A Killing in the Hills

18


Her ex-husband missed West Virginia. Bell was sure of it. He just didn’t want anyone to know that he did. He thought that looking back showed weakness. Strong people, he always said, looked forward.

When their marriage was still fresh and filled with promise, and Sam Elkins had taken a job in Washington, D.C., straight out of law school, he had referred to their move as a ‘clean break.’ He’d never let the phrase be. Wouldn’t give it a rest. He’d hauled it out at intervals during the drive east, all those years ago.

‘We’re making a clean break,’ he would say. ‘No looking back, right?’

And Bell, half listening, would nod, because in fact she did have to look back – but only because she had to keep an eye on the squirming toddler strapped in the car seat behind her. Without a steady series of distractions – Cheerios, a squeaky plastic duck, a plush purple giraffe – ten-month-old Carla Jean would’ve gotten bored and then begun to fuss and whimper, the whimpers quickly widening out into savage screams. Those screams would’ve turned the orange Pinto station wagon into a torture chamber on wheels.

The car was just about the only thing they owned outright. Everything else was mortgaged, borrowed, or recently procured in a swap from the Goodwill store in Morgantown, because Sam and Bell had put all of their money toward Sam’s law school tuition. And they still owed tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

They didn’t mind. Sam had ambition, and ambition, he liked to say, was worth more than mere money, because when you mixed ambition with hard work, you got success. Money was only money. Money could buy things – it could have bought them some real luggage, for one thing, and they wouldn’t have had to pack their belongings in what everybody they knew called ‘a matched set of West Virginia luggage,’ which meant brown paper grocery sacks – but that was all it could do. Nothing else. It didn’t simmer with possibility.

Bell loved his dreams. They were her dreams, too, at that point: leaving West Virginia. Starting a family. Settling somewhere that wasn’t hemmed in by the mountains and by the dark fatalism that seemed to throw shadows over the place even more effectively than these mountains did. As he approached graduation, Sam had been offered a job with a coal company, and then he’d been offered a job on the other side of that line, too – with a conservation group that lobbied against strip mining – but he’d said no to both. Because both jobs would’ve meant staying in West Virginia. And Sam Elkins wanted out. He wanted ‘a clean break.’

That was what Bell wanted, too. At first.

Once they were settled in D.C., she discovered that she made a lousy stay-at-home mom. She adored Carla, but she was bored and restless. The restlessness finally pushed her into taking the LSAT. She garnered an exceptionally high score that, she was certain, surprised her husband and made him double-check the number, although he was careful to hide his astonishment. Bell enrolled in Georgetown Law School. By that time, Sam had strategically quit his first job, then even more strategically quit a second, and let himself be wooed to join Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe, where he was paid so extravagantly well that hiring a live-in nanny to look after Carla – now a sturdy and inquisitive seven-year-old, rambunctious and daring, blessed with Bell’s love of running – was not a problem.

The problem was something else: Bell still wasn’t happy.

She had decided, as her days in law school wound down, that she wanted to practice a different kind of law than what she saw all around her. And to live a different kind of life. She wanted to go back.

She’d never forget the day she told Sam. Her decision was still new to her, still slightly outlandish for her to contemplate. When she heard herself talking about it, saying the words, they sounded strange and unlikely, almost as if she’d grabbed the wrong script in the play and was speaking lines meant for somebody else.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Bell said.

They were sitting in a crowded Starbucks at a mall in Tysons Corner, at a small round table with a checkerboard inlay. Each time someone ordered a Frappucino, she and Sam had to raise their voices to be heard above the racket of the blender. The grinding buzz sounded like a toy lawnmower. A lawnmower, Bell thought, that Barbie might use.

Except that Barbie wouldn’t mow the lawn, she corrected herself. That’s what she keeps Ken around for.

‘Well, good,’ Sam said, in his singsong, indulgent voice. He smiled. ‘Thinking is good.’

He had four minutes to lavish upon her before he had to return to his Range Rover and head for the long-term parking garage at Dulles. He’d worked out the time that precisely. He always did. He was on his way to London because Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe had several important new clients there, and one of those clients was in some kind of serious trouble. Sam Elkins had a reputation for being the kind of man you sent if there was serious trouble. He was smart and he was charming, but he also possessed an attribute that was even more important than intelligence or charm: discretion.

Bell looked across the table at her husband and was struck once again by how handsome he was. Conventional word, but the right one. He was born handsome. On her first visit to his parents’ home for Sunday dinner, back in 1988, Sam’s mother Lillian had spread out the photo album on Bell’s lap so that she could admire his baby pictures, and damned if the pictures didn’t prove that he was handsome back then, too. He was probably the world’s only toddler who’d looked like George Clooney – that is, if you could imagine George Clooney in a cockeyed diaper and cereal-stained T-shirt that read LI’L MOUNTAINEER. Which Bell, having seen the photographic evidence, certainly could.

At Acker’s Gap High School, he could’ve had his pick of girlfriends – he played football, too, in addition to being handsome, which was the cherry on the sundae when it came to high school popularity – and he’d chosen her. Belfa Dolan. The misfit, the rebel, the strange dark girl with the gruesome past, the girl that nobody else wanted to have much to do with. He loved her fierceness, he told her. He loved the way she argued with him. Held her own. Kept to herself and seemed to revel in her solitude, as if the whole thing were her idea, not theirs, as if other people were just a smeary blur of sameness, not worth bothering about.

Bell was awarded a track scholarship to West Virginia Wesleyan. The first week of classes she was running across campus, each stride widening the distance between her and the invisible thing that shadowed her, the trees rustling overhead with a sound like pages turning, the sky sporting a blue so intense and determined that it looked as if it were trying to burn off what was left of the summer in the course of one fiercely perfect day, and there he was: Sam Elkins. He hadn’t told her he was coming here, too.

After that, it was understood. They were together. During spring break of senior year, they were married. In Sam’s final year at WVU Law School, Carla was born. Happiness, Sam had said, the day he loaded everything they owned in the pumpkin-colored Pinto, using a series of crossed bungee cords to secure the boxes on top, is West Virginia in your rearview mirror.

And Bell, already in the passenger seat, looked up from the crinkly map on which she had traced, with a yellow highlighter, the fastest route from Morgantown to Washington, D.C., and responded with a war whoop of enthusiastic agreement.

These days he was still handsome, but it was a different kind of handsome. She watched him sip his latte. They were down to three minutes now, before he had to leave.

Sam wore gorgeously tailored suits, the kind with a whisper of a pinstripe in fabric that fell in precise lines and crisp angles. He regularly indulged in fantastically expensive haircuts, haircuts whose results looked about the same to Bell as the ones he used to get back in Al’s Barber Shop on Main Street in Acker’s Gap – but that didn’t, Lord knew, cost anything like the ten bucks Al asked for. Yet the big and little pleasures, the personal luxuries in which he indulged, didn’t make Bell think any less of Sam; she was proud of his success, pleased for him. But now that he’d proved himself, she hoped that maybe, just maybe, he was outgrowing the need to prove himself anymore. That he could relax.

And that they could stay together, even after the bombshell she was about to drop right in the middle of his sumptuous and self-assured life.

‘Sam, I want to go back to West Virginia.’

‘No problem, honey. Christmas is right around the corner and my parents are really looking forward to seeing Carla.’ Sam had moved his mother and father into a retirement community in Greenbriar County.

He smiled again. Bell had always loved his smile, but lately, it was as if someone had told him once too often that it was boyishly appealing. There were times when he seemed to milk it.

‘In fact,’ Sam added, the smile sticking around too long, ‘I kind of enjoy those snow-covered mountains myself – as long as I’ve got the Range Rover and that sweet little thing called four-wheel drive.’

‘No, Sam. That’s not what I mean.’

For the first time since they had grabbed seats in the crowded Starbucks, tucking their elbows close to their sides so they wouldn’t bump the couple at the next table, Sam seemed to give her his full attention.

‘What is it, then?’ He wasn’t smiling anymore.

‘I want us to go home, Sam. To West Virginia. For good.’

His face was blank. He wasn’t upset. He had no reaction at all, at least initially. He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

She went on. ‘There’s so much to be done there, Sam. So much good work. Look, I’ve been reading about all the problems. It’s even worse than it was when we were there. The poverty, the hopelessness – Jesus, Raythune County sounds like a Third World country. With our law degrees, we can really help Acker’s Gap. Carla can grow up there and we can have a real home and a real life and—’

‘Hold on, Belfa. Wait,’ he said, interrupting her. He frowned down at his cup, which he’d trapped between two tanned hands. ‘What do you mean? You know we can’t go back. And you know why we can’t go back. You know, Belfa. We agreed on this a long time ago. A clean break.’

He uttered the three words as if they constituted some kind of religious mantra, sacred and mysterious and inarguable. ‘A clean break. That’s what we said,’ he added. He looked at her, his gaze so fixed and severe that it rattled her.

‘I – I want us to go back, Sam. You and me and Carla. To live in Acker’s Gap.’

‘No.’

She had assumed there’d at least be a vague promise of further discussion, a putative willingness to compromise; at a minimum, she’d expected the illusion that he was considering her opinion. Her needs. Sam was a professional negotiator. He knew about strategic postponement. He knew that the dead stop of a ‘No’ was the mark of an amateur.

But he wasn’t negotiating.

When Bell looked at him, she saw something in her husband’s eyes that she’d rarely seen there before:

Fear. Not for himself – for them. Fear of losing the life they’d built. Fear of erasing the distance they’d put between themselves and West Virginia.

He knew about her past, about the fire and the foster homes, about the trailer down by Comer Creek, about the night on which everything changed for her. It was not something they discussed often. Discussing it gave it too much power in their lives. Made it too real, too present.

Which was why he’d been so stunned by her request. They had worked diligently, both of them, to move beyond Bell’s history, and part of the process of moving beyond it had been to move, period. Away from Acker’s Gap. Away from West Virginia.

This, then, was the absolute last thing Sam Elkins had ever expected to hear from Bell. She could see it in his eyes. It was the one request he would not consider.

And Bell had no way to explain to him why it mattered so much to her. No way to clarify what was, for her, a powerful conviction that had taken root in her soul and now could not be dislodged – not by argument, not by logic, not even by her love for Sam.

She had read a proverb once: To know and not to do is not to know.

She knew what was back in West Virginia. And now she had the means to do something about it.

‘I think,’ Sam said carefully, ‘that you’re searching for something, Belfa. You think you can find it by going back home. But, sweetie’ – he reached across the table, touching her hand with just the tips of his fingers – ‘your home is with me and Carla. It’s here. You’ll realize that, I’m sure, if you just give it some time.’

‘I did that, Sam. I gave it time. It’s been on my mind for a couple of months.’

‘A couple of months.’ Now he was angry. ‘And you spring this on me now.’

‘I’m not springing anything. I wanted to tell you today so that you could be thinking about it. When you get back from London, we can talk more, okay?’

He shook his head. ‘Ghosts, Belfa. Ghosts and echoes. And pain. That’s all West Virginia holds for us.’

‘I don’t believe that, Sam. I can’t believe that.’

‘I have to go.’

He stood up, reaching for the handle of the sleek black roller bag he’d parked next to their table, the one with the discreet monogram: sEc. Samuel Carl Elkins.

‘This is the last flight to London with available seats until tomorrow night,’ he informed her. ‘I have to be on it.’ While they were talking, he had been arranging the scarf around his neck, tucking the silky ends under the lapel of his overcoat just so. That was one of his new skills: scarf-arranging. Bell once asked him if Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe offered a course in it for their employees. She was sort of joking. And sort of not.

Sam had one more thing to say to her. There was no emotion in his voice, no rancor or bitterness, but rather a calm finality. He needed to make his position clear.

‘If you go back to West Virginia,’ he said, ‘you’ll be going alone.’