Bone on Bone:

by Julia Keller

“Yeah? Well, here’s the thing, Sawyer,” Rhonda said. She was annoyed by the surly sarcasm in the deputy’s tone. “Your opinion—it doesn’t count.”

  Simmons wasn’t backing down. “What does count, then?”

  “Only one thing.” Rhonda stood up. “The facts. And we don’t have them yet. So let’s go.”

  * * *

  Maybe this was going to be an easy one.

  Maybe Deke Foley had killed Brett Topping. Just like it seemed.

  Rhonda felt a surge of relief. Her first big case—and it was going to be a snap. Easy-peasy. Foley’s conviction would put a major drug dealer out of circulation, too.

  Could she be that lucky?

  Well, why not?

  She had dismissed the others ten minutes ago. Perversely, the office felt much smaller now than it had when it was filled with people. Not larger, like you’d expect. Almost as if the room automatically adapted to whatever its current circumstance happened to be. Stretched or shrank as needs required. Shape-shifted to accommodate an ever-changing reality.

  Or maybe she was just so tired that she was hallucinating.

  Rhonda sat behind her desk, her hands on the arms of her chair, thinking. She wore black slacks ribbed with dog hair—Rhonda had three dogs, all rescues and all excessive shedders—and a white sweater with an unraveling sleeve and scuffed brown loafers. She usually dressed up for the office but not when she had to fumble frantically around her bedroom after a call at 1 A.M.

  By this point she had turned off the overhead light and switched on the desk lamp, preferring its soft, creamy, horizontal light to the fusillade of fluorescence from above. Her eyes itched and her head felt as if it were stuffed with foam peanuts.

  Price of the job, as Bell Elkins would say.

  Sunrise was less than an hour away, and so going home was beside the point. Not that Rhonda had been tempted to. If she had felt such a temptation, it would have vanished just seconds after she asked herself The Question—the one that seemed to hover at her elbow every minute of every day in this office:

  What would Bell do?

  And one thing she knew for sure: Bell would not have gone home. She’d be sitting here just as Rhonda was, creating a to-do list on her legal pad.

  During her first week on the job three years ago, Rhonda had contemplated a shortcut. She’d considered asking her Aunt Millie to make her a needlepoint with the message:

  WWBD?

  But she didn’t. She needed to handle the job her own way, on her own terms—which was, Rhonda knew, exactly what Bell would have advised. So perversely, the answer to What Would Bell Do? was:

  Bell Would Do Whatever She Wanted to Do, and Would Advise You to Do the Same.

  Or: BWDWSWTDAWAYTDTS.

  Which might, Rhonda realized, be a little too much for a needlepoint, even for Aunt Millie.

  She knew what she had to do. She needed to create a timeline for Brett Topping’s final hours; compile a list of Deke Foley’s known associates; procure warrants to search his home and his car; confirm Ellie Topping’s alibi; get Tyler Topping transferred to the Raythune County Jail so they could find out what he knew about Deke Foley; follow up with Sheriff Harrison for a list of what had been taken from the Topping home.

  And in a few minutes, she needed to head to the Raythune County Medical Center to interview Ellie Topping.

  But before she did any of that, Rhonda had another crucial task that she was most definitely not looking forward to.

  She had to call Mack and give him the bad news. She knew him well enough by now to know that he’d prefer to get the news right away, even if it meant waking him up.

  They’d have to postpone the wedding—which, on the scale of human tragedies, was not even in the same universe of pain and anguish as that suffered by someone whose loved one had been brutally murdered.

  But it was still damned irritating.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bell still wondered how news spread so fast in a small town. When she was prosecutor, she’d look on with amazement as people who never watched TV or listened to the radio, never read a newspaper, didn’t have a telephone—neither landline nor cell—and who barely left the La-Z-Boy in their own living room for anything except bathroom breaks always seemed to know, instantly and accurately, the minute particulars of any given crime anywhere in Raythune County, seconds after said crime was perpetrated.

  She’d once theorized to Nick Fogelsong that there must be a secret sound emitted at the moment of a homicide or an armed robbery or a drug deal, a sound that, like a dog whistle, could only be heard by certain ears—in this case, the ears of lifelong residents. Or maybe it was a mysterious change in the air pressure that only registered on particular kinds of skin.

  Could be, he’d replied, sipping his coffee and giving her a pitying look over the rim, as if she’d lost her mind. Sure, Bell. We’ll go with that.

  But it was true. And she’d just seen it in action, yet again.

  When she arrived home this morning to the big stone house on Shelton Avenue, after her final night of work at Evening Street Clinic, Bell looked across the street. She waved at her neighbor, Sally Ann Turner, who’d just come out on her porch.

  Frost glittered on the driveways and sidewalk. The mountains in the near distance wore a dusting of snow on their spiky shoulders. This was Bell’s favorite time of day, when the sun had just begun to tip over the tops of those mountains. After this moment, everything would go downhill.

  Her shift had been busy. She was tired. And she had a lot to do today, including the nap that she was already anticipating with great relish. Carla was coming over for dinner tonight, Saturday being her daughter’s only full day off from her job in Charleston. There was a house to clean, food to shop for.

  Still, Bell knew that a conversation with a neighbor was a nonnegotiable in Acker’s Gap. It was an absolute requirement. Unless you wanted to be slapped with the nickname “Boo Radley,” superficial sociability was a must.

  “Sally Ann,” Bell called out. “Good morning.”

  “Hey, Bell.” Sally Ann was a tall, skinny, woman with yellowish-white hair that she wore in a long rope down her back. She was in her late eighties but was still spry and nimble, with a spine as straight as the handle of the broom with which she was vigorously sweeping her front steps. She’d buried three husbands and, as the neighborhood well knew from the strange cars that often left Sally Ann’s driveway at the comparatively late hour of 9 P.M., was working assiduously on acquiring a fourth.

  “Cold out here,” Bell said. She waved, indicating the fact that Sally Ann was in shirtsleeves, corduroy skirt, and sneakers. No coat. No hat.

  “My people always run hot,” Sally Ann answered. “Feels good to me. Hey—how you doing?”

  That would serve as Sally Ann’s sole reference to the fact that Bell had now fulfilled the terms of her obligation to the state of West Virginia’s Department of Corrections. Other neighbors, Bell knew, would follow suit. They might gossip about her behind her back—okay, so she knew for certain that they did gossip about her behind her back, and who could blame them?—but to her face, they were polite. They didn’t pry.

  “I’m good,” Bell said. Social obligation now officially concluded, she turned and began to unlock the front door, a thick slab of battered oak that attested to the house’s antiquity.

  “Hang on,” Sally Ann called. “You hear the news?”

  Bell turned around. “What do you mean?”

  “Brett Topping.” Sally Ann and her broom had finished with the bottom step and now started back up at the top again. Might have missed a spot. “Murdered in his driveway last night.”

  “What?”

  “MUR-DER,” Sally Ann yelled, breaking the word in two and doubling the volume of her voice. “Brett Topping.”

  Bell didn’t answer right away. Sally Ann’s news had startled her, causing a sense-memory to ripple through her body in a sharp, almost painful wave: It was the visceral feel of a violent event, momento
us and disruptive even though it had happened to somebody else, even though she hadn’t witnessed it.

  Back when she was the prosecutor, Bell had experienced this kind of dark, startled wonderment several times a day. She’d been at the bull’s-eye of all the bad things that happened in the county, from the first 911 call down through the arduous aftermath: investigation, arrest, interrogation, trial, and, if the cosmic coin-flip of the criminal justice system decided on a whim to get it right, sentencing and incarceration.

  “Bell? Did you hear me?” Sally Ann hollered. She swept as she talked, going up and down, back and forth, worrying the front steps over and over, just as she did every morning and most evenings, too. Bell was surprised that there was any wood left by now. “You knew him, right?”

  “Yeah. They arrest anybody?”

  “Nope. But it’s gotta be the drugs. Not Brett—it’s his boy, Tyler. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Same old story.”

  Bell had indeed known Brett Topping. Not well, but enough to be able to picture him: Big face. Solid handshake. Friendly. Prosecutors and bank vice presidents traveled in some of the same circles. Civic groups, county commission subcommittee meetings.

  She remembered his wife even better. Ellie, was it? Yes, Ellie. Blond hair, pretty. From three years ago came a flash of memory: Ellie, going into the James Cancer Center the same moment Bell was leaving it. Ellie’s brother, leaning on her arm. Both of them—Bell and Ellie—there to take care of someone they loved. Their meeting that day was an accidental rhyming of undeserved fates and soon-to-be tragedies.

  Three years ago.

  Back when Shirley was still alive. Fading, dying, but alive.

  Bell needed to change the subject in her own head. Right away.

  “That’s a shame,” she called back across the street.

  “Yeah. Way I hear it, the boy maybe owed some money to the wrong people. Real bad people. Tyler wouldn’t pay up—and so they went after Brett.”

  Bell’s thoughts suddenly fell into a familiar groove, clicking along, hitting all the marks she knew so well. She was thinking like a prosecutor: Make the kid give up his sources, track down the dealer, use the aggravated murder charge against the dealer and the possibility of lifetime imprisonment as leverage in a plea bargain to get—

  She stopped herself.

  You’re not the prosecutor. That’s Rhonda’s job now.

  But she could march inside and call Rhonda, right? Give her advice? Suggest some avenues to pursue, some techniques to try? It would be a public service. Definitely. And Rhonda wouldn’t resent it. She couldn’t. Bell had all those years of experience, and she’d be a valuable source of—

  No.

  But—

  No. Just stop it. Now.

  Sally Ann was staring at her. Bell wondered if she’d been talking to herself. Mumbling, maybe, as the fierce debate had raged inside her head.

  Jesus, she thought. If I do this too many more times, they’ll be calling me a lot worse names than Boo Radley.

  Being a bystander was going to be hard. Very, very hard. Much harder than she’d anticipated.

  When she was in Alderson, she’d deliberately avoided the news from Acker’s Gap. She knew how it would eat at her—each crime, each case, the trials. If she followed every detail, every turn, she’d make herself crazy. And so she didn’t. Instead, she generally confined her reading to investigative reports about Utley Pharmaceuticals and how the company had grown rich off the miseries of West Virginians.

  And then, during her time at Evening Street, when it was impossible not to pick up on the local news, there hadn’t been any major incidents. Just run-of-the-mill mayhem and low-level lawlessness.

  So this was the first. The first time that the new reality hit her: You’re not the prosecutor anymore. If you offer any tips to Rhonda Lovejoy, you’re not helping her—you’ll be getting in her way. That’s all. You’ll be just another nuisance.

  She had to stand down. Let Rhonda do her job. And embrace a new life—one that didn’t include being at the center of law enforcement efforts in Raythune County.

  Bell took a deep breath. Right now, she needed to shift her thinking away from the emptiness that had suddenly engulfed her, a feeling that edged close to despair.

  She’d go in another direction entirely. Now was a good time, she decided, to dig out the truth, once and for all, about how people like Sally Ann Turner got the news ahead of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a dozen or so satellite uplinks.

  “Hey, Sally Ann—how’d you find out about the murder so fast?”

  The old woman stopped sweeping. She contemplated the question.

  “Oh, you hear things,” she said. “Bits and pieces. Here and there. Always keep my ear to the ground.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “How long?”

  Rhonda was baffled by Ellie Topping’s question.

  “Ellie, I’m not sure I understand what you’re—”

  “How long? How long?” Angry, desperate, Ellie reached out and grabbed the sleeve of Rhonda’s coat. “How long?”

  “If you could give me a general idea of what you—”

  “How long?”

  Rhonda turned to the other woman in the room, hoping she could help. Sandy Banville shook her head. Widened her eyes. I’m as clueless as you are, the head-shake and the eye-widening implied.

  “Ellie,” Rhonda said. “I want you to take a deep breath. I’m Rhonda Lovejoy. The prosecutor here in Raythune County. And I have some questions for you.” She spoke slowly and carefully, the way she’d watched Bell speak to newly bereaved people. “I know you’re still in shock. I’m really sorry for your loss. But right now, time makes a big, big difference. We need to find out who did this to your husband. So I have to ask you some—”

  “How long?” Ellie repeated again, but this time she said it softly, wonderingly, not angrily.

  That felt like progress to Rhonda. She waited. Her instinct was correct: Ellie was settling down. She was ready to explain herself.

  “How long will I feel this way?” Ellie asked. “I can’t—I don’t know what I’m—” She swallowed hard. She looked down at her hand, and realized she was clutching Rhonda’s coat sleeve. She released it and uttered a small moan. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t hurt you, did I? I didn’t mean to—”

  “I’m fine.” Rhonda lifted her arm and shook it. “All good. See?”

  They were sitting in a small room next to the ER. The nursing supervisor had offered the space when Rhonda said she needed a private place in which to talk to Ellie Topping. The sign on the door said simply: FAMILY ROOM. But Rhonda knew what the room really was, behind the polite euphemism. She had been here before.

  This was where the hospital chaplain met with the next-of-kin of someone who’d been brought into the ER—after that someone had unfortunately died. In here, the conversations generally started with the solemn words: The doctors and nurses did all they could, but I’m very sorry to have to inform you that …

  Lime-green walls. Nubby orange chairs. Blue-and-white striped carpet. Comfort colors? Rhonda always wondered. Or just lousy decorating instincts?

  Lamp. End table. A small red artificial flower, rising perkily from a plastic bud vase.

  Sandy Banville and Ellie sat next to each other. Rhonda had moved the third chair around in front of them, so she could face both women. Ellie, as the nurse had reported to Rhonda in a discreet whisper, was sedated, but only mildly; she should be able to handle a few questions, as long as they were delivered with sensitivity.

  “You’re in shock, hon,” Sandy said. She reached for Ellie’s hand.

  To Rhonda’s surprise, Ellie quickly pulled her hand away. Weren’t they supposed to be neighbors? Friends?

  “Don’t you touch me,” Ellie snapped. “Why are you here?”

  Sandy nodded, as if she’d expected this. “Because you asked me to come along,” she said patiently. “In the ambulance. You were scared, hon. You needed somebody.”

&
nbsp; Ellie seemed confused. She looked at Rhonda.

  “I can’t remember. My mind—it’s just—I’m—”

  “It’s okay,” Rhonda said. “Let’s take it slow. Like your friend says, you’re in shock. And if it wasn’t really important, I wouldn’t be bothering you now. I’d let you rest. But we have to find out who did this. You understand that, right? We’re doing this for your husband. For Brett.”

  The mention of her husband’s name had done the trick. Ellie seemed to channel strength from it. She sat up straighter in her chair. She nodded and looked directly into Rhonda’s eyes.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  “Okay.” Rhonda pulled a legal pad from the briefcase she’d propped next to her chair. “I know you already spoke to Deputy Simmons. And normally she’d be talking to you now, too. But we’re short-handed. So you get to deal with me. Lucky you, right?” She smiled. Sometimes that brought an answering smile from an otherwise nervous, distracted person: the lighthearted sarcasm, the self-deprecation was a sort of universal solvent.

  But Ellie didn’t react to it. She spoke in a deadpan voice.

  “I didn’t go to him. I left him there. I didn’t help Brett.”

  “There was nothing you could’ve done,” Rhonda said. “He had already passed away by the time you got there.”

  “You’re sure? The paramedics said that?”

  “Yes.” Rhonda wasn’t sure, and the paramedics had said no such thing. But she had to keep Ellie Topping calm. Regret and recrimination wouldn’t help their cause right now. “According to what you told Deputy Simmons at the scene, your husband recently had an altercation with a drug dealer named Deke Foley.”

  Ellie gasped slightly, remembering. “It was terrible. Foley came to our home the other night because Tyler owed him money. He had a bat and he—he smashed the garage door. Again and again.”

  “So Tyler was working for Deke Foley.”

  Ellie flinched. Her eyes widened in horror. A thought had just occurred to her, one that Rhonda easily guessed: Could her son have had something to do with this—more, that is, than having brought such ugliness, such brutality, into their lives in the first place? Was Tyler specifically involved in the murder of his father? Could he have—