A Killing in the Hills

8


The morning was milky-gray and cold.

Head turned to peer out the back window, right arm stretched across the top of the passenger seat, Bell backed the Explorer out of her driveway. Once in the street, she gave a quick look around to make sure Shelton Avenue was clear – no kids, dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, or snapping turtles, all of which, at one time or another, she’d had to swerve to avoid when she squirted out of her driveway in a hurry – and then shifted from reverse into drive. All systems go.

In ten minutes she’d be on Route 6, climbing the side of the mountain, which meant accelerating her way into a series of dizzy, lurching turns of legendary peril. Route 6 was the kind of road that required you to grip the wheel until your fingers ached and your palms were rubbed raw, while hoping that prayer could outmaneuver gravity.

She remembered the old joke. There are only good drivers in West Virginia, the joke went, because all the bad drivers are dead. With the steep drop-offs and hairpin turns, with the winding roads and the sudden plunges that awaited you down either side, if you weren’t a good driver, then you – followed by your next of kin – found out pretty quickly.

Lori Sheets lived near the top of the mountain. Bell had met her twice before, both times briefly: at the time of her son’s arrest three weeks ago and then again at his arraignment a day later. Bell’s impression of Lori Sheets was tentative, incomplete, composed of quickly glimpsed fragments, a makeshift mosaic. She could recall short frosted hair; a square, chunky, decidedly middle-aged build; circular face; and anxiety. Lots of please and thank you and excuse me. That was Lori Sheets: excruciatingly polite, exceedingly nervous. The kind of nervous that went with being poor and powerless.

Bell wanted to have one last talk with the woman before deciding whether or not to try her son Albie for the murder of six-year-old Tyler Bevins.

Albie was twenty-eight, but profoundly mentally retarded. Albie and Tyler had been playing together in the Bevins’ basement when things somehow went catastrophically wrong. Tyler, limp, pulse-less, was found propped against a wall, a garden hose wrapped tightly around his small neck. Albie’s tennis shoe was close beside him. Paramedics discovered Albie in the Bevins’ backyard, kneeling behind a tree, shaking and sobbing.

‘Done a bad thing,’ he had said. When Albie pulled his big hands away from his face, the officers told Bell, shining strings of snot connected his nose and his fingertips. His regret, they said, seemed genuine. ‘Done a bad thing,’ he mumbled. ‘Albie bad. Bad. Bad.’

Bell could charge him with first-degree murder, or she could argue for diminished capacity. She could insist to the judge that he belonged in prison for the rest of his life, or she could say he ought to be detained in a forensic facility and evaluated regularly, until he could be released into his family’s care.

She had to make up her mind by the next day. So she’d called Lori Sheets, in between her conversations with Sheriff Fogelsong about the shooting, and she asked for permission to stop by early Sunday morning. Albie was in jail, and would stay there throughout the trial, but Bell wanted to get a sense of his family. To see them in their home, the home where Albie had lived, too.

She wanted every speck of information she could get before making her decision about Albie’s fate.

Lori Sheets had been instantly obliging. ‘That’s no problem at all, Mrs Elkins,’ she had said, and her voice on the phone was perky, hopeful. ‘No problem at all. We’ll put on the coffeepot. You come on by. And thank you. We’re much obliged. Thank you.’ She knew what the stakes were. Her attorney, Serena Crumpler, had explained it all to her. The prosecutor’s decision about what Albie would be charged with – first-degree murder or involuntary manslaughter with mitigating circumstances – could make all the difference.

The Sheets case was the kind Bell craved. It was complex and it was multilayered, and it required her to locate the fine line between justice and mercy. It was the kind of case that validated her decision to uproot her life and move herself and her child back to a hometown that – unlike Washington, D.C., unlike anywhere else in the world – knew her, knew every knot and twist and nuance.

Which was both good and bad.

She wrestled the gearshift into second. The engine put its protest on the record, making a low throaty grumble.

The higher Bell climbed, the more the world thickened and dimmed. To her left and right, the woods seemed to push headlong, bunching closer and closer to the road, as if these woods had definite plans to reclaim the space one day, no matter who had the upper hand for now. Even without its flamboyant summer foliage the woods felt immense and solid, the tree branches making a natural latticework, forthright, impenetrable. At sporadic intervals the overhanging limbs scratched hard at the roof of Bell’s Explorer, startling her. Fingernails dragged across a front door would’ve been less menacing.

The road’s pitch was so severe that occasionally it felt almost vertical. Bell had the sensation that her Explorer could just slip off the blacktop – not skidding sideways, as it might do if the road was iced up in winter, but flipping backward, end over end, like an animal losing its grip as it shimmies up a tree, winding up a thousand feet down in a makeshift grave of sticks and leaves and dirt and fog. Lost forever.

The morning had gotten off to a rocky start.

She’d tried to awaken Carla before she left, just to say good-bye.

Bad mistake.

When Bell leaned over the couch, gently jostling the swirl of blankets and dark hair and warm flesh that constituted her sleeping daughter, Carla had twitched, cried out, and shot straight up off the couch.

‘Jesus, Mom! What the f*ck—’

Flustered, startled by the jab of profanity, Bell had backed away. ‘I’m – I’m heading out now, sweetie. I have some work to do for a case,’ she said. ‘Just wanted to tell you that when you’re ready, there’s milk and cereal, or oatmeal if you’d like, and in the freezer, there’s some waff—’

‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Carla said in a foggy, seriously annoyed voice. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. She rubbed at the side of her head with the heel of her hand, breathed through her nose, coughed, then slumped back down on the couch. Her body instantly curled up again in a tight little ball, like a paramecium on a microscope slide reacting to the light.

Bell stood there for another minute. She was engaged in a furious internal debate. She wanted to ask Carla how she was doing, how she was feeling, if she’d had bad dreams, if she needed—

No. Not now.

She walked back to the foyer. A pale blue cardigan was hanging over the banister. Bell grabbed it and arranged it across the shoulders of her white oxford-cloth blouse. She smoothed down the pleated front of her black flannel trousers. Fall in West Virginia was a hard season to dress for; the day could start out crisp but end up sweltering. Fashion advice for this time of the year generally came down to one word: layers. It was critical to have options. To not commit to anything you can’t shed the instant it doesn’t work anymore.

Not such bad advice for a marriage, either, she thought.

Bell had plucked up her cell from the charging stand on the hall table. Then she took a last appraising look at herself in the mirror over the table. She frowned. She fluffed her hair with her fingertips. She used her palm to rub at a spot on her chin that ended up being a shadow. She fluffed her hair one more time. Squared her shoulders. Like every woman she’d ever known, Bell spent most of her time basically hating the way she looked, and then hating herself for hating it.

Well. It was what it was.

Thirty-nine years old. Divorced mother of a teenage daughter. Not what she had planned for. Not what she had expected.

But who got what they expected?

Bell lifted her briefcase. She opened the big front door, jiggled the knob back and forth to make sure the lock would engage when she pulled it shut behind her, jiggled it again – just making sure – and departed.

She had called Sheriff Fogelsong from the road. She knew she had to do that before she hit Route 6 and started the steep climb up the mountain. At that point, she’d need to keep her full attention on something other than a phone call: the attempt to maintain control of her SUV so that it didn’t go skittering over the narrow berm, not to be seen again until the spring thaw revealed a flattened car and her half-mummified remains.

Maybe not even then. It was a long way down.

‘Mornin’, Miss Belfa,’ Fogelsong had said, putting a lilt in his voice when he pronounced her formal name, the one guaranteed to piss her off. He’d picked up after half a ring.

Good sign. If Nick had the energy to be ornery, it meant he wasn’t slumped in a chair after an all-nighter at the office, brooding about the state of the town for which he’d felt too much responsibility for too many years.

‘Mornin’, Nicholas,’ she replied. Two could play at that game. ‘Any news?’

‘Now, Bell, you know good and well that if there’d been any news, I would’ve called you before now – no matter what time it was.’

‘True.’

‘But I do have to say—’ Fogelsong had paused, and Bell could hear him take a long satisfying slurp of his coffee. ‘– that things are moving along.’

She pressed the phone tighter against her ear.

‘That right?’

‘Yeah. We got the comprehensive ballistics report back from the state police crime lab. Nine-millimeter slugs, just like we thought. We’re going over it right now. Which is a start. Plus, a couple of my deputies worked all night and came up with some good leads. They went over the reports of some gun-related violence in adjacent counties over the past few months and pulled out some similarities in the incidents.’

‘Any idea why somebody would want to kill those three people in particular?’

‘Nothing yet. We’re going to be talking to their families again. Trying to shake something loose. We’ve got to go easy, though. Their loved ones are pretty broken up. Just like you’d figure they’d be.’

‘Yes,’ Bell said. ‘Of course.’

She was driving past the post office and saw, in the small parking lot, an enormous TV news van surrounded by a bobbing, shifting mass of people in baseball caps and flannel coats. Still eager, no doubt, for the chance to be interviewed for a newscast. Bell figured she ought to be disdainful of these people and their fierce hunger to see themselves on television, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t be.

A lot of the people in Raythune County felt invisible. They felt marginalized, forgotten. The world paid them no mind. This might be the one time in their lives – just one measly time, a few seconds, tops – that the spotlight would swing their way, and they would feel its welcome heat on their weathered, used-up faces. Being on television, even if it was only to say, Yessir, we’re all pretty darned scared ’round here after that awful shootin’, no question ’bout it, might be the high point of their lives. Thus Bell couldn’t begrudge them their determination to stand in a parking lot, first thing Sunday morning, and jostle and bump and elbow each other out of the way for the chance to look into a TV camera and give opinions. They weren’t used to anybody caring about their opinions.

Which was not to say Bell herself wanted any part of the publicity. She’d had to deal with the press on a few of her cases, and she found herself wishing that the big fat van that was now safely in her rearview mirror might somehow wind up with four flat tires and a snapped-off antenna.

She was coming to the intersection of Route 6. She had to wind up the call.

‘Nick,’ she said. ‘I know you know this, but let me say it anyway. You’ve got a lot going on, too, what with Mary Sue’s illness. You need a hand with anything, you need to talk anything over—’

‘You bet, Bell,’ he said, cutting her off in just the way she’d expected him to. They were two of a kind. ‘How’s Carla this morning?’

Bell was at a loss about how to answer. She felt exiled from her daughter’s emotional state. Even if Carla hadn’t been a witness just the day before to an act of grotesque, unfathomable brutality, she still would have been a mystery to her mother. Bell knew from her own teenage years – singed, as her daughter’s now were, by a flash of violence – that there were some things you could not talk about, no matter how much the people who loved you wanted you to.

‘Doing okay for now,’ Bell said. ‘Thanks, Nick. Gotta run. On my way out to the Sheets place.’

The sheriff, she knew, wasn’t terribly interested in the Sheets case. It was, to his mind, over. The perpetrator had been immediately apprehended. There was no mystery to it, no crime to solve. Albie Sheets was guilty. He was locked up. Now it was up to the courts; it was none of his lookout. Nick Fogelsong was a man of action, and his attention stayed fixed on cases in which he had to hunt down the culprit.

He liked to focus on the chase. To stay in motion.

For Bell, though, the murder of Tyler Bevins wasn’t over at all. Not even close. Albie Sheets was guilty – but guilty of what? There was plenty of motion in the Sheets case, but it wasn’t the sheriff’s kind of motion. It wasn’t about high-speed car chases or gun battles. It was the kind of activity that took place in a prosecutor’s head.

Could someone with an IQ as low as Albie Sheets possessed even know what murder was? And if he didn’t – by what right did the state punish him?

‘Well,’ Fogelsong said, ‘if you’re heading out to the Sheets home, you be sure and watch the curves going up and down that mountain – they’re pretty damn treacherous.’ He made a harrumphing sound in the back of his throat. ‘Like you don’t know that already,’ he added testily, scolding himself. Sometimes, Bell knew, he could forget that she’d been born and raised here, just like him.

She’d lived away from Acker’s Gap for a few years, and to some folks – Nick Fogelsong was not usually among them, but occasionally he slipped – that was almost enough to mark her as an outsider. A spectator. Not a native.

‘Will do.’ Bell flipped her cell shut and dropped it onto the seat beside her. The mountain loomed dead ahead.