A Killing in the Hills

29


God. The smell.

It hit Bell right in the face. It was intense. And intensely familiar.

Didn’t matter how old you were, or how many years it’d been since you walked into a high school. The smell would get you every time, she thought. Ambush you.

Sweat, perfume, the cheap cleaning fluid used nightly to wash down the lockers and swab the floors. Cooked food – some of it, the worst of it, probably, emanating from the cafeteria, from the olfactory onslaught of greasy hot dogs and mushy tater tots and burned lima beans, but there was an equally foul undernote, too, from the food stuffed in lockers and left there too long, the lunches kids brought from home, the bologna sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches. Tuna and meat loaf. Rotting fruit.

And then there was the trailing scent of old socks, stray farts, hair spray, spicy deodorant, and the persistent mashing-together of all of that plus the sour, oniony smells of young bodies pressed up against each other for too many hours every day, day after day.

Last time she’d taken a good, long look at the halls of Acker’s Gap High School, she was eighteen years old and enrolled here. She’d been back a couple of times more recently, for parent-teacher conferences, but that wasn’t the same. She’d go in and out, with barely a flicker of a glance at her surroundings. She was oblivious – on purpose. Moreover, those visits came at the end of the day, when the students had mostly drained away from the yellow brick behemoth at the top of the small hill just outside town, when the last buses were grunting their way out of the parking lot and the whole place seemed to sink back with an exhausted sigh, having improbably made it through another day.

The walls were painted a bright cheery peach, Bell noted, instead of the sickly pale institutional green she remembered from her time here. The lockers were beige, not dark gray. The wooden classroom doors had been replaced with bright white aluminum ones, the top half of which were glass. And the library was not the library anymore. It was, according to the proud sign over the door, THE MEDIA CENTER.

Bell let her eyes slide over to Carla. Her daughter was doing her absolute best to ignore the fact that her mother was right beside her as she walked through the main hallway of Acker’s Gap High School at 8:13 on Tuesday morning.

Carla moved stiffly, eyes straight ahead. Her backpack hung clumsily off her right shoulder like an extra limb, bumping her kidney in rhythm with her jerky, preoccupied stride. At any moment the backpack seemed ready to slide off her shoulder and end up on the floor, there to be trampled and torn apart and scattered by the ordinary rampage of students racing to beat the tardy bell.

This was, Bell knew, possibly the most embarrassing moment in her daughter’s life. Carla was trying to make the best of it, though, because they both knew that the record for Most Embarrassing Moment would be a short-lived one. It would be broken in just a few minutes, when her mother rose to speak at the morning assembly.

Then that would become the brand-new Most Embarrassing Moment.

All around them, students surged and swirled, pinballing against each other. Locker doors were slammed, books dropped. Tennis shoes made short sharp squeals against the linoleum. Voices rose and ricocheted in a high-pitched babble, casually spiced with expletives and an occasional lick of shrieking laughter: You are f*cking kidding me, dude! No WAY. That is some crazy shit. No lie. Hey, bitch – can I take a look at your calculus homework? You’re shittin’ me – he didn’t even call her last night? That is cold, man. Cold.

Bell and Carla moved steadily forward. There was a slight deference shown to them – Bell was clearly a foreign creature in this environment, an interloper, an antibody in the bloodstream of pure adolescence coursing through this hall – and the farther they progressed, the more the other students fell back, bit by bit, creating a crooked lane in the chaos through which Bell and Carla walked.

The first bell had already sounded. The second bell would ring in three minutes. If students weren’t sitting in the auditorium by then, and instead were still bouncing through the halls, hollering their hellos, digging through their lockers, they were in trouble.

Big trouble.

Roger Jessup, the assistant principal, would come stomping through the corridors of Acker’s Gap High School, fat and fiery and cheerfully vengeful, the twin front halves of his unbuttoned plaid sport coat fluttering against an epic belly, hunting for stray students whom he could happily slap with detention slips.

‘Hey, Carla.’

Her daughter’s head turned with a snap.

‘Hey,’ Carla replied to a young woman Bell didn’t recognize.

Bell thought about Dean Streeter, a man who’d walked these same halls, who’d moved amid these same noisy streams of students, listening to their jokes, having easy and regular access to them, for all those years. She hadn’t known him; kids like her didn’t take driver’s ed. What was the point? She didn’t have a car back then, or any way to get one. She’d been lucky to have a roof over her head and shoes that almost fit.

Nice new seats – not those hideous old metal things with the paint flaking off that we were all sure would leach into our bloodstreams and give us lead poisoning. She and Carla walked down the center aisle of the auditorium until Carla, head lowered in shame and embarrassment, broke off and joined her homeroom.

To Bell’s left and right, row after row of twitching, fidgeting, mumbling students. The hissing of hundreds of whispered conversations seemed to create a second atmosphere, one composed not of oxygen but gossip, and Bell could swear she felt the updraft from it, the rustle and the sweep.

Up on the stage, the principal of Acker’s Gap High School, Carlton Stillwagon, waited for her, hands clasped, head tilted to one side. Bell had met with Stillwagon a few times, and talked on the phone with him many more. Occasionally the interactions concerned Carla; most often, though, they constituted official court business. They were about students who faced criminal charges. Bell and her staff often needed a background report from the principal: What was the kid really like? Heading for real trouble – adult-style, felony trouble – or just temporarily sidetracked by a lack of impulse control?

Stillwagon was loud, pompous, borderline buffoonish. He was encumbered, or so Carla had once informed her mother with palpable distaste, with perpetual body odor, the kind correctable only by surgery, although Bell assumed that that piece of weirdness was just one of the ordinary slanders routinely slung at high school principals. In Bell’s day at Acker’s Gap High School, the principal had been an exceptionally tall, mannish woman named Louisa Hinkle, and the rumors persisted that she’d undergone a sex change, that she’d started out life as Louie Hinkle. The small mustache on her upper lip hadn’t helped to quell the gossip.

Stillwagon was in his late fifties. He had a snowman’s build, round belly set atop short, fat legs. Atop the torso was a big round head. The head featured the world’s most unnatural-looking comb-over, an abomination to which the eye was drawn due to the lavish application of gel to the dwindling strands. He seemed positively to relish the fact that he wielded the power of life and death over a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.

He and Bell were natural enemies. They had clashed repeatedly ever since she took office. The principal didn’t share her urgency over the prescription drug problem in Acker’s Gap High School. Had Bell believed this was an honest difference of opinion, she could have lived with it. But she always suspected that Stillwagon just didn’t give a damn, knowing that if he agreed with her, he’d have to work harder.

Their most recent tangle had come during a school board meeting late last spring.

Kids, he’d said to her, have always done drugs. Always have, always will. Didn’t you smoke pot in high school, Mrs Elkins?

How ’bout it?

It’s not the same, she had replied.

Sure it is.

No, it isn’t, she had countered heatedly. This isn’t the bus driver selling you a dime bag. This isn’t your cousin taking you out in the woods to sample ’shrooms. These are well-armed, highly organized, and highly efficient organizations that are destroying an entire generation of young West Virginians. They’re targeting the poor and the hopeless, and they’re—

Hey, Mrs Elkins, Stillwagon had interrupted, smiling, looking not at her but at the school board members, as if they surely shared his private assessment that she was a bit of a crackpot on this issue, a hysterical female. They make decaf, you know.

As a ripple of laughter had crossed the room at the school board meeting that night, Bell felt an anger so intense that it made her dizzy.

Stillwagon had only invited her to the assembly today because he’d had no choice. A group of parents had requested her presence. As Bell mounted the stage, Stillwagon came forward to greet her. His handshake went on too long, and it was distastefully moist.

‘We’re just so darned glad you could come today, Mrs Elkins,’ Stillwagon declared, insincerity oozing from him like excess grout on a bad tile job. ‘This is a genuine’ – he pronounced the word so that it rhymed with ‘twine’ – ‘honor.’ He winked. His pink cheeks were frosted in a bright sheen of sweat. ‘Truly.’

‘Happy to be here.’

‘We’ve got some of your fans in the crowd. The parents who wanted to hear you speak.’ He lowered his voice until he sounded like a cartoon villain, warning about death rays coming from aliens in the sky. ‘They’re real worried about the pills and such, same as you.’

‘Good. They should be.’

Five minutes later, after Stillwagon had delivered a series of short, pointless announcements and colorful threats of serious repercussions if the student body of Acker’s Gap High School did not give Raythune County Prosecuting Attorney Belfa Elkins its complete attention, Bell stepped to the lectern.

A brief crackle of applause.

She dipped her head toward the fuzzy black microphone.

‘Good morning,’ Bell said.

Her too-amplified voice was a shock. She moved back slightly, tapped the mike with a finger to judge its sensitivity. Cleared her throat. Leaned forward again. ‘Nice to see everybody. As Mr Stillwagon told you, I’m a prosecuting attorney. That means that when you get into trouble around here, I’m the person you need to be second-most afraid of. The person you need to be most afraid of is your mom or your dad.’

A dutiful wave of chuckles spread through the auditorium. Reluctant ripples across a sullen pond.

‘I’m here today,’ Bell went on, ‘to talk to you a little bit about your future. Most of you won’t listen. Most of you are already tuning me out. You’re totally sure that you know everything you need to know about the world. Right? You don’t need some old lady to tell you anything about your life. You’ve already got it all figured out, don’t you?’

Another wave of chuckles. She was right, of course: Most of them wouldn’t be paying the slightest bit of attention to anything she had to say. But – and this was the part of which Bell reminded herself, each time she agreed to make this kind of speech – there might be one kid who was listening.

One kid who, in the heat of the moment when a choice had to be made, might make the right one.

One kid.

All the lost children. Those were the words that came into Bell’s mind sometimes, when she thought about young people growing up in the mountains of West Virginia. Alma and Chess Rader seemed to have ended up all right. But so many didn’t.

That’s why she was here. Why she showed up. Why it was worth it to look out across the sea of bored and belligerent faces, enduring the sounds of shuffling feet and coughs and sneezes and sighs, even though at least 99 percent of the student body wouldn’t be able to tell you – ten seconds after the assembly’s end, even if you offered them a million dollars to get it right – a single word that their friendly local prosecuting attorney had said.

Carla was in misery.

She scrunched low in her seat, head down, arms crossed, feet flat on the sticky auditorium floor, hoping everybody would forget about the fact that she was related to the woman up on the stage.

Only one thing kept her from absolute, soul-obliterating, suicidal despair. She had a little more information now.

She was on the trail.

She was getting somewhere.

Lonnie had texted her that morning while she was still at home, pulling on her black tights. He’d found out something about Mr Piggy. Lonnie’s friend Eddie – he was the guy who’d had the stupid party at his stupid house – was tracking him down. Will call U, Lonnie had ended his message.

If she found the guy, the shooter, she could do something for her mom. The same mom who, even now, was embarrassing her so much that, if she’d been able to pull it off, Carla would have chosen to sink right through that same sticky floor and disappear for, like, a thousand years or so. Or at least until her mom was finished talking.

It was weird. She hated her mom but she loved her, too, and it was like the two emotions were locked in a kind of primitive combat in her heart, fatally bound up with each other, equally matched throughout eternity, like characters in a video game who fall off cliffs together in a single snarling unit because neither one will let go. Neither one could win outright, either. One couldn’t get the edge over the other. So on it went.

Carla was going to help her mom solve the case. Find the killer. And that would make up for the fact that she was leaving. Moving in with her dad.

All she had to do was get a name.

Mr Piggy’s real name.