Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  That, in fact, was why Lindy had brought it up tonight. Jason, she’d figured out, felt responsible for his brother. And he understood what it was like when someone you loved—someone in your own family—harbored a secret darkness, like a letter carried in an inside pocket. Jason knew what she knew, or at least what she might be on her way to finding out: that people could do things you never, ever thought they’d do. Terrible things. Unforgivable things. And yet you still had to take care of them. Right?

  “So maybe it’s the drugs,” Lindy said.

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Yeah.”

  But if it’s him, if it’s Daddy, Lindy asked herself, then why don’t I tell somebody? Warn them? Don’t I have to do that? Don’t I have to turn him in? Let them take him away? Don’t I have to—?

  “Earth to Lindy,” Jason said. “Kind of zoned out on me there.”

  “Sorry.” She’d made a decision: She would search the house before she talked to anybody. Scour it. Take it apart, if need be. See if she could find any real proof of what her father did when he went out at night. Evidence. Anything—anything at all. She’d be thorough. She had to be. Had to know what was going on. Otherwise—

  Jason was talking again. She struggled to pay attention.

  “Anyway,” he said, “you ask me, it’s drugs—shit like that.” He nodded sagely, as if he were plugged into a vast and exclusive knowledge source labeled What’s Really Going On In The World. “The money’s gotta come from somewhere, you know? Don’t be growing on no trees.”

  Lindy started to answer, but the perky little ding-ding!—the automatic signal that someone had pushed open the glass double doors from outside—startled them both. Focused on their conversation, they had turned away from the entrance. Usually they were more alert than that, especially after dark. More aware of who was coming and going, on what was happening outside the store, just beyond the scrap of light at the pumps.

  The new customer looked vaguely familiar. Maybe, Lindy thought, she’d seen her picture in the Gazette. Definitely, this woman had patronized the station previously, although Lindy could pretty much swear she’d never come inside before. Just paid at the pump. Medium-length brown hair. Nice face. No makeup. White blouse. Light blue cotton skirt. The skirt had the rumpled, slightly wilted demeanor of a garment that had gamely done its duty throughout a ravishingly hot day and into an equally hot night. Lindy watched the woman’s face. It was pale and stressed-looking; her nose was slightly red and her eyes were ringed with tiredness.

  “Help you, ma’am?” Lindy said.

  Jason had backed away a step or two, giving the stranger a clear lane to the counter to conduct her business, but he kept an eye on her. This late at night, he and Lindy had to look out for each other. Missing the woman’s approach had rattled him.

  “Yes, I—” The woman paused. Her face unwound into a smile. “Looking for a cold pop. Hot as hell out there, you know? Never lets up, even when the sun goes down.”

  “Cooler’s in the back.” Lindy pointed.

  The woman nodded, then left to go pick out the chilled can of her choice. Neither Lindy nor Jason spoke until she returned. They were veterans of the night shift, old hands, but it always felt weird when the blackness was split wide open like this, at irregular intervals; there was no pattern, nothing that would make you expect a well-dressed, plainly sober woman to come walking into the station at 3:17 A.M.

  “Thanks,” the woman said, taking her change from the five-dollar bill she’d given Lindy and sliding it into her skirt pocket.

  “Anything else?” Lindy asked.

  The woman held up the can of Diet Dr Pepper and waggled it. “This’ll do the trick.” The smile lingered longer this time, and Lindy had the feeling—it came as she looked directly into the woman’s gray-blue eyes—that she liked her. She wasn’t sure why, exactly, but she did.

  Through the glass, Lindy watched her return to the Explorer parked next to the pumps. She had a purposeful, straight-line kind of walk. Very little wasted motion.

  Lindy couldn’t be absolutely certain, she wouldn’t swear to it, but when she recalled the customer’s eyes, and the smudged and rumpled look to the skin that surrounded them, it seemed to her that the woman had recently been crying.

  * * *

  Bell drove away from the little gas station and back out onto the country road. The Explorer’s headlights worked like a pickax, chipping systematically at the dark tunnel but just a bit at a time; it revealed nothing except what lay a few feet ahead, after which the darkness collapsed again behind her, like a constant series of quiet cave-ins.

  Her left hand was on the wheel. With her right, she held the unopened can next to her cheek, rolling it down onto her neck and back up again. She needed to cool off. The cold can, slick with condensation from the moment she’d stepped out of the little store and back into the night’s mighty heat, left a wide wet trail on half her face. She didn’t care.

  She’d been driving for hours. At first she’d kept to the back roads, the ones that kinked and twisted as they rose and fell, the ones that passed slatternly trailers and crowded salvage yards and nameless creeks and long-abandoned coal tipples, but then she changed her mind and headed for the interstate. She could go faster on the freeway. The back roads enforced a lower speed limit. Enforced it, that is, if your desire was to remain on a solid surface and not conclude your evening upside down in a ditch with all four windows blown out, hanging by your seat belt while fluid leaked out of the radiator—and leaked out of you, too, if you’d had the bad luck to puncture something.

  Bell drove through the darkness because that was what she always did when she was upset. It was a sweeping, ravening kind of darkness that arose out of heat and hopelessness and crimes and questions, a dark that seemed not the opposite of light but light’s true master, as if it allowed the light to exist as a courtesy, nothing more, and when the time came, the dark would revoke the privilege. The dark was in charge.

  So she drove. She drove until she ran out of problems or ran out of gas. The latter always came first.

  And on this night, when she grew weary of the freeway, she had headed back to the county roads. They provided a different kind of solace. Not every kind of night driving was the same; on the interstate, you were never alone, while on the back roads, you almost always were. The high-up Lester sign—a white neon rectangle with LESTER spelled out in slanting blue block letters, rising over the small asphalt lot on a string-bean aluminum pole—had drawn her toward it. She didn’t want to see or talk to anybody she knew. A safe bet in this place, she figured.

  Still, Bell hoped that the young woman behind the counter wouldn’t pick up on the fact that she’d been crying. If she did—well, to hell with her.

  Bell had received the text at 6:47 P.M., just as she was getting ready to leave the hospital lot with Nick Fogelsong; he had offered her a ride back to the courthouse, where she’d left her Explorer. Deputy Harrison was busy dealing with the drunk who’d befouled the lobby. Riley Jessup was long gone, safely packed up in his motor home with his daughter and his private security staff—all of them plenty glad, no doubt, to have Raythune County in their rearview mirror.

  The message was from Carla. It was so long that it had broken itself into two blocks of type that seemed to quiver with excitement:

  Hi Mom. Know u will understand. Going to London!!! Dad got me a summer internship there. Total surprise!!! Some other girl got sick or something. Anyway, hate to miss summer in WV and getting 2 know Aunt Shirley and hanging out w/u, but—London!! London! Can u believe it????? ☺ Will call soon. Luv u lots n lots

  Bell hadn’t said a word to Fogelsong. She didn’t want his sympathy right then. She’d been stunned and hurt—and pissed off, too. Not at Carla, but at her ex-husband. He’d done it again. Performed a dirty little trick, deftly and cleverly undermining the spirit of their shared custody arrangement.

  Could Bell insist that Carla spend the summer in Acker’s Gap as originally pla
nned? Yes, she could. She could do that. She could force her daughter to come to West Virginia and forgo London—thereby breaking Carla’s heart. Not to mention making herself a villain in her child’s eyes. A heartless, selfish, fun-spoiling bitch.

  That was why Sam had called her the day before. He knew what he’d done, but didn’t have the guts to tell her himself.

  So Sam had won. He always did.

  She had fired off a single-word text to her ex-husband:

  Bastard

  He didn’t need any context. He’d know what she was referring to.

  The sheriff had dropped her back at the courthouse and she retrieved her Explorer. All that was left to her now, her only recourse, was to drive. Drive fast. Drive hard. Drive long. Drive with all four windows rolled down. Drive—and try not to think about the rest of the summer and how much she would miss Carla.

  She drove across a road that curled tightly around the mountain the way a cracked whip wraps around a fence post. Down an ancient lane pinched to a treacherous narrowness by high trees and massive rocks frowning over it. Past dusty mountain towns that closed up early, the junk-ringed houses now just gray humps lining the road, not a flicker of light in a front window or a shed.

  And as she drove, she cried—not a lot, not for long, but enough. Enough to know she didn’t want anyone to see her like this, weak and distraught and disheveled. She’d actually been glad when she remembered that Shirley wasn’t home; she’d called there earlier, and nobody picked up the phone. Fine. Fine. Hell with her.

  Hell with everybody.

  She transferred the can to her left hand, using her right to maneuver the Explorer up the wicked incline of Fiddlers Run Road. She was on her way home. It wouldn’t be long. She rolled the can against her cheek, again relishing its cool wet sides. She still didn’t open it. Had no intention of opening it. Truth was, she hated Dr Pepper, diet or otherwise. Thought it tasted like cough syrup laced with shoe polish and served up in a rusty ladle. But it was Carla’s favorite. And Bell desperately wanted to feel close to her daughter right now, even in small, silly, pointless ways.

  That’s why she had stopped at the Lester station. When she opened the cooler door and felt the sweet rush of the refrigerated air, she saw the cans—red cans, white cans, black cans, blue cans, yellow and green cans—lying on their sides, gleaming smartly in their designated rows. She reached for the Diet Dr Pepper. First thing when she arrived home, Bell planned to sink down in her favorite chair and silently toast her daughter’s trip. Have fun, sweetheart, and don’t worry about me or Shirley or anybody else, just take care of yourself. She would do it with a beverage that reminded her of Carla.

  And she would do it the same way she seemed to do everything these days: alone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Lordy, look at that,” Rhonda said. She tilted her head and squinted out the car window, the better to take the measure of the luscious blue sky that started at the top of the mountain. “Always looks bluer this time of year.”

  “No,” Bell said.

  “You don’t think it looks bluer this time of year?”

  “No, I mean I can’t look.” Bell tapped the steering wheel. “Better keep my eyes on the road.”

  “Oh.” Rhonda emitted an embarrassed blurt of a giggle that could have doubled as a hiccup. “Yep. Good point.” She settled back in the passenger seat of the Explorer, folding her hands on the roomy lap of her peach-colored skirt. “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it, then.”

  It was Saturday morning, one day after the dedication ceremony at the hospital. Just after nine, Bell had picked up Rhonda at the courthouse in her Explorer. Twenty-five minutes later, they crossed the Raythune county line, and fifteen minutes after that, reached the trailer park listed in court records as the home address of Jed and Tiffany Stark and their daughter, Guinivere.

  Bell would have preferred to work on the Arnett and Frank cases. Leads, though, were frustratingly few, and were being pursued by others. Deputy Harrison was reinterviewing one of the hitchhikers, who had called the sheriff’s office to say that maybe he recalled something, after all, and that maybe he’d seen a man in the woods that night, wearing a long coat, close to the spot along Godown Road where Charlie Frank died of his wounds. He couldn’t be sure—but maybe. Maybe he’d seen that. And Sheriff Fogelsong was meeting with a specialist from the state crime lab; he wanted help in consulting more extensive databases, checking for crimes with similar weapons and methodologies in surrounding counties. Digging deeper.

  When Rhonda had proposed a trip to the Stark trailer, Bell was silently grateful. She wanted to be in motion today, just as she’d wanted to be in motion last night. She needed to keep one step ahead of her grief over Carla’s absence. And if she and Rhonda weren’t working on the homicides in their own jurisdiction, then they might as well be exploring the question that now needled Rhonda almost as much as it did Bell: Why would a man like Jed Stark be doing business with a New York lawyer?

  Their conversation as they drove that morning had been mostly superficial, and mostly it emanated from Rhonda: The sky. The heat. The new youth minister at Rhonda’s church. The goatee that Deputy Mathers was trying to grow, the one that made him look like he’d been two-fisting Oreos and ought to bother wiping his face every once in a while. The hip replacement surgery that Rhonda’s mother would undergo next month.

  Bell pulled into an unmarked lane. The Explorer bounced like a pogo stick across the pothole-pocked road until they reached a dead end. Clustered around the dirt-packed circle, radiating out from it like the spokes of a prone wheel, were some twenty house trailers. Each trailer had a rickety lawn chair on its stoop, a chair that took up most of the space; next to the chair on many of the stoops was an old metal coffee can, overflowing with cigarette butts. Sunlight glinted off the flimsy-looking trailer frames. Only a few had cars parked alongside them. Bell read the bumper stickers: KEEP HONKING. I’M RELOADING was one. PROUD WIFE OF A COAL MINER, another.

  There had been no sign along the road to designate the trailer park. Bell’s ability to locate it quickly and efficiently came from Rhonda’s preliminary work. The assistant prosecutor had called her uncle Cam in Steppe County, told him the address, and gleaned the particulars: Dirt road, just after the turnoff for Muddy Hollow. If you get to the intersection that hooks up with Route 147, you’ve gone too far.

  Rhonda shifted in her seat, peering around. “Kinda odd that there’s nobody outside. Nice morning like this.” She thought about it. “Well—maybe not. This’s not the kind of place that welcomes strangers, I guess. ’Specially not now.”

  The Explorer had surely been spotted before they even made the turn off the main road, and the warning had spread via an informal network that couldn’t be pinned down to a conduit as specific as a phone call or a text or even a yell, a network that moved as mysteriously as the wind. Unexpected visitors generally meant trouble. Might be somebody from the propane company, waving an unpaid bill. Or the bank or the sheriff’s office. Could be a disgruntled ex-husband or a spurned girlfriend or a cousin who’d lent money against his better judgment and now wanted it back. Plus interest.

  These days, it could be somebody with a sledgehammer or a knife.

  After a single glimpse of Bell’s vehicle from a side window, doubtless the word had gone up and down this dirt road, flicking into each trailer like a snake’s tongue: Keep quiet. Stay low.

  “Over there,” Bell said.

  The third trailer on the left-hand side was the one they were looking for. It was turd-shaped and dilapidated, brown with silver trim. Somebody had tried to make it look a little better by planting annuals in a half-moon track around the stoop. The heat had turned the tiny blooms into a damp wilted mess.

  While Rhonda waited a few feet away, Bell went to the door. There wasn’t room on the stoop for both of them. She knocked. Fatigue made her arm feel unusually heavy, as if she were moving in slow motion, fighting invisible pressure. She’d had, by her most op
timistic estimate, about two hours of sleep between the moment she arrived home from her driving marathon to her departure for the courthouse. Shirley had stayed away all night; there was no word from her, either.

  The door opened. A young woman peeked out. Dirty blond hair was teased up into a fragile swirl that topped her narrow face like cotton candy on a stick. Mid- to late twenties, Bell estimated.

  “Yeah?”

  “Morning.” Bell had her ID ready and held it up. “I’m Belfa Elkins, prosecuting attorney of Raythune County. I’d like to talk to you for a moment or so about Jed. You’re Tiffany, right?”

  The woman blinked. “Yeah. Okay.” She seemed hungry for company, a hunger that superseded any suspicions or hesitations. Opening the door wider, she spotted Rhonda in the yard. “You can come on in, too, hon.”

  The interior of the trailer smelled like cigarettes and soon-to-be-sour milk and socks that had gone too long without a washing, and, as a top note, a cheap air freshener, the plastic cone-shaped kind that you activated by sliding up the cover, a little at a time. Ocean Breeze—that was the name of the scent. Bell recognized it. It was a smell from her childhood. And the name was a joke, given the smells it was trying to cover. Impossible fight on its hands.

  Ocean Breeze, my ass, she thought.

  Bell and Rhonda had to move aside an impressive pile of toys to make room to sit on the red-plaid corduroy couch. The living room was small, so constricted that Bell felt slightly short of breath. The heat didn’t help. There was no AC. No fan. Throw in the cloying fake-sweetness of Ocean Breeze, and Bell wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to last in here.