by Julia Keller
And if he had, he would’ve shot the boy himself.
She was ready.
The knob turned.
The door swung open.
“Ellie? Honey? You up here?”
Her husband’s big body filled the doorway, like something jammed in a box too small for it.
Brett Topping’s eyes instantly went to the gun. He flinched, shocked by what he saw.
“Ellie—for God’s sake—what in the name of…”
She let her wrists drop. The muzzle now pointed at the floor. She was breathing so hard and so fast that her shoulders juddered up and down. Her breath kept catching in her throat. She was crying now. Silently, but passionately. They were tears of relief, of course, tears of desperate gratitude that she had not mistakenly shot her husband, the love of her life—but she was feeling another kind of relief, too.
A secret one.
Relief that the necessary thing—killing her own son—had been postponed for just a little while longer.
“I—I was scared,” she said, her voice hoarse and shaky, barely audible. She couldn’t look at him and keep up the lie, so she looked away. “I heard a noise—I thought—it’s just that—you’re never home anymore. At night—at night I get so scared. I didn’t know—I was afraid—I—”
While she was babbling he crossed the short space. He took the gun from her hands—gently, gently—and he set it on the small table by her chair. Now he held her, letting her weep into his chest.
She couldn’t tell him about her plan. There was no reason to involve him. None.
“Sweetheart,” he murmured, “I’m here, okay? It’s all right. You’re safe. You’re safe now. I’m here.” He stroked her hair. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I had a meeting at the bank. Another one. It ran long. Like the others.” He was breathing through his nose, a slow, deliberate kind of breathing, filled with solemn regret. “I wish I’d known how frightened you were.”
“I don’t like to bother you. It’s just that with Tyler living here again—I mean, I haven’t seen him since last night, but there’s always the chance that—I keep thinking that somebody might come after—I mean, the people he hangs around these days, they’re not—”
“I know, I know.” He stroked and he stroked. He made a sound in his throat, an mmmmm sound that he intended, Ellie knew, to be soothing. “So he hasn’t come home.”
“No.”
“Well, he’s got some cash.” Brett’s voice was bitter, knowing. “Which means he won’t be back for a while. That’s for damned sure.” A thought occurred to him. “Do you think we ought to call his probation officer? Tell him what happened?”
“We’re supposed to.”
“I know. But will it do any good? It never does. Nothing does. Nothing.” Another deep breath. “Dammit. Look what he’s done to you. Made you so scared that you had to bring a gun up here to defend yourself and—oh, God, Ellie. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about my meetings and I’m sorry about—everything. I’m so sorry.”
Standing there in the doll room, her eyes drawn to a pale shaft of moonlight on the wooden floor, encircled by her husband’s strong arms and by his words, Ellie had a sudden epiphany.
It should have occurred to her before. But there were too many other things on her mind.
She didn’t say anything out loud. But she was sure of it:
Brett wasn’t telling her the truth.
She didn’t know where he’d been tonight—but it wasn’t the bank. And the other nights?
No. Not the bank. And there weren’t any board meetings, either.
She’d been so focused on Tyler that she had ignored the glaring, unassailable, too-obvious truth: Brett was lying. He’d been lying to her for weeks. Ever since he’d started staying out so late, not returning home until midnight or long after.
This was yet another way Tyler was ruining their lives. He’d turned his father into a liar.
And his mother into a killer.
She trembled. Brett kissed the top of her head.
He thinks I’m still upset over the close call with the gun. He thinks I’m still frightened. He doesn’t know what I’m really thinking. He doesn’t know I’m going to kill our son.
Just as her husband had no idea what was going on in her mind—she didn’t know what was going on in his, either.
She had never felt lonelier.
Chapter Seven
There it was.
The Raythune County Public Library was just as Bell remembered it. The old bricks were still painted malarial yellow, and the paint was still peeling, still flaking, in all the same places.
Well, maybe a few more places, too. She could see that now, courtesy of the morning sunlight.
The green metal box on the sidewalk out front, with BOOK RETURN stenciled on the side in look-at-me white lettering, still had the same dents and gouges in all the same spots.
Everything was the same.
Everything was completely different.
This wasn’t the first time Bell had walked through the heart of downtown Acker’s Gap since her release. But it was the first time she’d been here so early in the day, with no one else around. Usually she went right home when her shift at the clinic ended, avoiding these streets and their closely packed cargo of reminiscences.
Morning, she realized, changed the place. It was as if the memories coiled deep inside each object—parking meter, streetlight, mailbox—moved closer to the surface for just a few minutes, knowing she was the sole witness.
She read the sign on the door: Yes, the library still opened at nine. She’d be back after she got some breakfast.
It was very cold this morning. Surprisingly cold, given the fact that it was only October. The young sunrise had yet to dent the intense chill. The surrounding ring of mountains looked as stern and black as a barrel stave.
A blast of wind flung a red plastic cup end over end along the brick street. The clatter made her turn and look. Bell zipped up her jacket, hunching her shoulders. Her hands found their way deeper into her pockets.
She kept walking.
She passed an empty storefront. This had been Waltrip’s Furniture. Jesse Waltrip had finally given up a few years ago, after a good half-century in business. A sheet of plywood covered the space that once had been a broad picture window, behind which the beautiful accouterments of a perfect living room—couch, coffee table, end tables, wing chairs, fireplace—offered up a cozy little fiction.
As a girl, Bell remembered, she used to stand in front of this window and dream. She had known perfectly well that the fireplace was fake, but warmed herself by the happiness it promised.
She came to another empty storefront. This one still had glass in the window but that glass was filthy, smeared with dried mud and gray scabs of bird shit. The hand-painted sign on the crumbling door had faded almost to invisibility, yet if you looked close, you could barely make out the once-peppy lettering: CAPPY’S SHOE REPAIR AND CUSTOM-FIT ORTHODICS. Cappy—Billy Capperton—used to own the place.
He’d died a good ten years ago. Or was it fifteen?
Now she was coming up to JPs, the diner where she’d had so many conferences with Nick Fogelsong, late at night or early in the morning, for so many years. He used to be the sheriff.
And I used to be the prosecutor.
Bell shook her head. She had a bad case of the used-to-bes. There was no cure—at least none she’d ever heard of, other than just putting up with the sadness, the melancholy, caused by wandering through a dense thicket of her yesterdays.
This town was where she’d grown up. Yes, she’d gone away to college, then law school. She’d lived in the D.C. area for a while after that.
Then, in a move that surprised herself as much as it did everyone else, she had returned.
Newly divorced, with her sixteen-year-old daughter in tow, she had come back. She’d had a vague, poetic notion about rescuing Acker’s Gap. Ripping it free from the fist of darkness that seemed to hold the town in its smothering
grip. Drugs, alcohol, poverty, crime, despair: The roll call of afflictions was dreary. And endless.
Had she been she naïve? Of course, Bell thought. And idealistic and probably arrogant, too. So sue me.
Her first act had been to run for prosecutor. Nick Fogelsong’s favorite joke still rang in her head: And the bad news is—you won. But they’d made a great team, she and Nick. For years. Sheriff and prosecutor. Colleagues. Good friends. Fighting the good fight—at least until Nick resigned five years ago and took a job in private security. A year ago he and his wife, Mary Sue, retired to Florida.
Christmas cards, emails: not the same. Not the same at all.
He’d visited her often at Alderson. The visits were always awkward. He didn’t agree with what she’d done—her guilty plea, her demand for prison time—and his disappointment, while wordless, still dominated their time together. He was her oldest, dearest friend, and she didn’t really know him anymore.
He’d said the same thing about her, back when she first told him her intentions: I don’t know who you are, Belfa, when you talk this way. For God’s sake, don’t do it.
She was still bitter about his defection. Instead of supporting her decision to request prison time, he had lectured her. Lectured her. She was throwing away her life, he said. She was making a meaningless sacrifice. Playing the martyr card.
On and on.
I’ll never forgive him, she thought. To hell with him, anyway.
She had reached JPs. God, the memories! How many times had she and Nick sat across from each other in one of the high-backed, dusky-red Naugahyde booths, drinking coffee by the gallon, arguing by the hour, laughing, kidding each other, talking over cases?
Hundreds. At a bare minimum.
She tried to push open the door.
It wouldn’t budge.
“Check the sign,” said the woman who’d just come up behind her. “Doesn’t open ’til eight.”
Bell turned around. “As of when?” She’d seen the woman’s reflection in the glass window, which is why she didn’t jump from the shock.
“As of—well, I don’t rightly remember, but recently,” Rhonda Lovejoy said. “How are you, Bell?”
“I’d be better with a cup of coffee and one of Jackie’s cinnamon rolls—but I guess it can’t be helped.” Jackie LeFevre owned and operated JPs. “Anyway, it’s good to see you, Rhonda.”
A brief hug ensued. It was awkward for both of them. But it also was the thing to do, and so they did it. And then they broke apart.
Rhonda Lovejoy was a broad-faced, big-shouldered woman with a curly luxuriance of orange-blond hair that was, right now, mostly tucked beneath a black beret. She wore a belted beige trench coat over what Bell could see was a navy pants suit. Black heels. Businesswoman’s attire.
And why not? Bell told herself. This was a workday. For everyone.
Almost everyone.
“What brings you downtown so early?” Rhonda said.
“Finished my shift at Evening Street. Realized I wasn’t the least bit tired. So I thought I’d have breakfast at JPs and then do some work at the library.” Bell crossed her arms and shivered. “Damn this cold.” She tilted her head. “How about you? Pretty early to be heading to the courthouse.”
Rhonda smiled. “Not really. Compared to the hours you used to keep—I’m already late.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Or maybe it was the right thing. Who knew?
In any case, Rhonda had gotten it out of the way before it had a chance to become a burden, the Great Unsaid Truth that would brood over their conversation like a patient, I’ve-got-all-day vulture:
She was the prosecutor now. Bell’s job.
Rhonda had kept in touch with her over the past three years, first driving over to Greenbrier County to the prison as often as Bell would allow it, and later stopping by Evening Street Clinic. The visits were brief—they had to be, because Bell’s time was strictly supervised—but they were regular.
And so this wasn’t the first time they’d seen each other since the momentous change in Bell’s life.
But it was the first time that such an encounter had occurred in the shadow of the Raythune County Courthouse—the granddaddy, Bell realized, of the used-to-bes.
That courthouse stood in all of its foursquare, limestone glory on the very next corner, an ancient, gray symbol of enforced rectitude. In a heavy fog, it might be mistaken for a whaling ship, its tarnished gold dome poking up through the murk like a crow’s nest. The wide lawn rose at a slow incline to meet a sweeping expanse of steps. The steps led to a massive double door flanked by four white pillars, two on either side. Such a massive, ornate structure seemed wildly out of place in a downtown so humbled and shrunken, so scraped raw and pounded down by decades of adversity and lack.
But out of place or not, Bell still loved every inch of it. She’d been immensely proud of what she and Nick had done at the courthouse—the cases they had solved, the lives they had saved, the children and elderly people they had rescued. And the justice they had tried, in their own imperfect but steady and determined way, to serve.
And now she was exiled from it. Forever. She’d never work there again.
“You look great, Rhonda,” Bell said hurriedly. She needed to get her mind back to the here and now.
“Got a big trial starting today. Aggravated assault.” Rhonda lifted her right foot, frowning as she turned the uncomfortable-looking heel this way and that. “It’s Judge Tompkins. You know how it goes. If you show up in his courtroom and you’re not dressed fit to kill and cripple, he’ll tell the bailiff to throw you out—if you’re female, that is.”
Bell nodded. Certain courtrooms were the last bastions of misogyny; judges were the absolute rulers of their domains. Yes, you could complain—but God help you when you made your next motion before that judge. You’d be cut off so fast and so completely that your sentence would need a tourniquet to keep it from bleeding out.
“Oh, yeah,” Bell said. “I remember.”
“So I guess I’d better go,” Rhonda said, after another brief but awkward stretch of silence. “Lots of prep work to do.”
A pickup truck rattled by, shedding sparks from a dangling muffler that bumped along the bricks. The driver honked; Rhonda waved.
“Sure,” Bell said. “I understand.” Once, she’d been the one who had to cut short the conversations; she’d been the one with the impossible schedule and the ludicrously overstuffed to-do list.
“We’re having that dinner we talked about, right?” Rhonda said. “Soon as you’re settled and all. We can catch up then.” A grin. “I’ve got some news.”
“Really. Do I get a hint?”
“Nope. I want your curiosity honed to a fine edge. I want you to be jumping out of your skin until I spill the beans.” Rhonda’s grin got bigger.
And then it disappeared altogether, as if she only allowed herself a few seconds of levity in any given morning. It was clear that Rhonda had something else she needed to say, something serious, something somber.
The words came out in a ragged rush.
“Truth is, Bell, things’re bad. Really bad. As bad as they’ve ever been. I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but the overdose deaths are still piling up. The drug gangs are worse than ever. Bolder. More vicious. Even kids from good families—kids who’ve had every advantage, every break in the damned world—they’re getting involved, too. Starting early. Pills, then heroin. Fentanyl. It breaks your heart. You know?”
Before Bell could reply, Rhonda said, “Of course you know. You saw it, too. We saw it together. No stopping it. Not then, not now.” She looked down at the sidewalk, and then back up again, meeting Bell’s eyes.
This isn’t the Rhonda I knew, Bell thought. Sunny, fun-loving, optimistic Rhonda—where had she gone? The job’s gotten to her.
How could it not?
“Let me tell you about a crazy dream I had,” Rhonda said. Her voice had shifted again. It was softer now, less agitated, even thoug
h her words were still grim. “More like a nightmare, really. Sometimes—right before I fall asleep—I see us heading for some final crisis. Some kind of Appalachian apocalypse. Where the whole damned place just … explodes. It all goes up in a big old ball of smoke and flame and it’s all wiped out—and then we have to start over.” A bemused half-smile. “Well, not ‘we’—I guess we’d be dead. But somebody. Somebody starts over. From scratch. And this time around, nobody invents any drugs.” She touched Bell’s arm. “Gotta go.”
“I know.”
But it was a bad note to end on. Bell could sense Rhonda’s hesitation to leave, with the terrible vision hanging in the air.
“The good news is,” Rhonda said, “Jackie’s been able to keep JPs open. Hell of a struggle, tell you that. Things’ve been real slow.”
“Is that why she changed the hours?”
Rhonda nodded. “Wasn’t getting the early morning business off the interstate anymore. All those truckers, the ones who didn’t mind a little detour to get a plate of eggs over easy with hash browns and rye toast? They started minding, I guess.” She shrugged. “Jackie’s hanging on, but barely.”
Like all of us, Bell thought.
As soon as Rhonda had gone she peered in through the big picture window, cupping her hands across her forehead to create a makeshift visor. Even without the lights on she could still make out the booths with their bench seats and battered wooden tables, slotted against the walls. Tables and chairs in the middle of the room. Cash register and coffee urn on a shelf at the side. Across the back was a long bar. Four leather-topped bar stools in front of it.
Carla, she remembered, used to love perching on a bar stool and twirling and twirling. She’d laugh and—
Stop it, Bell scolded herself. Enough with the used-to-bes.
She dropped her arms and turned. She rammed her hands in her pockets. The cold was cutting through the fabric of her jacket, as if it wasn’t even there.
She’d drive up to the interstate, find a place to get a cup of coffee, and then come back when the library opened. She had work to do.
She wasn’t a prosecutor anymore. Law enforcement was out of the picture for her now. That much was true.
