A Killing in the Hills

6


Bell pulled into her driveway and shut down the engine. She’d driven through a dark town to get here. Night fell blunt and heavy in the mountains, like something shot cleanly out of the sky that drops to earth with a whisper.

The big stone house with the wraparound porch reared up on her right, massive, imperturbable. Peppy yellow light filled the first-floor windows. No lights burned in any other house on the block. People in Acker’s Gap went to bed early and got up early; you’d find more lights on at 4:30 A.M. than you would at 9:30 P.M.

She opened the door of her Ford Explorer and felt a mean pinch of cold. If it was already this chilly in November, a hard winter was waiting for them. Hard and long. Standing on the blacktopped driveway, Bell reached back into the vehicle, scooping up her briefcase in one hand and her empty coffee mug in the other. She shut the door with a cocked knee.

In the distance, a dog yodeled his protest. He’d probably smelled a coon, and now strained painfully against a stake-out chain. Each elongated bark ended in a series of high-pitched yips. The yips bounced and echoed, hitting the cold air one by one with a ping! like a strike by a tiny bright hammer.

And then the sounds abruptly stopped, which meant the dog had either given up on the coon or was just taking a short break.

Bell hoped it was the latter. She didn’t like the idea of anybody giving up on a chase these days, no matter what the odds.

It was later than she wanted it to be. Much later. She’d planned to get home to Carla a long time before now, but as the meeting with the sheriff had gone on and on, she’d resigned herself to the necessity of being painstakingly thorough. To getting a jump on the case. To doing things right. She’d explain it all to Carla. And Carla would understand.

Of course she would. Wouldn’t she?

Bell paused a moment at the bottom of the porch steps, looking not at the house but above it, beyond it, back up at the mountain, as if it had, just now, softly called her name.

It knew her name very well.

It knew because the past was always present here, no matter what time your wristwatch tried to tell you it was. Time was like a mountain road that wound around and around and around, switching back, twisting in a series of confusing loops, so that you were never quite sure if you were in forward or reverse, going up or going down, heading into tomorrow or falling back into yesterday, or if, in the end, it really made all that much difference.

Before she’d left the courthouse, she and Fogelsong had gone over the preliminary forensics and ballistics reports from Charleston, which had finally come stuttering out of the fax machine. They’d fielded a call from Floyd Fontaine over at Fontaine’s Funeral Home about the timetable for releasing the bodies, referring him to the county coroner’s office. They’d conferred with Nick’s deputies about the discouraging lack of progress in the manhunt. After that, there’d been a brief conference call with the regional vice-president of the Salty Dawg chain down in Charlotte. The company wanted to establish three college scholarships for students at Acker’s Gap High School to commemorate the victims.

And then, because she and the sheriff were already so tired and heartsick and bewildered that they figured they might as well push on through, might as well bring all the bad news right out into the open, they had talked again about the theory – based on rumors, based on recent patterns of arrests and statistical data they were getting from the state police – that a lot of the prescription drug abuse in West Virginia was being coordinated out of just a handful of places.

One of those places was Raythune County.

The thought repulsed Bell, and it angered her, but the facts were persuasive. Prescription medications were showing up everywhere, but if you stood before a state map and used your finger to trace a path toward the center of one set of concentric rings, it would end up in the vicinity of Acker’s Gap.

By the time she had risen from the straight-backed chair facing the sheriff’s desk and said, ‘That’s it for me, Nick,’ fatigue was making her left eyelid twitch.

She’d rubbed at it as she had driven home, using her knuckle to dig deep, which put her left eye temporarily out of commission. But when you knew these streets as well as Bell did, you could easily drive them one-eyed.

Hell. She could probably drive them blindfolded.

Bell opened the big front door – the hinges always sounded like a cat in a catfight, no matter how often she shot WD-40 into the creases – and walked in.

An arched threshold separated the foyer from the living room on the left. Four steps later, Bell was leaning over the faded green couch. Carla was curled up in a corner of it, lying on her right side, knees at her chin, arms linked around her knees, caught in a restless sleep. Her eyelids fluttered. Her chin quivered.

‘How’s she doing?’

Bell’s whispered question was addressed to Ruthie Cox, who sat at the other end of the couch, book in her lap. Ruthie’s wrists were as thin as sticks. The eyes in her hauntingly concave face were large and dark, as if she kept them open just a little bit wider than everyone else did, so that she wouldn’t miss anything.

Ruthie was sixty-seven, but on account of her illness, could be mistaken for eighty. Fuzzy wisps of white hair dotted her scalp, like cotton balls glued to pale construction paper in a child’s art project. Her hair was struggling to grow back after repeated assaults of chemotherapy.

‘She’s okay.’ Ruthie mouthed the words.

Bell looked around the living room: Every lamp was lit.

Ruthie answered the implied question in a soft voice. ‘She didn’t want to wake up in the dark.’

Bell nodded.

The two women on this couch – her daughter, her best friend – and a third woman, the sister she hadn’t seen in almost three decades, were, along with Nick Fogelsong, all that Bell loved in the world.

That was it. Four people.

The thought made her feel vulnerable, exposed. So she shoved it aside.

The living room was small – Bell preferred to call it ‘cozy’ – with a working fireplace and a white wooden mantel, a wide front window garnished with long brown drapes that Bell generally kept pulled back and cinched at either side and, next to the couch, an overstuffed armchair. Bell had bought the chair at a Goodwill store many, many years ago, in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and it was her favorite piece of furniture in all the world precisely because of that crooked but unknown history. It was severely dilapidated. The brown plaid fabric on its arms was stained by innumerable sloshes of coffee, its back and sides sagged, the skirt around the bottom was torn and, in some spots, missing completely. Somehow, though, despite all the insults it had absorbed, the chair retained a tender, flaccid, inviting charm. Bell longed to just sink down in it, to try and forget about the day and its horrors.

Ruthie was rising. She slid the book onto the coffee table and motioned for Bell to follow her back into the foyer.

‘She’s had a few restless spells,’ Ruthie said, ‘but for the last hour or so, she’s been sleeping.’

Bell nodded.

‘I was worried when I first got here,’ Ruthie went on. ‘She was pretty agitated. I was just about to call Tom and ask him to bring over my prescription pad. Rest is what she needs. I was thinking about a sedative. But then she just dropped off. With any luck, she’ll sleep through the night.’

‘I can’t thank you enough, Ruthie, for coming over and for—’

Ruthie shook her head so swiftly and emphatically that Bell had to stop talking.

‘Hush,’ Ruthie said. ‘You know there’s nowhere else I’d want to be. Just here. So you hush.’

Bell bit her lower lip, to keep the emotion from showing. She realized she was still holding her car keys and briefcase and coffee mug, and so she took a few steps over to the hall table. On the wall above it, the oval mirror played a nasty trick: It told the truth. Her shoulders were slumped. Her skin tone, sallow. Her eye sockets looked as if they’d been pushed too far back in her head.

‘Still,’ Bell said, setting down her cargo. She didn’t want to look at Ruthie. If she lost herself in her friend’s kind face right now, if she let go, she would relinquish the equilibrium she had maintained so carefully throughout the long day, the perfect wall of composure. ‘It was sweet of you. She needed you tonight, Ruthie. And I needed you.’

She and Ruthie Cox had been best friends for five years, ever since Bell had returned to her hometown and moved into the neighborhood. Back then Bell was a divorced mother with a twelve-year-old-daughter, a law degree she hadn’t yet put to much use, and the vague, outlandish idea that someday she might want to run for Raythune County prosecuting attorney.

One year later, the incumbent, Bobby Lee Mercer, was forced to resign after a scandal involving his romantic liaison with the choir director over at Good Hope Baptist Church – Mercer was the married father of six children – and Belfa Elkins put her name on the ballot. During the campaign for the special election a few stories flared up about her past, some dark mutterings, and a couple of ugly, innuendo-laced missives ran in the letters-to-the-editor section of the Acker’s Gap Gazette, alluding to what had happened twenty-nine years ago in the trailer at Comer Creek, but most people were willing to judge Belfa Elkins by who she was.

Not who she’d been. And not who her family was.

When Sheriff Fogelsong announced his support for Bell, it was a done deal: She crushed Hickey Leonard by a three-to-one margin. Now Hick worked for her as an assistant prosecutor, along with Rhonda Lovejoy.

Ruthie and Tom Cox had supported Bell’s bid as well. And in the years since Bell and Carla had moved into the stone house on Shelton Avenue, the older couple had become a very big part of their lives. Ruthie was a semi-retired physician. Tom was a vet who still practiced, still ran his hands several times a week down the quivering length of golden retrievers and Border collies and sleek Labradors while murmuring, ‘There’s a good dog. Easy, girl,’ feeling for lumps or tender places, keeping eye contact with the dog’s owners as he stroked, so that they would know from the slight rise of his brows – never altering his voice, never frightening the animal – that he had found something, and that it might be serious.

Even though they were two decades older than Bell and old enough to be Carla’s grandparents, Tom and Ruthie were the best friends she’d ever had. Was that the right phrase for it, though? ‘Friend’ seemed too small a word, too ordinary, to contain the essence of what they meant to her. Too common. There was a calmness to Ruthie and Tom, a stability, a rootedness, that was so different from what Bell had known for most of her life. She rejected the idea that she’d been drawn to them because she was searching for parent figures to replace the ones she had lost. She despised that kind of trite psychology. But she had a hunger for something solid, dependable, and when she looked at Tom’s hands or when she looked into Ruthie’s eyes, eyes that never judged, eyes that seemed timeless with an expansive understanding, Bell felt, at long last, that she belonged somewhere.

From the living room, they heard Carla stir, utter a brief moan.

‘How are you doing, honey?’ Bell asked. She’d circled the couch again and now bent over it.

‘I’m okay,’ Carla said, but there was an edge to her voice.

Abruptly the young woman sat up, pushing the hair out of her face with the heel of her hand. Her cheeks were flushed. Eyes blood-shot.

‘Sure about that, sweetie? You’ve been through a lot,’ Bell said.

A strand of Carla’s hair had strayed onto her forehead. Bell tried to smooth it back out of her eyes.

Carla flinched violently at her mother’s touch.

‘I know that, Mom,’ she snapped, pushing away Bell’s hand. ‘Jesus. Can you lay off for a little while? Maybe give me a break? Not treat me like I’m five freakin’ years old or something?’

Bell was startled. But knew she shouldn’t be. The Carla she’d seen that morning, the gentle Carla, the Carla who’d been frightened and needy in the wake of a terrible event, was temporary. An aberration.

In the past year or so, Bell’s earnest, good-natured little girl had somehow morphed into a sour, bitter, rude smart-ass, suspended twice so far this year from Acker’s Gap High School – once for smoking in the girls’ bathroom, once for mouthing off to her math teacher.

And then came the night a month and a half ago when Carla rammed a tree with her car over on Riley Pike. Bell’s ex-husband Sam had bought her a bright red Mustang. The car, Bell thought, was a ridiculous, shortsighted, show-off gesture that had concerned her from the moment Sam had delivered it, dangling the keys in front of Carla’s face and chuckling when she tried to catch them between her smacking hands, like a happy kid chasing a firefly.

Carla wasn’t hurt in the accident, but she had screamed obscenities at the deputy who’d arrived on the scene within minutes. The reason for her outburst was quickly determined: Three ounces of pot were found in the glove compartment.

Along with suspending her license and requiring her to perform forty hours of community service, Judge Terrence Tolliver had ordered Carla to attend the Teen Anger Management Workshop at the RC for the rest of the school year.

All of which had only enraged Carla even more, because she couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t intervene with the judge. ‘You know Tolliver,’ Carla had said on the night of the verdict, her voice a pissed-off hiss, eyes narrowed, fists bunched and held tightly at her sides, like two grenades with the pins already pulled. ‘You know the guy. Like, personally. You’ve gone to lunch with him. And you couldn’t have asked for a favor? One lousy freakin’ favor? I mean, it’s not like I’m this big criminal or something.’

Carla’s tone had grown even darker, marbled with bitterness. ‘Oh, right – you’re so worried about what people in this craphole of a town think of you. You’ve got to be Ms Perfect all the time. You’re better than everybody else, aren’t you? It was a little bit of pot, Mom. Like, a handful. And a freakin’ fender bender. Jesus. You couldn’t have, like, just asked him to go easy on me?’

The reason Bell didn’t call Terry Tolliver and ask him to cut Carla some slack – which he surely would’ve done had she requested it – had nothing to do with appearances, nothing to do with her reputation, nothing to do with her job as prosecuting attorney, nothing to do with justice or fairness or reelection campaigns.

Carla was at a crossroads.

Bell knew it, just as surely as she knew that the sun would rise over the mountains in the morning, painting Acker’s Gap in colors of peach and gold and pink. One nudge in the wrong direction – the slightest indication that shortcuts were permissible, that she didn’t have to answer for her actions – and Carla could fall right off the edge of her own life.

Everybody’s life had that kind of moment. A moment when the world hesitates, when the future is not quite set. Still a mix of brilliant possibilities. A moment when things can go either way. Right or wrong. Up or down.

Bell could point out just such a moment in the backstories of a great many of the criminals, punks, and bad-asses she dealt with. The thieves, the drug dealers, the people whose lives were shaped and fired and glazed by violence.

There was always a moment when things could’ve turned out differently. Always a moment when a life was up for grabs.

She’d be damned if she would let her little girl slip away, just because it was easier, in the short run, to give in.

Carla coughed. With a bare foot she kicked at the brown wool blanket, the one Ruthie had tucked around her shoulders earlier that evening and that now trailed off the couch onto the floor.

‘Well,’ Ruthie said. ‘Your mom’s home, Carla, so I can head out. Oh – before I forget – Bell, you need to know that about a million people dropped by with casseroles. Check your fridge. You’ve got enough mac and cheese in there to last through Christmas. Next Christmas, I mean, not the one coming up.’ She smiled, sending a spray of wrinkles jetting across her tanned face.

Ruthie spent a lot of time outdoors, riding her bike, poking around her garden with a shiny trowel, walking Hoover, her Jack Russell terrier. The breast cancer and the harsh means of fighting it had taken a lot of things away from her – hair, flesh, energy, a still-unknown number of tomorrows – but one of the things it had given back was a capacity for appreciation. She couldn’t get enough of the world, now that she’d been granted more time to enjoy it.

Many mornings, when Bell hurried out the front door and headed for her SUV, she’d see Ruthie Cox, buttoned up in her moss-green quilted jacket, red baseball cap, corduroy trousers, and hiking boots, rounding the corner of Shelton Avenue, while beside her marched the snooty, imperial-looking Hoover, legs scissoring importantly back and forth, his head high, his brown-and-white coat looking polished and handsome in the clear air.

‘You two take it easy tonight,’ Ruthie said. She put a hand on Carla’s shoulder. Carla let it stay there.

‘Carla,’ Ruthie said. And that was all she said.

Carla nodded.

Bell walked Ruthie back to the front door. The moment they crossed the threshold between the living room and the foyer, they heard the TV set. Igniting the aggressive sound level conveyed Carla’s sour, bristling message: Don’t give a damn what you two are talking about. Don’t even care enough to eavesdrop.

‘Any progress in finding the guy who did it?’ Ruthie said. ‘Anything at all?’

‘No.’

Bell was suddenly exhausted. She felt as if her hand were pressed against a wall, and if she dropped her arm, everything would collapse: wall, house, town, world. ‘People are really shaken up,’ she said. ‘And why shouldn’t they be? A terrible killing like this – right out in public. It’s just unthinkable. Might as well be New York or Chicago or D.C. We’re not used to this. Hope to God we never do get used to it.’

‘Well, if anybody can solve this thing, you and Nick can.’ Ruthie paused. ‘I knew one of them, Bell. One of the victims.’

Bell wasn’t surprised. In a small town, the proverbial six degrees of separation was reduced to one or two degrees. Or sometimes, half a degree.

Her ex-husband Sam Elkins had always hated that. It was one of the things that drove him away. Everybody lives in everybody else’s damned pockets, he would say, back when he and Bell were still married and still living in D.C. and he was trying to explain all the reasons why he absolutely could not return to Acker’s Gap. No way in hell.

Bell hated it, too. Except that she also kind of loved it. In fact, that’s how she had responded to Sam: You know what I hate about our hometown? Everybody knows everybody else and always has.

You know what I love about our hometown?

Everybody knows everybody else and always has.

‘Dean Streeter,’ Ruthie went on. ‘Well, truth be told, I didn’t know Dean all that well. Or his wife Marlene. It was their daughter, Cherry. She was in my support group for cancer survivors. She’s the one I knew.’

‘I see.’ Bell was never certain how to react when Ruthie brought up her illness. It had been such a grueling ordeal for her and Tom. Ruthie’s gradual recovery had left Bell almost speechless with gratitude. Her joy at Ruthie’s survival was something that Bell just carried inside; she didn’t even try anymore to express it in words. It had no firm borders. It resisted the limits of language.

‘We lost Cherry six months ago,’ Ruthie said. ‘I can’t imagine what this is going to be like for Marlene. First her daughter – and now her husband.’ She shook her head. ‘The things people have to endure. That’s what astonishes me in my medical practice, Bell. You know what I mean? The challenges people face – terrible grief, grief past all imagining. But they do get over it. I don’t know how exactly, but they do. They go on. I’m sure you and Nick see that as well. Living in a small town like this – well, we all know each other’s sorrows, don’t we? There’s nowhere to hide. We’re all a part of each other’s lives.’ Ruthie touched Bell’s hand. ‘I really do mean what I said before. You and Nick will get to the bottom of this. I’m certain of it.’

Bell nodded. It was true that she and the sheriff made an effective team. They’d handled killings before. Brutal, horrendous ones.

Last year, an eighteen-year-old, floppy-haired, vacant-eyed punk named Kyle Waller – definitively rejected earlier that evening by Tiffany Amber Porter, aged seventeen, on account of his drug use and general good-for-nothingness – had expressed his humiliation and rage by murdering four people in a trailer park over by the interstate, driving his point home by killing, in addition to the lovely Miss Tiffany herself, the girl’s parents and her toddler niece with a semiautomatic weapon that turned the inside of that trailer into a compact slaughterhouse, a red metal tube of death. A semiautomatic wielded by an eighteen-year-old, Bell had thought at the time, shocked despite herself. In Raythune County, West Virginia. Every year, the river of violence rose, the river that swept in from the big cities and the faraway places, and now it was washing up at the edges of Acker’s Gap.

It was coming. You could smell it, Bell thought. You could feel it.

Today’s violence, though, was far more ominous than Kyle Waller’s rampage. Waller was a kid, and his act came from a moment’s whim, for which he’d pay a lifetime’s penance. But what had happened in the Salty Dawg that morning seemed to have nothing to do with passion. It was cold. Methodical. Carefully planned.

That much had been clear to Bell and the sheriff as they’d gone over details of the case, again and again and again. They’d compared witness statements, noting the fact that he didn’t try to rob the place or anybody in it. They’d reenacted the shooter’s movements, from his casual entrance to his precise aim to his calm getaway.

Why in the world, though, would anybody want to kill three harmless old men?

Ruthie opened the big front door. The hinges yelped, but complied. ‘Call me if you need to, Bell,’ she said. ‘Day or night. You know that.’

‘I do. We’ll talk soon. And thanks again for coming over.’

The overhead light suddenly flickered. It lasted less than a second, just a slight dimming before returning to full strength, but Bell muttered, ‘Damn this old house.’

‘Thought you just had all the wiring redone.’

‘I did. By Walter Meckling and his crew,’ Bell said, naming the best-known general contractor in Raythune County. ‘Good thing it’s still under warranty. Walter’s supposed to be sending somebody over to take a look at it.’ She shook her head. It wasn’t the wiring that was bothering her. ‘Hell, Ruthie, can’t anything go right around here? Just one damned thing. That’s all I ask. Just one.’

Ruthie gave her a quick hug. It wasn’t an answer, but it would have to do for now. Even through Ruthie’s jacket Bell could feel how thin she was, how sharp and prominent the bones were.

‘Let me know if there’s news,’ Ruthie said. ‘And listen, Bell.’

She leaned close to her friend and dropped her voice, although the volume on the TV set in the next room was plenty loud enough to ensure privacy. ‘Carla’s going to be okay. She’s really just a scared little girl right now. She can’t show you that, though.’

Bell nodded, as if it all made perfect sense to her. But it didn’t. Not really.

The door closed.

She turned and walked slowly back into the living room. Carla stood in front of the couch, blanket foaming around her feet, arms folded across her small chest, head bowed, breathing deeply. She wasn’t watching the TV set. The noise pouring out of it was ludicrously loud. Bell knew better, though, than to reach for the remote control to shush it. That would be a declaration of war.

‘You sure you don’t want to talk a little bit about today?’ Bell said.

She timed her question to arrive in the space between the braying honks of a sitcom laugh track. Bell didn’t recognize the show. They all seemed alike to her these days. Big oily vats of dumb jokes, mostly about sex.

Carla lifted her head and gave her mother a savage sideways glare that mingled contempt and incredulity. ‘Talk about it? You want me to talk about it.’ She snorted. ‘I watched people get their freakin’ heads blown off today, Mom. Is it okay with you if I try to, like, forget about it for just a little while?’

Bell wanted to embrace her daughter, same as she’d done earlier that day, wanted to pull her close, to kiss her and tell her how much she loved her, cherished her. But she also knew that such gestures would be, under the circumstances, exactly the wrong moves to make.

‘Okay,’ Bell said. ‘Sometimes talking helps, though.’

Carla’s eyes blazed. ‘Really.’ She cocked her head to one side. Deciding. Yeah, she’d do it. ‘So why,’ she said, challenge in her voice, ‘don’t we ever talk about Shirley? She’s your sister. Your only sister. But you don’t even bring her up, Mom. We’ve never discussed it. Not ever. All I know is that she’s in prison. I know what she did – and I only know that because Dad told me – but I don’t know why she did it. Or why we don’t ever go visit her. If talking is so all-fired great, Mom, how come we never talk about Aunt Shirley?’

In her head, Bell counted off ten seconds.

She added another five.

‘That has nothing to do with what happened to you today,’ Bell said quietly. ‘Nothing.’

‘Fine.’ Carla spat the word.

Bell moved toward the staircase. ‘See you in the morning,’ she said neutrally. She couldn’t risk any more conversation. Not now. Not after the topic Carla had introduced.

Both of their bedrooms were on the second floor, but Carla sometimes slept on the couch on weekend nights, falling asleep in front of the TV. This was going to be one of those nights.

Carla listened to her mother’s steps on the stairs.

She knew the sounds well, and could hear them even through the firehose blast of noise from the TV set. The old house creaked and sighed and moaned at the slightest touch, signaling the discontents of its age and its state of disrepair. They were updating it, but had to proceed gradually, bit by expensive bit, as they could afford it. The new wiring installed last month had carved a significant hole in her mom’s savings – for all the good it had done.

Carla clicked off the TV set. She needed to focus. The sounds grew fainter as Bell reached the second floor. Carla was aware of her mother’s movements overhead as she stopped in at the bathroom – there was a strangled mini-swoosh as water forced its way through a tottering series of old rusty pipes, the brief scream of ancient faucets being turned on and off – and then Carla could hear her walk into her bedroom. An old house was better than a GPS tracker.

She listened.

Silence.

Good. Her mother was in bed now. Or at least not bothering her anymore.

Carla fell back onto the couch. She drew up her bony knees until they were close to her face. She thrust that face into the small crook of her arm, trying to muffle her sobs in the soft cotton of her longsleeved pink T-shirt. She’d been determined not to reveal – not to her mom, not even to Ruthie – what she was feeling. The panic. And the confusion. And cold dread.

She’d decided to stuff it all behind the anger her mother had come to expect from her. To hide it. To use that anger as a shield. Anger was the best protection. Absolutely.

The first thing everyone had wanted to know was: Did you get a good look at him? Recognize him? Did you know the shooter?

And Carla, like all of the other witnesses, had said, No, no, never saw him before. Don’t know him.

But she did.