Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  “Sorry I’m late,” Bell said. She was half-convinced that she might as well have those words tattooed on her forehead, and thus could just point to them everywhere she went. It would save time and breath.

  Bonita nodded. “Do you mind coming this way?” She used a hand to indicate the secure corridor. “A member of the staff is waiting to talk to us in the lounge.” Before they set out, Bontia turned to the receptionist. “Dorothy, I need that light switch for the lamp fixed in my office. I’ve asked Travis about it multiple times. Where is he?”

  “He was right here just a minute ago.” Dorothy looked around. She was perplexed. “I don’t understand it. He was working on the front door—the weather stripping is coming loose. Then your visitor drove up, and he just disappeared.”

  Bell was instantly on alert: Why would an employee vanish when she arrived? It wouldn’t be hard to find out that she was a prosecutor; she assumed the staff had gone into Full Gossip Alert seconds after her earlier visit. What was this Travis person afraid of? Once she had finished with whatever Bonita Layman had to show her, she would check on the maintenance man’s access to patient rooms. And his work schedule on the days when each of the three residents had died.

  The lounge had just been cleaned. Bell did not need a forensic team to tell her so; the evidence was clear. It smelled of lemon Pledge. There were wide stroke marks on the carpet where the vacuum had made its symmetrical swipes. The four chairs had been pushed back under the round table, and the checkerboard was ready to go. The cushions on the sofa had been plumped up.

  A short, small-boned woman stood next to the bookcase. The pink smock and white pants told Bell that she was an aide. She was exceedingly nervous; she could not keep her fingers out of the sausage curls that dangled across her shoulders, playing with them, flipping them back and forth. Those curls were a very unlikely shade of red. The Clairol box, Bell speculated, probably called it something like “Come-Hither Crimson” or “Dusky Rose Sunset over Sausalito.” She remembered the less charitable name by which she and a friend would refer to that brassy color back in high school, when they’d spot it on store clerks who were plainly trying to hide gray hair: Redneck Red.

  “Grace Ann,” Bonita said. “Let’s sit down.” She nodded toward the table.

  The woman looked terrified, but she complied. She stayed on the forward edge of the chair, back straight, the living embodiment of discomfort. Her hands were flat on the tabletop in front of her, as if maybe Bell would want to check her for weapons.

  Bonita had pushed the checkerboard to one side. “Bell, this is Grace Ann Rogers. She’s been working here about a year now. Grace Ann, this is Belfa Elkins. She’s the prosecutor over in Raythune County.”

  “Prosecutor.” Grace Ann breathed the word as much as said it.

  Bonita went on. “I want you to tell Mrs. Elkins here what you told me this morning. When I came to you with what I’d found out. I checked the assignment logs, right? And I discovered that Marcy Coates was not originally scheduled to be working with Harmon Strayer on the day he died—isn’t that correct?”

  Grace Ann nodded. She looked so miserable, so totally distraught, that Bell wondered if she was going to faint or throw up.

  “Yeah,” the aide muttered.

  “So as it turned out,” Bonita went on, “Marcy Coates was the last person to see Harmon Strayer alive. Not you. Why did you switch jobs with Marcy that day?”

  Head down, Grace Ann delivered her answer to the tabletop. Bell could not make out what she mumbled.

  “What?” Bonita said sharply. “You need to speak up, Grace Ann.”

  The aide reluctantly raised her face, and Bell saw a multi-pack of emotions flitting across it: fear, confusion, doubt, dread. Grace Ann was much older than Bell had first taken her for. She had done all the things a woman could do to camouflage her age—all the things, that is, that a poor woman could do. A facelift was not an option. Instead she had dyed her hair and slathered herself with makeup, from sparkly blue eye shadow to mascara so black and so thick that it looked as if plump spiders were clinging to her eyelids.

  “She asked me to,” Grace Ann said.

  “Did she say why?” Bell asked.

  Grace Ann shook her head. “And it didn’t make sense. One room’s the same as another, really. Once the patients move in here, they kinda blend. Don’t have no real personality no more. Just need. Just the things they need, all the time. And they all pretty much need the same things, you know? Sad to say, but it’s true.” She took a breath. “We come in and we get our assignments for the day—which rooms we’ll be taking care of. Nothing much to pick and choose over. Oh, there’s a few folks around here that you’d rather steer clear of, if you can—Sammy Landacre is one, because he’ll cuss you out as soon as look at you, and Mavis Henderson is no picnic, lemme tell you—but mostly it don’t matter. That’s why I couldn’t figure what had gotten into Marcy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was real agitated that morning. She was standing by the bulletin board with the room assignments, and the minute I got there, she was after me. Asking me to switch with her. She wanted Mr. Strayer’s room. She wanted it bad.” Grace Ann’s head flipped back down, as if she feared the tabletop had missed her. Then she looked up again. “I was real sorry when I heard that Mr. Strayer had died that day. He was a nice man. And then when it come out that Marcy’d been killed—well, this has been a terrible time, tell you that.”

  Bell looked her squarely in the eye. “You’re sure that Marcy never mentioned why she wanted to work in Harmon Strayer’s room that day? Not even a small remark in passing? A hint?”

  “I’m sure.” Grace Ann’s voice was emphatic. “But I still traded with her. Because you didn’t say no to Marcy. Not when she asked like that.”

  “She threatened you?” Bell asked. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Threatened me? No, no, no.” Grace Ann was aghast. “You gotta understand. Marcy was a real good lady. The best. She really cared about the people here. She hated to see them suffer. Said so all the time. She’d make them as comfortable as she could, even if she was off the clock. Pushed herself. And Lordy—she had a hard life at home, too. Only family she had left was that good-for-nothing granddaughter of hers, who was always coming around begging her for money. More and more and more. So what I meant was—you didn’t say no to her because if there was anything you could do to bring a little happiness to Marcy, you did it.”

  As soon as Grace Ann left the lounge, Bonita turned to Bell. Her face was grave. “I should have listened to Darlene,” she said. “She told me there was something going on with her father’s death. But I put her off. I thought she was being emotional. Letting her grief get the best of her.” She pressed the table with her fist. “I just—I just didn’t want anyone telling me how to do my damned job, you know?”

  “Yeah. I do.” Bell understood that motive very well. It came from stubbornness, and it came from pride. But in Bonita’s case, she thought, it also came from talent and ambition, and from having been overlooked a lot of times in the world, when you know you’re qualified and you’re not given a chance to prove it. And so when you do get that chance, you cannot admit to doubt.

  “It’s hard enough trying to get some respect when you’re younger than people expect you to be, running a place like this,” Bonita declared. “And then when you add black and female…” She closed her eyes and shook her head. When she opened them again, she’d recovered her poise. “I’ve always felt I have a lot to prove in this job. Muth County, West Virginia, is not exactly diverse.”

  “Grant you that.”

  “You should have seen what happened when I tried to check into a motel last year. I hadn’t closed on my house yet. So I walk up to the reception desk in the lobby, with my credit card out and my ID ready—and the woman behind the desk says, ‘We don’t need any more maids right now. But you’re welcome to fill out an application in case we have an opening.’”

  Bell
shuddered. “I don’t know how you kept calm.”

  “No percentage in getting upset. I just politely told her that, no, I wanted a room.” Bonita shrugged. She shifted back into professional mode. “Okay,” she said. “So what do you think’s going on around here?”

  “No idea. But I need to be clear—it might be nothing, after all. Marcy Coates could have had any number of reasons—perfectly innocent reasons—for wanting to switch assignments with Grace Ann. And Harmon Strayer’s death was most likely the result of age and ill health and Alzheimer’s. But I’ll make some inquires at the coroner’s office. And I’d like to chat with other employees, too, at some point. See if they noticed Marcy Coates behaving out of character. Would you mind giving me a staff roster? And scheduling some time for each employee to meet with me?”

  “Funny. That’s the same thing I was doing when I found out about the assignment switch—putting together a roster and some interview times.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. For the librarian at the Raythune County Public Library. She called me last week. Wants to send someone over to interview our older staff members. For an oral history thing.” Bonita paused. “Hold on. I just remembered the interviewer’s name she gave me—Carla Elkins. Any relation?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Bell said, “she’s my daughter.” There was pride in her voice. There would always be pride in her voice when she talked about Carla.

  * * *

  Carla Jean Elkins stepped down from a Greyhound bus in the middle of Blythesburg, West Virginia. It was as close as she could get to Acker’s Gap, because the bus station in Acker’s Gap had closed down five years ago. No other business had taken over that location—the town had run out of reckless fools—so now it was a crumbling building with a gouged-up linoleum floor, cracked windows, and the slithery ghosts of long-ago travelers whisking to and fro.

  The station in Blythesburg was even less impressive, although it was still open. It was just a kiosk and a couple of benches on a concrete pad. But it was the only place for many miles to board and disembark, so no one was likely to complain about the lack of deluxe accommodations.

  The first thing Carla did when her feet hit the frozen ground was to look up. Just for a second, because there were people behind her, shuffling and wrangling their belongings, also eager to get off the bus.

  The sky was clear. The sun was the color of a saltine cracker. Snow had been pushed back into a low dirty-white hedge that ran alongside the sidewalk. It was very cold, and very windy. Carla moved on, clearing the way for the other passengers.

  She felt … well, how did she feel? She wasn’t sure. That was a new thing. Before, she had always known how she felt. Exactly. She could describe her feelings precisely. She could even select the right words for other people’s feelings. Her friends would come to her with a hot whirling mess of half-formed thoughts and vague impressions and blunt yearnings, and Carla would sort it all out for them, separating the various emotions, reverse-engineering their moods.

  Not anymore. Now she was just as blind and bumbling as everybody else when it came to feelings. She had intended to figure it all out on the long bus ride, but instead she mostly slept. It was not a restful sleep; she jerked awake each time the bus rocked sideways or the driver braked hard, wondering where the hell she was. Then she’d doze off again, head jammed sideways against the seat back, backpack secured on her lap with both hands.

  Her dad had offered to drive her to Acker’s Gap. No thanks, she had said. He’d offered to buy her a plane ticket to Charleston and then hire a limo to get her the rest of the way. She turned him down again. She wanted time to think. She’d only been on a Greyhound bus one other time in her life—she had visited her friend Sandy Lightfoot in Owensboro, Kentucky, the summer after seventh grade, because the Lightfoot family moved away once school was out for the year—and she remembered that a bus ride created an amazing space for thinking. It took a long time, but unlike flying it featured the same old crap out the window that you had seen a million times before, so you did not get distracted by awe. You could focus on what you needed to think about.

  Kayleigh Crocker was going to pick her up. Carla hadn’t told her mother that she was coming. She wanted it to be a surprise.

  Back in Arlington, her dad had fixed things for her. She was not sure how she felt about that. Without him—and had she been, say, a homeless veteran with psychiatric issues or a black teenager with anger management problems, and had she done exactly the same thing—she knew the outcome would have been far different.

  But Sam Elkins knew everybody in the world who mattered and, in addition to knowing them, he also was owed favors by them, because he had done things in the past on their behalf. So it all happened very quickly, in a blur of insider privilege: the store dropped the charges, the cop withdrew the resisting arrest complaint, and the judge told her to pay the fine and mind her manners henceforth. Those were not his exact words, Carla had explained to Kayleigh when she called her the night before and asked for a ride from Blythesburg to Acker’s Gap. But close enough.

  And now Carla understood about courts. She had thought she did already—everyone thinks they do—but standing in front of somebody in a black robe, waiting for your entire future to be decided, was a watershed experience. Carla had listened to her mom talk about it, and she’d learned about the court system in her civics class, but the actual feel of it—of watching the little mole on the left side of the judge’s mouth sort of jump as she spoke, of smelling the aftershave on her attorney’s pink shaven jaw, of hearing the brief creak of leather as the deputy standing in the back reclasped his hands and the gun belt shifted on his hip, of realizing that her life was completely up for grabs at this moment—was very different from hearing about it or reading about it. It was like seeing pictures of the circus—and then walking the tightrope. She was scared out of her mind, and she never wanted to be in this kind of place ever again, and she knew exactly where she needed to be.

  As they were walking out of the courthouse her father had said, “So, where do you want to go now, young lady?”

  Carla’s reply: “I want to go home.”

  And here she was.

  “You got a car?”

  A pesky old woman had climbed down out of the bus right behind her and then followed her onto the concrete pad. She had long, greasy hair with blond highlights that had grown out a long time ago, leaving the gray parts in charge. She was dressed in what looked like an accumulation of knotted-together dishrags, safety-pinned scarves, and ratty overlapping blankets. She smelled like a dirty bathroom.

  “No,” Carla said. She hoped Kayleigh would be getting here soon.

  “’Cause if you did,” the woman said, arching her scraggly eyebrows, “I was gonna ask you for a ride.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  The woman sniffed repeatedly. Either a bad cold or drug habit, Carla thought. Smart money was on the latter.

  “Okay, well,” the woman said. “But if you did, that’s what I was gonna do.”

  The bus had loaded right back up again with the people who’d been waiting on the pad. Carla didn’t want to inhale that noxious exhaust when the bus left, which it would do within minutes, so she headed for one of the benches.

  The old woman followed her.

  Leave me alone, Carla thought, but did not say out loud, because some people only got more clingy after that, bolder, as a kind of perversity took hold of them. Doing the opposite of what you asked became a mission. Whereas if you ignored them, you had a fighting chance of seeing them give up and go away.

  “I got bit by a cat,” the old woman said. She wriggled her bare right arm out of its nest of materials and stuck it out, underside turned up. An abscess had cracked the scabby white surface and now bloomed like a fierce yellow flower. “Bite got infected. That’s why it looks so bad. Them infections get real dangerous. I was in the hospital in Charleston for a week and a half.”

  Carla scooted to the far side of t
he bench. Come on, Kayleigh. Come on.

  The old woman had only bothered her a few times on the ride itself. Once to ask Carla if there was a toilet on the bus. Once to ask if Carla had a tissue. And once more to apologize for the two times she had already interrupted her.

  It was not a cat bite. That was obvious. It was a DIY drug portal that had been poked at too many times with a filthy syringe. Carla did not know why the woman had chosen her as the audience for her spontaneous confessions—her fibs, that is—but she had.

  Lucky me, Carla thought.

  Her one-word, noncommittal answers finally began to wear down the woman, who picked obsessively at the skin around a fingernail and made a few more remarks about the overly aggressive cat. Carla said nothing. Finally the woman left. Carla settled in to enjoy these last few minutes of solitude.

  She wanted to think about everything that was ahead of her. One of the most important things was her job, which she was even more excited about, now that she had been away from it for a few days. She couldn’t wait to get back to the interviews. She had called Sally McArdle on Monday, and explained what was going on—although she left out some of the more embarrassing parts. You did not lie to Sally McArdle. And Sally McArdle had said, in a curt voice that Carla found far more satisfactory than she would have found a gushy, gooey, sympathetic one: “Okay, fine. Clean up your mess over there and then get back as quick as you can. We need to finish things up.”

  And then there was Travis Womack.

  That was another reason Carla was glad to be back. She had been thinking about him. A lot. It was not a boyfriend kind of thing—at least she didn’t think it was, because, Jesus, he was ancient, he was older, probably, than her father—but it was something. She just didn’t know what. Do you ever know, though? That’s what she was thinking about now, as she sat on the cold bench. Does anybody ever figure out what attracts them to one person and not somebody else? She had discussed that with her mom once, when her mom first started dating Clay Meckling. People talked. Wow, did they ever! Clay was younger than her mom, more than ten years younger, and—this being Acker’s Gap—people were on fire with gossip. At one point her mother said to her, “Look, sweetie, we never really know why we like someone, beyond some common interests.” Carla had rolled her eyes. Common interests was, like, the lamest phrase in the world. Then her mom said: “But in the end, you have to decide if it’s worth it. Doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. It’s up to you. You decide if the person you have chosen is worth all the fuss and the bother, worth changing your life for.”