A Killing in the Hills

13


Damn, he looked good. She had to admit it.

She gave Sam Elkins the once-over, not letting her gaze linger too long, because she knew he’d get a kick out of it, and that wasn’t the kind of kick she wanted to administer.

‘Jesus, Bell,’ he said. He had a headlong, hectoring way of talking, as if he were always in the midst of a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. ‘Three people gunned down in the middle of town? What the hell’s happening to this place? And what are you and Sheriff Andy doing about it?’

That was his permanent joke, the old reliable. Acker’s Gap was Mayberry. Nick Fogelsong was slow-moving Andy Taylor, hands in his pockets, whistling a little tune while the bad guys robbed banks and snatched old ladies’ purses.

It wasn’t funny the first time Sam said it. Hadn’t grown any more amusing since.

The three of them moved into the living room. Sam was commandeering the space as well as the conversation, just like always. He and Carla sat down on the couch. He’d edged in front of Bell to claim the spot. Everything was a contest with Sam.

Bell didn’t care. Let him win. She didn’t want the couch, anyway. Just as she’d planned, she fell into the big overstuffed chair in the corner, dumping her briefcase and her sweater on the first horizontal surfaces she passed on the way. Settled herself in the mushy-soft cushions with a delicious little wiggle of her backside. Only two things would’ve made the moment any better:

The presence of a cold Rolling Rock on the little table beside her, its green glass side pebbled with beautiful condensation.

And the absence of her ex-husband.

‘We called you yesterday, Sam,’ Bell said. ‘Carla’s fine. Fine then, fine now.’

She didn’t want to tell him about the wild ride down the mountain. She knew he would use it as yet another chance to slam West Virginia. Knew what he’d say: Must’ve been some drunk hillbilly. Stupid reckless redneck. Told ya so. Besides, she was used to keeping secrets. It was second nature.

‘Appreciated that,’ Sam declared, ‘but I needed to check on my little girl. Well worth the trip.’ He hooked an arm around Carla’s narrow shoulders. ‘Can’t imagine what it was like. Being so close to that kind of thing. You’re brave, sweetie. I’m proud of you.’

Bell watched him give their daughter a hug. She wished it weren’t so, but her ex-husband really did look good. He was dressed in a buff-colored V-neck pullover and sleek cuffed khakis and soft tasseled loafers, a vivid contrast to her sweat-matted blouse and rumpled trousers. It was Sam’s casual look. The fact that he even had a look – that he spent so much time fussing over his clothes these days, primarily to appear as if he hadn’t fussed at all – was strange. It was a measure of how much he had changed.

Bell could remember a time when Sam’s casual clothes consisted entirely of ratty jeans and ripped-up T-shirts, when putting on shoes and socks felt, he’d wail, like a week in jail. When they’d first started dating in high school, he despised having to dress up. Forced to wear a tie, he’d groan and yank at the offensive strip of cloth, pulling it straight up in the air as if his neck were being squeezed in a noose, while he crossed his eyes and let his tongue loll.

She remembered all of that, and a lot more to boot. And that’s the problem, she thought. When you’d been married to someone for a long time, when you’d shared your life so completely, you were never able to live only in the present. You were perpetually surrounded by the ghosts of all the people that both of you had once been. The room got very crowded, very fast. Every sentence had an echo.

‘I was just glad to see that my little girl’s all right,’ Sam said. ‘And we were having a great talk – weren’t we, sweetie? – before we were interrupted.’

To Bell’s surprise, Carla allowed her father’s hug to go on. She didn’t jerk away. She didn’t roll her eyes or lean forward and make the universal ‘gag me’ sign by sticking her index finger in her mouth, which was her typical reaction to attempts at affectionate gestures by either parent.

‘Sure, Dad.’

Perplexed, Bell rubbed her shoulder while she sized up the situation. She wondered if she’d sprained something while tugging on the wheel, trying to keep from becoming a permanent part of the West Virginia scenery.

She could feel the sweat cooling on her skin.

Why hadn’t she seen Sam’s car out front? Oh, right. Her powers of observation had been compromised by the definite possibility of ending up in a heap of smoking chrome and shattered glass and motley ruin at the base of the mountain.

Sam watched her. ‘What’s with your arm?’

‘I’m fine.’ She didn’t need his concern. Matter of fact, she didn’t need anything from him.

He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he went on.

‘So seriously, Bell. About the investigation. That shooting sounds scary as hell. Any progress finding the guy?’

‘Not yet. But Nick’s working hard. And he’s getting a lot of help from the state police.’

‘Good. He needs it.’

‘Nick knows what he’s doing.’

‘Well, we’ll soon find out about that, won’t we?’

She hated her ex-husband’s tone. ‘You have a problem with how the sheriff does his job, Sam?’

Nick would’ve told her not to bother defending him. He didn’t care what Sam Elkins thought of him. Didn’t care what almost anybody thought of him. But Sam was pissing her off. What did he know about Raythune County these days?

Nothing. That’s what.

‘Things are different around here now,’ Bell continued. ‘It’s not like it was when you and I were growing up. It’s rougher. The drug gangs are vicious. Extremely well organized. And ruthless.’

‘I work in D.C. You’re going to tell me about gangs? About drugs? Please.’

‘No comparison.’

‘You’re damned right there’s no comparison.’

‘This is worse.’

‘You can’t be serious.’ A snort of disdain.

‘I am,’ Bell declared. ‘Look, Sam, drugs and drug gangs are a part of big cities – and have been for a long, long time. In D.C., you expect it. You’re not even surprised by it anymore. It’s everywhere. You’ve got junkies stopping cars in intersections, begging for spare change. You’ve got drug deals going down in public parks. But around here, it’s still new. That makes it a whole lot worse. People don’t know how to think about it. They’re seeing their children disappear right before their eyes – sometimes metaphorically, when they get hooked on pain pills or heroin. And sometimes literally. We’ve had a lot more gun violence lately. Because of turf wars, and because of desperate people doing desperate things to get drugs.’

Sam gave her an indulgent smile, the kind that used to enrage her during the dwindling days of their marriage. It was the equivalent of a head pat. She wasn’t even worth arguing with.

She found herself wishing, like she always did, that he’d gotten fat or ugly or bald. Even a small cold sore would’ve made her day. But, no. He took great care of himself. Even at forty, Sam looked as if he could return to his old job at Walter Meckling’s remodeling business, the job he’d had in high school and during his summers home from college. The job he’d been doing when he and Bell had first gotten together.

That was a very long time ago.

‘So things are pretty bad around here?’ he asked.

‘Terrible. It’s a fight, Sam. Every day.’

‘Too bad. But in that case,’ he said, his smile now broad enough to concern her, the smile of a man springing a trap, ‘you won’t mind the fact that Carla wants to come live with me in D.C. Right after the first of the year. That’s what we were talking about when you walked in.’

Confused, Bell looked at Carla.

‘Sweetie?’

Carla wouldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

Sam pulled Carla closer and again kissed the top of her head. Again, she didn’t pull away. Okay, Bell thought. So that’s where we are. It’s two against one.

Carla’s attitude toward her father varied from week to week, day to day, Bell knew. Occasionally, hour to hour. Sometimes Carla seemed to resent the hell out of him, sneering at his attempts to keep her up to date on his life or his ladyfriend du jour. Other times, though, Carla adored him. Daddy’s little girl could pop up from out of nowhere. And the Mustang had been a master stroke. A seventeen-year-old couldn’t resist that kind of blatant bribery.

Hell. Nobody could.

But go live with Sam? Leave her, leave Acker’s Gap, and go live with him?

Bell felt sucker-punched.

‘She told me right after I got here today,’ Sam said. Affable voice, as if it wasn’t a big deal. He knew better. ‘She doesn’t feel safe anymore in this town, Bell – which is understandable, I think, under the circumstances – and she misses her dad. She’d like to give it a try, living with me.

‘And as I recall,’ he went on, lifting his hand from Carla’s shoulder and placing it on the top of her head, ‘we agreed that it was her choice, once she turned sixteen.’

Bell didn’t take her eyes off her daughter. She ignored Sam. Let him feel victorious, let him score his little points. She didn’t care about him.

She cared about Carla.

‘Honey?’ Bell said again. ‘What’s going on?’

Carla wouldn’t look at her.

Bell didn’t understand anything, but she understood everything. She didn’t know the particulars of what was bothering Carla, but she knew something was. She knew it because she’d been a little like Carla – no, a lot like Carla – when she was younger. She, too, had felt fury and longing and frustration, as well as a conviction that things would be better somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

‘Carla,’ Bell said gently. She would talk, even if her daughter didn’t. ‘You can move in with your dad if you want to, I won’t stand in your way, but I’d like to know what’s really going on.’

Carla bit her bottom lip. She sniffed. With the back of her small hand, she vigorously rubbed her nose. ‘The thing is—’ She paused, tried again. ‘I think that maybe I—’

The ping! of a text.

Bell and Sam frowned, looking at Carla in unison. Had to be her cell.

Carla shook her head. Her cell was on the coffee table, propped up against her calculus book, a red silo of Pringles, and two Diet Coke cans.

‘Wasn’t me,’ she said.

Bell touched the lump in her pocket, which she now realized was vibrating. She pulled out her cell and scanned the message.

It was from Hick Leonard, one of her assistants: AS ill. trial start postponed min. 1 week. HL

Bell texted back: K.

Staring at the tiny screen, Bell wondered what had happened to Albie Sheets. How serious it was. Trial postponements weren’t terribly rare, but the last time she’d seen Albie, he looked fine. Then her thoughts moved on to Sheriff Fogelsong and the investigation of the shooting. With the Sheets trial briefly on hold, she now would have time to help Nick. They needed to find out a lot more about the three victims and why somebody wanted them dead.

Three harmless old men. It didn’t make sense. Crimes, even crimes of passion, had a logic to them, a rationale, even if it was a murky one. They had to find it. Dig it out from the forest of facts already in evidence. I’ll call Nick, pick a time to meet for a strategy session and then . . .

She looked up.

Her daughter and her ex-husband were staring at her. Briefly, Bell felt as if she were the seventeen-year-old, the troublemaker, the rule-breaker, and they were the authority figures. Explanations began to form in her head, justifications, rationalizations: Look, we’re getting ready to go to trial in the Sheets case, and I told my staff to contact me right away if there were any developments, and so naturally—

‘Sorry,’ Bell said. ‘Work thing.’ She pushed the cell back in her pocket.

‘Can’t you turn that off?’ Sam said. He might have meant her cell, but he also could have meant her passion for her job. Ever since she’d become prosecuting attorney, he’d complained about it. She was paid too little, he scoffed, for what the office required, the long hours, the constant aggravation.

‘This is our child, Belfa,’ Sam went on piously. ‘Our little girl. She wants to talk to us. Seems pretty important.’ He paused. ‘At least it is to me.’

Bell gave him a slit-eyed stare. In years past they’d been interrupted many, many times during important family conferences by his cell, his work, his ‘emergencies’ – she couldn’t even think the word without attaching pincers to it, the invisible grappling hooks of sarcasm – and he had the nerve to criticize her?

At least her calls were about things that mattered. They were about people’s lives. Not last-minute details about some golf junket for a bunch of on-the-take congressmen, some trip bankrolled by a pharmaceutical company desperate for FDA approval for some new anti-cellulite pill that was going to make somebody a gazillion bucks. Which constituted Sam’s main business these days, the splendid use to which he was putting his law degree: smoothing the road for rich guys to get richer, courtesy of the United States government. Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe was a top lobbying firm in D.C. One-stop shopping for any company seeking inroads with Congress, the regulatory agencies, even the president – and willing to pay for it.

Sam was a lawyer. A damned good one. He had the skill and the knowledge to help people, to level things up just a bit in a world that was relentlessly slanted. Instead he’d gone for the big payday.

There was little left in him of the man Bell had married.

It wasn’t the only reason they had divorced – Sam’s occasional infidelities also put a crimp in things – but for Bell, it was right up there near the top. It might have been even more crucial and damning than the affairs, which Sam seemed to regard as additional fringe benefits of being rich and successful, like two-hundred-dollar haircuts and bespoke suits, affairs which never bothered Bell as much as other people told her they ought to.

Now she refocused on her daughter. She leaned forward and smiled, feeling the pinch in her shoulder but realizing that the other pinch – the one that came in her heart when she looked at Carla’s sour wounded face – felt worse.

‘Sweetie,’ Bell said, ‘why don’t you tell me what you wanted to—’

‘Forget it,’ Carla snapped. ‘Just forget it.’

Carla knew she sounded mean and that was perfectly fine, because she wanted to sound mean. Her mom didn’t care about her. That much was obvious. All she cared about was work, the stupid cases and the stupid people and all the stupid lawyer stuff. Carla was sick of her mom’s job. Sick of Acker’s Gap. And behind all that, fueling it, pushing it, causing it, really, although Carla didn’t want to admit it, she was scared of what she knew about the shooting and even more scared of telling her mother how she’d come to know it.

Carla realized, even as she was letting the bitter thoughts about her mother unspool in her head, that they were unfair and inaccurate; the thing about irrational anger, though, was that it satisfied. It was like a sugar rush. Temporarily, it felt damned good. To hell with the aftermath.

Carla had been teetering. Hadn’t been able to make up her mind. The text her mother received was just the nudge Carla needed. She doesn’t care about me. Never did. Never will.

And that was why, when she saw her mother’s face, earnest and concerned, with a kind of melting softness in her eyes, Carla felt something twist inside her, something that hurt, burned, because of course she knew that her mother did care, did love her, loved her more than anything else in the world, and that made it worse somehow. All Carla could think of was that she wanted to punish her mom, to make her pay, make her pay for loving Carla so much and for letting things get to be so complicated and difficult and confusing, for putting this hot twisty thing in Carla’s stomach – and Carla knew how to do that. She knew how to hurt her mom.

Her dad had told her right when he got there today that his offer was still in effect – she could leave West Virginia and go live with him, could start all over again – and that would solve everything, Carla thought, and that’s exactly what she would do, even though she knew it would break her mother’s heart.

‘Just figured I oughta let you know that I’ve made up my mind,’ Carla said, ripping through the words as if she were pulling things out of a drawer without even looking at them, flinging them over her shoulder, hasty and heedless. ‘I’m going to go live with Dad. Just as soon as I can. I’m outta here.’