A Killing in the Hills

15


Bell looked at her daughter. The living room suddenly felt colder, even though the afternoon sunlight was cruising in through the large picture window, filling the house with a casual radiance, turning the rundown chair and the worn carpet and the chipped mantel into brighter, brasher versions of themselves.

‘So you want to go live in D.C.?’

Carla shrugged.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I do.’

‘What about school? And your friends?’

‘There are schools over there.’ Carla said it quietly, seriously, not in the smart-ass way that Bell had anticipated. ‘I’ll make new friends.’

Bell let some time go by. Sam didn’t speak either. He sat back on the couch, the ankle of one leg balanced on the knee of the other leg, and he fingered the pressed hem of his slacks.

If Carla truly didn’t want to be in Acker’s Gap, then Bell wouldn’t keep her here. She had made a promise to her daughter. She didn’t want West Virginia to seem like a prison. If you felt that you were trapped here, it could seem like the worst place in the world. If you stayed voluntarily, it could be the best.

Sam and Carla had discussed the logistics before Bell had arrived home. Just in case, Sam had said. Just in case Carla decided to do it. She could finish out the semester at Acker’s Gap High School. After the Christmas break, she would move into her father’s condo. And enroll at a high school in Alexandria.

The three of them stood in the front hallway. Sam needed to get back to D.C. There was, he said, an important meeting that night at the office, a conference call with Dubai.

‘With who?’ Carla said.

‘Dubai.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a place, honey, not a person. Better Google it. I spend a lot of time there these days.’

He had won, so he could afford to be gracious. He turned to Bell.

‘You’ve had a hell of a weekend,’ he said.

Bell wondered how he knew about the chase on the mountain – then realized he didn’t. That’s not what he meant. He was referring to the shooting the day before. And the Sheets trial, which she’d mentioned to him in an e-mail. She liked to keep Sam up to speed on her hardest cases. He had excellent legal instincts – even though he hadn’t actually practiced law for years now, preferring to use what he knew about the law to help his powerful clients worm their way around it. She liked to hear his gut feelings about her cases.

Bell shrugged, nodded.

‘I’ve had better,’ she said.

He turned to Carla and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘See you later, sweetie. I’ll tell Glenna the good news. We’ll start getting your room all ready for you.’

Bell watched him go down the front steps. Sam had the same crisply confident way of moving through the world that he’d always had. Even in high school. First time she had really noticed him, first time she was aware of him as something other than just a blur in the hallway at school, he’d been shingling a roof downtown. She heard her name. She looked up and there he was. Raising his hammer high over his head in some kind of weird tribute. Smiling.

If anybody else had done that, it would’ve seemed ludicrous. From the guy up on the roof, though, it somehow struck Bell as . . . gallant. A gallant tribute. Like something out of her favorite novel, Wuthering Heights. Tall and confident, even though he was standing on a roof and wearing filthy pants and cracked work boots and a ratty red T-shirt with MECKLING CONSTRUCTION CO printed on the front in slanty white letters, and even though his hair was spiky with sweat and there was dirt smeared across his face, Sam Elkins was her Heathcliff. Her Heathcliff with a hammer.

‘Hey!’ he’d called out. Just that: ‘Hey!’

She had pretended to ignore him. But she wouldn’t ignore him for long.

Bell shook her head. Memories were a bitch.

The present-day Sam – her ex-husband Sam – was just about out of sight by now. Behind her, Bell heard Carla climbing the stairs, on her way up to her room.

That left Bell alone in the front hallway. Silence was what she’d wanted, ever since she’d arrived home; silence and peace were what she thought she craved, after the wild ride down the mountain that morning. Now that she had it, though, the silence and the solitude felt peculiar to her, unsettling, and she felt an emptiness that she didn’t want to call fear. Bell Elkins would rather be sad than afraid, any day of the week.

Her cell phone rang. She quickly levered it out of her pocket and checked the screen. It was Hick again. Calling her this time, instead of texting. More news on the Sheets case, no doubt. Or news on any of the other cases they were handling. News too complicated to be reduced to a few acronyms in a text message.

She felt a quick surge of relief. Relief that she had her work, her cases, her obligations to the people who had elected her. If Carla moved away to live with Sam and what’s-her-name – was it Julie? No, wait, that was last year – Bell would need something to keep her mind and her heart occupied. She hated the idea of emptiness, of a gap at the center of her life. She was grateful for the heavy caseload in the prosecutor’s office.

Glenna. That was it, right? Yeah.

The name of Sam’s girlfriend was Glenna Saint-something-or-other. Bell would have to get used to the name. This Glenna person would become a daily part of Carla’s life. She’d see more of Carla than Bell did.

Bell would get Skype and e-mail. Glenna would get the real thing.

‘Hey,’ Bell said hurriedly into her cell, trying to keep her voice steady, nonchalant, so Hick Leonard wouldn’t guess at the emotion that had just rocked her with that last realization. ‘What’s going on, Hick?’