A Killing in the Hills

56


Next morning, Bell parked her Explorer between the faded yellow lines marking off a spot in the Acker’s Gap High School parking lot. The sky was gray and white, with long skinny streaks of watery blue that looked like veins pushing through a chunk of marble.

As she opened her door, the wind caught it, nearly wrenching the thing out of her hand. She had to struggle to keep control, holding and pulling. It was like being carjacked by a ghost.

She was back to finish her speech.

It was Carla’s idea.

Bell had spent the night at Carla’s bedside in the county medical center. The diagnosis was a mild concussion, along with a badly sprained right wrist and cuts and bruises on her arms and legs, and a large ugly slash on the side of her face that required twenty-two stitches to close. The nurse had sedated her, but during Carla’s last few minutes of agitation before falling asleep, she had cried and asked her mother to hold her. ‘Lonnie,’ Carla murmured through her sobs. ‘He was my friend, Mom. No matter what, he was my friend. My friend.’ And Bell, leaning over the bed to embrace her, had felt the slender body shudder, had felt Carla’s tears dampening her neck.

In a few short sentences, spoken softly into her daughter’s ear, Bell had given Carla the gist of what had transpired that night. She’d fill in the details later.

Very early in the morning, with the window of Carla’s hospital room still a tall black rectangle, her mother heard her stir. Bell had slept in a chair next to the bed, sideways body bunched in the shape of a comma, coat rolled up and angled between her neck and the wooden armrest. One arm was thrust straight out toward the bed so that she could keep contact with the young woman’s pale forearm all night long.

‘Mom.’

Bell, instantly awake, unkinked herself and stood up. Pain poked at her shoulders and tweaked her knees, the inevitable residue of having slept at a crazy angle in a chair – and being thirty-nine years old to boot, Bell thought with a wince.

The only light in the room came from the rack of small bulbs illuminating the monitors on the wall above Carla’s bed. But it was enough. Bell looked at her daughter’s face. She wanted to touch that face, to stroke it, but she held off, knowing that it would hurt.

Carla’s hair had been shaved on one side. A crooked ladder of stitches ran across that half of her scalp. Both eyes were ringed in black. The remainder of her face was massively swollen, with splotches of brazen purple and sickly yellow. It would stay that way, the nurse had said, for weeks.

‘Sweetie,’ Bell whispered. ‘Shhhhh. Settle down. It’s still early.’

‘You have to go back.’ Carla’s hoarse voice was emphatic. ‘You promised. You promised them you’d go back. So you have to.’

‘Back where, sweetie?’

‘To school.’ Carla struggled to sit up, flailing at the IV line that ran from the crook of her arm to the tall metal pole alongside her bed, shoving it away as if it were a pesky branch encountered on a jungle march.

‘Carla, sweetie—’

‘Mom.’

‘Sweetie,’ Bell said, ‘you had a terrible ordeal last night.’ She tried to make her voice light with exaggerated incredulity, playful, to settle her down. ‘And the first thing you think of this morning is – me going back to your school? Really?’

‘Mom. Please.’ Carla’s head fell back on her pillow. She was too tired to hold it up. But her eyes never left her mother’s eyes, never broke off their intense focus.

‘Sweetie, I really think it’s best if I—’

‘Mom, it’s my fault. All of this. I knew him. I’d seen him before – the shooter in the Salty Dawg. But I couldn’t tell you. Because he was at this party, and there were drugs, and—’

‘Shhh, sweetie.’

‘No, Mom, I have to tell you. I screwed up so bad. Please, Mom. If you can just go back and finish your speech, it’s like – like everything will start to be okay again.’

‘Carla—’

‘Dad’s on his way, right? I heard you on the phone with him last night. He can stay here with me until you get back.’

‘Carla, sweetie, I’m just not sure.’

‘Please. Please, Mom. Just go.’

So now Bell knew for sure. It was confirmed. She’d passed it on to her daughter: The gene for stubbornness.

Nick would get a kick out of that when she told him what he probably already knew: Think I’m trouble? Think I’m hard to handle? Just wait’ll you tangle with Carla when she gets up a head of steam.

The students sat quietly, displaying a stark attentiveness that had nothing to do with Bell’s title or with the presence of a teacher at the end of every row.

Most of them, Bell was certain, had already heard about what happened at the RC last night. News traveled fast in a small town, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it or even slow it down. They knew about the secret life of Tom Cox. A much-respected man. Hell, she might as well concede it: a beloved one.

Bell had already received two hectic messages on her cell from Dot Burdette, hungry for details. She’d return the calls later that day, telling Dot about the extent of Tom’s operation. The audacious scope of it. Rhonda and Hick, working all night, making phone calls that woke up anybody they needed to reach and offering only a quick insincere apology, had pieced together a good part of it. Tom Cox had met Charles Sowards while volunteering his vet services at the county animal shelter. Sowards worked there as a day laborer, hosing out cages, spreading straw. Sowards had become a small part of Tom’s business, just one of dozens of young unemployed West Virginians who’d signed up to distribute pills or to punish anyone who crossed the boss, or to do whatever else Tom asked of him. Because it meant a pay-check. Because they were broke and bored.

Like, perhaps, some of these kids, too, Bell thought, looking out across the auditorium at all of the faces.

Stillwagon gripped Bell’s cool hand in his own moist pudgy one, welcoming her to the stage. Just like last time. Except that, between then and now, so much had changed.

‘Once again,’ the principal said, looming so low over the lectern that his big chin bumped the microphone, the gelled threads of his hair gleaming wetly beneath the stage lights, ‘we have Raythune County Prosecuting Attorney Belfa Elkins. Mrs Elkins?’

She hesitated. What could she say that these students hadn’t already heard a hundred times before from parents, grandparents, teachers, preachers? What could she say that would make any damned difference? She wanted to tell them that they held a precious thing in their hands – this one life, the only one anybody ever got – and that they should cherish it. She wanted to tell them about the choices they’d be required to make, and about the fact that even if they made no choice – even if they let their lives just happen to them, as if that life was just a scrap of notebook paper blown around the school parking lot by a ravenous wind – then that, too, was a choice.

It wouldn’t work. They’d never listen. Platitudes were pointless. You couldn’t tell other people how to live. If some adult had tried to do that back when she was sitting in a morning assembly at Acker’s Gap High School – well, she would’ve snickered and rolled her eyes, and the phrase know-it-all a*shole jerk would’ve been the dominant element in her mind, blocking everything else, bringing all of her thinking to a halt like a big piece of furniture stuck in the doorway on moving day.

She was here. Maybe that was the most important thing. Not what she had to say – but the fact that she’d bothered to show up to say it.

In the end, each person had to find her own path out of the mountains.

And sometimes, her own path back again.

Her speech was brief. She told them about the drug operation, about how one of her best friends had been in charge of it. She told them what else she knew: that many of them had bought pills from one of their teachers, Dean Streeter. What he did was wrong. But he’d tried to change his life. And died for that decision.

Afterward, as the students bumped and shuffled out of the auditorium, Bell lingered at the foot of the stage. Several parents came by to thank her, and to tell her how glad they were that she and her daughter were safe, that they’d survived the ordeal of the night before.

Bell turned to go. Along the wall, looking shy and uncertain, was an older woman, thickset, with a messy thatch of short gray hair.

The woman walked with a slight limp. She was dressed in work pants and a baggy gray sweatshirt bearing the oval logo CLAUSEN JANITORIAL SERVICES. Between two big hands, she twisted a black baseball cap with CJS in gold letters on the crown.

‘Wanted to tell you,’ the woman said, ‘that this is a good thing you done here today. Talking to these kids.’

‘Well,’ Bell said, ‘I’m not sure they were listening.’

‘Don’t matter. You gotta try.’ The woman twisted the cap a few more turns. ‘So I just wanted to thank you – and to tell you ’bout my girl. Couple of years ago, she was sitting here, too. She was a good girl. She was. But then come the drugs. They took hold of her. Got so she’d do anything for the money. I mean anything.’ The woman dropped her head. ‘Wasn’t nothing nobody could do. I lost my sweet little girl forever.’

‘What was your daughter’s name?’ Bell said softly.

The woman raised her head. She seemed grateful for the chance to speak it, to let her child’s name live out loud in the world again just one more time, during the instant it took to say the syllables. She swallowed hard.

‘Lorene,’ the woman said. ‘Her name was Lorene.’