by Julia Keller
Not tonight. Tonight, Tyler was on his own.
“Get up—or else,” Brett said.
Tyler’s response was a cross between a mumbled FugYou and a wheezy moan.
In a move that came so quick it thoroughly surprised Ellie—she didn’t know that her husband could summon such strength and speed—Brett jerked the chair out from under him. Tyler tumbled onto the floor, yelping like a kicked puppy.
“Dammit, Dad, what the hell are you—”
“I told you to get up.” An iciness in Brett’s voice now.
A few minutes ago, as his friend was getting ready to leave, Brett had introduced Ellie to Pete Pauley out on the driveway. “Pete lives over in Swanville,” Brett said. “Runs a carpet place. Sales and installation.” The way Brett said that—sales and installation, as if he were reading it on a business card—tipped her off that Pete Pauley was probably a bank customer. Pauley had likely come in one day to go over the terms of his business loan and started chatting with Brett Topping, one of the VPs, and before long, they realized what they shared: both of them had a kid in rehab. Again. Because nobody went just once. Both of their families had been eaten alive by drugs. And both of them were ready to fight back. They weren’t willing to cede the region to the dealers, to just hand over everything precious to them.
And then Pete Pauley had walked down the driveway and gotten back into his car, as if his visit had been an ordinary one, as if he hadn’t raced over here late at night to serve as backup in a standoff with a drug dealer.
The world, Ellie reflected, was only barely recognizable to her anymore.
When she and Brett had walked from the garage into the kitchen, Brett headed straight for Tyler. A few seconds later, Tyler was sprawled on the floor.
“Whaddaya want?” their son muttered in a whiny, slurred, poor-me voice. He tried to stand but couldn’t manage. So he flopped right back down on his butt again.
“Your buddy came by,” Brett said. “Deke Foley.”
The name seemed to hit Tyler like a slap. He flinched, his head snapping back so that he could look up at his father.
“How do you know Deke?”
“I know a lot of things.”
Tyler shook his head, trying to clear it. He blinked and he coughed, and then he looked up at Ellie, who stood several feet away from Brett.
“Mom?” Tyler said plaintively. “Help me up, okay?” He stuck out his arm. There was a hint of impatience in the way he waved the hand at the end of that arm. Of course she was going to help him up. She was his mom. Mothers did that. She’d always helped before, right? No matter what he’d done? She always capitulated. Always crumbled. She couldn’t resist. Couldn’t stop herself.
Every instinct in Ellie’s body told her to reach down and take Tyler’s hand and help him up.
But, no. Not this time. She would back up her husband.
“Your father’s talking to you,” she said. “You’d better listen.”
Tyler dropped his arm. Whatever. He shifted his eyes back to Brett. “So how do you know Deke?”
“I’ve been following you. Keeping a record. I’ve seen you meeting with him. You and other people, too. Plenty of times. Got an ID from his plate number.”
Now Tyler was focused. “You what?”
“Surveillance. For months now,” Brett declared. Ellie heard the note of pride in her husband’s voice. “That’s where I was tonight. I saw you making your rounds, trying to sell that shit. I’ve been watching you. Saw you at the high school. I know what you do. I know where you pick it up. I know how Deke Foley runs things.”
“You didn’t tell him that.” Tyler made it a statement, not a question.
“Yeah. I did. That’s why he hightailed it out of here.”
Tyler stood up on his own. He fought against his wobbliness, grabbing the table edge. Ellie saw fear in her son’s eyes. Fear and panic.
“Dad—listen, okay? Deke Foley’s a really bad guy. I mean it. He’s dangerous. You shouldn’t have told him—”
“Don’t worry. The file’s in a safe place. If Foley shows up here again, those notes go straight to the sheriff. It’s what we call leverage, son.”
“You don’t understand,” Tyler said. He swayed toward his father, clawing at his arm. Ellie realized that Tyler was crying. Crying! “Dad,” he said, “please, please listen to me. You can’t threaten Deke Foley. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Sure it does.” Now Brett, too, noticed Tyler’s tears. Ellie could feel her husband’s surprise. Maybe he’d forgotten that drugs could do that: make somebody emotional. Strip off the top layer of a person’s self-control.
“Good Lord, Tyler,” Brett said. Brisk, businesslike. There’d been a problem to be solved—and he had solved it. Executive-style. “Get hold of yourself. I just told you—Foley can’t do a thing to us now. We’ve got him. He’ll stay away. He knows my file could shut him down. So this is your chance, okay? You’ve got to straighten up. Quit working for him. Get clean. We’re talking last chances here, son. I mean it. No more empty promises. No more excuses. You stop now. Tonight. And your mother’s backing me up on this. We’re in this together.” He turned to Ellie. “Right, sweetie?”
“Yes,” she said.
Tyler stared at the floor, shaking his head, breathing hard, using upward strokes of his palm to wipe at the ropy dazzle of snot on the bottom half of his face. Then he staggered toward the back door, churning his arms as if the air itself was putting up a fight, as if it was too thick with doom to let him slide through with no resistance.
“You don’t know what you’ve done, Dad,” Tyler muttered as he lurched forward. There was a darkness in his voice that startled Ellie, a quality of frank foreboding that chilled her right down to the bone. “You don’t know. You don’t friggin’ know. They’re gonna kill me. They’re gonna kill all of us.” He blundered out the door.
Chapter Twelve
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
Startled, a little confused, and definitely unsettled, Bell flinched and shuddered. Her head jerked up as she searched for the source of the sound. A stranger—harmless-looking, but you never knew—stood on other side of the broad table, regarding her with curiosity.
Okay, Bell thought. Okay. Right.
She took a quick second to ground herself. It was all coming back: You’re in the public library. You’re sitting at a table in the reference section. You’re fine. Absolutely fine.
Nothing like a couple of years in a state-run facility to put you on edge. Permanently.
“Yes?” Bell said.
“It’s getting late.”
“What?”
Bell looked around. The rest of the room was deserted. The tall windows were black. The green carpet bore the marks of a vacuum cleaner’s evenly plowed rows.
You mean somebody vacuumed in here and I didn’t even notice it?
Her gaze swung back to the ragged stack of documents on the table in front of her: printouts, file folders, newspapers, magazines, books folded open to pages marked with fluttery yellow tassels of Post-it Notes. There was a pencil in her hand, an open notebook at her elbow, and a chunk of numbered bullet points on the page in handwriting she recognized as her own.
“What time is it?” Bell asked.
“Almost ten.”
“Almost ten?” Bell was incredulous. Also slightly panicked. Her shift at Evening Street started at 11 P.M.
She looked sheepishly at the woman. She was young—no more than twenty-five, Bell surmised—with a sturdy square body, soft brown eyes and a thick rope of chestnut-colored hair draped across her left shoulder.
“I guess I was preoccupied,” Bell said. “Sorry. You’re probably getting ready to close.”
“Um—we actually closed a couple of hours ago. But you were so focused, I didn’t want to disturb you. It’s just that—well, I have to get home. I’ve got a dog, and she needs to—”
“Jesus. Of course. Sorry.” Bell stood up. She put a hand on her lower back. She’d been sitting way too
long.
She was annoyed with herself. How had she gotten so deeply preoccupied with her reading that the real world slipped away? She knew better. She couldn’t lose track like that. It had become a scary habit in Alderson. The danger didn’t come from the character of the facility itself—Alderson was more depressing than perilous, and the gravest threat came from too many empty hours and too much self-reflection, not from other inmates.
What worried her was the mental drift itself. The lack of self-control.
After which, all hell could break loose inside her.
“So the rest of the staff went home—and you stayed on my behalf?” Bell said. She’d grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair and was poking her fists through the arm holes.
“Um—there’s actually no ‘rest of the staff.’ I’m it.” The woman smiled.
Of course, Bell reminded herself. This is Acker’s Gap. Two librarians? An impossible luxury.
“Well, I really appreciate it. Let me help you put these things away. So you can get home to…?”
“Virginia Woof.” The woman spelled out the surname so that Bell would get the joke. “She’s a black Lab. And I was an English major.”
Bell smiled approvingly. “Home to Virginia Woof, then.” Bell had fostered a dog a few years ago, a wonderful shepherd-retriever mix named Goldie. Goldie’s sweet brown eyes swam up from the special place in Bell’s memories that she reserved for her. “And please pass along my apologies.”
The librarian touched the top of the stack. “If you’re coming back tomorrow, you can just leave these things here.”
“That would be great. I know you spent a lot of time digging up all this information for me. Are you sure it’s okay?”
“We don’t get a lot of patrons these days. Nobody’ll touch it.”
Bell nodded. She had recognized a kindred spirit in this young woman when she’d met her early that morning, shortly after Libby Royster had unlocked the rickety front door and flipped on the overhead lights, about a quarter of which didn’t work. Bell was right behind her.
She had outlined what she needed. Libby had nodded thoughtfully, a finger on her chin in what Bell assumed was a gesture taught in library school, and then snapped her fingers. “Coming right up,” she’d said.
That proved to be overly optimistic. The topic about which Bell had requested information—anything relating to a multinational company known as Utley Pharmaceuticals—produced a massive trove of material after even a cursory data search. “Give me a few hours,” Libby said, “and I’ll have even more.”
And so Bell had returned later that afternoon. She went directly to the square wooden table in the far corner. The butternut surface was broad and burnished, with occasional blotches marking the places where forbidden beverages had spilled, leaving indelible stains. In the center was an enormous pile of materials.
“I set a Google news alert for ‘Utley’ and ‘McMurdo’ and it went a little crazy about two P.M.,” Libby had explained. “A couple of congressmen announced a hearing for next month on opioids—yeah, I know, another hearing, same old same old—and the minute you hear opioids”—she made air quotes around the word—“Utley’s back in the news, big time.”
Bell had nodded. She’d picked up a printout of a Wall Street Journal article on the top of the heap. Skimmed the first few paragraphs.
“This one,” Bell said, “has all the usual comments from the CEO.” She found the sentence she was after. “Here you go. Right in the first paragraph. ‘We provide a valuable product to millions of people suffering from debilitating pain’ and ‘If our products are not used properly then we join with Congress in rising up to demand an accounting of’—blah, blah, blah. You get the gist.”
“Yeah.”
Bell already knew the players well. The name “McMurdo” was a reference to Roderick Utley McMurdo, CEO and chairman of the board, grandson of company founder Sebastian Utley.
She had moved eagerly through the top items on the stack. “You’ve really helped me a lot. You’ve found things in places I didn’t even know existed.”
“Well, good. Glad it helps.”
“By the way, my name is—”
“I know who you are.”
Bell had felt a quick spasm of disappointment. It figured: Her story was three years old, but gossip had a long shelf life. Scandal, an even longer one.
She had wanted to be just another patron. She had wanted to be somebody that nobody knew anything about—not a former prosecuting attorney who’d admitted to a long-ago murder. She could hear Carla’s voice: Then you ought to get out of Raythune County, Mom, just as quick as you can. And go as far away as you can. That’s the only way you’re ever going to outrun who you are. Who you were.
Libby had continued to talk. “I knew from the moment I saw you. I wasn’t living in Acker’s Gap when you were prosecutor, but I recognized you from your picture in the paper. I didn’t say anything because—well, I didn’t want to embarrass you. And when you told me what you were interested in—Utley Pharmaceuticals—it was perfect, because I have a good bit of interest in that company, too.”
“Really? Why?”
“You’re not the only one looking for answers to this epidemic. The law enforcement part—the dealers, the addicts—that’s one side of it. You and your colleagues fought that war for a lot of years. But that’s not the only battlefield. More and more, people are turning to another one.”
“The drug manufacturers.”
“Right.” Libby’s nod had been quick and resolute. “The illegal drug trade is bad—sure. Absolutely. But the appetite for pain pills in these parts wasn’t created by the dealers. It was created by Utley. And by the doctors who were more than willing to prescribe highly addictive pills—as long as it kept the assembly line moving along. The line of desperate people.”
“You sound like you know a lot about this.”
“More than I’d like to.”
“What do you mean?”
Libby had paused, but only briefly. “My maiden name was Washburn. Howie Washburn was my brother.”
She thinks I’ll know the name, Bell had thought. And she’s right. Because everyone knew the name. Howie Washburn, a nineteen-year-old deputy in the Collier County Sheriff’s Department, had been killed on the job five years ago. A car had passed his county-issued SUV on Highway 14 just after 2 A.M., traveling at a high rate of speed. Deputy Washburn flipped on his lights and siren and gave chase. The car pulled over. Washburn approached. The driver’s door popped open. In seconds the deputy was on the ground, drilled in the center of the forehead by a slug from the driver’s handgun.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. The reason everyone remembered it was because, when they pried open Deputy Washburn’s locker at the Collier County courthouse to clear out his belongings, his colleagues made a surprising discovery: a stash of Oxycontin massive enough to supply a dozen pharmacies for the better part of a year.
Deputy Washburn was dealing.
Because Deputy Washburn was using.
“I’m sorry,” Bell had said to Libby. Here was proof once more that the tentacles of the drug crisis spread out in every direction, metastasizing with ghastly speed. Bell had always understood that on an intellectual level.
But sometimes she could still be brought up short by the visceral feel of that pervasiveness, by the sense of its relentless reach into unexpected places—like, for instance, the life of an able and good-natured reference librarian in a small county library.
Nobody gets away clean, Bell had reminded herself. Nobody.
That afternoon, before Bell got down to work, Libby told her the rest of the story. “I knew he had a problem,” she’d said, speaking in the slightly trancelike way that Bell had heard in the voices of other people when they recounted this kind of narrative, as if it was some perverse fairy tale, heading toward the polar opposite of a happy ending.
“Started with a football injury. High school. Unbearable pain. Right knee.�
�� Libby reached down and tapped her own. “Hyperextended after a nasty tackle on a kickoff return. Doctor told him he’d fix him right up.” Her tone grew even darker. “And he did. Boy, did he ever.” She tucked in her lower lip. Shook her head. “Howie liked the way the pills made him feel. Simple as that. So he couldn’t stop. It got hold of him and—that was it. He hid it pretty well at first. I mean—he got hired as a deputy. Proudest day of his life. Mine, too. But after a while, I figured out what was really going on. So I did all kinds of research on addiction and treatment—what works, what doesn’t. I was sure I was going to save my brother. I just knew it. What I didn’t know”—she swallowed hard—“was that he’d already started dealing. His job helped him out. He was around dealers all the time. It was the only way he could pay for what he needed. By the time he died, he’d moved on to heroin. He had to. It was cheaper than the pills.” The pain in her voice was hard for Bell to hear. “Heroin. My brother snorting heroin. Impossible. But—no, not impossible.”
“You’ve read a lot of this material, too, haven’t you?” Bell had inclined her head to indicate the stack of printouts.
“Yeah.”
“So you know the numbers. Four out of five heroin users started out taking prescription pain pills.”
“And Utley made forty billion dollars last year,” Libby declared. “Billion. They like to say they didn’t understand how addictive their pills are. And once they knew, they started warning physicians. But you know what? I think they did know. They knew—but they didn’t care. They were making too much money.” Her voice shook slightly with a livid anger she was trying hard to suppress.
“You may be right. Hard to prove, though.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” Libby had asked eagerly. “Getting enough information so you can go after them?”
“No. Nothing so grand as all that. I’m not a prosecutor anymore. I’m not even a practicing lawyer.”
“Well, somebody better do something.” Libby’s face had changed. It was hard now, and pinched. The soft lines seemed to tighten up. The anger was winning out. “Those bastards. Those bastards. They’ve got to pay for what they did—what they do—to Howie and a lot of other people like him. Decent people. Honest people. People who get hurt and go to the doctor in good faith and do what they’re told to do and who never dream—not in a million years—that they’ll ever end up—”
