by Julia Keller
Shot glass pressed to her lip, Shirley took a long soulful slug. Then she shook herself with gusto, like a dog after a deluge, as the fiery liquid pitchforked its way through her insides. She twisted her torso to thump the glass back down on the bar. It was then—with Shirley in a half turn, licking her bottom lip—that her eyes met up with Bell’s. The three-man band in the opposite corner had just commenced another number, and the blistering bass beats seemed to make the small building shimmy and throb.
Before Bell had a chance to speak, another commotion erupted. Several chairs tipped and crashed, the top rails of their wooden backs clattering against the red concrete floor as people jumped and scattered. Three round tables were upended; glasses slid off and shattered. First one woman screamed, then two more. The band stopped playing—not gradually but abruptly, as if someone had kicked out a power cord.
Jesus, somebody muttered. What the hell, came from somebody else, followed by yet another opinion: Drunk as a goddamned skunk, just like always. Leave him be, why doncha. There was a sudden batch of ear-ripping static from the electric guitar, until the skinny, big-nosed guitar player—having brushed the strings with his sleeve—silenced it again with a hand clamped over the fret.
The crowd parted clumsily, opening up a Z-shaped lane to the source of the tumult. Sprawled facedown on the greasy floor was a wiry, black-haired man in a pale yellow flannel shirt and dirty white carpenter’s pants. Sturm and Bell moved simultaneously to the spot. The deputy, reaching it first, called out sharply, “Hey, mister—you okay?” and then lowered herself to his side with the velocity of a dropped rock. Sturm’s movements, Bell saw, were surprisingly nimble and efficient for a woman her size. She groped under his chin for a pulse. Nothing. With two hands, she turned him over.
An orange-handled screwdriver had been punched into the man’s chest, after which the force of his fall pushed it sideways, ripping the wound wider. A dark stain fled rapidly across the front of his shirt, as ominous as a storm system filling out a digital weather map. His acne-chipped face was white, his jaw slack. Eyes open. Pupils fixed and dilated.
Sturm’s big head swung up to look at Bell. There was a stunned, uncertain quality to the deputy’s stare. When you do this for a living, Bell reminded herself, you always think you’re prepared, but you’re never prepared. Never. Bell felt a swell of nausea cresting in her belly. She fought it, clenching her jaw. And she was aware as well of a cold sense of dread throwing a shadow over her thoughts like a cloud crossing an open field. First the old man back in Acker’s Gap. Now this. Jesus.
The deputy quickly recovered her composure. Still on one knee, she unclipped the radio from her belt and thumbed it on. The bar had grown eerily quiet—no one so much as coughed or shuffled a foot or bumped a table—and that fact gave the few simple words of Sturm’s summons for an ambulance the chiseled mien of a haiku.
Call completed, she barked at the stunned onlookers: “Anybody know this guy? Anybody see what happened? Anybody?”
More silence.
The deputy reached in the dead man’s pocket, hunting for ID. Bell was just about to tell her to back away to preserve the integrity of the crime scene when Sturm pulled out a small white business card. She scanned it, then passed it up to Bell. Can’t matter much at this point, Bell thought, accepting it. There had already been enough contamination of the scene to piss off the state forensic folks, the ones who would be showing up in their fancy van just as soon as the techs back in Charleston finished their argument about whose turn it was to make the drive over crummy roads in the tricky dark. Communities as small as this one didn’t have their own crime-scene units. They had to wait their turn, just as Bell and the deputies had had to wait two nights ago, when they stood, helpless and appalled, alongside Freddie Arnett’s shattered body. And they would have to wait now.
Bell scanned the black embossed letters on the card:
SAMPSON J. VOORHEES. ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. NYC.
No phone number, no fax, no e-mail address. Strange way of doing business for a law firm, Bell mused. Usually they’re throwing their contact info at you so fast, you have to duck. Her ex-husband worked for that kind of firm. Hell, she’d often thought, given half a chance, he’d probably slap the company logo on the toilet seats in the men’s room. She turned over the card. Along the bottom edge, another name had been hand-scrawled with a blue pen:
Odell Crabtree
Sturm was reaching up now to retrieve the card, because it was evidence. Part of the official record. Bell wanted a longer look, but complied; this was Deputy Sturm’s turf, Deputy Sturm’s investigation. Collier County would be calling the shots. Which was good news: Raythune County had all it could handle right now.
Still, Bell was curious. She wondered what link there could possibly be between a publicity-shy New York City lawyer and a body on the floor of Tommy’s bar in the middle of West Virginia on a sweat-oiled summer night, the life in that body having recently seeped away amid a sour backwash of sloshed beer, bad jokes, loud cackles, high-hanging gray webs of cigarette smoke, and the foot-stompin’, good-time tunes of Bobo Bolland and His Rockin’ Band.
Chapter Two
He was moving around again. She could hear him bumping into things, and with each thump, Lindy winced; she imagined the pain of a knee hitting a box or a cheek scraping a rough wall. But she was reluctant to check on him. She didn’t want to open the basement door and call down into the darkness, “You okay, Daddy?” Not anymore. She had done that at first—in the early days, she had reacted to every noise—and like as not, he’d come roaring up at her, swinging his fists over his head and yelling: “Leave me be! Told you to leave me be!”
So now Lindy just listened. Listened hard. In ten minutes, she would have to leave for her overnight shift at the Lester gas station, and she couldn’t be late. Summer Saturdays were a zoo. A twenty-four-hour place in these parts was a magnet for every drunk, every weirdo, and every druggie in a thirty-mile radius; Saturday nights seemed to bring out the crazy even in normal people. But before she left, she had to make sure he was okay.
There were three or four bumps in a row. Then a spell of quiet. That meant, most likely, that he’d gotten his bearings again; his internal radar had mysteriously kicked back in. She pictured him as he moved amid the loose branches and the jumbo rocks. Three years ago, she had dragged in those loads from outside, inch by inch, scavenging them from the ravine out beyond the big hill. She also tracked down, from yard sales and thrift stores, a mess of old wooden tables, chipped and rickety. Some were round, some square, some rectangular; some were as small as TV trays, while others were long enough to host a dozen family members at Sunday supper.
She had made a place for him that was like the place he knew best, the place he loved: a coal mine. The coal mine that had closed down five years ago, leaving him and thirty-two other miners stunned and bereft, not knowing where to go or how to be.
He didn’t walk upright; he crouched. He had to, because long years spent working underground had left his back as curved as a question mark. His habit was to reach ahead in the darkness, swaying from side to side, picking and scrabbling at the hard surfaces that surrounded him, surfaces he sensed rather than saw. He tried to restrict himself to the space under the tables because he liked to stay bent and the tables enabled him to do just that. It was the one position that didn’t hurt. He dozed often, curled in a clenched circle like a barrel stave, and when he first woke, there was always a period of disorientation. Always a span of time during which he’d forget and rise too quickly and—with a furious yelp, because a scalding-hot starburst of pain was born over and over again in that torqued, ruined back of his—ram into the things with which she’d filled the cellar, the tables and the crates and the rocks and the mounds of dirt. He was still a big man, big and solid and strong. When he hit something, you heard it.
Lindy went back to her reading. If she had only ten minutes to go before leaving for her shift, she’d spend it reading. She’d propped up her
book against the stack of still more books on the kitchen table. This was her domain now; her father rarely came up to the first floor these days. She had filled his space with what he liked, and so she felt entitled to fill her space with what she liked. And what she liked were books.
The Fabric of the Cosmos. That’s what she was reading. He didn’t like to see her reading. If he were still a regular part of her daylight life, the way he’d been until a few years ago, he might have come up behind her and grabbed the book right out of her hands, holding it up too high for her to snatch back—he wasn’t a tall man to begin with, and forty-seven years in the mines had shortened him even further, but he was still taller than she was. And then he would sidearm the book into the trash can next to the sink. She never said a word. She would cross the small kitchen and pick the book out of the trash, sweeping away the coffee grounds and wiping off the gelatinous white-yellow globs of skillet grease and try not to react. She didn’t want him to see how hurt she was.
He’d always had a temper. A terrible waiting rage that could spring to life the way a flame leaps up when you click on a lighter—just that suddenly, just that easily. From the time she was a little girl, Lindy had learned how to cope, how to deal with his temper, how to walk carefully around it the way you’d sidestep an injured animal along the road, never knowing when it might rally and come after you, all teeth and claws and survival instinct. He hadn’t liked her very much back then. Lindy’s mother loved her—there was no doubt about that—but her father had seemed to hold some obscure grudge against her. He’d accepted her presence, but he didn’t have to be happy about it. Six years ago, the cancer had taken away his wife, Margaret, and now it was just the two of them. Just him and Lindy. And he changed, bit by bit. He softened. Part of it, she knew, was fear—fear of what was happening to him. He needed her. But she didn’t care about the cause. Didn’t mind the fact that it was panic and desperation that drove him into finally being a father. She loved him. And now, it seemed, he loved her, too.
“Something’s happening to me, my girl,” he had said to her, back when it began. “In my head. Clouds. It’s like big black clouds moving in before a storm. Getting between me and what I want to say or do. Clouds. They come and they go. Makes me mad. I can’t think no more. I can’t—” He would stop. Shake his head. Lindy would reach up and lay her hand flat on his chest, and keep her hand right there. He’d close his eyes. The two of them would stay that way for a long while, and he’d be himself again. For a time.
Now he spent most of his days in the cellar. In the place she had built for him three years ago, to calm him down. She’d hauled in the big rocks. She’d stacked up the boxes, arranged the tables and the old barrels. She’d procured the sticks and the scrap lumber, and she’d scattered all of it around the cold dirt floor. Dumped coal here and there. Gravel, too. He wanted it dark, insisted on it, and so she had unscrewed the lightbulb from the overhead fixture. Then she had climbed the stairs back up to the first floor. Closed the door behind her.
He spent his time in a blackness that matched the blackness rising inside him. Except for the occasional thumps and groans, she didn’t hear much from him. She knew he came up the stairs at night. She’d find the results in the morning: A box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes with the top flap torn off and three-quarters of the contents gone, courtesy of a frantic plunging hand that spilled half its load on the floor on its way to his mouth. Melon rinds, with an unevenly spaced row of shallow dents marking the spots where his remaining teeth had gnawed at the sweet meat. And a sick-making, dizziness-inducing smell from the sink, where he sometimes emptied his bucket, not bothering to run the spigot to rinse the feces and urine down the drain. She had to disinfect the sink daily with Clorox. The smell was like having fingers poked in your eyes.
Two and a half years ago, the last time he’d let her take him anywhere, the doctor at the Raythune County Medical Center—the only neurologist left in the area who would see Medicare patients—had been blunt with her: “Your father has significant and chronic health issues in addition to the neurological deficits, including emphysema and congestive heart failure. There’s no way to tell how long he might survive. The end could be fast, or it could be slow.” What the doctor didn’t say, but allowed Lindy to extrapolate from the silence that descended on the beige-walled room after his pronouncement, was this: Given his current mental state, fast might be better. She had nodded, and then she helped her father get down from the examination table. She tried to help him put on his jacket—he kept ramming his fist in the wrong armhole—but he smacked at her hands and cursed her.
The only place her father was comfortable now was the past. The past, for him, meant the Acer Mine No. 40, twenty-seven miles out on Route 6 in rural Raythune County, where he’d worked his shift well into his sixties, tilted like a tree pushed from behind by a permanent hurricane.
Lindy was just finishing up Part IV of The Fabric of the Cosmos. She loved the book—it was all about space and time and gravity, things you could measure, things that rewarded your deep thinking about them by proving to be solid and comprehensible, unlike things such as your feelings and your family—but now she had to stop. Time to get ready for work. She was the night manager at the station, a job she’d held since her graduation from Acker’s Gap High School two years ago.
Another thump.
She waited. No more noise. No yelling. Good. He probably hadn’t hurt himself, then. No reason for her to open the basement door and call down to him, asking if he was okay, a gesture that might very well be met with a yip and a snarl. Her father was in a nasty mood today, restless and surly, knocking things over and bellowing about it. He’d probably heard the mail truck earlier and was riled by the sound. He didn’t like anybody coming by the house. But there wasn’t a bookstore within a hundred miles of here. What she wanted, she had to buy online and have shipped. She’d ordered enough books to take her all the way through next fall. The white-haired, scraggly browed postman, Perry Crum, his sixty-two-year-old body scrunched up like a lumpy quarter-moon after so many decades of lugging heavy mail sacks back into the hollows of rural Raythune County, often teased her about it; if he had the time, Perry would drag the heavy carton of books inside for her, even though he wasn’t required to, and as he lifted it onto the kitchen table, he’d say, “Heavier’n a box of rocks! Sure wish you were collecting crocheted pot holders instead of books.”
He was teasing. He didn’t really mind. In fact, Perry Crum talked to her about the books she read because he, too, was interested in science; he’d planned to be a biology major in college, but in the end he couldn’t go, because he had to take care of his sister Ellie, who had Down syndrome. Their parents were long dead, and there was no one else to do it. He mentioned his family situation to Lindy just once, and only in passing. It was not the kind of thing that people in these parts talked about. Your burdens were your burdens. Everyone had them. It was a given.
Last month, Lindy’s father had been in the kitchen on the day when Perry came in with a carton of books. Perry smiled and waved. Her father glared darkly, his lip raised in a snarl.
“Daddy, you know Perry Crum,” Lindy said. She patted the top of the square cardboard box, which Perry had dropped on the kitchen table. “He brought my books. You remember Perry.”
Her father growled something indecipherable. Putting a twisted-up hand on the kitchen wall to steady himself, he groped and lurched to the basement door. He didn’t look back at the postman or his daughter. His journey down was a heavy and solemn one, each step a separate chunk of thunder that made the staircase shimmy.
A wince of concern had redistributed the wrinkles on Perry’s face. “You okay here, Lindy?” he said.
“Fine. Really.”
And she was. She could take care of herself. She’d been doing it for a long time. Even before her father got to be the way he was, he had worked long hours at the mine. Came home practically comatose with exhaustion.
Lindy looked around for
a bookmark. There was a stack of mail at her elbow, mail from the past week or so because she always put off going through it, envelopes thick and thin, mostly white but in a variety of sizes, plus slick flyers from the discount stores up on the interstate.
She grabbed the envelope on the top of the heap. Her father still received mail from time to time. Nothing of a personal nature. Junk mail mainly, along with Social Security and Medicare bulletins, although Lindy had long ago arranged to have his meager retirement income direct-deposited, and she used that to pay the mortgage. Otherwise, she never touched his money. She bought her books with her own salary.
The letter—she stuck it in the book to designate her place between pages 376 and 377, giving the envelope a glance as she did so—looked like another blind solicitation from some company wanting him to buy something he didn’t need. New York City postmark. In the center, in the space for the recipient’s information, was her father’s name and address in typed black letters:
ODELL CRABTREE
COUNTY ROAD 76
ACKER’S GAP, WV
Chapter Three
Long after this night was over, Bell would remember how thin her sister’s arm felt in her grip. She had first grabbed Shirley’s wrist, but Shirley jerked it out of Bell’s hand. Somebody else in the bar—Bell didn’t know if it was a man or a woman, and she couldn’t tell by the sound and didn’t care enough to check—laughed a loud two-note laugh, amused by Shirley’s active disinclination to be dragged out of the place. The laugh infuriated Bell, and she clamped her hand around Shirley’s upper arm. The arm felt like a kid’s arm: wiry, hard, all bone. Bell marched her roughly out of Tommy’s and into the soup-warm West Virginia night.
