A Killing in the Hills

55


The street should have been dark at this hour. Instead it was unnaturally bright, thanks to the emergency vehicles congregated there, their muscular artificial lights sweeping the neighborhood with a stupefying pulse. If you didn’t know better you might think these giant vehicles were living creatures, breathing behemoths, and that if you tried to shut them down, they’d resist. Fight back hard.

By now the neighbors up and down Bethany Avenue, lured by lights and sirens, had come out from behind the peekaboo twitch of their living room drapes. They stood nervously on long front porches in their stocking feet, shivering in bathrobes and sweatpants, in overcoats flung hastily over nighties or striped pajama pants. Small children stood there, too, rooted behind their parents’ legs, occasionally sneaking glimpses at all the commotion.

Bell, standing on the sidewalk, wasn’t aware of the spectators. She wasn’t aware of much of anything. Shock had scoured out her mind, like a landscape leveled by a natural disaster. She felt numb. She was aware intellectually of the cold – night had come, the sun was gone, cold was a consequence – but she didn’t feel it or flinch from it.

At that moment, the only fact to which she could’ve attested with full confidence was the presence of Nick Fogelsong right beside her, wrapped in his big black coat, his back as straight as a surveyor’s rod, weight balanced evenly between his black-booted feet, jaw set, thick arms hanging stiffly at his sides. There was something almost prehistoric about Nick when he stood like this, Bell thought, something ancient and steadfast and immutable. His quietness had a power building up at the back of it, as if he’d managed to channel the hard wisdom of some natural element – tree or rock or river – in order to maintain the silence. He didn’t move, but he didn’t seem to be at rest, either.

‘I wonder,’ Nick said, ‘how long the crime scene techs’ll stick around. Hell of an operation out back. And hidden pretty damn well. Bet they call Charleston for extra manpower.’

Noises from the porch. Tangle of voices. Heavy door closing. Two deputies, a long object stretched between them, started down the front walk. While Bell and the sheriff looked on, the body – encased in the county’s standard-issue pale blue vinyl bag with the thick black zipper vertically bisecting it – was carried across the yard.

The bag was loaded into the back of the coroner’s van. A heave, a push, a twin slamming of doors. Two quick pats against the closed doors by one of the deputies, as a signal to the driver: Done. Go.

Ten minutes before, Bell had been standing in Tom and Ruthie’s living room. She had watched Tom liberate the gun from its hiding place beneath the couch cushion, she heard the jarring crack of a gunshot at close range, and for one confusing moment, Bell thought Tom had shot Ruthie. Even though she saw the gun pressed to his temple she also saw, at the moment the shot was fired, Ruthie swooning, collapsing. Uttering a brief strangled cry that was part shriek, part moan, and part something else, too, a piercing sound that was like no other sound Bell had ever heard, the sound of bottomless shock and eviscerating pain. Ruthie had fainted, her frail body falling in a soft diaphanous drift, like a loosened ribbon sliding over the edge of a wrapped package.

Then Bell had watched as Tom toppled from the couch. He rolled headfirst, arms limp, forehead finding its way to a spot on the carpet as if there had been a small X printed on the fibers, summoning him there. It was the first time she’d ever seen Tom Cox make an awkward move. He’d always been so controlled, so precise in his movements, so elegant and fastidious. This person – the one who slumped onto the floor, like a life-sized doll flung aside by a bored and sullen child – was not Tom Cox. Except that it was.

The sheriff had rushed forward. Dropped to his knees. He turned Tom’s ruined head, thrusting two fingers up under the man’s unresisting chin to check his pulse.

The face that Nick raised toward Bell was grave, pale.

He mouthed a silent No. He pulled his hands away and tilted his torso back, still on his knees, breathing hard, shoulders lifting and descending slowly, as if each breath required an individual decision, a separate and arduous effort that was only marginally worth the price.

Bell’s mind was beginning to function again. It felt like some finicky machine she had to handle just so, babying it, being patient with it, pressing levers in the right sequence as it warmed up. She couldn’t rush it.

She heard a gurney rattle past, carrying Ruthie to an ambulance, and turned to watch. Her friend, still unconscious, looked dreadfully small and fragile, one tiny hand slipping out from beneath the blanket, curled like a fallen leaf. But she was alive. Alive, Bell repeated to herself. It was a word she could touch when she needed to, in the days and weeks ahead, like a stone kept in her pocket. Fingering it for luck. Alive.

‘That thing he said,’ Nick muttered. ‘At the end. Sounded like a poem. What the hell was it?’

‘John Donne,’ Bell said.

‘Who?’

‘A poet.’

‘Thought so.’ He snorted, as if his worst fears had been confirmed. ‘First it was The Red Badge of Courage, now it’s poetry. Regular damned study hall around here.’

Bell wrapped her arms around her shoulders, trying to keep her core warm. Beside her, Nick stomped his feet on the sidewalk. He was getting restless, Bell guessed. He needed to be moving, pitching in, doing something. Or maybe it wasn’t just the itch to be participating. Maybe he had something to say to her.

‘Nick?’

He grimaced. With the gloved knuckle of his right hand, he rubbed at a spot under his chin. Moved his big jaw back and forth. He was buying time, Bell knew. Trying out sentences in his head, judging them, editing them, before he uttered a word out loud.

‘That night at Comer Creek,’ he finally said.

‘Yeah.’

‘You’ve never really talked about it. About what happened, I mean. Between you and Shirley. And your father. I’ve haven’t pushed you on it, Bell. I let it be.’

Why now? Bell thought, with a trace of anger. Why the hell are you bringing this up now? But she knew why.

The violence, the lights, the sirens, the confusion: This was a lot like the night they had met, twenty-nine years ago. The echo of it had been kept alive all this time, caught on the wind, swirling in and out of sight but always there. Biding its time.

The sheriff lowered his hand, but still kept it balled in a fist. The night had quickly gone from chilly to downright freezing, and it was easier to keep a fist warm than an open hand. There was less surface area to protect.

‘We watched that fire burn,’ Nick said, ‘and then the firefighters came. When it cooled down enough, they found your father’s body. Your sister told us what she’d done. After that, everything happened so damned fast. They took her away – and I remember looking down at you and thinking, Well, what the hell? What’ll I do now?’

Bell nodded. She took up the thread of the story. ‘And Sheriff Rucker gave you the job that nobody else wanted. You had to take a traumatized ten-year-old and watch over her until somebody could rouse the social services people in the middle of the night. You took me for pie.’

‘Yeah. I did.’ He grinned and shook his head. ‘You were the skinniest thing I’d ever seen.’

‘I ate four pieces, as I recall. Three apple and one blueberry. A new house record for Ike’s. Still stands, I bet.’

‘Bell.’ He knew what she was trying to do. She wanted to sidetrack him with reminiscences, avoiding the hard things he wanted to talk about. ‘Bell,’ he repeated, ‘a lot of folks back then knew what you and your sister were going through. They knew about your father.’

‘Leave it alone, Nick.’ She turned away from him.

The siren on an ambulance parked nearby gave a single yelp, then clammed up. There wasn’t any more need for sirens now.

‘Bell.’

‘Please, Nick.’

‘Bell, listen.’

The word dug at something in her memory. Three decades ago, somebody else had said the same thing to her. Just that emphatically. Listen.

‘Way I heard it,’ he said, ‘lot of people had a hell of a good notion exactly what that bastard was doing to you girls, and they didn’t lift a hand to stop it. Didn’t bother themselves. Didn’t want to make any trouble. And they were ashamed of that fact, I guess, which is why they didn’t come forward and help your sister during the trial. They just wanted it all to go away. Be done with it. Sweep it under the damned rug.’

It was too dark now to see the mountain, the one that brooded over Acker’s Gap, the one that bordered this world. On some nights the mountain seemed to disappear, merging with the darkness, its shape gradually absorbed by the black vastness of the sky. The sky was the only thing bigger than the mountain.

Truth was, though, that anybody who’d grown up here didn’t need to see the mountain to know where it was. Day or night, eyes open or closed, you always knew. And that was the direction in which Bell now turned.

Toward the mountain.

She watched it for a few minutes, focused and resolute, almost as if she expected it to move or change. Then she spoke. Something inside her had said: It’s time.

Time to tell him the secret she’d kept for all these years

‘I was part of it, Nick.’ Her voice was steady. ‘I helped spread the gasoline. We burned down that trailer together. Me and Shirley. It was both of us.’

A minute passed, two minutes, and then Bell felt the weight of the sheriff’s arm. He was placing it around her shoulders. Drawing her toward him, toward the warmth of his big wool coat. She wasn’t ten years old anymore, she was bigger and taller, and that made it more awkward this time, it wasn’t smooth, but he didn’t seem to care. She didn’t, either.

‘Doesn’t matter, Bell,’ he said. ‘You’re not responsible. Same goes for Shirley.’

‘Not sure the law sees it that way.’

‘Hell with the law. You were a couple of lost kids. That’s what you were.’

All the lost children.

The next time Nick spoke, it was brusquely. Back to business.

‘Parole board meets the day after tomorrow. You need to be making up your mind, Bell. If you want her out, you’ll have to speak on her behalf. They’ll ask you about a plan – that’s what they call it, an approved home plan – and they’ll ask you to vouch for her.’

‘I told you, Nick. Over and over again. She doesn’t want any part of me. Won’t answer my letters. Won’t return my phone calls. I’ve tried. Tried everything I can think of. I haven’t seen her or talked to her since the night of the fire. And that’s her choice. Because I’ve given it my best shot. Time and time again.’

‘I know that.’

‘Okay, then. So what do I do? Just show up at the hearing? It’s been twenty-nine years, Nick. I won’t even know her.’

‘Here’s a hint. She’ll be the one in shackles.’

Bell groaned. ‘Christ, Nick.’

‘Sorry. But you’ve got to decide. You don’t show up, I’m not sure how it will go down. Guaranteed it won’t help her.’

Bell didn’t say anything, so he went on.

‘If you want to talk about it, we can drive on over to Ike’s right now. We can stay there all night if we have to. Mary Sue’s doing better these days. New medication. I’ll call her and tell her not to wait up. We can drink a pot of coffee and we can argue the pros and cons and then we can—’

‘No. Thanks, Nick, but no. Not this time. I have to figure this one out by myself.’

‘Okay. Change your mind – the offer stands. Anytime.’

But he didn’t have to tell her that.