by Julia Keller
Startled, the man had blinked a few times, and then he smiled.
“Good morning,” he said. “May I help you?”
“Hope so.”
“Well, I hope so, too. Hang on. Let me ask my wife if she can walk Gil. Get me off the hook.” At the sound of his own name, the terrier had reared up on his hind legs, begging for his walk. He was so close. He could see the grass. Shirley figured he could probably smell it, too.
“I didn’t mean to come to your home,” she said. “I thought this was the church.”
“It’s both. The rectory’s attached.” Paul inclined his head. “I come through the sanctuary sometimes. When I’m taking Gil out. I just like the feel of a church without any people in it. Especially in the morning. We’ve only got the one stained-glass window, but it faces east and—wow. It’s just beautiful. It’s like the whole world is getting a second chance, you know?”
Shirley had nodded, because a nod seemed to be called for. In truth, she did not remember what a church felt like in the early morning. Or any other time of day. She had not been inside a church since she was a little girl, when certain relatives—an aunt and uncle she now referred to exclusively in her mind as “damned hypocrites”—would come by on Sunday mornings and pick up her and Belfa and take them to church. Uncle Chester and Aunt Bess knew very well what was going on in that trailer, the one the sisters lived in with their pig of a father, but they didn’t do anything about it. They were scared of him, too. And so they told the girls to bow their heads and pray and ask God to make them more obedient, better behaved, so that they wouldn’t make their daddy mad. That, Uncle Chester insisted, was the crux of the problem: They pushed his buttons. Set him off. Better ask the Good Lord to help you learn to keep your mouth shut, Aunt Bess would say, holding Shirley’s upper arm in a grip as tight as a tourniquet, and not be such a smart-aleck. You girls need to learn to be humble. And grateful that your daddy takes care of you. Since your mama done run off like she did.
There was more to the story about what had happened to their mother. Shirley knew that now. There was always more to every story than what you were told as a child.
Shirley had occasionally gone to the nondenominational service run by the prison chaplain, but that was in a square beige room with folding chairs and no windows. Hence no light. Of any kind.
“Be right back,” the minister had said. The dog reluctantly let himself be dragged away.
When Paul returned a few minutes later, his wife was with him. She was short and portly, a vivid contrast to his height and leanness. She had a shelf of dark hair and round, gold-rimmed glasses.
“Jenny Wolford,” the woman said. She shook Shirley’s hand with a brisk friendliness that was also somehow impersonal, which Shirley appreciated. “It’s my turn to walk Gil, anyway.” She smiled. “His name’s short for Gilead. I’ll let you and Paul have some privacy.” And then she was gone, taking the leash from her husband in such a smooth and seamless way that Shirley was barely aware of the handoff.
He led her back through the sanctuary. Shirley had an impression of old wood and long splintery benches and a gray flagstone floor—the floor looked chilly, even in August—and yes, a stained-glass window, rising behind the altar in a radiant blaze of reds and yellows and blues. She consoled herself with the thought that she probably wasn’t the first person to show up on the church doorstep; others before her had surely appeared at an odd hour and asked to talk to the minister. Both Paul and Jenny had seemed thoroughly at home with the interruption, with having their day scrambled by a surprise visitor.
She followed him through a paneled corridor and into his office. He motioned her into a chair. He took the one behind the desk and waited for her to fill him in. After their brief initial conversation, during which she told him who her sister was, Shirley had stopped. She was unsure about how to go on. She asked him for a moment to collect herself. She did not feel pushed or rushed, and that enabled her to find a way forward.
She shifted her gaze back to his face. “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”
He waited.
“I have a lot going on,” Shirley said. “First off, like I said—my little sister’s the prosecutor. Belfa Elkins. She goes by Bell.”
“I’ve heard of her. Impressive woman.”
“Yeah. She is.” Shirley let the pride rise in her voice. “If you knew how we grew up—if you’d seen what we had to put up with, the both of us, if you’d seen the miserable SOB who called himself our father, you’d…” She expelled a brief jet of air. “Never mind. Let’s just say that my sister’s a good example of what you can do if you work real hard. Make the right choices.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“And I don’t mind saying—before we go any further—that I didn’t always do that. Make the right choices, I mean. Made a lot of mistakes in my life.”
“Just like everybody else.”
“Well, mine were pretty big. I spent some time in Lakin.” Lakin Correctional Center was the women’s prison in West Virginia. Shirley spoke the next part quickly, to get it over with. “For killing our father. Donnie Dolan. So that he wouldn’t hurt us anymore.” She looked down at her shoes. When she raised her head again, she added, “And for burning down the trailer. Where we lived.”
She waited for his reaction.
“Okay,” he said.
“Been out of Lakin a few years. Me and Belfa—we get along fine. Wish I saw more of her. But she’s real busy. All the time.” Restless, eager to get to the point but also apprehensive about it, Shirley shifted her feet forward and backward on the floor. “Anyway, I got something I need to tell her. That’s the real problem here. But I don’t know how.”
“What do you think will happen if you tell her?”
His question surprised her. “Don’t you want to know what it is first?” she said.
“If you want to share it—sure. But before we get into that, I’d like to know why you’re reluctant to talk it over with her.”
Shirley pondered. “She’ll be upset.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is?”
Again, he waited. She liked the careful, respectful way he handled silence. He seemed to know when to hold off and keep his mouth shut and when to speak, when to move the conversation forward.
“I just don’t have the right words,” Shirley said. “But I gotta tell her. And I gotta tell her real soon.”
He was distracted. Someone had come into the office. Shirley turned her head. His wife stood in the threshold.
“So sorry to interrupt,” Jenny said. “Paul, when you’re finished here, you need to call Dot Burdette. She said it’s urgent. Sounded really upset.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Thanks, Jen.” As soon as his wife had cleared the doorway, he returned his attention to Shirley. “We can take as long as you need. Don’t feel rushed. I get calls like that all day long. You’re my priority right now.”
She felt a small blush of pleasure. It was nice to be someone’s priority.
“Maybe you could meet your sister for lunch sometime,” Paul went on. “Or better yet—write her a letter. Not an e-mail. An actual letter. Write it out by hand or type it on a typewriter and take it to her house. You could watch her while she reads it. That way, you won’t have to say anything out loud if it doesn’t feel right. But you’re there. If she wants to discuss it.”
Shirley licked her lips. They felt dry and rough. “You still don’t know what it is.”
“It sounds private. You don’t have to tell me unless you—”
“I’m dying.”
He seemed to absorb the information through his skin. He shuddered. “Oh, my. Oh, my.” He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he locked onto her eyes. She appreciated the fact that he didn’t look away. Looking away surely would have been easier.
“It’s the cancer. “She blurted the words.
“Your sister needs to know. And like you said—the sooner, the better.”
Shirley realized he had misunderstood. “That’s not the thing that’s hard to tell her.”
He was confused now. She could tell from his face. So she quickly spoke again, her words coming in a rush: “It’s something else. Something different. I lied, okay? I lied to everybody. I can’t lie anymore. It’s over. That’s what I’ve gotta tell her—that I’m all through with the lying. I have to speak the truth. It’s going to tear her apart, but I have to do it. I can’t…” Her throat was suddenly much too dry. She coughed, swallowed.
And then she told him the rest of the story.
Bell
8:57 A.M.
This would be a day like no other.
In the beginning, though, nobody knew what was coming. It was impossible to know.
Or was it? Surely she should have predicted it, the blunt consequence of a perfect storm of causes and effects: a chilling rise in the number of addicts, a surge in potency of the heroin coming up from Mexico, the ease of finding willing customers. Any sentient person—especially a county prosecutor, for God’s sake, someone who knew just how rapidly the situation was deteriorating—should have seen it. Should have known.
But even if there had been an unmistakable omen, an in-your-face portent, Bell might have missed it. Because at the crucial moment that morning—the moment when she should have received her first inkling that something horrific was stirring in its cradle—she wasn’t thinking about drugs or death or the myriad issues involved in public safety and the administration of justice.
What was she thinking about?
She was thinking about doughnuts.
Her secretary, Lee Ann Frickie, had brought doughnuts to the office this morning, an occurrence that was, if not unprecedented, certainly highly unusual. Lee Ann was decidedly anti-treat, and militantly anti-sugar; she had once grabbed a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie out of the hands of Deputy Charlie Mathers mere seconds before its insertion into his widened mouth, declaring as she did so that he could thank her later for saving his life. Charlie did not see it quite that way. He was surprised, and he was angry, and he never quite forgave Lee Ann. She later apologized for startling him and perhaps acting impetuously—but she would not apologize for attempting to safeguard his health.
Yet the moment Bell walked through the door, Lee Ann rose from her desk and handed her a buff-colored circular confection upon which the honey-glaze had already cracked, like a mirror whose structural integrity had recently been breached by a slight tap, creating an interlocking network of polyhedrons that straddled the whole. As a consequence, the doughnut was shedding small cloudy flakes of sugar. Lee Ann had wrapped it in a napkin, but the fractured bits of deliciousness slipped over the napkin’s edge in a constant messy sprinkle.
“Here you go,” Lee Ann said. She had passed the mandatory retirement age for county employees some years ago, but no one seemed to care about that, least of all Lee Ann. She wore her hair in a gray bob. She was straight, tall and very thin; she claimed to prefer kale to cake, and her slenderness meant that it might actually be true. She had served six county prosecutors—all male, until Bell improbably was elected to the post—but would never, even when pressed, offer up an opinion as to which boss was her favorite. It seemed clear to most observers that her rejection of an easeful retirement meant that Bell Elkins topped her list, but there was no independent confirmation of that hunch from the only person who knew for sure: Lee Ann.
Bell stared at the doughnut. For a moment she was too flummoxed to move. She stood there, doughnut in one hand, briefcase in the other, and tried to solve this first mystery of the day. Her initial hunch—and she could be forgiven, surely, given Lee Ann’s age—was that her secretary must have suffered a mild stroke. Only a stricken and ailing brain could account for the fact that Lee Ann had cast her lot with something that actually tasted good. Or that possessed any taste, period.
And then, just like that, the mystery was solved.
“It was my turn to get the doughnuts for church yesterday,” Lee Ann said. “Clean forgot that attendance goes way down in the summer. I bought too many. Hate to waste ’em.”
So that was the explanation. The only thing Lee Ann disliked more than indulging in sugary snacks was squandering resources.
Bell continued on into her office. The prosecutor’s suite was on the first floor of the Raythune County Courthouse, an immense stone behemoth that presided over Acker’s Gap like a stern grandparent, reeking of iron judgment and encroaching decrepitude, gradually unraveling at the edges. Behind it a sawtooth-topped black mountain blocked a large part of the sky and hence the sun, so that, no matter the season, the courthouse felt chilly in the natural shadow. There was a time when Bell had referred to the courthouse as her second home. But as her workload had increased, and as her ability to delegate had decreased, she had tallied up the hours one day and realized it was actually her first. That place with the living room and bedrooms and kitchen was now the runner-up.
She set the doughnut on the edge of her desk. She didn’t have the heart to tell Lee Ann what every doughnut aficionado knew: They didn’t keep. Unless you ate a doughnut within a few hours of its creation, it quickly grew brittle and stale. A day was an eternity in the life of a doughnut. The dandruff-like spillage from the cracked glaze told Bell all she needed to know about Lee Ann’s little gift: By now it would be a hard flavorless glob.
And so it was that when her cell rang, Bell was not thinking about the deep, abstract themes that usually engulfed her each morning in the first few minutes when she sat down behind the oak desk. She was not thinking about crime and punishment, or the universal propensity for selfishness and greed, or the violence bred by the dismal economic plight of the people who had elected her. She was not thinking about justice or injustice, or life and death, or suffering and redemption.
She was thinking about doughnuts.
The foolishness of that, accidental though it was, would haunt her for a long, long time.
“Elkins.” She hadn’t bothered to look at the caller ID. It didn’t matter who was on the other end; she would answer. That was what being a public servant was all about. You didn’t get to pick and choose whose problems you responded to.
“Morning.” The word was a friendly one, but the tone was blank and plain, with no embellishment to suggest actual affection. It was not that Sheriff Pam Harrison was unaware that her manner of speaking struck some people as offputtingly rude; she simply didn’t care. She had a job to do. Social niceties did not register on her personal list of Things That Matter.
“What’s going on, Pam?” Bell’s voice was slightly more cordial than the caller’s, but not by much. In the beginning she had attempted to forge a closer bond with Pam Harrison; she had been rebuffed so many times—not harshly, but with no question about Pam’s desire to keep her colleague at arm’s length—that she no longer bothered. If the sheriff was on the line, it was about business. Might as well get right to it.
“Rough night.” Pam’s voice was a straight line. It never changed to accommodate the nature of the information being conveyed, be it tragic or routine. “Five overdoses. One fatality.”
“Damn. Five?”
As bad as it was, it wasn’t a record, and thus Bell felt no premonition. A year and a half ago, the total number of overdoses on a single night was seven. Six of the seven had hailed from a single notorious, troublemaking family: the McAboys from Hawksbridge Hollow. No one died. More’s the pity, Bell had thought at the time, and she knew she was not alone in that sentiment. She also knew it was the kind of thing you couldn’t say out loud.
“Yeah,” Pam said. “The fatality, by the way, was Sally Ann Burdette.”
Bell winced. She had gone to high school with Dot Burdette. The first time she met Dot’s niece, Sally Ann, Bell instantly knew the kind of trouble the girl was in; the runny red eyes and the unhealed sores on her arm and her fidgety demeanor could all be filed under the category “dead giveaway.” But there was nothing Bell could do about it. Nothi
ng Dot could do about it. Nothing anyone could do about it—until Sally Ann herself made the decision to change her life.
The window on that possibility, Bell thought grimly, was now officially and permanently closed.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for the heads-up.” She pulled the cell from her ear to check the time, wondering how many minutes would elapse before Dot called her, bereft and wailing. She and Dot were not close friends, but she knew that she would be among Dot’s first calls. Dot would want to make sure the prosecutor’s office was ready to pounce on whoever had sold her girl the drugs. Family members had to blame somebody. You couldn’t blame a dead person, even if the dead person had injected herself with a lethal dose of heroin.
The sheriff was talking again. “Looks like a bad batch. Laced with something a lot more powerful than these folks are used to.”
“Should we start tracking down the source?”
“We know the source.”
Pam had a point. It was an infuriatingly well-established fact that drug gangs—mostly from Mexico, according to FBI reports—made regular trips to the area. They were, Bell thought, like peddlers from a couple of centuries ago, those canny con men who sported big smiles and practiced lines of snappy patter. Instead of horse-drawn wagons that swayed and clinked with pots and pans hanging from hooks on the side, the dealers tooled around in Trans Ams and Chargers with small plastic bags packed in the glove box. And they didn’t bother with patter. They didn’t need to.
“True,” Bell said, “but somebody’s getting the stuff into the hands of the addicts. Somebody here in town, I mean.” The gangs were wholesalers, not retailers. They relied on local help for distribution.
“You think we should find out who sold it to Sally Ann and the others.”