by Julia Keller
The truth, Bell believed, was that it could not be explained. And even if it could—would you really want it to be?
Truth. The word lay like a lead weight on Bell’s mind. On her way back into town she had checked in with the Raythune County coroner, Buster Crutchfield. Time to tell Ava what she’d learned, as hard as it might be for this woman to hear about the partner she had cherished and respected.
“I know Darlene was active in AA,” Bell said, “but the investigating officer believed alcohol was a factor in her accident. The coroner confirmed it. Her blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit.”
“Yes,” Ava said. “I know.”
“How do you—?”
“I spoke to your coroner this morning. At length. Don’t look so shocked. I’m a physician, Mrs. Elkins. And so is he. There’s a thing called professional courtesy. Anyway, he told me about the blood work and toxicology report. Darlene was obviously impaired. Getting behind the wheel of a car in the state she was in—well, it was reckless and irresponsible. No question.”
“So if you know all that, what makes you think her death was suspicious?”
“Darlene was afraid. She’d had some threatening calls.”
“Did she contact the police about them?”
Ava placed the mug carefully on Bell’s desk. “No. She didn’t. I advised her not to. She had no proof, no recordings—it was only her word about the calls—and I told her they wouldn’t believe her.”
Bell felt a faint itch of impatience. “Okay, I’m still in the dark here. Who was supposedly threatening her—and why? And you just acknowledged that the evidence proves she was drunk when she started down that mountain Saturday night. So how could foul play have been involved?”
Ava answered the second question first. “Both could be true. She was drunk—and someone ran her off that road. Or tampered with her car.”
“Look, Dr. Hendricks, I—”
“Call me Ava. If we’re going to be working together, we need to lose the formality. I’ll call you Bell.”
“Whatever.” Bell’s impatience was growing. She would deal later with the “working together” fallacy. There was nothing to work on. “So I’ll ask you again. Who might have been threatening her? Someone she prosecuted in federal court? Someone in organized crime, maybe?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Then who?”
“Darlene believed that someone at Thornapple Terrace was complicit in her father’s death. Maybe it was just negligence or maybe it was outright murder—she didn’t know. She was collecting evidence. Interviewing the staff. They knew she was getting close. So they killed her, too.” Ava’s composure slipped for a moment. Her lip quivered. She swallowed hard. By the time she spoke again, she was back in control of herself. “I don’t have a lot of details. And no description of the calls—just that the caller was male, or sounded that way to Darlene, anyway—and that he warned her to stop asking questions about her father’s death. She wasn’t sure why Harmon had been targeted. Maybe it wasn’t personal. Maybe he’d been picked at random. She didn’t know. Her investigation had just started. Darlene didn’t tell me much more than she told you on Saturday night.”
“Why not?” For God’s sake, Bell wanted to exclaim, you were her partner, right? Why the hell did she hold back? Why didn’t she give you every speck of information she had uncovered thus far?
Ava’s eyes softened.
“Because she loved me,” she replied. “And she didn’t want to put me in danger. The more I knew, she said, the greater the risk. Given what happened to her up on that mountain, I’d say her apprehension was justified.”
“Or it could be,” came Bell’s sharp response, “that she was paranoid, and her judgment was clouded by grief, and her suspicions were baseless, and she was beginning to realize that and was embarrassed by it, and so she was wallowing in self-pity on Saturday night, and after talking to me she just decided to get drunk in a bar and—in effect—kill herself. It could be that, too.”
Bell hated her own harshness, but she was tired, and the world outside her window was getting colder and darker every minute, and there was no way to do anything more for Darlene Strayer than to mourn her and to wish that she had been able to accept her father’s death from natural causes. Yes, Bell had promised Ava to look into the accident, but her visit to the Terrace that morning had yielded nothing of note. The additional deaths were explicable. Everything made sense.
It was time to be honest with Darlene’s partner.
It was time to stop indulging the highly unlikely notion that a conspiracy was brewing at an Alzheimer’s facility in Muth County, West Virginia, a conspiracy to do—what? To rid the world of octogenarians with bushel-baskets of serious health problems and the inability to recall which end of the toothbrush they ought to use?
No. The truth here was not dramatic or sinister. It was ordinary: A very old man with a very bad disease had died. End of story.
Ava seemed taken aback by Bell’s brusqueness. Her umbrage was almost immediately superseded by a kind of snippy stoicism. “All right,” Ava said. “Then I don’t suppose there’s anything more for us to discuss. Thank you for your time.” She stood up, tapping the rim of the mug with two fingers as she did so. “And for the coffee.”
Bell watched her gather up her coat and her purse. “You’ll let me know the date and time for Darlene’s service?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be back in D.C., I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“And that eight-year-old.” Bell had to know. “She died, right?”
“What?”
“The child you operated on. You said there were complications.”
“There were.”
“So I’m guessing she passed away.”
“No. She’s holding her own. Chances are, she’ll make a full recovery.”
I have to remember, Bell thought. I have to remember that happy endings do exist. It’s easy to forget. Because I’ve seen so few of them lately.
* * *
By seven p.m. Bell was thinking not about crime and punishment, but about spaghetti and meatballs. She had promised to make dinner for her and Carla. So she stopped at Lymon’s Market on her way home to pick up the ground beef and the tomato sauce and the spices. Her intention had been to leave the courthouse much earlier—but that was always her intention, and it was usually an unfulfilled one.
Lymon’s parking lot was almost empty. When Bell opened the door of her Explorer, a freezing wind fought her for control of the handle. Twice she skidded on the icy pavement, barely catching herself before she ended up flat on her ass. Opal Lymon constantly harangued her staff to keep this lot cleared and well-salted, but even when they did, once the sun went down and the temperature dropped, the melty runoff from a day’s worth of parked cars froze into a dangerous black glaze. Moreover, snow had started again, a thick continuous shimmer of flakes that rapidly stacked up. By the time she reached the front door and watched it slide open automatically, Bell’s hair was wet.
God, she thought. I hate winter.
It was nearly closing time, so she had to be quick about her business. She’d just put a jar of Ragu into her cart when her cell rang. She made a quick bet with herself that it was Carla. What else would her daughter be reminding her to pick up at the market? Of course: Cap’n Crunch. Carla had been disappointed to discover that, once she’d moved out four years ago, her mother did not still keep multiple boxes in stock in the pantry.
“Hey,” Bell said. She jammed the phone between her ear and an upraised shoulder. She needed to keep shopping while she chatted.
“Boss.” It definitely wasn’t Carla. “I’m over at my grandmother’s house. Grandma Lovejoy.”
“Hi, Rhonda.” Bell was holding up a second jar of Ragu. Should she? She could always freeze the extra batch. Yes: two jars, definitely.
“I hate to bother you, but Grandma’s kind of upset.”
“What’s wrong?”
Bell did not want to be rude or impatient with Rhonda, but she needed to finish her shopping and get home. And she was unclear as to why this was any of her business.
“Rhonda, I—”
“Connie works at the Terrace, remember? She’s in housekeeping. She’s gotten to be good friends with an aide named Marcy Coates. Marcy’s the one who found those residents who died. They gave her a few days off—she’s been real upset about it, and no wonder. Well, Grandma was calling Connie because she knew Connie was worried about Marcy. And that Connie planned to go over to check on Marcy tonight.”
Bell’s head was starting to hurt. The maze of relationships in Rhonda’s world often had a byzantine quality that you tried to chart at your peril. “I’m a little busy here. Can we talk later?”
“Bell, listen. Please. Grandma talked to Connie’s husband, Luke. Turns out Connie went over to Marcy’s house three hours ago. And nobody’s heard from either one of them since. It’s over off Hanging Rock Road. Marcy doesn’t answer her home phone. Neither one’s answering her cell.”
“Maybe their cells are down in the bottom of their purses. Happens. And the landline’s out. Has anybody gone over there to check?”
“That’s why I’m calling you. Luke drove out to Marcy’s place. We just heard from him. Says Connie’s car is there, and Marcy’s, too, but there’s nobody home. The front door’s wide open. Cold as it is, that doesn’t make any sense. Luke says the door is just swinging back and forth on the hinges. Says he found signs of a struggle inside—chairs on their backs, dishes knocked off the kitchen table. The home phone’s been pulled clean out of the wall.”
Bell did not like the sound of this. She felt a tingling in her fingertips.
“Call Sheriff Harrison,” she said. “Right away.”
“I did. She’s on another call. So she’s sending Deputy Oakes.”
“Good.” She didn’t realize how hard she was gripping the handle of the grocery cart. She looked down. The knuckles of her hand were drained of color. “Rhonda, call Luke back and tell him to get out of there. Get out of the house. Just go sit in his car—with the doors locked—’til Jake gets there.” By now the tingling was moving through the rest of her body, splitting into separate filaments, branching out. She had been feeling cold all day but now she was even colder. It was a different kind of cold. It was the cold of foreboding.
“Bell, what do you think is going—”
“Just call him, Rhonda. Just tell him to sit tight, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. And you stay there with your grandmother. Don’t leave her.” She’s going to need you, Bell thought. If the news is as bad as I think it might be, she’s definitely going to need you.
* * *
They found the dog first. Marcy’s rambunctious border collie, Nadine, had had her throat cut, and then, based on the blood trail that Luke Dollar missed in the darkness but that the deputies would later discover, had staggered crookedly out of the house in a daze of mortal pain. She collapsed in the snow about a dozen yards from the front porch. Later, the people who had known Marcy Coates would say they were not at all surprised at the dog’s behavior; Nadine was a noble and resolute warrior. Whoever had gone after the women would have had a real fight on his hands, getting past Nadine.
It took Oakes and a second deputy, Charlie Mathers, another twenty minutes to locate the bodies of Connie Dollar and Marcy Coates. The deputies had searched in an ever-widening radius with the house as the center point, moving through the densely packed snow in which they repeatedly sank to the tops of their boots. They fought for visibility through the silvery haze of snowfall. They wove their way between the trees, trees that looked like black stakes jammed randomly into the snow as if searching desperately for its heart.
And then the heavy-duty flashlights illuminated a gruesome tableau. The two old women lay on their backs at the base of a tree about three-quarters of a mile away, on a white mound of snow, limbs twisted like an Egyptian hieroglyphic. They were holding hands. By now, the snow had almost covered them over.
Connie had been shot twice in the chest. Another bullet had caught Marcy full in the face. The sight of the carnage caused Deputy Mathers to stagger backward a few steps, lurch to his left, and vomit up his dinner—pork chops, applesauce, and corn bread—in the snow, after which he dragged his wrist across his mouth and apologized, an apology to which Oakes responded: Forget it. Only reason I didn’t upchuck myself is ’cause I ain’t had my dinner yet.
The women were not wearing coats, only the long-sleeved wool dresses and support hose they’d been wearing when they were surprised—or so the investigators would later theorize—by the intruder. They had not had time to grab their coats or their boots. While the dog held off the assailant as long as possible, until her throat was slashed, the women had bolted out the back door, making a run for it through the fast-falling snow.
They must have blundered and crashed across the freezing woods as best they could—Marcy with her bad hip and her peripheral neuropathy, and Connie with the extra sixty pounds she’d been carrying since the birth of her third child, forty-one years ago, and a painful lack of cartilage in her right knee—and given up only when it became clear that they had to. They were at the end of the line. They must have been able to hear their pursuer as he chased them, getting closer and closer. They might have been able to hear his breathing. Certainly, they would have heard him thrashing through the woods just as they had done a few seconds earlier, only much, much faster, batting away the snow in front of his eyes, tearing at the vines and branches. Relentless.
And then, the evidence appeared to show, they had understood that they were not going to be able to escape. At that point, they had turned and faced their attacker. They joined hands. Connie’s friends would smile at that detail—later, months later, once those friends had gotten over the shock and the grief and could finally contemplate a thing like smiling, which at first had seemed impossible—and say, Yes, that’s our Connie, that’s exactly what Connie would have done. With the end so near, with death a certainty, she would have reached out her hand and taken her friend’s hand, so that neither one of them would face it alone. Connie’s husband Luke Dollar said so, too. She’d have done that. That was pure Connie, he said.
Holding hands, looking their killer straight in the eye through the whispery scrim of snow, they waited for the shotgun blasts that had not been long in coming—or so their loved ones hoped, knowing the agony of anticipating the grimly inevitable.
Chapter Eight
She needed to talk to Nick.
Two days had passed since the night when Connie Dollar and Marcy Coates were found dead at the base of the tree. Heavy snowfall had obscured any usable clues. A search of the house and repeated sweeps of the area had turned up nothing.
The conviction had gripped Bell suddenly: I have to talk to Nick Fogelsong. So even though she had just settled herself at her desk on Friday morning, she sprang up again, pulling on her coat, ignoring Lee Ann’s perplexed and even slightly alarmed look as she left.
She parked in front of the long, low, cedar-shingled house and walked around the north side, heading for the backyard. The walks bore no evidence of the week’s repeated bouts of snow; they were cleaned down to the quick. Nick was a demon with a shovel.
She was not in the least concerned when she heard the pop! of a gunshot as she rounded the back corner. She had expected it. It was the quality of the sound, not its presence, that intrigued her. Cold air changed everything. Sound waves traveled faster in warmer air than in cooler; the cold muddied the sounds, knocking the sharpness out of them. She heard another pop! and then two more in succession: pop-pop!
The regularity of the shots—the way they were spaced out, the orderly rhythm of them—meant target practice, not random gunfire. Nick was trying to get his marksmanship skills back. A year ago he’d had an inj
ury, a serious one, and the nerve damage in his right arm was a hill he just might not be able to climb. Ever. But no one said that to his face.
“Hey,” Bell called out. She knew better than to sneak up on a man with a gun. You made your presence known, loud and clear and often. If she’d had a bugle, she would have tooted it.
He lowered his weapon. He turned around. He grunted a greeting.
Nick was wearing a gray plaid Woolrich coat and boots, a workingman’s clothes, but the dress pants were the giveaway. He had a desk job now, an executive position. Until recently, he had been sheriff of Raythune County. He had held that position for many years, and for the last portion of them, he had been Bell’s confidante and partner in keeping peace in the region—but not anymore. He had gone another way. She had finally forgiven him, but it was a long time coming.
“Heard about those poor old ladies out on Hanging Rock Road,” he said. “Any leads?”
“No.” She crossed her arms, jamming her hands up into her armpits. “It’s damned cold out here, Nick. Can we go inside to talk?”
He nodded. “One more?”
“Sure.”
He turned back to the cardboard target he had suspended from a pair of thin black cables that traversed the back of his property. On the target was a sketch of the top half of a man’s body; the man was crouching, a revolver in his hand. Tiny circles with numbers on them radiated out from the man’s center of gravity, the numbers getting smaller as the size of the circles increased. Nick bent his knees, brought both hands up on the Glock, held his arms out in front of his body—not rigid, but relaxed and natural—and aimed and fired. The pop! ricocheted off the white-hooded mountains in the distance, but in the frigid air, it never achieved the wincing sharpness of a classic echo.
The target jumped and shuddered. He holstered his pistol and pulled at the parallel cables, hand over hand, until the target came close enough for him to snatch it off the line. He checked it out. He had hit it very close to the center.