A Killing in the Hills

27


On the drive back into Acker’s Gap, when the companionable silence descended once more inside the Blazer, a phrase tolled in Bell’s head:

Twenty-nine years.

In all that time, Shirley Dolan hadn’t answered a single letter from her. Not one. When Bell had tried, over and over again, year after year, to see her sister during visiting hours at Lakin Correctional Center, the answer that came back was always the same one:

No.

The bleak sameness of the county’s back roads churned by the windows like dirty smoke. Bell was thinking about Lee Rader and about the shooting, and about the man still at large, the man who’d walked into a restaurant and opened fire, and she was thinking about Albie Sheets and Tyler Bevins – but she was never not thinking about her sister as well. And about the parole hearing.

People always talked about multitasking as if it were a desirable skill. A valuable technique. An asset. But it wasn’t, Bell knew. It wasn’t a choice. It was a curse. You couldn’t not do it.

She looked over at Nick Fogelsong. His hat was off, flung into the backseat when he’d first climbed in, but he’d left his coat on. Hunched over the steering wheel as if he were protecting it from insult, he glared straight ahead at the perforated road, the way he tended to do, Bell knew, when he was engaged in serious and protracted thinking of his own. His musing-mosaic was different from hers – its pieces surely included his wife’s illness, and other things of which she was unaware – but there were also areas where the two pictures overlapped, places where Bell’s thoughts convened with his.

‘Ever wonder?’ he said.

She waited for him to explain.

‘I mean, your sister not wanting to keep in touch,’ Nick went on. ‘You think it’s guilt over what she did? Or not wanting to drag you down with her? Or what?’

‘Don’t know, Nick.’

‘You’ve thought about it.’

‘Well, sure.’

‘And?’

‘And I don’t know.’

He nodded.

He was the only one who could get by with asking her about it. Because he’d earned the right. Because at every important event in Bell’s life, the ones where her sister would have been, he was there. When she’d stood on the podium at each of her three graduations, high school and college and then law school, elbow to robe-rustling elbow with her classmates, it was Nick’s face she looked for first, even before she looked for Sam’s. She’d scanned the crowd, bobbing and swaying and rising up on tiptoes while she kept a hand on the mortarboard to keep it from sliding off her head, and then when she picked him out, when she spotted Nick’s big open face and the brush-cut hair, she forgot decorum and poise and she waved a big hearty wave, and she mouthed Thank you.

Bell was fairly certain that Nick sometimes still saw her as that scared ten-year-old, standing in the dark by a smoldering trailer. The one who needed him.

Who needed somebody.

‘Got to follow up,’ the sheriff said, ‘on the info from Alma Rader. Might not pan out, but it’s something.’

Bell generally allowed herself one cliché every six months or so. She decided to indulge. ‘Well, something’s definitely better than nothing.’

He dropped her off at the courthouse. He had his rounds to make on the other side of the county. And she needed to brief Rhonda and Hick about what they’d learned from the trip.

She would send her assistants out the next day with a couple of Nick’s deputies to reinterview Marlene Streeter and Fanny McClurg, hoping to determine which man’s behavior had so infuriated Lee Rader. Which of his two friends did Rader believe was involved in illegal drug sales? And for Christ’s sake, a weary and baffled Nick had put it, as Bell climbed out of the Blazer in front of the great gray pile of the courthouse, why the hell would some old guy with more’n half his life behind him get mixed up in that kind of thing, anyway? Drugs and all the rest of it?

Bell worked in her office until just after 7:30 P.M. Then she turned off the lamp on her desk and nodded good-bye to the night custodian, Janet Leftwich, a petite black woman who had come into the office a few minutes before to empty the trash cans into the large wheeled garbage container. Leftwich had a withered right arm, and that made it hard for her to lift the cans, but you did not offer to help. All of the courthouse employees knew that. Leftwich wanted to do her job. She took quick offense if you suggested, by your offer, that she couldn’t do it herself.

Bell stopped at Ike’s to pick up two dinners to go. Fried chicken with green beans and mashed potatoes for her, a grilled cheese sandwich and fries for Carla. She finally made it home by 8:15.

Carla was in the living room, jammed against the far end of the couch with her knees folded up under her chin, watching TV. Or at least pretending to. It was some kind of reality show, with tanned people in bright bandanas yelling at each other for being stupid. Bell had only been in the room a few seconds when Carla clicked it off and rose from the couch, using the floppy cuffs of her long-sleeved T-shirt to rub at her cheeks.

Not hungry, she said.

Muttering something about a ‘ton of homework,’ Carla headed to her room, clumping her way up the stairs.

She stopped halfway.

‘Hey, Mom. Any leads on the shooter?’

Bell wished she had news. But she didn’t.

‘Not yet, sweetie.’

No reply. Bell knew better than to push, to ask her how she was feeling or about how the school day had gone.

There was a pause before the clumping resumed.

Bell decided she wasn’t hungry, either, so she shoved both white Styrofoam containers in the fridge. She had to wedge them between two stacks of Tupperware containers. She’d forgotten about the casseroles.

She returned to the TV set. She found a cop show, which usually amused her. All that lovely, endless time they were able to lavish on a single case. And all the fancy, expensive equipment. And all those wisecracking coroners and playful ballistics experts, just standing around, waiting to help. Bell scooted deeper in her chair, hunching her shoulders, crossing her arms in front of her chest. Her mind drifted. She’d lose the thread of the plot, grope for it, find it, and then lose it again. Finally, she gave up. Switched it off, even before the killer was identified.

She’d live with the mystery.

What was one more, after all the others she’d learned to live with?

Bell had to talk to someone.

Not about her work. She had plenty of people for that. There was Hickey Leonard, Judge Tolliver, Lee Ann Frickie. And – oh, what the hell – Rhonda Lovejoy. Plus prosecutors in adjacent counties. Friends from law school.

As she stood in her bedroom ten minutes later, she realized how much she needed to talk to someone about her sister’s parole hearing. Someone other than Nick, who was too close to things. And too protective of her. His advice was always tainted by too much concern. Too little objectivity.

Ruthie? Tom?

No. They knew some of the story about Comer Creek, but not all of it.

She knew whom she had to call. Because it was possible to detest someone but still respect his opinion.

Bell closed her bedroom door. She listened. Heard nothing from Carla’s room.

She didn’t turn on the light. She didn’t need to. She knew where everything was. She flipped off her shoes, exchanged her slacks for the sweatpants that hung on a hook on the back of the door. Tugged off her blouse and replaced it with an old white T-shirt, gloriously tattered, deliciously broken in, that lived on the same hook.

She climbed into the king-sized bed. She’d bought this extra-big bed when they moved here; she wanted Carla to join her at night, whenever she was scared or lonely or confused or distraught. Or just because she wanted to.

When Carla was twelve, that happened often. They’d talk long into the night. Or Bell would read to her. The Hobbit. A Wrinkle in Time. The Harry Potter books.

At fourteen, Carla had stopped coming. Just like that.

Bell sat back against the headboard, legs crossed at the ankle. She pushed a number on her speed dial.

He answered before the end of the first ring.

‘Bell – is everything okay? Is Carla—?’

‘She’s fine, Sam. Just fine.’ A pause. ‘I need to talk.’

‘Oh.’ Sam’s voice changed. Bell heard him speak in a low tone to someone else, someone who was right beside him: ‘Gotta take this, honey. I’ll go downstairs. Be back soon.’

Through the phone line, Bell was aware of a door closing. Footsteps. The creak of chair leather.

Then he was back on the line with her again: ‘Yes?’

‘Didn’t mean to cause a problem for you there, Sam. Really.’

‘Glenna was just startled when my cell rang. That’s all.’

Bell hesitated.

All at once it felt odd to be talking to him in the dark – even though they were separated by many miles, by dozens of bitter arguments, by a divorce decree.

It was still dark. And they were still talking.

Bell reached over to her nightstand and switched on the lamp. Better, she thought. That’s better.

‘Just needed a little advice, Sam.’

‘Sure. Absolutely.’

He was in his element now. Giving advice was what he did best, dispensing it with a calm, smooth, practiced authority. The Voice of Reason. As he had explained once to Bell, the secret was that people want to be bullied. They want to be told what to do. Gets them off the hook.

‘Is it about tracking down that killer with the fine law enforcement professionals of Acker’s Gap?’ Sam said. He was making fun of her, making fun of the town, and his voice – it rose and fell in dramatic swoops – sounded like the guy at the Raythune County Fair who sold blenders out of the back of an El Camino. ‘Tell me they slapped the cuffs on him and he’s awaiting trial. Or tell me that Andy and Barney – wait, I mean Nick and one of his deputies – managed to take him out in a blazing gun battle. Tell me that’s what happened, Bell.’

‘Don’t make me wish I hadn’t called, okay?’

‘Okay.’ His voice shifted.

He knew how to be a jackass. He also knew how not to be one.

He waited. He didn’t rush her. The thing was, Sam Elkins had known her longer and better than anybody else in her life, except for her sister and Nick Fogelsong. And there were things she’d shared with Sam that she hadn’t shared with Nick – because Sam had been her lover, her husband, her partner, the father of her child. At one time, she thought she’d be spending the rest of her life with him, and that meant he needed to know.

She’d told him everything about that night in 1981.

She settled back against the headboard.

‘Turns out,’ she said, ‘Shirley is coming up for parole again. Hearing’s in two days.’

‘Can’t be. No way. It’s too early.’

‘Nick got the call. They’re moving up some of the hearings. The prison’s busting at the seams and they’re worried about federal oversight. So they’re going through the list a lot faster these days.’

‘Hell. Just what you need, on top of everything else.’

She nodded, then she realized he couldn’t see her nod.

‘So what do you think, Sam? Should I testify? If Shirley will let me, I mean. I don’t have a lot of time to make up my mind.’

‘Hell,’ he repeated.

The word was his shorthand way of acknowledging how difficult this was for her, how there was no right answer. How he wished she didn’t have to deal with this now, while she was also working on two major cases and adjusting to the fact that Carla would be moving out just after Christmas.

‘Will there be any publicity?’ he said. ‘Anybody put the names together yet?’

‘Don’t think so. It was a long time ago, Sam.’

‘Yeah, but all it would take is one bored reporter, hanging out at the parole hearings, to do some checking and figure out that a county prosecutor is there to give testimony on behalf of her killer sister.’

‘Don’t call her that. Please.’

‘I’m just telling you what others are going to say, Bell. You know that.’

‘Yes. I do.’ She sighed. She wondered how the sigh sounded at his end, after it had traveled all those miles, after it had been translated by different kinds of distance – the geographical kind, the chronological kind, the emotional kind.

‘Listen, Bell. You want my opinion? I’ll give it to you. Don’t do it. Don’t go anywhere near this. You’ve had no contact with her all these years – I know it was her choice, I know she cut you off, I know you tried and tried – and it’s worked out okay. Hasn’t it? You’ve built a new life for yourself. Nobody remembers where you came from. It was – thank God – before Google. That trailer doesn’t even exist anymore. So don’t go back there, okay? Don’t do it. Don’t testify.

‘Because you know what, Bell? This is how your sister wants it. She’s made that clear. She wants the past to stay past. For whatever reason, she’s never explained herself, never talked about that miserable bastard that you two were unfortunate enough to have as a dad. You need to honor her choice, Bell.’

‘Honor her choice.’ Bell repeated his words not because she was questioning them, but because she wanted to feel them on her own tongue.

‘Yeah. Honor her sacrifice. Because if you go charging in there now, you’ll be doing it against her wishes. You’ll be making the last thirty years of her life meaningless. It’ll count for nothing. So stay away from it, Bell. Do what Shirley wants you to do. Forget her. Forget Comer Creek. Move on.’

Bell waited.

‘Thanks, Sam,’ she finally said. ‘Really – I appreciate it.’ She spotted the red numbers on her digital bedside clock. ‘Better go. Early day tomorrow. Have to give a speech.’

‘Rotary Club? Kiwanis?’

‘Acker’s Gap High School. The drug issue.’

‘Bet Carla’s thrilled.’ There was amusement in his voice.

‘Oh, yes. Absolutely.’ There was sarcasm in hers.

‘Seriously, though, I’m glad you’re doing that. Hard to believe how quickly it’s taken over the high schools around there. What a damned shame. Thank God Carla has steered clear of it. For the most part.’

‘We’re lucky, Sam. We may have a few problems with her now and then, but basically, we have a good kid.’

‘We do, don’t we?’ he said, and there was a touch of awe in her ex-husband’s voice, and humility, and maybe a hint of gratitude, too, and they were all qualities she seldom heard there. ‘Lots of the credit for that goes to you, Bell.’

She didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to.