Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  He was humble now. Vic Plumley looked down at the concrete. When he raised his head again, there was fear in his eyes.

  “It’s my damned colon, Alvie. Started there, anyways. Spread everywhere. Bones, liver, the works. I’ve got a couple of months, tops. Miracle I’m still walking around.” There was no self-pity in his voice, which surprised Alvie. He was sure that self-pity had been Vic’s first reaction to news of his fate. And Alvie wished he had seen that part, the part where Vic whined and moaned about how it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Everybody else in the world might get cancer but not him, not Vic Plumley.

  Vic was still talking. “So that’s why I’m here. Want to see Harm again. For the last time. He usually doesn’t have much to say, but sometimes he surprises you, right? Starts talking about the old days. The Arky. And other things.” He rubbed at a spot under his nose. It might have been the cold that was making it run, or it might have been something else. “And—hey, there’s one more thing, Alvie.”

  “Yeah.” Alvie was aware that he still had not said anything about Vic’s revelation that he was dying. No condolences, no expressions of surprise and regret. Some preacher he was.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Vic said. “About Caneytown.”

  The three boys had rarely spoken the word out loud in seventy-six years. If it came up inadvertently in conversation with friends, if someone was asking for directions and one of the boys needed to say the name of the town in order to be accurate, they would sidestep it, using another phrase, some all-purpose euphemism: “That little hole-in-the-wall just past Redville” or “Oh, you know that little place I mean,” and the other person would say, “Oh, yeah, sure I do” and name it themselves, sparing them, sparing the three boys from having to say the name of the town.

  Vic had always been Alvie’s last choice for who was going to crack first. For long, long years Alvie had thought that he himself was the most likely one to fall. Not because he was a moral fussbudget—no, because he was a chickenshit. And a blabbermouth. He knew himself better than anybody else did. Harm was next on his list. The next-most-likely to turn them in. Harm, too, was weak.

  But Vic Plumley? Vic would hold out forever, Alvie had thought. Vic was tough. Vic knew the score, knew how the world worked.

  “Yeah,” Alvie said.

  “And, well—I think we ought to do something. Talk to somebody. Admit what we did. For our own peace of mind. I mean, they’re not going to do anything to us. My God. We’re closing in on ninety years old. But it would mean a lot, I think.”

  Alvie nodded.

  “It’s time, Alvie,” Vic said. “You know it just as well as I do. We’ve had decent lives, all three of us. Harm’s not so good anymore, but he had some fine years. That girl of his—a real firecracker. Fun to read about her. But we’re old now. And yeah—this’ll change how they remember us. That’s okay, though, right? Because it’s the truth. And you know what, Alvie? I don’t want to end up like my old man. He was a liar and an asshole. Never told the truth. Always twisted things to suit how he wanted them to be. Sure, he made a lot of money. But that’s all he did. He didn’t have anything that mattered. Nothing.” He looked into Alvie’s eyes. “So it’s time, right?”

  Vic pulled a hand out of his coat pocket. Alvie realized that Vic wanted him to shake his hand. He complied. He had no choice. Vic held onto Alvie’s hand just a few seconds too long. Alvie, uncomfortable, tried to pull his hand away. Vic would not let him.

  “Right, buddy?” Vic said. He needed Alvie to agree with him. Say it out loud. Seal the deal.

  You fucking bully, Alvie thought.

  “Sure,” Alvie said.

  Vic grinned. “Good. Good. Well, I better get inside. Need to see old Harm.” He nodded at Alvie. “I’ll be in touch, okay? And in the meantime, you think about it, okay? About how we ought to do it. The two of us go in together, or one after the other? Just think about it, buddy. I value your judgment, you know. Always have.”

  Vic turned. He bent his head and walked a slow, crablike walk toward the entrance to Thornapple Terrace. Alvie did not waste any time watching him go. He was already sliding into the passenger seat of the Chevette, crunching up his spine to do so, and shaking Lenny’s shoulder to rouse him.

  “What?” an annoyed Lenny said. “What?”

  “Shut up.” Alvie checked his watch. “Take me home. And then I want you to get another car and take a little drive tonight. A car that’s not registered to you. Can you do that?”

  “You mean steal one?”

  “That’s up to you. Whatever you have to do, do it.”

  “Drive where, Pop?”

  “Bluefield.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bell had forgotten just how crummy the Tie Yard Tavern looked from the outside when it wasn’t nighttime, when the place was clearly, drearily visible: rotting roof, stained cinder block walls, slushy parking lot constantly garnished with glass from beer bottles smashed against those cinder blocks in fury or boredom or both. Like every bar, its charms were not aesthetic, but anesthetic.

  It was still early—not yet 6 p.m.—but the roads were already at the edge of unmanageable. The thick snow made a wall as it fell, a wall that Bell’s Explorer had to cut through again and again. Finally she turned into the parking lot.

  “You’d think this weather would keep a few folks home,” Rhonda murmured, surveying the rows of snow-covered, car-shaped lumps.

  “For a lot of them,” Bell said, “this is home.”

  They wanted to be discreet, thus Rhonda had called Kirk and asked to be let in the back door. Getting to that door was an ordeal; the owner of the Tie Yard Tavern was not, it was safe to say, a neat freak. Every item he had ever bought at a garage sale was stacked and wedged at the back of the building. Bell and Rhonda had to do as much climbing as they did walking.

  “Any such thing as a fire code in this county?” Bell muttered as she scooted around an old wringer washing machine and moved a trash barrel to get to the door.

  “Sure there is,” Rhonda said, engaged in her own clumsy waltz with a rusty bicycle and an upright piece of PVC pipe. “I bet the fire chief’s inside right now, having his fifth beer. You can ask him about it.”

  Kirk the bartender met them at the back door. He turned out to be a middle-aged man with a nasty scar that ran diagonally from his right eyebrow all the way down to the left side of his chin. The slash must have been gruesome, Bell thought, and it was clear he’d had neither the time nor the cash to get it stitched up properly. His skin, as it aged and shrank back, had pulled and fussed at the long cut, so that now his whole face was implicated in the wound. His hair was a dirty mop of gray. He was skinny everywhere except in the gut, which meant his physique matched that of two out of every three adult males in these parts.

  “When we get to where we can see the bar,” Kirk said, “he’s the second guy from the end.” He led them through a narrow, poorly lit tunnel that smelled like piss and beer. It occurred to Bell that those substances were really one and the same, because beer was, in effect, piss in the larval stage. “Hasn’t been here since the night he sat with that gal and kept her drinking,” Kirk added. “Noticed him right away. Seems keyed-up.”

  “He’s here alone?” Bell asked.

  “Yep, near as I can tell.”

  They paused before a pair of waist-high white louvered doors that swung inward and provided access to the bar. The place was drowning in loud music and louder laughter. Here, nobody fretted over an approaching storm or plunging temperatures or the need to stock up on bread and milk. There was only noise and booze and the comfort of a willed oblivion.

  Kirk put a hand on one side of the door, ready to pull it toward him. “You gals okay on your own? I gotta get back to work.”

  “Thanks, Kirk,” Rhonda said. They watched him over the top of the doors as he returned to his dominion, fending off the shouts of those who had had to wait—shockingly—a good three minutes for a refill.

  Bell quickl
y spotted the man at the bar. “It’s him,” she said.

  “Like you thought.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do we do now?” Rhonda said.

  “When in Rome.”

  “Huh?”

  Bell pressed the edge of the louvered door. “We buy him a beer.”

  * * *

  Lenny’s face when he first saw Bell was like a balloon being filled by a faulty pump. It got big with shock, then went back to its normal size as he realized the necessity for playing it cool; it puffed up a little more after that as he took some deep breaths, holding them too long before exhaling.

  He sat in front of his beer, a gloomy hunch to his bony shoulders.

  “You’re that judge from Raythune County, right?” he said. “Last time I saw you was in church.”

  Bell slid onto the stool next to him. Rhonda took the one on the other side.

  “It’s prosecutor, not judge,” Bell said. “And that’s the first time anyone’s ever said that they remember me from church.” She laughed. “Buy you another beer, Lenny?”

  “Sure.” He looked uneasy. This time, it was more than just an aversion to law enforcement. The Tie Yard Tavern was not the sort of place where people bought each other beers. Any beer bought for somebody else was automatically one less beer for yourself. Do the math.

  “Lenny, this is Rhonda Lovejoy. She’s my assistant.”

  He gave Rhonda a brief sideways swipe of a glance, and then came back to Bell. She signaled Kirk that Lenny would be having another.

  “Whadda you want?” he said.

  “I need your help,” Bell said.

  “My help.”

  “Oh, yes. You see, Lenny…” Bell paused, because Kirk had just set a sticky-looking bottle of Budweiser in front of her, and she had to push it down the line to Lenny. “It’s like this. Darlene died pretty close to here. She was run off the road. Hit a tree and died instantly. Do you remember that, Lenny? I’m sure you do. She was your friend, after all. Tragic story, don’t you think?”

  “She wasn’t run off no damned road,” he muttered. “She was drunk off her ass. Everybody says so.” He kept his eyes forward.

  “That’s what we thought at first, too, Lenny. But we were wrong. Her car was forced off that road.”

  “Forced.” He flung up his head and twisted it sideways, peering at her. Under the bar lights his skin looked even worse than usual, redder and shinier and flakier, as if an ancient disease were reawakening under the surface, a roused dragon. “Nope, that ain’t the way it happened.”

  “Oh, yes, Lenny.” Now that Bell had his eyes, she intended to hold onto them. “And I think you know that. You were here that Saturday night with Darlene. You sat and drank with her. You knew she had a problem—you knew she shouldn’t be drinking. But you needed her to be impaired. So that when that truck came along and bumped her car, she wouldn’t have the reflexes to save herself.”

  “That’s a lie.” He said it mildly, like someone ordering fries at a drive-through window.

  “We have witnesses, Lenny. People who saw you in the bar that night, buying her drinks. Why’d you do that?”

  “Me and Darlene, we go way back.”

  “So that’s all it was. Just some drinks with an old friend.”

  “Yeah.” His face was in lockdown. No emotions were allowed in or out.

  “Okay, fine,” Bell said. “Let’s move on. We know you placed several calls to Darlene’s home. You used a voice changer. You told her to stop asking questions about her father’s death.”

  “Didn’t do no such thing.”

  Bell let out a don’t make this harder than it has to be sigh. “Once again, Lenny, we have proof.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t matter. No big thing. So maybe I made some calls. No law against it.”

  Bell raised an eyebrow at Rhonda, who had been waiting for the signal. Her turn.

  “Hey, Lenny?” Rhonda’s voice offered its just between us lilt that Bell admired. A lot of very sly people had admitted to some very bad things while relaxing in the shade of that voice. “Remember the night you went out to Marcy Coates’s house? You needed to shut her up. Isn’t that right? I bet she was threatening to turn you in. Was that it? Marcy was a good woman. She took your money, because she wanted to help somebody else, and because the people she took care of at Thornapple Terrace were so far gone, anyway. And then she smothered Harmon Strayer—just like you’d told her to. She used a pillow, maybe. And put it over the old man’s face. He was helpless, and he died right away. Just like the other two. But she couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t live with herself. So she called you and said she was going to go to the police. No way that was happening, Lenny—right?”

  Rhonda leaned closer to him. His elbows were locked tight at his sides and he was looking straight ahead, at the rows of liquor bottles lined up on stacked shelves at the back of the bar, avoiding her eyes. The room was hot and crowded, and the thumping music never stopped, but it was as if they were, at that moment, the only two people in the world: the skinny haunted man and the woman on the next stool over, murmuring into his ear, telling him truths he already knew.

  “Lenny,” Rhonda said. “You had some trouble that night, didn’t you? There was another woman there. Marcy’s best friend, Connie. They ran. You had to chase them out of the house—after you’d killed the dog. You chased them into the snow. You got them—but you made a mistake.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “We found your shoes, Lenny,” Rhonda said, interrupting him, but doing it gently, almost reluctantly. “The ones with blood on them. From when you walked over to the bodies to make sure Marcy and Connie were dead.” It was a long shot, but she had seen much longer ones pay off, so why not?

  A tremor ran through Lenny Sherrill’s body, top to bottom. “You couldn’t have found them,” he said, his words rushed and bunched. “I buried ’em. I buried ’em that very night. Only pair I had. Nobody knows where I put ’em. Nobody. So there’s no freakin’ way you could’ve—”

  He stopped.

  Rhonda was silent. She leaned away from his ear and put her hands on the bar, as if she had to steady herself in the wake of this revelation, to deal with the momentousness of what he had just revealed.

  Lenny changed. He seemed to droop. It was as if he was letting go of something he had been holding onto so tightly for so long that he’d forgotten what it felt like to not be holding it. Now that he was free, he realized it felt pretty damned good.

  He looked first at Rhonda, then at Bell. He touched a couple of fingers to his chin, where the stubble had to fight for room to sprout between the acne scars. He knew what he’d done. He knew.

  And instead of getting mad, or backtracking on his story, or claiming they had not heard him right, or threatening them in the way he was used to doing when things went against him, he nodded. His voice sounded thoughtful. And a little relieved.

  “You didn’t really find my shoes, did you?”

  Bell shook her head.

  Lenny nodded again. He sat up a little straighter. “Got it,” he said. He slapped a hand on the wood. The impact made a funny sound as flesh hit the gathered wetness of a bar at this time of night, when the sloshed beer and the spilled whiskey were so abundant that desperate drinkers down to their last dollar had sometimes been known to take a quick lick.

  Lenny had made his decision. “None of this was my idea,” he said. “I’ve been doing what that old bastard tells me to do for my whole damned life.” He finished off the beer they had bought for him with a long, soulful slug, head thrown back, Adam’s apple bobbing. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “You tell me where I need to sign and I’ll sign. I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

  Bell recited his Miranda rights. She asked if he wanted to keep talking to them. He did. She asked if he wanted an attorney. He didn’t. He started to say something else when his chair was bumped hard by a passing customer, a man with long black hair tied back in a
ponytail. Lenny tipped forward on his stool.

  “Sorry, bro,” the man said, his voice a slurry mumble. “Sorry ’bout that. Oh, hey, Lenny—didn’t see it was you. How you doin’?”

  “Hey there, Jeff,” Lenny answered. “How you doin’?”

  By way of reply the man lifted his empty glass, which he handed over to Kirk for a refill. “Better soon,” he said, winking at Lenny. They both laughed and then the man moved on to wait for his drink at a spot farther down the bar.

  Bell leaned back on her stool so that she could see Rhonda. She nodded. Rhonda nodded back and began texting Deputy Oakes. She was asking him to come pick up Lenny Sherrill.

  Lenny hunched over the bar, shoulders raised high, head sunk between them. He was lost in his own world now. Bell wondered if he even heard the raucous music overhead, the punchy bass notes so powerful that they could serve as unofficial defibrillators, the electric guitars rolling out in fuzzy bursts of static.

  “A few more questions,” Bell said.

  “Fire away,” Lenny said. “Got nothing to hide no more.” He took a deep breath. “First good clear breath of air I’ve had in forever. Feels better already, you know? Being out from under my old man. Free of that SOB.”

  He cocked an elbow on the counter and faced Bell. He knew his life was about to change immensely—he knew what he had done, and knew he would be called to account for it—but there was satisfaction in that as well as anxiety, because the old life was hateful and painful and nothing he had ever chosen. And the new one—well, no one knew what the new one might bring, least of all Lenny Sherrill. Only that it would be different.

  That day at the church, Bell had sensed this about Lenny: Out of all the things he wanted to be—tough, cool, strong, a player—the one thing he didn’t want to be was anything like his father, Alvie Sherrill. It was Lenny’s single redeeming feature. Bell had counted on it. But she also knew that Lenny could not escape that fate on his own. He needed a hand.