by Julia Keller
“Okay.” Bell swept a hand over the spot. She was no longer aware of the other students or even Professor Burnside; her world had narrowed to the shallow cavity in the dirt and the kid named Rick. “So what did you do?”
“First I cleared off the surface debris.”
“Like what?”
“Like—rocks. Dirt. Seeds. Broken-off branches.” His reply flew back at her like a vicious return of serve in a tennis match between rivals. “Just your basic outdoor shit, okay?”
“And then what?”
“Then I got down on my hands and knees.”
“Your hands and knees.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how we do it. When we come across something, we don’t use rakes or shovels or even trowels or toothbrushes. We get real close and we do it by hand. That’s how we’re trained, okay? We don’t want to destroy the things we’re out here to find.”
“Okay.” She was settling down. The agitation in her voice was receding. “And then what?”
“I was sifting through the dirt, and I probably went a little deeper than I should have. I felt something hard. Hard and sort of long and skinny. So I called over to Professor Burnside. Asked him to give it a look.”
Burnside took over the narrative. “Tell you the truth, when I first heard Rick calling me over, I was thinking he’d probably dug up some animal bones. Until I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
Burnside sucked in air. Let it back out. Bell’s intensity had rattled him, just as much as it had rattled his students. “Two things, really. First, as we proceeded to go deeper with our bare hands, we came across a rounded piece that we knew—well, we suspected—was a skull. Or part of one, anyway. Definitely a human skull. And there was another thing.”
Bell waited.
“There was,” the professor went on, “a piece of cloth. Light blue. With a pattern on it—clouds, I’d say, if I had to guess. Maybe it was clothing. Maybe something else. But it was definitely fabric. That’s when we called the university’s forensics team. We went back to work, but we gave this place a wide berth. We went to a section about three-quarters of a mile away. We didn’t want to take a chance on destroying something important. When the forensics team got back to us with the preliminary report—there was actually some DNA on file that could help make a positive ID—we contacted your sheriff right away.” He looked at Bell. “Believe me, Mrs. Elkins, we meant no disrespect to you or your family, and if we’d had any idea that what we’d stumbled upon was—”
“I know.” She gazed up at the mountain that had been watching them all the while. “I know.” She left the mountain to its own devices, seeking out Rick Drayton once more. She’d been hard on him. Too hard. Her desperate, lunging hunger for answers had blocked out everything else. Yet that was no excuse. She needed to make it right.
“Listen,” Bell said. “I want to apologize. I was rude to you and I’m really sorry. This is all just so—”
He quickly cut her off with a smile and a wave of his hand. “No problem.”
Bell envied him his ability to heal so quickly. It was, she knew, an attribute of youth—but then again, she’d never had it, not even when she was young.
“The thing is,” she continued, still trying to explain herself, “if this turns out to be my mother, I have to tell my sister. And when we talk about it, I want to be able to say that they found her in—” Bell stopped. She swallowed, and then resumed. “To say that they found her in section Fourteen-B. I don’t want to say that they found her in a hole in the ground out in the middle of nowhere. Section Fourteen-B. Not exactly poetic, but it sounds a lot better for a last resting place, don’t you think? Section Fourteen-B.” She gave Drayton and the rest of the students a thin, rueful smile. “Beats the hell out of saying ‘A dirty old hole in the ground.’ ”
A few of the students nodded, just to be polite, but most of them stared at their feet or rubbed a thumb along the handle of a rake or a shovel. They didn’t really know what to say or do. They didn’t know her story, its violence and its complications, and they didn’t yet understand the kind of chokehold that the past could maintain on a life. They were too young to understand that, even the ones whose own histories had a healthy portion of raggedness and kinks. Because when you’re young, Bell knew, you always assume that you’ll live your way past any of it mattering—or at least mattering enough to affect every decision you make, every angle from which you regard the world. You think you’re more resilient than that. You think you can simply slough off your past, shedding it like the dead skin of a bad sunburn after a day at the beach.
Her cell rang.
“Elkins.”
“Bell, it’s Nick. You out at the scene?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m still tied up over here in Chester.” He paused. “Wish I could be there with you. I mean—Lord, it can’t be easy. Looking at the spot where— “ He paused again, longer this time. “How are you doing with all this?”
“Fine. I’m fine.” He knew better than to ask her that.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, I’m calling because I heard from the forensics lab again. At the university.”
She waited. She had an inkling of what he was about to say, but hoped she was wrong, because it would make this day even darker.
“The marks on the skull,” he said. “They confirmed it. Evidence of significant fractures. Very significant. At least one of them would’ve been a lethal blow. Which means there’s an excellent probability she was murdered.”
Bell didn’t say anything. Her father’s face—dark, ugly, hungry—reared up in her thoughts. The bastard killed her. Just like Shirley said. Donnie Dolan had claimed that their mother abandoned the family, but Shirley didn’t buy it; each time he muttered it Shirley would nod, so as not to rile him, but then she’d give Bell a look. The look said: like hell. Bell was too young to feel anything but confusion and fear. Once they became adults, she and Shirley had only speculated about their mother’s fate a handful of times, and all they had to go on were fraying memories, stray threads of guesswork, half-remembered dreams. Nothing solid. Nothing definitive. No one other than their father had ever talked about her in their presence. So there had never been any resolution to the question of what really happened to her.
Until now.
“Bell?” the sheriff said. “You still there?”
She was. Physically, that is. Emotionally, she was far away; she was speeding back into the past, traveling toward the center of her memories and the seat of her dread.
* * *
Of course she’d asked questions. Kids always ask questions about everything: fireflies; earthworms; where the stars go when the sun comes up. Naturally she’d asked questions about her mother.
“But why?,” Belfa had said. She was five years old at the time. Her mother hadn’t been around for quite a while—later Bell would do the math and realize that, at the time of this encounter, her mother had been missing for at least two years.
Her father was sitting at the kitchen table. She was standing about a foot away from him. Experience had taught her to stay out of his reach. He was drinking from a gallon jug of milk. That was how he always drank it. He’d hoist the funny-shaped plastic container, arching his back and lining up the spout with his big red mouth, and he’d close his eyes and receive the continuous river of milk. Belfa was fascinated by the sight of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, as if it were some kind of primitive semaphore: Stay back. Stay back.
Once, she had tried drinking her milk the same way. She was sitting at the table by herself. The jug of milk was almost empty, making it light enough for her to lift. She reared back her head and put her lips against the round opening. At the last minute she remembered to close her eyes, the way her father did.
Suddenly the jug was flying out of her grasp, knocked away by a swiped hand. Then she felt a stinging slap on the side of her face. The blow was so hard—and she was so s
mall—that the force of it nearly sent her tumbling out of her chair.
“Don’t you never do that,” her father said. “Don’t you never.” He didn’t shout, but she almost wished he had; the low voice, riven with menace, was worse than being yelled at.
The jug had hit the far wall, leaving a starburst splatter of milk and a series of tiny white dribblets heading toward the floor.
“Clean it up,” he said. And she did. Somehow, even at five, she knew better than to point out his hypocrisy, knew better than to refer to the fact that he was allowed to drink right out of the jug but she wasn’t.
On this morning, Belfa had watched him chug the milk, staring at his Adam’s apple as it jumped. When he finally lowered the jug, he gave her a sidelong look.
“What,” he said.
“You said it didn’t look like Mommy would be ever coming back and I asked you why.”
He raked the back of his hand across his mouth. He wiped that hand on his pants. “Yeah, you did. Well, truth is, girlie, I don’t know. Nobody even knows where she is.”
“One person does.”
“Who?”
“Mommy.” Belfa wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass. Looking back, she recalled the moment precisely, and knew for certain that she wasn’t trying to be clever. She was just being logical.
Donnie Dolan glared at his younger daughter.
“You don’t even remember her,” he said, a scoff in his tone. “Bet you don’t.”
She didn’t, at least not with any specificity, but he still hadn’t answered her question.
“Where’d she go?” Belfa asked. She’d decided to try another approach.
“Told you already. Don’t know.” He was getting ready to rise and leave the table; she could tell because he leaned forward and dropped both palms flat on the tabletop, preparatory to pushing down with a loud groan as he tried to stand, freeing himself from the chair and from gravity’s mean bite.
“Doesn’t Mommy love us anymore?”
Recalling this question as an adult, picturing herself as an undersized five-year-old whose only frame of reference at the time for the abstract concept known as “love” was the things her sister Shirley did for her, Bell was a little embarrassed. It sounded like a line from a TV movie, an unbearably schmaltzy one. But she could also recall her sincerity at the time. She wasn’t trying to trip him up or force him into some kind of revelation. She believed what he said. Donnie Dolan was—as she’d later come to know—a rat bastard and an abusive son of a bitch, but she was five years old and she believed what he told her. She’d honestly wanted to know how somebody who loved you could just up and leave you.
Donnie Dolan seemed to contemplate her question. Then he grinned.
“Well,” he said. “I guess maybe she found somethin’ she loved more ’n you, okay? Happens.”
By the time she was nine, Belfa understood that the reply he’d given her that day—and which, pleased with himself, he subsequently tended to repeat whenever the subject came up—was intended to be a dirty joke. It was a reference to sexual appetite. In the wake of his wife’s disappearance, Donnie Dolan spent a good bit of time spreading the rumor that she’d run off with a roofer named Dave Hickok. He shared his suspicions with Belfa and Shirley, and he muttered them to the one or two members of his wife’s family who’d shown up unexpectedly from time to time, asking about Teresa’s whereabouts. A cousin named Jeb Wyler was especially persistent, but Donnie Dolan finally wore him down with regular doses of innuendo. She was crazy in love with that Dave Hickok fella. That’s all I can tell you. He was a nice-looking man and she got herself a good look at him one day and that’s all she wrote. Didn’t care nothin’ no more about me, nor her two precious little girls, nor the rest of her family. All she cared about was that roofer. Oh, and gettin’ drunk. That was her second-favorite thing. The two of ’em was headed West, last I heard. Good roofer can always get work.
As a college student armed with the Internet, Bell had tried to find out the truth about her mother’s fate. Nothing came of her searches. Technology sometimes seemed all-powerful, but if something had happened before the onset of Google and Bing—and if it wasn’t momentous enough to make the history books—then it was virtually unrecoverable. She tried to locate Dave Hickok, but no one recalled the name; the 1970s were a long time ago. Donnie Dolan had never contacted the police about his wife, so there was no missing-persons report. Of course there isn’t, Bell had always told herself. Bastard killed her.
But is that what had happened? And if so, how? How had he hidden his wife’s body? Donnie Dolan wasn’t a clever man. Why had the body never been found? It wasn’t as if Bell didn’t believe her father capable of such an act—of course, he was—but rather that there were no clues, no leads, no traces. Nothing.
The mystery of her mother’s fate had left Bell unsettled from as far back as she could remember. She didn’t talk about it—talking about personal matters wasn’t her way—but it was a part of her life anyway, like something concealed in a secret box that she carried with her wherever she went.
The discovery at the base of the mountain was the first solid information Bell had ever had about her mother’s disappearance. It was as if that secret box had sprung open, spilling a deeply private part of Bell’s life all over the dry, red-brown ground.
* * *
That night, Bell took a wet sponge to the sides of her shoes, attacking the dust from the excavation site. She left them on the porch to dry. Then she settled into the big, broken-down brown armchair that dominated her living room, a chair that had accompanied her on her move away from and—six years ago—back to Acker’s Gap, and she pressed the number on her cell’s speed dial that would link her to Shirley’s cell number. Shirley lived with her partner, a man named Bobo Bolland, in a garage apartment near Blythesburg, some thirty miles away.
After her conversation with Shirley, Bell planned to call her daughter, Carla, who now lived with Bell’s ex-husband in Alexandria, Virginia. Carla had graduated from high school in June, but had decided to work for a year before starting college. Bell didn’t know what she’d say to Carla about all of this. Family was not an easy topic; for too many years, Bell had tried to protect Carla from the grisly realities of her grandfather’s criminal acts. Even though Carla was old enough now to know, Bell still had a hard time talking about it. Words made things too real, brought the past too close.
“Hey,” Shirley said.
“Hey, yourself.” It was their standard mutual opening, understated and rote. An eavesdropper might think they didn’t care much at all about each other, given the bland exchange. The eavesdropper would be wrong.
“How’ve you been?” Shirley asked. “Meant to come by your house over the weekend, but I got tied up with a couple of things. Always the way, seems like.”
“Yeah. Know what you mean.” Bell wasn’t sure how to get to where she needed to be in this conversation. She didn’t want to upset Shirley. But nor did she feel comfortable withholding information about the discovery any longer.
“Listen,” Bell went on. “I need to talk to you about something. This a good time?”
“Good as any.”
“Okay.” Another pause. “It’s about Mom.”
The word sounded odd to Bell, even as she spoke it; it was a common word, an ordinary one, but in their case it denoted little more than a bare spot in the center of their lives, like a clearing in the woods where something once had been but now wasn’t. Shirley’s memories of Teresa Dolan were more substantial than Bell’s—Shirley, six years older, had been eight when their mother disappeared—but the details were still faint and sketchy, and growing ever more so, year after year: Their mother was tall and had long hair and always smelled like Dove soap. But then again, Shirley would always add when cataloging these attributes, to an eight-year-old, most adults seem tall, right? Slender build. Big eyes. Quiet voice. Patient, most of the time. At least she tried to be. She was the opposite of their father, a loud, broad, c
oarse man with tiny eyes and a buzz cut and stacked rolls of fat on the back of his neck. And the kind of anger that didn’t come with an Off switch.
“Really,” Shirley replied. That was all.
“Yeah.” Bell paused, and then pushed forward. “Some students from Virginia Tech have been digging around the rural parts of the county, looking for Native American artifacts. The other day they came across—well, it’s been determined that what they found were human remains. In an area called Fourteen-B. There’s a good chance that—” She paused, then plunged forward. “They think it’s Mom. And the cause of death—” Bell found this part harder to say out loud— “They’re still doing tests, but the evidence suggests she was murdered.”
“Of course she was. Daddy killed her.” Shirley tried to deliver the words with a casual bravado, but there was a hitch in her voice. She, too, was deeply affected by the discovery. Bell knew that, even if her sister pretended otherwise.
Shirley was still talking. “Mom probably mouthed off to him once too often and he knocked her down and then finished the job. Dumped her wherever it was that those kids found what they found. He hated her and he got rid of her. Fucking bastard.”
Even the profanity was offered up with an apparent absence of passion. Bell had feared the opposite. She had worried that Shirley might get upset, might march out to the excavation site that very night and then turn right around and drive down to Blacksburg and pound on the front door of the forensics lab and demand details about the body, the fatal blow, everything. Shirley, like their father—like Bell herself, come to that—had a temper, a black streak of anger that could widen without warning and take her behavior hostage. Both sisters, in their own ways, had picked up tricks over the years to control that anger as best they could. Still, it was always there. It was like a chronic illness: You learned to live with it, to make accommodations for it, but you could never forget its presence. It would never go away.