Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  Chapter Five

  Rhonda Lovejoy leaned over Bell’s desk from the opposite side and deftly executed a document dump. The tall stack of printouts hit with a wallop. The top several pages slid to one side like a drifting snowbank, bumping up against Bell’s coffee mug.

  “Everything you ever wanted to know about Ava Hendricks,” Rhonda declared.

  It was just after eight on Monday morning. The overnight snow hadn’t materialized, after all. Good thing: The town was still digging out from under what was now commonly referred to as the Saturday Night Massacre. It snowed every winter in these mountain valleys, but rarely did it snow this much all in one go.

  In the downtown area, the plow had pushed the snow into tall piles that brooded over the corners of major intersections, creating a mini-Stonehenge effect. Driving to the courthouse that morning, Bell could have sworn she saw a couple of Druids chanting and gesturing oddly at the base of an obelisk, but it turned out to be adolescents in gray hoodies with floppy sleeves who were posing for selfies next to snow piles.

  “And by the way,” Rhonda added. “Real sorry about your friend. That road’s bad news in the ice and snow. Curves’ll sneak up on you.”

  “Thanks.” Bell moved the mug so that it wouldn’t be in the way if the stack shifted again. “What’d you find out?”

  “Hendricks is a big deal. Head of neurosurgery at George Washington University Hospital. Pretty amazing credentials. I found a ton of stuff on the Internet—interviews, profiles, award citations.”

  “So she’s solid.”

  “Solid? Yeah, I’d say so.” Rhonda lifted her eyebrows and lowered her chin, her standard Wait’ll you get a load of this pose. “Born in Boston. Everybody in the family’s a doctor. Even the cat, I bet. Oh, and then there’s—um, let me see here—oh, yeah. Columbia med school, residency at Mass General, surgical fellowship at Johns Hopkins. A ton of commendations for community service. There aren’t a lot of neurosurgeons, period. And female neurosurgeons? We’re talking really rare. Endangered-species rare.”

  Two chairs faced Bell’s desk. Rhonda picked the one on the left. She was a large woman who moved with nimbleness and grace. If Bell had been asked to come up with a phrase that defined her assistant, she would have said that Rhonda was comfortable in her own skin. She possessed a distinctive sense of style that Bell admired without ever feeling the slightest desire to emulate. Today her assistant wore a white wool cable-knit sweater with flecks of red and gold thread, an orange scarf, and purple wool slacks. Her bright blond hair was stacked on top of her head and secured there by a combination of hope and hair spray.

  After a brief pause to enable Rhonda to situate herself, Bell spoke.

  “Did you enjoy your weekend?” The topic-switch was abrupt. And the words sounded rehearsed, because they were. Bell was trying to be friendlier to her staff these days. Lee Ann Frickie had recently used the words “prickly” and “moody” to describe Bell’s behavior as a boss, and it bothered her, so much so that she had lashed out at Lee Ann—thereby proving her secretary’s point.

  “I mean,” Bell added, “with the snow and all.”

  Rhonda was flummoxed, and looked it. Bell did not make small talk, especially small talk about the weather, for God’s sake, and this felt an awful lot like small talk. About the weather, no less.

  What was going on?

  “It was fine,” Rhonda said. Cautiously.

  “Good.” Social niceties over, they could get back to business. Bell placed a hand on top of the stack. “Looks like you were thorough.”

  “I brought you anything even remotely relevant. Hick finally fixed the printer in our office, so I didn’t have to run all over the courthouse looking for one I could cabbage onto. Last week they almost threw me out of the assessor’s office. I tied up their printer for an hour and a half, trying to print out all those motions in the Vickers case.”

  Hickey Leonard was Raythune County’s other assistant prosecutor. Bell was fortunate to have two. Most West Virginia counties as small as this one had only a prosecutor and no assistants at all. It wasn’t a question of workload; there were always plenty of cases. It was a question of money. Pressured by a steady drop in revenue as coal mines shut down and businesses closed up and families moved away in multiples, the majority of counties could not afford the luxury of assistant prosecutors.

  But Bell was lucky: Two-thirds of the Raythune County commissioners owed their political success to Hickey Leonard, and he never let them forget it. He had lived every second of his sixty-seven years in Acker’s Gap, as had his father and mother before him. He knew which skeletons rattled in which closets belonging to which commissioners, and if there was ever any talk about cutting the budget for the prosecutor’s office and maybe getting rid of him or Rhonda, all Hick had to do was show up at a commission meeting and, while the minutes of the last meeting were being read, tug a small spiral-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit coat and thumb through the first few pages he came to, brow furrowed, mouth bunched in a thoughtful frown as if he had forgotten the particulars of some especially heinous incident but—oh, my!—here those particulars were, written down in all of their lurid shamefulness. And then he would look up and catch the eye of one of the commissioners—Bucky Barnes, say, or Sammy Burdette or Carl Gilmore or Pearl Sykes—and, still holding the eyes of that suddenly nervous person, he would lick his finger and use it to turn to yet another page of the notebook, slowly, slowly, while shaking his head ever so slightly as if to say, You think you know a person, but no. No, you don’t. Not when you see what they’re truly capable of, when no one’s looking. Or at least when they think no one’s looking.

  It was a form of soft blackmail that once upon a time would have disgusted Bell, but she was a different person now from the one she had been when she first came back to Acker’s Gap, stuffed uncomfortably full of idealism and judgment, in addition to being headstrong, snippy, and quickly notorious as a know-it-all. She had changed. She had been forced to change, if she wanted to accomplish anything. Now she appreciated Hick’s regularly scheduled performance. It meant that Bell was able to keep him and Rhonda Lovejoy on the payroll, and she needed them. More to the point, the county needed them.

  And besides: She’d had a peek at that notebook of his. The pages were blank.

  “I appreciate you pulling all this together so fast this morning,” Bell said. “I’m sure Dr. Hendricks will be paying us a visit. Apparently she and Darlene were together a long time. And a grieving spouse is going to want some answers.”

  “Yeah. Well. About that. Jake Oakes said that when he finally reached her—apparently you have to go through about twenty-eleven layers of hospital bureaucracy to even get her on the phone—she was, like, ‘Okay, thanks.’ Pretty weird, he said. For somebody whose whole life just changed.”

  “People grieve in their own way.”

  Rhonda put a funny squint on her face. “I do sort of wonder about them.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “About—well, you know.”

  “Not a clue. Wonder what?”

  “I mean…” Rhonda discovered a phantom speck of lint on the sleeve of her sweater that she needed to remove. The gesture took a very long time. Too long. She was stalling.

  “What are you getting at?” Bell said. Her voice was brusque. She had a full schedule today. And she had asked Carla to meet her for lunch at JP’s, the diner down the block from the courthouse, after her job interview. The list of things Bell had to accomplish between now and the moment she slid into a booth at JP’s, clamping her hands around a mug of hot coffee, was dauntingly long.

  “Well,” Rhonda said, “I just mean that—well, usually you think that women who are—well, together, you know, in that way, you just assume it’s because…” She was struggling.

  At this point Bell understood perfectly well what Rhonda was trying to say, and was determined not to help her out. She was surprised at her assistant’s attitude, but then again, except
for Rhonda’s time at West Virginia University and then its College of Law, she had lived all thirty-three years of her life within a stone’s throw of the Raythune County Courthouse, in the shadow of which diversity did not exactly flourish.

  Still, Rhonda was a bright woman, and usually an open-minded, wide-souled one, and Bell was disappointed in her. Bell consoled herself with the thought that everyone had to start somewhere.

  “Explain,” Bell said curtly.

  “You just naturally assume,” Rhonda said, starting again, but haltingly, “that it’s because they can’t get a boyfriend or a husband, right? And so they finally just give up and get involved with each other as a kind of—well, I mean—”

  “As a kind of what?”

  “As a kind of substitute. Next best thing. But your friend—she was really pretty. And this woman…” Rhonda gestured toward the stack of printouts she’d left on Bell’s desk. “This woman’s a brain surgeon, for heaven’s sake. And she’s attractive, too, if those photos got it right. Bet she doesn’t have a lick of trouble finding men who want to go out with her. But somehow the both of them ended up…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  Bell did it for her. “They ended up with each other. By conscious choice. Not desperation.”

  “Totally.” Rhonda looked relieved. “So you do get what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Come on, Bell. You know the point I’m trying to make.”

  “Maybe you’d better enlighten me.”

  Her assistant looked around the room dismally. She was clearly regretting the topic she had introduced. Major blunder. She’d just remembered that Bell, despite being born and raised in Acker’s Gap, was not really One of Them. Bell had started out that way—but then she left. When she came back, she wasn’t anymore. That was how it worked.

  Bell read the sentiment right off Rhonda’s distressed face. And waited.

  “Okay, fine,” Rhonda said, peeved at being put on the spot. “But would you ever want to be in a relationship with a woman?”

  Bell smiled. “Sorry, but I’m already spoken for. Anyway, I don’t believe in workplace romances.”

  “No—wait—I didn’t mean…”

  Bell let her sputter and blush for a few seconds. Then she reached for a file folder on the far side of her desk. She opened it. “Let’s get back to work.”

  For the next hour they went over the latest developments in the county’s case against a man named Charles Leroy Vickers. The charge was aggravated assault. There was a simpler phrase for the fancy label “aggravated assault,” Bell had learned after her first few years as a prosecutor in these parts: using a broken-off beer bottle during a bar fight. The trial had been postponed several times. First Vickers grabbed his gut in his jail cell one day, claiming illness; his attorney demanded that he be hospitalized. After several weeks of tests and Jell-O, Vickers decided that he was feeling much better, thanks. Next came a string of frivolous motions by the defense. “It’s like they think we’ll just get frustrated and give up and go away,” Rhonda had said last week, as she and Bell went over strategy. The Vickers case was the first one that Rhonda had been assigned to handle all on her own—not as second chair to Bell or Hick Leonard.

  Now there was a new trial date—a week from today in Judge Tolliver’s courtroom. “Unless,” Rhonda said, as she accepted the transcript of a deposition that Bell was handing her, “Charlie-boy gets a toenail fungus and we have to wait for him to heal up.” She had read this transcript multiple times already. She had made notes about her notes. And then more notes about those notes.

  “Pretty good chance you’ll actually be starting next week,” Bell said. “You feel ready, right?”

  “I’ve been ready for three months.”

  “Good.” Bell set aside the legal pad that contained her prosecutorial to-do list on the Vickers case. “So you’ll have some time this week.”

  “Absolutely. And I’d appreciate another assignment. Take my mind off things while I wait for the trial.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Bell gripped the arms of her chair and leaned back. She let her gaze wander around her office for a moment, taking in the glass-fronted bookcases and their brood of maroon law books, the painted plaster walls that always looked scabby and slightly damp, and finally the tall leaded window that looked out on the snow-beleaguered streets of Acker’s Gap. Few people strolled those streets today. It was too cold. Fronds of bright white frost were printed across each pane, a curt reminder of the outside temperature and the perils of poorly caulked windows. “You up for taking a little drive this afternoon? By yourself, I mean? I can’t promise it’ll be easy. Some of those county roads haven’t been cleared off yet.”

  “Let me at ’em,” Rhonda said eagerly. “I’ve been using my cousin Rodney’s truck to get around in. He’s got a brand-new Silverado. The tires alone are higher than any of those snow piles out there. Where am I going?”

  “The place where Darlene Strayer’s father died. That new Alzheimer’s care facility over in Muth County.”

  “Thornapple Terrace.”

  “So you know it?”

  “My grandmother’s best friend, Connie Dollar, is the assistant head of housekeeping.”

  And that, Bell reminded herself with satisfaction, was the great glory and verified value of Rhonda Lovejoy: She either knew or was related to a good four-fifths of Raythune County and the counties adjacent to it, which meant she could slide with ease into places and conversations without disturbing the surface area.

  She was a good assistant prosecutor, now that Bell had cured her of unfortunate habits such as procrastination and a tendency toward verbosity when nervous—but she was a great investigator. And every prosecutor needed a great investigator. Not every prosecutor could afford one—but every prosecutor needed one. In an office as small and as poor as this one, the fact that Bell could rely on Rhonda to do the digging—and to do it discreetly and reliably and effectively—was a blessing beyond measure.

  Bell was still disappointed by Rhonda’s bigotry toward lifestyles that did not look like those she saw all around her every day—but she could teach Rhonda to be more tolerant. That would come. What she couldn’t teach—to anybody, including herself—was the subtle art that made Rhonda a dogged bloodhound of an investigator. It was a gift.

  “Excellent,” Bell said. “I’d like you to poke around a bit. Talk to the staff about Harmon Strayer’s death. If there’s any blowback, you can reassure the director that it’s just a routine inquiry—because, quite frankly, that’s what it is.”

  “Do you remember the news stories about that Alzheimer’s place back East? Couple of years ago? Turns out this crazy nurse wanted to put the patients out of their misery. So she added a little something—a lethal something—to their morning orange juice. Her motives were pure. But she still went to jail.”

  Bell shook her head. “As a friend of mine used to say, there’s only room for one God. And the job’s already taken.” She moved the stack of papers. It was a signal to Rhonda that the meeting was almost over. “Strayer’s death certificate said natural causes. Nothing suspicious. So this is probably a waste of time. But I’ll still feel better if we go through the motions. Maybe we can help Darlene’s partner find some peace—once she knows that both deaths were accidental. So just gather up any details you can find about the old man’s passing. And anything else that’s going on out there.”

  Rhonda used a thumb and a finger to flash a small round O of acknowledgment. “If it happens at the Terrace,” she said, “you’ll know about it.” She turned at the door. “Oh, and I meant to ask—how’s Carla doing? She’s back, right?”

  Bell had not said a word to her about Carla’s return. Rhonda just knew it, the way she knew about everything. Sometimes a gift could be a nuisance, too.

  * * *

  It took Carla a good five minutes to shed all the winter gear in which she’d wrapped herself in a futile defense against the cold. She lifted of
f her earmuffs, pulled her knit cap off sideways, unwound her scarf, struggled out of her long wool coat, peeled off her mittens, and untucked her trouser cuffs from the tops of her sopping-wet boots. It felt to her like the slowest and least-sexy striptease in the history of the world as she removed one heavy item after another and then hung it on the coat tree next to Sally McArdle’s desk.

  “I think,” Carla said, “I’m melting on your carpet.” The snow sliding off her boots was steadily darkening the beige.

  “Don’t worry about it. Winter’s winter.”

  McArdle hadn’t gotten up when Carla came in. Carla knew why. She knew because she’d grown up in this town, for the most part, and when you’d grown up here, you knew things like the fact that Sally McArdle had had her left leg amputated on account of her diabetes on the day after her fifty-eighth birthday, which was ten years ago. Getting up and down was difficult for her.

  Wow. I know two different people who’ve had a leg amputated, Carla suddenly realized. The other was Clay Meckling, her mother’s boyfriend. He had been trapped beneath a heavy beam after an explosion. Two people: What were the odds? Infinitesimal, probably. Well, maybe not in Acker’s Gap.

  Why hadn’t it struck her before? Maybe because she never thought of either one of them—not Clay, and not this old woman—in terms of lack. They were strong, both of them. You did not focus on what wasn’t there. You focused on what was.

  Or maybe it wasn’t as noble as all that. Maybe she was just obtuse. Inattentive. Preoccupied with her own problems—such as the fact that, while she’d slept better last night than at any time in the past six months, she’d still woken up with a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach, like something dark and greasy that hadn’t gotten washed down the drain when it should have.

  “Have a seat,” McArdle said. Her voice was gruff, but it was an abstract, professional-grade gruffness. It didn’t mean that she didn’t like you. Carla knew that, too. She had spent a lot of her Saturday mornings here when she was in middle school and the first two years of high school, rooting through the stacks, searching for a book for a class assignment—or, more desperately, for a book that would verify that there really was a world beyond this one, a world beyond the narrow streets and throwback attitudes of a small mountain town.