A Killing in the Hills

57


One day later Bell drove the Explorer as far as she could go into the woods and then stopped. She climbed out. She’d walk the rest of the way.

The forest was filling up with the prelude to its winter music. The creak of high-up tree limbs rubbing together, the low groan of the wind, the sporadic crackle of the thick underbrush as small creatures moved across it in a rhythmless series of abrupt jumps.

Bell arrived at the spot where the trailer had been. There was nothing here. Only a black gash on a blank patch of cold ground.

She sometimes thought she could hear voices out here, shouts and cries of pain, echoes of the anguish that had lived in this space so long ago, still revolving slowly, slowly, in the singed air, an endless upward spiral of loss. But she knew it was just her imagination. Because there was nothing left.

She wouldn’t come here again.

She was finished with this place. And it, she hoped, was finished with her.

Bell walked back to the Explorer. Reaching the hard road, she shifted into park and waited, leaning forward in her seat, arms folded across the top of the wheel.

One direction led to the rambling old house back in Acker’s Gap. To the big chair in the living room. A cold bottle of Rolling Rock. The world as she knew it. But even that was changing, of course. Carla was leaving. Going to live with her father.

The other direction led to Lakin Correctional Center and the parole hearing. If she started right now, she could make it there for the 2 P.M. start.

Bell shoved the car into gear and headed toward Lakin.

The hearing felt like a formality. The only witnesses were Bell and the prison psychiatrist, a small-shouldered, broad-bottomed man in a shiny black suit. His hard black shoes had a slight squeak to them as he walked from the row of folding chairs at the back of the room to the single chair at the wooden table. On the other side of that table were the nine members of the parole board.

The psychiatrist’s testimony was brief and perfunctory: Shirley Abigail Dolan, prisoner number 3476213, incarcerated for manslaughter and arson for twenty-nine years, four months and seventeen days, was, in his opinion, no longer a threat to society. Bell’s testimony was also short; she was asked if she would help her sister become readjusted to society, provide a home and job placement assistance, and she said yes. Yes, she would.

And then Shirley Dolan was led into the room, an emaciated figure in a blue jumpsuit, stooped-over, with long gray hair pulled into a ponytail that hung nearly to her waist. She had hooded gray eyes and a putty-blob of a nose that looked as if it had been broken multiple times. She was only six years older than Bell, she was only forty-five, but she could have passed for sixty. Her skin was yellow-pale. Her face was marked by deep creases. Like an old map that had been folded too many times and stuffed in the back of a drawer.

She answered the questions posed by the board members in a voice so frail and quavering that she was often asked to repeat herself. Yes, she felt remorse. Yes, she planned to get a job.

By unanimous vote, parole was granted to Shirley Abigail Dolan, prisoner number 3476213. She would be released in ten days.

Bell had less than a minute to talk to her, before her sister was led away again. There was so much Bell wanted to say, so many questions she wanted to ask, so much she wanted to tell her. But they would have time for all of that later. For now, she settled for the first thing that came into her head.

‘Shirley,’ Bell said, ‘it’s going to be okay now.’

On the morning of Shirley’s release, Bell wanted to get an early start on the drive to Lakin. She was nervous, apprehensive, but also excited. She’d called Dot Burdette and asked her to come keep Carla company, and when Dot arrived she asked Bell if she and Carla could bake a cake to mark the day. Have it ready for their return.

At first Bell said no – she didn’t want any fuss, she didn’t want anything that might make Shirley self-conscious – but then she thought about it and said, Sure. Okay.

As long as it’s chocolate.

Bell headed out to the interstate and then on to West Virginia Route 62, driving down through Ripley and Mason, past the redbud trees, now just skinny bundles of sticks dreaming of spring. The road clung to the Ohio River, like two friends linking arms on a long, long walk. At the big curve just above Point Pleasant was Lakin Correctional Center. A series of single-story square buildings of pale yellow brick, with scribbles of barbed wire arranged across the top of the fences. Behind the prison, the black mountain kept a close watch on it.

‘I’m here for Shirley Dolan.’

The woman at the reception desk shuffled through papers, exchanging one clipboard for another.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘What is it?’

‘She’s gone. She left about an hour and a half ago.’

‘No, no, there’s been a mistake,’ Bell said patiently. ‘Can you check again, please? Shirley Dolan. D-O-L-A-N.’

The woman looked down at her clipboard again, raising the bottom corner of the first sheet to look at the sheet beneath it, then looking at the first one again, frowning, concentrating, but the gestures were clearly just for show, just to make the news more palatable.

‘No mistake,’ she said. ‘Shirley Dolan left this morning.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘I don’t know.’

Bell’s voice rose. ‘You don’t know? You don’t—’

‘She’s free to go wherever she wants to go, ma’am.’

‘And there’s no note, no message, nothing like that? I’m her sister – she knows I’m coming to pick her up today and—’

‘No, ma’am. No message.’

Running. It was what everyone did when they were confused and overwhelmed. Bell had done it herself. Many, many times. That was why she’d joined the track teams in high school and college: It made the impulse to run – and keep running – seem healthy, seem like part of a plan. Not like animal panic. Not like endless dread.

How could she ever find Shirley again? Where would she start?

Back in the parking lot, Bell stood by the Explorer, hand cupped around the door handle. The metal was still cold. The sun had finally groped its way through the dirty gray rags of clouds, but it had taken all morning for it to do so.

She lifted her eyes to the mountain. If you looked at it long enough and hard enough, you could almost believe that anything was possible. You could almost believe that the mountain itself might move one day, like a ragged black triangle of coal heaped on a barge, a barge that rides the river’s brushed-nickel back on its way to who knows where.