Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  Harmon Strayer looked at the cell. He raised his arm. Bell assumed he was going to wave.

  Instead, the old man suddenly let out a terrible bellow. He leaned forward and smashed at the checkerboard again and again. Then he swept the board and its pieces off the table.

  “Daddy—Daddy, what are you doing?” Darlene said. The picture wobbled as she leaned forward to try and stay his hand; her hand was briefly visible. “Daddy, stop. Stop it.”

  The video ended.

  Bell looked from the screen to Ava’s face. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing,” she said. “Don’t people with Alzheimer’s sometimes display inappropriate anger? It’s not uncommon, is it?”

  “Play the next video. It’s two days later.”

  Bell touched the screen again. This time, Harmon Strayer was wearing a red turtleneck sweater. He was sitting in the same spot, his twisted hands settled on the table. But the checkerboard was not there. He blinked, and then he appeared to grow more apprehensive; he shifted back and forth in his chair, making a moaning sound. He pulled at his bottom lip.

  The checkerboard slid into the scene; an unseen someone had brought it to the table. A pudgy white hand and a pink sleeve came into view, placing the pieces on the squares, one by one.

  From behind the camera came Darlene’s voice: “Isn’t that nice, Daddy? Your friend Marcy is getting the checkerboard ready. They had to move it to dust under it. But now it’s back. Maybe somebody’s going to play a game later. So it will be all ready for them.”

  The look that Harmon Strayer gave to the camera—to his daughter, who held it—was hard for Bell to witness. It was filled with startled panic and a clawing, ravening, bottomless fear. She wanted to reach into the video and pull the old man out of there, protect him, shelter him. The pitch of Darlene’s voice revealed that she, too, saw all those things in her father’s eyes: “Daddy, what’s wrong? Daddy, please don’t be upset. What’s wrong? I’m here, Daddy. I’ll always be here. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise, Daddy.” The video ended.

  Bell put the cell down on the tabletop.

  Ava said, “There are several more, very similar to those two. Darlene and her father are in the lounge. Something upsets him. It’s like a switch being flipped. He goes from quiet and submissive—to this.”

  “What do you think it means? Was someone at the Terrace abusing Mr. Strayer? A staff member? Marcy Coates? Is that why he’s reacting this way?”

  Ava shook her head. “I don’t know. But I can’t believe that if Darlene knew her father was being physically abused she would have left him there. It has to be something more subtle. And she was trying to figure it out herself. What could be spooking him like that?” She surprised Bell with a baffled, bemused smile. “I mean—like, a haunted checkerboard? Or what?”

  The smile completely transformed Ava’s face. Her features came alive, and there was a soft sparkle in her dark eyes. And then, a few seconds later, it was all gone; the hard face was back, the closed one, the one that let nothing slip.

  “Here you go.” Jackie had arrived at the side of the booth. She set down the bowl of bean soup and the red plastic basket of corn bread. “Bowl’s hot,” she said to Bell. “Be careful.” She turned to Ava. “Anything for you?”

  “I’m fine.” Ava’s voice had a slight but perceptible shudder in it, as if even the contemplation of eating in this place was just a notch below repulsive.

  “Give a holler if you change your mind,” Jackie said. Back to Bell: “Plenty more corn bread where that came from. Got another batch in the oven. Just say the word.”

  By this time a few more customers had hustled in, stomping the snow off their boots, faces set grimly against the cold. The moment they felt the warmth of the indoors, those faces changed. They relaxed. Jackie left to take their orders.

  Ava watched her walk away. When she turned again to Bell, her face was puzzled but still riven with a sort of quasi-disgust. “So how do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Put up with this place. I mean, you don’t strike me as somebody who’s all that crazy about bean soup.”

  “You’re wrong about that. Nobody makes bean soup like Jackie’s.” To back up her words, Bell dipped in her spoon to sample it.

  “You know what I mean.” Ava frowned. “I used to ask Darlene the same thing. She actually considered coming back here to live, did you know that? She talked about buying a house and having her dad live with her.”

  “You mean ‘live with us,’ right? You would have come with her, surely.”

  Ava looked at Bell for several seconds before replying. “We discussed it. And yes—I suppose that’s what I would have done. Move here, but keep my practice in D.C. Live here, work there. Which is the opposite of how most physicians do it. I have colleagues who fly into Charleston once a week, perform back-to-back surgeries for two days, and then fly back home. They live in a big city—a more sophisticated place, frankly—and they work here.”

  “And then her father died.”

  “Yes.”

  “So she never had the chance.”

  “That’s right.” Restless, Ava picked a piece of corn bread out of the basket. “You mind? Looks pretty good. Fresh.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Bell said, nudging the butter dish in her direction, and sliding over a knife as well.

  “Long drive this morning. Just realized how famished I am.” Ava paused to butter and then eat a broken-off section of the corn bread. “This is actually delicious.”

  “Don’t let Jackie hear you say that. She’s liable to fall over from shock. The way you’ve been acting—sneering at the food, glaring at the table like you think it’s crawling with germs—well, she’s not expecting a compliment. The surprise of it might just take her down.”

  Ava’s tone was a bit sheepish. “Am I really that obvious?”

  “Yeah. You are.” Bell shrugged. “Look, there’s no law against snobbery. And the people around here—they’re used to it.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘we’? Don’t you mean we’re used to it?”

  Bell put down her spoon. This woman was smart. God, yes—she was a neurosurgeon. But she was smart in other ways, too. Ways that Bell had not been expecting.

  “I suppose Darlene and I were more alike than I realized,” Bell said carefully. “I came back to West Virginia—and from what you’re telling me, she might have been getting ready to do the same thing. But I’m not sure you ever make it all the way back, you know? Once you’ve lived somewhere else? And so you end up caught between two worlds. You don’t feel quite at home in either one of them. You’re like a tightrope walker who gets to the halfway point on the wire—and suddenly you’re afraid to go forward. But it’s too far to go back.”

  Her words seemed to resonate with the woman who sat across the table from her. “When Darlene talked about you,” Ava said, “she’d always get around to the fact that she wondered how you did it. Left D.C. Left your entire life behind. And made a new life here. I told her it could not have been as easy as it looked.”

  “You were right. It wasn’t easy. Still isn’t.”

  She did not elaborate. Ava waited a decent interval, and then she touched the cell that lay on the table between them. “So you’ll look into this? Keep trying to find out what was going on at the Terrace? And what happened to Darlene?”

  “I’ll do what I can. But I have to tell you—there are other priorities right now. The aide in that video? Her name was Marcy Coates. She was found murdered last week at her home. Along with the friend who had gone to check up on her. The town’s pretty rattled by it. As well they should be.”

  “I heard about that. When I stopped for gas this morning, I went inside for a bottle of water. That’s all anybody was talking about.”

  Bell nodded. She pushed the bowl to the far side of the table. The soup was good, but she was not hungry anymore. She was thinking again about the photo of Marcy Coates, and about the trusting eyes of an old wo
man who had worked hard, lived simply and honestly and frugally, tried to take care of her family—and still died a violent and painful death. It was not so much the flagrant unfairness of it all that nagged at Bell; it was the fact that it made no sense.

  Logic. It could be a prosecutor’s best friend—you always went with the most plausible explanation—or a prosecutor’s worst nightmare. Because sometimes the truth didn’t make sense. You were forced to grope along in the dark, hoping to find your way to the mouth of the cave, to the place where the sunlight was.

  She made a quick decision, reversing an earlier one. She had changed her mind about Ava. She deserved to know what Bell knew—precious little as it might be.

  “I didn’t want to tell you about this,” Bell said, “because it’s such a long shot, and I don’t want to get your hopes up. But we found a paint chip on the back bumper of Darlene’s car. From another vehicle.”

  “Which could mean she was forced off the road that night.” Ava’s voice was eager.

  “Yes. It’s a possibility. We’ve sent it off to the state crime lab for analysis. But Ava—I need to be very clear here. It might be nothing. A false trail. I don’t want you to think that—”

  “Understood.” Ava cut her off. She slumped against the back of the bench seat. She had been leaning forward ever since Bell mentioned the chip. “I’ll let you do your job. I know how irritating it is to deal with the unrealistic expectations of loved ones.”

  “I’ll bet you do. Brain surgery—that’s got to be incredibly nerve-wracking for everyone involved, for the family members as well as the patient.”

  “It is. And that’s why I have to be so controlled. I had to teach myself to be this way. To not be emotional in critical moments. To not let feelings get the upper hand. Because doing that doesn’t help anyone—not the patient, not the patient’s loved ones. And not the doctor, either.” She smiled. It was a soft smile of reminiscence. “Darlene and I used to talk about that all the time. She thought I was too cold. Too remote. And I told her that she was too impetuous. Wore her heart on her sleeve.” Ava paused. “There’s an Elizabethan phrase I like. It says that some people are ‘a feather for every wind that blows.’ That was Darlene.”

  As long as they were sharing, Bell decided to take a chance. “Your lack of emotion about Darlene’s death—it’s puzzling, frankly. Especially around here, where the norm for grief is a bit more demonstrative. Weeping, wailing, fainting in public. Shouting for Jesus. That kind of thing.” She looked down at the tabletop, and saw that she’d spilled a small beige drop of soup. Then she met Ava’s gaze again. “Some people even wondered—well, they wondered if you really cared all that much.”

  “‘Some people.’ Meaning you.”

  Bell did not answer. Ava reached for her winter garb: hat, scarf, gloves, coat. She pulled them back toward her, smoothing out the gloves, untangling the scarf.

  “I’m due back in D.C. tonight,” she said. “I’d better get on the road.”

  “Do me a favor. Forward me those videos. And anything else you find, okay? Diaries, notebooks, photos—anything that relates to Darlene and her father. Even if it doesn’t specifically refer to the Terrace.”

  “I will. There’s a ton of stuff. Darlene kept everything. Especially everything related to her dad. She even had his Navy uniform. From World War II. And the letters he wrote home to his mother and father.”

  Ava turned her body sideways. She started to slide out of the booth. She stopped. She looked back at Bell. Her face showed no emotion, but her voice was unexpectedly filled with it, breaking at certain points, growing hoarse and shallow and then robust again, and then faltering. “I need to say something here. To you—and to anybody who has the slightest doubt about how much I loved Darlene.” She swallowed hard, fighting to maintain her composure long enough so that she could finish what she needed to say.

  “When I walked out of that surgery on Sunday night,” Ava went on, “and they handed me the phone, and someone on the other end of the line told me that Darlene was gone, the bottom dropped out of my world. I could not think. I could barely breathe. I had to hold it together, though, because there were people all around me—my colleagues, the nurses and the other doctors, the hospital staff. I had to be professional.” She paused. “I wanted to scream. I wanted to fall on the floor in a sobbing heap—but I couldn’t. I had to be steady. I had to keep my emotions in check. For one thing, I still had to go talk to my patient’s family. They’d been waiting all day. I had to be strong and resolute, so that they would know their little girl was in good hands.

  “But make no mistake. Darlene was my life. My life. Is that clear? I don’t know if you’ve ever loved anyone like that. Or if you love someone like that now. If you have, if you do, then you will know what I mean. When she died—I died.” Another difficult pause. “They called me a ‘survivor’ in the Post obituary. That’s the word they used. But if you love someone, you don’t survive. When they bury the person you love, they bury you, too. This body that you see, this body that’s walking around, talking, working, driving, eating food, breathing”—Ava tapped two fingers against her chest—“this person, this one, is not real. I’m a ghost. Do you understand? This is what’s left behind. That’s all. Not a person—a ghost. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”

  Ava’s dark eyes drilled into Bell’s. Her voice was pitched so low that no one else in the diner could have heard it unless they were making a deliberate attempt to listen, and no one was. “Can you pass that along to your friends and colleagues? To anybody who wonders if I really loved Darlene? Can you?”

  “Yes,” Bell said.

  Chapter Eleven

  The mourners here did not look like ghosts. They looked more like sleepwalkers. They looked gray and exhausted and even slightly stupefied as they made their way under the low brick arch that led from the church door to the long stone steps. There was no rail for those steps, which surely violated several building codes as well as state and federal laws requiring proper handicap access—but few law enforcement personnel had the stomach to take on a house of worship. They would have to answer to their grandmothers, for one thing.

  So the Crooked Creek Baptist Church in Norbitt, West Virginia, got away with it. They got away with not updating the century-old crumble of steps, forcing the elderly and the disabled to grab whosever’s arm might be close by as they swayed and tottered during their slow downward ordeal.

  Bell, sitting in her Explorer, watched a couple of near-spills and almost-stumbles and so-close disasters. She had parked across the street. The funeral had been scheduled to start at ten on this cold, wind-bruised Tuesday morning, thus Bell assumed it would be finished by eleven thirty. Or noon at the absolute latest.

  Alas, she had forgotten to factor in the stunning loquaciousness of your average country preacher. She had not reckoned on his affection for his own blowsy gusts of rhetoric, liberally spiced with Bible verses and long excerpts from the more sentimental hymns. A good preacher—even one as old and presumably feeble as Alvie Sherrill—could go three hours without breaking a sweat. So here it was, almost one o’clock, and Bell was still waiting for her chance to mount those treacherous steps herself, in search of Rev. Sherrill.

  The brief announcement of the funeral on the church’s Web site—Bell had checked Sherrill’s schedule—had identified the deceased as Lillian Pauline Strunk, seventy-two years old, lifelong resident of Norbitt.

  The funeral meant that Sherrill would be on the premises. A small church such as Crooked Creek would normally be locked up tight on a weekday. But Bell caught a break—even though Lillian Pauline Strunk, to be sure, had not. The funeral meant that Bell could drive over to Norbitt, wait for the conclusion of the service, and then ask Sherrill for a few minutes of his time. The article noted that he would not be attending the graveside service. It was understandable. Having a ninety-year-old stand out in this weather, while they lowered the mortal remains of Lillian Pauline Strunk into the ground, was lik
ely to bring on a second funeral hard on the heels of this one.

  The cell video that Ava had shown her was troubling. Harmon Strayer’s childhood friend, Bell figured, might have a theory about the source of his buddy’s agitation. Yet Bell wanted to come to Sherrill’s workplace, not his home; a home visit was too pointed. It raised too many questions she could not answer. Chief among them: Why was she spending so much time exploring the death of a sick old man with Alzheimer’s? A death that wasn’t even in her jurisdiction?

  Monday’s activities in the Charlie Vickers trial had been dominated by opening statements. It was Hick’s responsibility, not Bell’s, but because everything had been dumped in his lap at the last moment, she did not feel right about being out of the office on an investigative whim while he presented the state’s case against the slippery and suspiciously illness-prone Vickers.

  Minutes after the opening statements, Vickers’s attorney announced that—surprise!—the defendant was feeling poorly again. They needed a continuance. The judge granted it. The court could not take the chance that he might truly be ill, and that the trial had worsened his condition. The ensuing lawsuit could put Raythune County in the red for the rest of their natural lives.

  Hence the next morning—today—Bell had driven to Norbitt. The trial was postponed for at least a week. Her conscience was clear.

  The roads, alas, were not.

  After a long slog across back roads cluttered with blowing snow, she arrived at the church. And then she waited. Every fifteen minutes or so she was forced to start the car and warm herself up, cupping her hands around the spot on the dash where the heat came out and cursing winter all over again.

  Finally, at 12:57 p.m., the wooden door swung open and the first mourners trudged out, dazed by grief and by the sudden resumption of cold in their lives. The older people—and it was mostly older people—were wrapped in so many insulating layers that they resembled hand grenades with canes and walkers. Some of the younger people raced down the steps to fetch their vehicles from the parking lot next door; they would pick up the old folks at ground level, saving them some painful steps.