  ‘Promise me, Belfa,’ Shirley said. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the pops and bangs and crashes and the terrible crackling sounds. ‘Promise me you’ll leave here. No matter what they do to me, no matter where they put me, don’t write. Don’t visit. I don’t want to see you, okay? I won’t see you. Won’t talk to you. Ever. Because I’m dead now, Belfa. I’m dead, just like Daddy. Promise me.’

  Belfa looked into her sister’s face, vivid now in the bright light of the reaching flames, Shirley’s skin damp and pink in the stunned wake of the fierce heat, shimmering, malleable, as if Shirley, too, were preparing to melt right along with the trailer, right along with everything they had and everything they knew, until all that remained was some small pure essence, an irreducible fragment of ore, a truth.

  ‘Promise me,’ Shirley said.

  Promise me

  Promise me

  Promise me

  55

  The street should have been dark at this hour. Instead it was unnaturally bright, thanks to the emergency vehicles congregated there, their muscular artificial lights sweeping the neighborhood with a stupefying pulse. If you didn’t know better you might think these giant vehicles were living creatures, breathing behemoths, and that if you tried to shut them down, they’d resist. Fight back hard.

  By now the neighbors up and down Bethany Avenue, lured by lights and sirens, had come out from behind the peekaboo twitch of their living room drapes. They stood nervously on long front porches in their stocking feet, shivering in bathrobes and sweatpants, in overcoats flung hastily over nighties or striped pajama pants. Small children stood there, too, rooted behind their parents’ legs, occasionally sneaking glimpses at all the commotion.

  Bell, standing on the sidewalk, wasn’t aware of the spectators. She wasn’t aware of much of anything. Shock had scoured out her mind, like a landscape leveled by a natural disaster. She felt numb. She was aware intellectually of the cold – night had come, the sun was gone, cold was a consequence – but she didn’t feel it or flinch from it.

  At that moment, the only fact to which she could’ve attested with full confidence was the presence of Nick Fogelsong right beside her, wrapped in his big black coat, his back as straight as a surveyor’s rod, weight balanced evenly between his black-booted feet, jaw set, thick arms hanging stiffly at his sides. There was something almost prehistoric about Nick when he stood like this, Bell thought, something ancient and steadfast and immutable. His quietness had a power building up at the back of it, as if he’d managed to channel the hard wisdom of some natural element – tree or rock or river – in order to maintain the silence. He didn’t move, but he didn’t seem to be at rest, either.

  ‘I wonder,’ Nick said, ‘how long the crime scene techs’ll stick around. Hell of an operation out back. And hidden pretty damn well. Bet they call Charleston for extra manpower.’

  Noises from the porch. Tangle of voices. Heavy door closing. Two deputies, a long object stretched between them, started down the front walk. While Bell and the sheriff looked on, the body – encased in the county’s standard-issue pale blue vinyl bag with the thick black zipper vertically bisecting it – was carried across the yard.

  The bag was loaded into the back of the coroner’s van. A heave, a push, a twin slamming of doors. Two quick pats against the closed doors by one of the deputies, as a signal to the driver: Done. Go.

  Ten minutes before, Bell had been standing in Tom and Ruthie’s living room. She had watched Tom liberate the gun from its hiding place beneath the couch cushion, she heard the jarring crack of a gunshot at close range, and for one confusing moment, Bell thought Tom had shot Ruthie. Even though she saw the gun pressed to his temple she also saw, at the moment the shot was fired, Ruthie swooning, collapsing. Uttering a brief strangled cry that was part shriek, part moan, and part something else, too, a piercing sound that was like no other sound Bell had ever heard, the sound of bottomless shock and eviscerating pain. Ruthie had fainted, her frail body falling in a soft diaphanous drift, like a loosened ribbon sliding over the edge of a wrapped package.

  Then Bell had watched as Tom toppled from the couch. He rolled headfirst, arms limp, forehead finding its way to a spot on the carpet as if there had been a small X printed on the fibers, summoning him there. It was the first time she’d ever seen Tom Cox make an awkward move. He’d always been so controlled, so precise in his movements, so elegant and fastidious. This person – the one who slumped onto the floor, like a life-sized doll flung aside by a bored and sullen child – was not Tom Cox. Except that it was.

  The sheriff had rushed forward. Dropped to his k
nees. He turned Tom’s ruined head, thrusting two fingers up under the man’s unresisting chin to check his pulse.

  The face that Nick raised toward Bell was grave, pale.

  He mouthed a silent No. He pulled his hands away and tilted his torso back, still on his knees, breathing hard, shoulders lifting and descending slowly, as if each breath required an individual decision, a separate and arduous effort that was only marginally worth the price.

  Bell’s mind was beginning to function again. It felt like some finicky machine she had to handle just so, babying it, being patient with it, pressing levers in the right sequence as it warmed up. She couldn’t rush it.

  She heard a gurney rattle past, carrying Ruthie to an ambulance, and turned to watch. Her friend, still unconscious, looked dreadfully small and fragile, one tiny hand slipping out from beneath the blanket, curled like a fallen leaf. But she was alive. Alive, Bell repeated to herself. It was a word she could touch when she needed to, in the days and weeks ahead, like a stone kept in her pocket. Fingering it for luck. Alive.

  ‘That thing he said,’ Nick muttered. ‘At the end. Sounded like a poem. What the hell was it?’

  ‘John Donne,’ Bell said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A poet.’

  ‘Thought so.’ He snorted, as if his worst fears had been confirmed. ‘First it was The Red Badge of Courage, now it’s poetry. Regular damned study hall around here.’

  Bell wrapped her arms around her shoulders, trying to keep her core warm. Beside her, Nick stomped his feet on the sidewalk. He was getting restless, Bell guessed. He needed to be moving, pitching in, doing something. Or maybe it wasn’t just the itch to be participating. Maybe he had something to say to her.

  ‘Nick?’

  He grimaced. With the gloved knuckle of his right hand, he rubbed at a spot under his chin. Moved his big jaw back and forth. He was buying time, Bell knew. Trying out sentences in his head, judging them, editing them, before he uttered a word out loud.

  ‘That night at Comer Creek,’ he finally said.