Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

“Fine. It’s fine. Why do you always ask me that, first thing? It’s like you’re expecting to hear that I’ve screwed up.”

  “No, I…” The conversation needed a reset. Bell changed directions. “It’s snowing like crazy here.”

  “Here, too. Has been for hours. CNN says they might shut down Reagan National. Dulles, too.”

  Carla lived with five roommates—and an untold number of mice and other anonymous freeloaders—in a tilting, fraying three-story house in Arlington, Virginia. Before that, she had lived with her father, Bell’s ex-husband, Sam Elkins, in a condo in Alexandria. She’d spent her senior year at a private school, transferring from Acker’s Gap High School after the terrifying night when she almost died at the hands of a killer whose real target was Bell. Carla had decided to postpone college for a few years, a decision that Bell found keenly disappointing, but she capitulated after sensing Carla’s resolve. Pick your battles, was the advice everyone had given her. Made sense—for moms as well as for prosecutors.

  “Are you home?” Bell asked.

  “Yeah. Just watching the snow from my bedroom window. Can’t even see the pavement anymore. How about you?”

  “Actually, I’m standing in the parking lot of a bar in Blythesburg. Getting ready to head home. Met an old friend for a drink.”

  “Mom, come on—hang up and start driving. That’s what you’d be saying to me.”

  “You’re right. I would.” Bell turned around and opened the Explorer’s door. “Kind of nice, though. Being out in it. Peaceful.” She scooted in and pulled the door shut.

  “Peaceful, my ass. Go home, Mom. It’s a long way from there back to Acker’s Gap. With the snow, you’re looking at an hour or more.”

  “Surprised you remember.” Bell started the engine, wanting to warm it up before she headed out. She’d have to wait, anyway, for the wipers to shove aside the snow that had congregated on the windshield.

  “Oh, I remember all right. And I also remember almost skidding down the mountain when I was driving back home once with Kayleigh Crocker,” Carla said, naming one of her best friends from Acker’s Gap High School, a young woman whose wildness had continued into adulthood. Bell knew that because, as a prosecutor, she’d had several encounters in court with Kayleigh Crocker and a revolving cast of worthless boyfriends clearly bound for much more significant trouble. “Trash magnet” was the category in which Bell placed Kayleigh Crocker.

  “We went to a party in Blythesburg,” Carla added. “Winter of junior year.”

  “Stop right there. Retroactive worry is a mother’s prerogative—even though it’s totally pointless.”

  She waited. There had to be more. Her daughter didn’t need a specific reason to reach out—Bell loved their casual, spontaneous conversations, and had told Carla so, many times—but she could feel the looming weight of whatever it was that Carla had called her to talk about.

  “Sweetie?” Bell said. “What’s going on?”

  A pause, a brief throat-clearing, and then a flying wedge of words: “I need to come home, Mom. Right away. To Acker’s Gap. For good. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “But this weather—can’t you wait until Monday or Tuesday?”

  “You’re not listening to me. I have to come now. Roads will be clear by late morning. Promise I’ll be careful.”

  “One day can’t make that much diff—”

  “See you tomorrow, Mom.”

  Chapter Two

  Snow fell throughout the night. Behind it came a ferocious cold. The cold set in with a vengeance, sealing the snow in place like quick-drying mortar.

  The sun rose on a motionless world.

  Bell stood at her living room window, mesmerized by the transformation. She’d seen it before, of course, having lived through many winters—too many, she thought, feeling a stiffness in her right knee and a tweak in her left shoulder that testified to her four-and-a-half decades on the planet. But a total whiteout like this one was always a spectacular surprise.

  She was dressed in a pair of red plaid flannel sweatpants and a gargantuan gray sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was rubbed clean through at both elbows, one sleeve was ripped and the collar was unraveling. It was a look she did not even like to share with her mirror. But the getup was warm, dammit. And comfortable.

  It was just after seven a.m. She had a mug of coffee nestled in her cupped palms like a battered chalice in a low-rent religious ceremony. She tried a sip. Too hot—and so she blew on it, and then sipped again. Still too hot.

  Well, no matter. Throats could heal, right? Sure they could. She needed the coffee, and she needed it now.

  Down the hatch.

  She winced, instantly repenting of her decision to face the pain and drink it anyway, and then, as the deliciously bitter black coffee branched through her body like a liquid wake-up call, she repented of her repentance. She was ready now. Ready to face whatever the day might bring.

  She took another drink. She did not notice the heat anymore. She had a lot on her mind, and snow was the perfect backdrop for thinking. It was the original blank canvas.

  Carla would be arriving today.

  Today.

  The idea made Bell feel a little dizzy. There was still a slightly dreamlike quality to the idea of her daughter’s return, a gauzy, Can it really be so? sense of unreality. The fact that the actual picture spreading out in front of her was so altered from its usual state—it was a tidy, homogenized wash of white, not a tangled, unruly mess of brown yards and gray street and broken sidewalks—added to the surreal feeling, the feeling of a landscape and a life unplugged from their usual sources of color and action.

  Bell had yearned for Carla’s return for so long now that she had forgotten what it felt like to live without that fierce desire, that ache in the very center of her being. She had never told Carla how deeply she missed her, because she did not want her daughter to feel guilty about her choice. Bell never discussed it with her ex-husband, either, or with her best friend, Nick Fogelsong. It was the most profound truth of her life and she had kept it hidden, as if it were a guilty secret.

  And so the sadness had tunneled deeper inside her. Life closed back over it.

  Carla was coming home to reassess things. Okay, not just “things”—everything. That’s what she had told her mother last night toward the end of their phone conversation, after announcing that she simply had to drive there Sunday. No delay. She needed new skies. Well, new-old, anyway. She’d quit her job. Found someone to sublet her room in the Arlington house. Her car was already packed. She would hit the road first thing tomorrow—now, today—and point her Kia Soul in the direction of Acker’s Gap. She knew all about driving in heavy snow, she said. She’d checked the tread on her tires, had all the fluids topped off. She’d be fine.

  Bell was thrilled at the prospect of Carla’s return. Of course. Of course she was.

  But part of her wondered—she had to wonder, it was her responsibility to wonder—if a small, fading, isolated and economically bereft town in West Virginia, a place from which a lot of people seemed to run screaming the very first second they had the chance, was really where Carla belonged, long-term. Or for however long her daughter ended up staying.

  Clearly there was a lot more to this abrupt homecoming than Carla had let on; something had happened in the young woman’s life, something that Bell would have to question her about, slowly and carefully, once she was settled in. It was not the kind of detective work that Bell relished. But it was necessary.

  Carla’s bombshell had shoved everything else out of her mind, including Darlene Strayer’s request. Now it came back to her. She felt a touch of guilt about having forgotten so easily. She would talk to Rhonda Lovejoy. Ask her to spend a few hours poking around the care facility, asking questions.

  Done.

  Back to Carla.

  She envisioned her daughter’s long narrow face and short dark hair. The set of her chin. The sound of her voice. Carla had a lot of Bell in her, but she had a lot of her fat
her in her, too. She had Bell’s stubbornness and grit but she had Sam’s analytical skills. And his sense of humor. And his charm—that golden charm that accounted for so much of his success. Carla had her mother’s eyes and she had her father’s chin. She had parts of both of them. The combination was mysterious and wonderful and slightly daffy and mildly exasperating and—well, it just was. It was.

  Her love for Carla was like an underground river, sweeping along so fast and so deep inside her that she took the slight humming sound in the background of her life for granted. It was always, always running.

  Another swallow of coffee. Her throat, she hoped, had built up enough scar tissue in the last minute or so to handle the heat. Bell realized that she had been looking at the snow without actually seeing it. Now she squinted out the window, exploring the particulars.

  She gauged the snow’s depth to be about fifteen to eighteen inches. Not impenetrable, especially not for the heavy-duty, all-wheel-drive vehicles favored by people who lived in the midst of mountains—but something you had to consider, to factor into your plans, before leaving your house. Not a single tire track had yet marred the street’s frozen perfection. A county road crew would come along eventually. The slowpoke snowplow would do what it could. But the crew, quite rightly, would focus on the main arteries first. They might not reach the residential streets until late this afternoon.

  Now there was activity. Bell watched as a black Chevy Blazer fought its way through the thick drifts that striped Shelton Avenue like nature’s speed bumps. Every few feet the Blazer stalled out and fell back, stymied by ridge after ridge of stubborn snow. The driver was forced to put it briefly in reverse and then attack the street from another angle. The sound of the engine—the chopped-up vrrrr vrrrr vrrrr of its constant revving—had a kind of seething frustration embedded in it, and an Are you freakin’ kidding me? weariness, too. Bell assumed it was just channeling the feelings of the driver.

  The Blazer stopped in front of her house. “Stopped” was a generous interpretation; it really just stalled and then quit. The door flapped open. A man in a thick black overcoat and knee-high black boots fought his way out. He shuddered briefly at the cold. He closed the door behind him. Bell took note of what she’d seen a second ago but had willfully chosen to ignore: the round white county seal on the door, encircled by the words RAYTHUNE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.

  No question about it. This was official business.

  Bell scarcely had time to set her mug on the mantel and pull on a ratty, dignity-preserving bathrobe before the knocks came, a bluster of four serious-sounding assaults on the ancient oak door. There was a doorbell in plain sight, but for some reason, Deputy Jake Oakes—she’d recognized him as he lurched and plunged up the long front walk, or at least in the general vicinity of what constituted his best guess as to where the walk might be lurking under the snow, and then struggled up the porch steps—always preferred to knock, loud and long. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth, he’d told her once, and she wondered if he secretly missed using his fists on a regular basis.

  She opened the door. The deputy’s nose and cheeks were cherry-red from the cold. His blue eyes watered profusely. He seemed slightly stunned by the ordeal of having traveled on foot just a few yards in this weather. His lips, she saw, were cracked and flaking.

  “Sorry to barge in on you like this,” he said.

  Bell nodded. She did not know the details of the situation that had prompted his visit, but she was sure its essence could be summarized in a single word:

  Trouble.

  * * *

  Darlene Strayer’s body had been found just before sunrise. That’s what Oakes told her, his words flat and informational. He knew she preferred to hear it that way: cold facts arranged in chronological sequence. She didn’t appreciate hesitation. She didn’t like it when people hemmed and hawed and hedged, trying to pretty things up, temper the blow.

  A trucker named Felton Groves had come upon the mangled wreckage off to the side of the road. Darlene had been ejected from the Audi when it slammed into a pine tree about twenty yards beyond the tight interior curve of the nasty switchback. Groves was negotiating that same Help me Jesus stretch of the descent when he spotted the carnage, his headlights splashing up on the crusty white snow like a flung bucketful of some glittering substance.

  That description, Oakes said, glancing up from his notes, had come from Groves himself. The trucker fancied himself a bit of a poet.

  Groves had immediately realized what he was looking at: a driver’s fatal misjudgment. The vehicle, going too fast around the curve, had sailed clean off the road in a long solemn arc until the tree put a sudden stop to its progress. Groves pulled over, yanked on his emergency brake. He approached the scene. One quick glimpse was all he needed. The Audi’s front end was a corrugated mess. A torqued body lay facedown on a mound of snow about ten yards from the drastically foreshortened car.

  At that point, Groves said, all the poetry fled from his mind. He called 911. He did not check for a pulse. “Maybe I should have,” he’d murmured uncertainly to Deputy Oakes, once the paramedics had trussed up the driver on a gurney and slotted the gurney in the back and taken off. The light on top of the van spun around and around, draping the landscape in dire pulses of red, but the paramedic behind the wheel had to exercise restraint; the road surface was compromised by the heavy snowfall as yet untouched by any plow, and by at least an inch of ice under the snow. It was strange, Groves remarked to the deputy, to see an emergency vehicle just creeping along like that, tentative, reined in, only moving forward in small cautious spurts. “Yeah,” Oakes had said. “Sure is.”

  He still had nightmares, Groves had added—unprompted—to Oakes, on account of an accident scene he’d once come upon near Macon, Georgia, fifteen years ago. Eight kids, two parents, nobody wearing seat belts in a van that for some unknown reason had gone left of center and ended up smashing headfirst into a tractor-trailer rig. He’d stopped his truck that time, too, and jumped out. Once again, it was before the cops had gotten there, and the air was still quivering from the ferocious impact, as if the earth itself still could not believe what had just happened, the violence of it, the terrible surprise. The bodies looked like laundry tossed every which way in a ditch. He would never forget the sight.

  That was why he’d kept his distance when he saw the body in the snow, he told Deputy Oakes. That was why he hadn’t gone closer, hadn’t looked for signs of life, hadn’t called out, “Hey—you okay?” He knew she wasn’t okay. And frankly, he was worried about his sleep. For the rest of his life. He could not take on yet another reason for insomnia, another trigger. But it bothered him, just the same. “Maybe she was still alive. Maybe if I’d…”

  “No,” Oakes had replied. He was matter-of-fact about it, tapping the eraser end of the little pencil back into his shirt pocket, and then rebuttoning his overcoat against the phenomenal cold. You could not use a pen in these temperatures; the ink froze. “Guaranteed—she was dead when she hit the ground. Never had a chance.”

  Odd to find that consoling, Oakes would think later. Odd that instant death sounded like a blessing.

  But it was. Given the condition of the body, it was. Definitely, it was.

  * * *

  They had found Bell’s name on a handwritten note in the victim’s coat pocket. That was why the deputy was here now. He had written down the words of the note in his little spiral-bound book; the original was in an evidence bag, stowed in a locked room at the courthouse. This was not a criminal investigation—it was an accident, plain and simple—but they did things right in Raythune County.

  “The paper said, ‘Bell Elkins. Eight p.m. Tie Yard Tavern.’ And then your cell number.” Oakes looked up from his notebook to meet Bell’s eye. “Car was registered to an Alice Darlene Strayer. Nobody’s made the formal ID yet—we’re having a hell of a time locating a next of kin, there’s no answer on the home phone—but the body matches the photo on the driver’s lice
nse. And on her federal ID. Looks like it was expired—the federal ID, not the license—but she still had it in her purse.”

  “Yes,” Bell said.

  She was too stunned at first to offer more than one word. It was impossible to believe. Just a few hours ago she had been sitting with her in the bar. She could remember the way Darlene’s hand looked when she lifted the whiskey glass. She could remember the sound of her voice, the expression on her face. And now all of it—the hand, the voice, the face—was gone. Darlene Strayer was dead.

  Bell realized that she and Oakes were standing in the foyer, facing each other, in radically different states of attire. She wore a pink chenille robe and sweats and slippers. He wore a brown uniform and a black wool greatcoat, and a black toboggan instead of his usual flat-brimmed hat. The snow was melting from his boots onto the wide-plank flooring. Already two pools had formed around his feet.

  In other circumstances, the disparity in their appearances would have amused them. Neither commented upon it now. Not even Oakes, who presumably kept a few choice wisecracks on ice just in case he ever encountered a prosecutor in a bathrobe.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I needed to notify you ASAP. And get a few basic facts for the timeline.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He sensed her shock and kept his demeanor businesslike. Normally, Jake Oakes was a joker, a scamp, a cutup; he and Bell often clashed over his reliance on the inappropriate quip as his primary communication tool. Not today. He was suitably serious. She appreciated that.

  “We met at the Tie Yard last night,” Bell went on. “I know Darlene from law school. Haven’t seen her in years. She’s originally from Barr County. Lives in D.C. now. But she wanted to get together. She left the bar just a few minutes before I did. And she’s a good driver, far as I know.” Bell realized she was still in the grip of the present tense. It was too soon to change.

  “Right.” He wrote some words in his notebook.

  “And like I said, she left before me. Why didn’t I come across the accident? It doesn’t make sense.”