Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  Okay, Bell had replied. She was glad to have Sam make the decisions. Her own judgment seemed highly suspect to her these days.

  Sam had spent most of Friday evening, he told Bell, working the phones. Working his sources. Pulling strings and trading a favor now for a reciprocal one to be named later. Warren Etherington, chief counsel for the development company that owned the mall? An old pal from Sam’s earliest days as a D.C. lawyer. If the store was reimbursed for the cost of the damaged merchandise, they would agree to drop the shoplifting and vandalism charges. “And if the judge is in a good mood and overlooks the fact that Carla missed the preliminary hearing,” Sam went on, “we can probably get her off with some community service.” No felony arrest record. A record which could, Bell knew, stand squarely in the way of so many things Carla might want to do with her life someday—law school, business school, law enforcement, a teaching career.

  So Bell was relieved. Sort of.

  If Sam fixed this for her, smoothed it over, would Carla assume she would never have to atone for the bad choices she made? Would she become chronically irresponsible? Was Sam—with Bell’s blessing—dooming their daughter to a life of excuses and underachievement? Or would Carla make this moment a turning point, and deal with the painful flashbacks, and never get into serious trouble again? There was no way to know. No certainty.

  To intervene or not to intervene: That was always the question with someone you loved. Were you creating a monster—or enabling a fulfilling life?

  Her cell rang. It was Clay, she saw.

  “Hey,” she said. She spoke softly, even though there was no one else in the house, no one she would be disturbing. She had a powerful sense-memory of Clay’s body next to hers, and the memory made her want to keep her voice silky-low. “You make it home okay?”

  “Only spun out half a dozen times. Only got stuck in a few ditches. I’m fine.”

  She laughed. “Good. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Do you mean that, Bell?”

  She had intended it as the cliché it was, as a throwaway line, and he had taken it seriously. As a declaration. But the fact was, she could not handle that—she could not handle any sort of discussion of their relationship—right now. She had to deal with her daughter.

  She ignored his question. “Sleep well,” she said, in an even softer voice. He would understand.

  “Everything okay with Carla?”

  “It will be.”

  A few minutes later Bell heard a sound from the front of the house. It was a light step, hitting the porch. Carla was home.

  * * *

  Bell watched Sam’s car all the way to the end of Shelton Avenue. It was astonishingly cold out here on the porch at this early hour, but she had bundled up for it, knowing she would want to wave until her husband and her daughter were officially out of sight; it made her happy to see Carla turning around in her seat and waving back, the gesture just barely visible through a rear windshield stamped with frost.

  The car rounded the corner, and then it was as if it had never been here at all. Only the parallel tire marks in the new snow—that narrow herringbone pattern made by the expensive tires on Sam’s Lexus—remained behind to suggest that a vehicle had come and gone. Otherwise the world did not stir, locked as it was in the deep freeze of a winter dawn. The neighborhood was still under wraps, the roofs submerged under snow, the yards entombed in it, the curtains shut tight to keep in the heat provided by beleaguered furnaces. No lights were on behind those curtains.

  Before Sam had arrived to ferry Carla back to Arlington, she and Bell had had a chance to talk. They assumed their usual positions in the living room—Bell in her run-down chair, Carla cross-legged on the couch—and tried to sort through the last few days.

  “You should have told me,” Bell said. She kept her voice calm and even. Losing her temper with Carla would accomplish nothing. “Right when you got here. You should have told me what you’re dealing with.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not the easiest person in the world to talk to, Mom.” Carla settled her head back against the couch cushion. She seemed fascinated by the living room ceiling.

  “How so?”

  Carla hesitated. “Because nothing I’ve ever experienced—no matter how bad—can ever be as terrible as what you went through as a kid, okay? Aunt Shirley, too. And you both survived. So it’s pretty lame of me to complain about the kind of shit that’s been coming my way.”

  Bell was startled. She had never considered trauma a competitive sport. And it had never occurred to her that Carla might think of Bell’s own resiliency as intimidating.

  “You can always talk to me,” Bell said. “About anything.”

  Carla lowered her gaze from the ceiling, but still didn’t look her mother in the eye. “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  “Sweetie, you could never—”

  “I did. I did disappoint you. And I’ve embarrassed you, too. You and Dad. Because I’m a complete and total screwup, okay? I know that. I know that.” The tears came in a great gush. Bell rose and in an instant was sitting beside her daughter, gathering her in, cradling her head, stroking her shoulder.

  “Carla,” Bell murmured. “My sweet girl.” There was too much to say—there was always too much to say—so Bell said nothing, but she continued to stroke Carla’s shoulder and to try to wish her pain away.

  Waiting for Sam, they had fallen asleep on the couch, Carla stretched out with her head on her mother’s lap. Bell kept a hand on Carla’s shoulder. It should have been terrifically uncomfortable for Bell, sleeping whilst in a sitting position, but it was not. Holding her daughter, touching her, keeping physical contact with her just as she had done when Carla was an infant, would make this—despite everything that was going on, despite all the questions about Carla’s conduct and choices—one of the best times of Bell’s life. She was able to keep her daughter safe, even for just a few hushed hours, deep in a winter’s night.

  And then Sam showed up. He stayed less than fifteen minutes. Not only did he want to get Carla back, he explained, but he had a full slate of his own meetings to deal with. He politely refused Bell’s offer to fill a thermos for them.

  “I can get coffee on the road,” he said.

  “Can’t be as good as mine. Mine’s strong enough to eat through the bottom of a Styrofoam cup. Try finding that at the Highway Haven.”

  He laughed, and some of the awkwardness vanished. But even as he was laughing, he was putting his coat back on. Sam Elkins was a man in a hurry. He would always be a man in a hurry.

  Bell watched them go. The sun was mere seconds from clearing the top of the mountains, whereupon it would fill the world with light but no heat. She stood on the porch as long as she could stand it. Finally the cold was just too much for her, and she went back inside.

  She had finished her first cup of coffee—Sam didn’t know what he was missing—when her cell rang. Caller ID told her it was Deputy Oakes.

  “Hey.” His voice had a quality to it that Bell rarely heard from him: a kind of keen excitement. Typically he cultivated nonchalance.

  “Morning, Jake. What’s going on?”

  “Heard back from Leroy.” She did not respond, and so he added, “About the car. The one Darlene Strayer was driving.”

  “Right.” She had not exactly forgotten about her request to Oakes to get an expert report on the Audi, but neither was it in the front of her mind. She had assumed—well, hoped—that he was calling about a breakthrough in the investigation of the deaths of Marcy Coates and Connie Dollar.

  “And so,” Oakes said, “he checked all the usual places—brakes, engine, tires. Everything was fine. Nothing suspicious. Nothing that might suggest any kind of tampering or foul play.”

  “Okay.” So why are you calling? she wanted to add, but knew she didn’t have to. Oakes would not leave her in suspense for long. He was busier than she was. The county had two deputies w
ho were forced to do the work of five. He did not waste time—neither his own nor anyone else’s.

  “But Leroy did find something on the rear bumper,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Paint chip. From another vehicle. Meaning the Audi might have been pushed from behind. Maybe just a nudge. But a nudge on an icy mountain road at those speeds is serious business. I’ve already sent off the chip to the state crime lab. Maybe they can tell us the make and model of the vehicle it came from. It’s a place to start, anyway.”

  Bell’s skepticism showed through in her voice. “No telling when the paint first got there. She had made a long drive that day. Came over from D.C. Somebody could have backed into her car the week before in a Whole Foods lot.”

  “True. I pointed out the same thing to Leroy. Without the Whole Foods reference, that is. Wouldn’t want to confuse old Leroy. He’d be wondering if there’s a Half Foods out there somewhere, too.”

  “And?”

  “And he agreed. Might not be relevant at all. But he thought you’d want to know.”

  She did. She absolutely did want to know, even though it added another complication to an already puzzling set of circumstances. And even though it tended to validate the fiercely held opinion of Ava Hendricks, whose dark solemn eyes Bell could still picture, as she stared at Bell in the prosecutor’s office four days ago, incensed that her lover’s death had been deemed an accident.

  If Darlene’s car indeed had been pushed into the curve, it could mean that the two women—one dead, and one very much alive and very pissed off at Bell for not investigating further—had been right all along.

  Someone did want to kill Darlene Strayer. And that someone had gotten away with it.

  * * *

  With Carla gone, the house was too big. Bell felt lost in it. She spent a good portion of the morning in an aimless ramble from room to room, wondering how the front hall had suddenly become longer, the doorways wider, the ceilings taller. She tried to figure out how the entire place had gotten so swollen and echoing and empty.

  In a bewilderingly short time—less than a week—Bell had become accustomed all over again to her daughter’s presence around the house. Carla was not a large person, but she seemed to take up a lot of space.

  After Jake’s call, Bell tried to settle down and finish some paperwork. She could not focus. Yet drifting around in search of domestic busywork didn’t do the trick, either, because it only reminded her of Carla’s absence. The house kept right on expanding, inch by inch, memory by memory.

  Maybe a change of scene would help. Shortly after noon she packed up her briefcase with the paperwork she had quit on earlier, wrapped herself in the big down coat, tracked down her car keys, and headed to JP’s for lunch.

  The drive took twice as long as usual. Each night for the past two weeks had brought an impressive dump of new snow, and the roads were still reeling. This winter, Bell reflected as she angled the Explorer into a cleared-out spot in front of the diner, had a relentless feel to it. A sense that snow would be coming down forever, bit by bit, like some sneaky form of torture.

  She was the only customer. She decamped in a booth in the back corner. Jackie came by, and Bell agreed to the daily special: bean soup and a basket of corn bread. Jackie nodded her approval and went off to fetch it.

  Bell set a stack of legal pads on one side of the table, leaving the other side free for her food. She was preoccupied by a question:

  Should she call Ava Hendricks and tell her about Leroy’s discovery?

  No. Because it proved nothing. It was speculation, not evidence. Evidence sometimes was discovered as a result of speculation, but speculation itself was useless until it could be backed up by facts, by science—by something hard and ineluctable, not a mushy-soft hunch. In the meantime, the ID of the vehicle that had pushed the Audi would have to come—if it came at all—from the forensics lab in Charleston, and that meant waiting their turn. It meant standing in line behind all of the other requests from all of the other small communities that had their own crimes to worry about, and their own prosecutors with hunches.

  Right now, Bell thought, they did not have much. They had a paint chip on a back bumper. And they had the musings of Leroy Perkins, tow-truck driver, salvage hauler, and amateur forensic mechanic. Until she heard back from the lab, it was not enough to justify a call to Ava Hendricks.

  She got down to work on the ten thousand other issues—give or take—that constituted a prosecutor’s duties. She flipped through the legal pad on the top of the stack. These were the notes she had prepared on the Charlie Vickers case for Hickey Leonard. She would be briefing him early Monday morning. Rhonda Lovejoy’s grandmother was still in the ICU at the Raythune County Medical Center, rigged to a ventilator, her brain function summarized by a thin green line on a monitor. Rhonda was at her side. And she would stay there, as long as the line did.

  “Excuse me.”

  Bell did not look up. She continued to write on the legal pad, wanting to get a thought down in black and white—or black and yellow, in this case—before it eluded her. “Just leave the bowl right there, Jackie,” she said, using her left hand to wave toward the tabletop. “Thanks.”

  Nothing.

  Bell lifted her head. It wasn’t Jackie.

  It was Ava Hendricks.

  “They told me I’d find you here,” Ava said.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Everyone I asked.”

  It was plausible. Bell hadn’t noticed any witnesses to her arrival here, but that did not matter; in a small town, your habits were as well known to your fellow citizens as if they routinely tracked you on a satellite uplink. There were only a limited number of possibilities as to where you could be. In her case, it generally came down to three: the courthouse, home, or JP’s.

  The courthouse was closed on Saturdays. Ava had probably gone by her house—everybody knew where the prosecutor lived, and nobody was shy about sharing. That left JP’s.

  “Care to join me for lunch?” Bell said. She was surprised, but wanted to be hospitable.

  Ava took off her coat and hat and scarf. She tossed them onto the bench seat. She was wearing dark green corduroy slacks and a gray cashmere sweater. She scooted into the booth, pushing her outerwear along the seat toward the wall to clear out a space.

  “It took me an extra two hours to make the drive this morning,” Ava said. There was umbrage in her tone. The look on her face suggested that she blamed Bell for the bad roads, as well as for every other impediment in the known world.

  “We’ve got one snowplow,” Bell said. “And one guy to drive it. And he’s pretty swamped.” She flipped shut the legal pad and put it back on the stack. “I won’t even ask about coffee. But the bean soup’s pretty good.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  The woman’s coldness was as off-putting as always. Bell attributed it to Ava’s profession; doctors in general could be an arrogant lot, with neurosurgeons leading the pack. The long years of training, the life-and-death stakes riding on every flick of the scalpel—the arrogance surely had some justification. Still, though. How could someone as rigid and austere as Ava Hendricks have an intimate life? How could she ever let go of herself long enough to love?

  Love.

  Well, there you go, Bell thought. Look at me—judgmental as hell. Ava Hendricks had lost her partner. How could she forget that? Maybe this woman’s distant attitude was coming as much from grief as it was from the brain surgeon bit. She was a woman in mourning.

  And maybe I’m just as narrow-minded as Rhonda. Maybe I forgot that because I don’t quite think of them as having been a couple—a real couple, that is, like a man and a woman. Maybe Acker’s Gap is changing me more than I’m changing Acker’s Gap.

  It was a dismaying possibility. Bell moved past it by speaking quickly.

  “So if you didn’t drive all this way for Jackie’s bean soup, what can I do for you?”

  “I found something. Something yo
u need to see.” Before Bell could respond, Ava was talking again. She was more animated now. “Darlene bought a new cell two weeks ago. It was a different model, with a different plan. But she hadn’t canceled the other cell yet. It still works. The data’s still on it. I came across it last night when I was—I was putting some things away.”

  When you were sorting through the belongings of your lost loved one, Bell thought. When you were touching the only things you have left of her now.

  “What did you find?” she said out loud.

  “This.” Ava handed her the cell, which she had retrieved from her trouser pocket. “It’s a video. Taken at Thornapple Terrace. According to the date stamp, the first one’s from a month ago.”

  Bell pressed the spot on the screen that initiated the playback. At first there was only fuzz and static, a large blue shape and a scuffling sound. Then the cell’s angle changed. It moved back, and the blue shape was revealed to be a sweater. Harmon Strayer’s sweater. Bell had never met him in person, but she knew right away that this was Darlene’s father: Even after the ravages of age and illness, the family resemblance was remarkable. Looking at his face was like looking into Darlene’s face—as it might have looked from a distance, and through a frosty windowpane.

  He was sitting at a round table in what appeared to be a lounge. His hands were placed on the table; they were pale and wizened, and wrenched by arthritis into painful-looking shapes. The view of the room behind him included other tables and chairs, too, and a sofa.

  On the table was a checkerboard. The red and black pieces were arranged expectantly on the squares.

  A voice could be heard from behind the cell. It was Darlene’s voice, softer than Bell had ever heard it: “Hi, Daddy. You look real good today. Real handsome. Are you ready for Alvie’s visit? He’ll be here soon. I know you like it when Alvie comes by.” There was a pause, and then Darlene spoke again. “I love you, Daddy. I love you so much. I hope you can understand me when I say that. But even if you can’t, I hope you can just feel my love. I hope it’s like the sun on your face. Even if you don’t know what I’m saying, you can feel the warmth of it.”