by Julia Keller
Bell stood up. She went over to the couch, leaned down, and put her hand on the top of Carla’s head.
She was aware, as she was each time she had the slightest, most casual physical contact with her daughter, of the still-astonishing reality of this person she had created, of the hair and the eyes, the bones and the skin. As always, awe blossomed in Bell’s mind at the beautiful, ever-perplexing mystery of it all:
This is my child. I made her.
And then, this: But she’s not mine at all, of course. She belongs to no one but herself.
“I never wanted to hurt you by what I did,” Bell said. She’d returned to the armchair now. “Or Sam, either.” Despite her differences with him, her ex-husband had always been an excellent father to Carla. Even after he remarried, he was still kind and attentive, still lovingly involved in his daughter’s life.
“But you didn’t, Mom. The only person you hurt was—you. You lost so, so much. Your home and your profession—everything. You lost the life you had. And now you have to start all over.”
“I’ll be okay. I’ll figure something out.”
Carla let a moment go by. “You’re never going to tell me, are you?”
Bell didn’t answer.
“At first,” Carla went on, “you said you might. Someday. But lately, I’ve had my doubts.”
“It doesn’t really matter now, does it? Shirley died. It’s over.”
“Mom.” Carla’s voice was grave. “You know better than that. It’s never going to be over. Not really. I respect your decision, but—it’s a life sentence. In a way, that’s what it is. You’ll be dealing with this forever. And I don’t even know why.” An edge of frustration now crept into Carla’s tone. “You didn’t have to confess. Aunt Shirley told me that. She didn’t tell me much—but she told me that. She wanted me to know that she didn’t pressure you into anything. She was fine with just the two of you knowing. She didn’t want you to ruin your life.”
“No. She didn’t.”
“So—why? Why did you do it? Why did you tell the judge you wouldn’t accept any sort of probation or deferred sentence? It’s like you wanted to suffer, Mom. Like you wanted to have everything taken away and—”
“Sweetie. Please—don’t.”
“Okay. Fine. Fine.” Carla’s voice backed down a notch. “But for the record—I’m worried about you. About how your life’s going to be from now on. I know you—and I know how much you need meaningful work. Something you can believe in. Something that does for you what being a prosecutor did.”
“I’ll be fine.” Bell thought about her research into Utley Pharmaceuticals. She didn’t want to talk about it tonight with Carla. The conversation was heavy enough already.
“You know what, Mom? Sometimes I wish…”
“What?”
“I wish you’d think about getting out of here. Moving away. Even just to Charleston. You could live with me. I’d be happy to—”
“Carla.” Bell’s voice was sharp. “No. We’ve been all through this. I can take care of myself. Good God. I’m almost fifty years old.”
“Everybody you run into, every single day, is going to know who you are and what happened. They’re going to know that you used to be the prosecutor. They’re going to know you pleaded guilty to murder. They’re going to know everything. Wouldn’t it be nice to be somewhere else? Where nobody knows you and you don’t know them, either? A fresh start—that’s all I mean.”
“This is my home.”
Carla took a deep breath. She knew it was a lost cause, but she had to try.
“Got it, Mom. But sometimes I can understand why Nick and Mary Sue Fogelsong retired to Florida. Can’t you? I mean—really? They see different things now. Not the same old crap they saw every day. Not the same people they’ve been looking at their whole damned lives.”
Bell didn’t answer.
“How about just a mini-vacation?” Carla went on. “A day trip somewhere?”
An idea stirred in Bell’s mind. It was a way to connect her work on Utley Pharmaceuticals with Carla’s suggestion.
“You know what, sweetie? I think you’re right. And I just thought of the perfect destination—D.C. I’ll go Monday morning. It’s a four-hour drive. And I already know the way.”
* * *
That night, long after Carla had left to drive back to her apartment in Charleston, Bell’s cell rang.
“Didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“I’ve been working nights, Nick. It’ll be a long time before I go to sleep at a regular hour.”
“Point taken. So how are you, Belfa?”
“Fine. I’m fine.” She had been expecting his call. She just hadn’t realized how much until she’d heard the sound of his voice.
She had known this man since she was ten years old. Nick Fogelsong had been the deputy on duty the night that everything changed for Bell and Shirley—the night their father died and their trailer burned to the ground. After that, their lives had dissolved into chaos. But for Bell, the young deputy was a guiding light, a helping hand, a steadying influence—and later, when she came back to Acker’s Gap, her colleague as Raythune County sheriff.
Nick was as much of a father as she’d ever known. Even when he gave up the job he loved and excelled at—a decision that troubled and disappointed her as much as her decision, a few years later, had troubled and disappointed him—she still cherished him, and trusted him, and counted on him.
As long as Nick was a part of her world, she could endure whatever bad luck and bleak fortune came her way.
Thus it was entirely fitting that he was calling her tonight, her first real night of freedom in almost three years.
She just wished he didn’t have to be doing it from Florida.
“Guess you’ve heard about Brett Topping’s murder,” she said. She knew that Nick kept up with the news from Acker’s Gap.
“Yeah. Knew him pretty well. Tragic.” His voice shifted, signaling a desire to move on. “But I don’t want to talk shop right now, okay?”
She started to point out that, technically, it wasn’t talking shop, because he wasn’t the sheriff and she wasn’t the prosecutor, but held back. Because she wanted to tell him about Utley Pharmaceuticals and her plan to make them pay.
And briefly, that’s just what she did.
“So what do you think, Nick?”
“I think,” he said, after a long pause, “that you oughta let yourself relax a little while, Belfa, before you go riding that big white horse of yours toward another damned windmill. Settle in. Plant some flowers.”
“It’s fall, Nick,” she retorted brusquely. She was miffed and didn’t mind him knowing. “Long past flower-planting season. But—okay. If that’s what you think—then, okay.”
Only later, an hour they’d hung up, did she realize that he hadn’t mentioned his wife, Mary Sue, at all. Mary Sue struggled with severe mental illness. It was kept in check with medication. Bell wondered if she was doing poorly, and if maybe that was why Nick hadn’t talked about her.
Although there might have been another reason, too.
Maybe Mary Sue was doing better.
Bell had always wondered what would happen to Nick’s marriage if his wife no longer needed him every minute of every day, if his role as rescuer and protector wasn’t required anymore.
Well, he’d never bring it up, and Bell would never ask. She had other things to think about, anyway. What had he said to her? Oh, right:
Windmills. White horses. And—of all things—flowers.
She was irritated all over again.
Chapter Twenty-one
“Missed you at church yesterday, Rhonda,” Lee Ann Frickie said.
“Busy time. We’re dealing with Brett Topping’s murder, plus all of the other cases that we still have to—”
“Don’t tell me.” Lee Ann cut her off, adding a small sniff of pure unadulterated self-righteousness. “Tell the Lord.”
“Will do.” Rhonda took off her coat and
folded it onto the bench seat beside her, cheerfully ignoring the old woman’s sanctimony. JPs did not have a coat rack anymore; the previous one had cracked beneath the stacked-up burden of too many heavy-duty parkas and ankle-length down coats on a memorable day last winter. Jackie hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. “Good to see you.”
Lee Ann, she knew, meant well; she simply believed that nothing was more important than church attendance.
And she may be right, Rhonda thought. But she hadn’t had a choice. She and Sheriff Harrison had spent their Sunday morning in Rhonda’s office, reviewing a list of people who might have had a reason to want Brett Topping dead. The roll call included a slew of disgruntled bank customers whose homes or businesses had been foreclosed upon, and a former colleague who had lost his job twelve years ago when Brett sided with a female bank employee who had accused the man of sexual harassment.
Long shots, every one of them. In Rhonda’s mind, all roads still led to Deke Foley.
“I do appreciate you meeting me,” Lee Ann said primly. “Of course I’ve heard about Brett Topping, and it’s just so shocking and sad. Such a tragedy.”
“Yeah, well—tell you the truth, Lee Ann, I don’t have a lot of time right now, because I’m got a conference call scheduled with—”
Lee Ann held up a bony hand to stop her. “I know about a prosecutor’s schedule, Rhonda.”
Yes, she did. Gray-haired, long-faced, and stick-thin, Lee Ann was seventy-nine years old and had worked for eight different prosecutors during her long career at the Raythune County Courthouse. She had retired shortly after Bell’s resignation.
An hour ago, as Rhonda sat at her kitchen table in her pink plaid pajamas, finishing off a carton of strawberry banana Light & Fit yogurt, her cell rang. To her surprise, the screen told her it was Lee Ann Frickie.
Lee Ann asked Rhonda if she could spare a minute or two on her way into the courthouse this morning. Maybe meet her at JPs?
Whereupon Rhonda, to what would turn out to be her everlasting regret, had said, “Sure.”
* * *
They were the only customers.
Lee Ann had worn her dress coat, Rhonda noted, a powder-blue wool one with a muff around the collar, from which her long, wizened neck emerged. She didn’t take off her coat. She looked older every time Rhonda saw her, which was usually just at church, because the old lady rarely came downtown anymore. The lines on her face cut deeper, and her pale, sad eyes were extra watery, pushed deep into nests of crinkled skin.
Rhonda signaled across the diner to Jackie, a tall, muscular woman with straight black hair that cascaded down her back until it nearly reached her waist. She wore a red flannel shirt tucked into a pair of black jeans. The jeans, in turn, were tucked into hiking boots.
Jackie brought over the coffeepot. She set a white china mug in front of Rhonda, filling it with a thick black ribbon of coffee. She didn’t bother setting a mug in front of Lee Ann. Lee Ann didn’t drink coffee. Everyone knew better than to ask her why not—and if you forgot and did ask, you’d be on the receiving end of a long and rhetorically ornate lecture on the dire health risks of caffeine in particular and the sinfulness of stimulants in general.
As usual, Jackie said nothing beyond a murmured Mornin’. She was not a purveyor of small talk. She had run this diner for almost a decade now, naming it in honor of her late mother, Joyce—the “JP” was for “Joyce’s Place”—who had also run a diner in this spot for many years with her partner, Georgette.
Coffee poured, Jackie looked at Rhonda. Rhonda shook her head. The meaning was clear: No food right now. Thanks.
Rhonda was always amused by the fact that she’d had entire conversations sometimes with Jackie and not a word was ever spoken.
Now she looked across the table at Lee Ann. “Okay,” Rhonda said. “I really do have a ton of things to do this morning. So if we could wind this up in just a few—”
“Understood.”
Lee Ann took a deep breath.
Since her retirement she had, Rhonda knew, devoted more and more of her time in service to Rising Souls Baptist Church. Three years ago the church had weathered a scandal when its former minister, Paul Wolford, had admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock, and ever since then the parishioners had accelerated the pace of their good deeds, as if they hoped to prime the pump of penance—penance for a sin that none of them had personally committed, Rhonda reminded herself.
Such an activity, sadly, was typical of a lot of women in these parts. They atoned not only for their own shortcomings, but also for those of the men in their midst.
“The time has come, Rhonda,” Lee Ann declared. “We’ve decided to take a stand.”
“‘We’?”
“The Ladies League of the Rising Souls Baptist Church.”
“Okay.” Rhonda sipped her coffee. It was satisfyingly scalding. She had inherited Bell’s taste in coffee temperature as well as her public office. “A stand against what?”
“Against what’s happening to this country.”
Rhonda felt the beginnings of a stomachache, and it wasn’t from the introduction of harsh black coffee into a belly already partially filled with strawberry banana yogurt. It was from the passionate gleam she’d just noticed in Lee Ann’s translucent blue eyes.
“Look, Lee Ann, you know I can’t discuss politics. It’s just not—”
“This isn’t about politics.” Lee Ann said the word with a shudder of disdain. “It’s about right and wrong. Good and evil. Jesus and the devil.”
Oh, Lord. Rhonda had heard from a few different sources that Lee Ann—and Rhonda hated the words they used, even though she knew how well those words communicated a certain state of unhinged fanaticism—had gone off the deep end, religion-wise, since her retirement. Jesus-crazy, some called it.
Lee Ann, most likely, had too much free time. And she used those empty hours to brood over the world’s wicked ways, and the responsibility of God’s army to rid that selfsame world of the scourge of sin and faithlessness.
“Lee Ann,” Rhonda said. She hoped that the simple saying of her name might get the old woman back on track.
No dice. “We want to put up a pillar.” Lee Ann’s words swept forward in a confident tsunami, coming faster and getting bigger the longer she talked. “A big stone pillar on the courthouse lawn. We’ve been saving our money and we think we’ve just about got enough. We’ve been selling quilts and having bake sales, rummage sales—anything and everything we can do. Because Acker’s Gap has become a place of darkness and iniquity, and unless we fight—and I mean fight, Rhonda, fight the fight of our lives—we’re looking at the end times. The prophecy is very clear. The signs are all around us.”
She wasn’t finished.
“The pillar has to be tall enough so that we can get all the words on it, starting at the top and going right on down the line. The words of the Ten Commandments. We’re going to hire somebody to chisel them on there in capital letters. Evelyn says her cousin over in Romney could do it. But if we don’t use him, we’ll find somebody else. The Lord will send us somebody. That’s for sure.”
Rhonda looked down at what remained of the contents of her coffee cup, at the little circle of black liquid. Her queasiness had increased in direct proportion to the length of Lee Ann’s speech.
“We’ve got it all planned,” the old woman went on. She leaned forward. Rhonda smelled talcum powder. That was the only scent you ever detected on Lee Ann Frickie; she dusted the back of her neck with Johnson’s Baby Powder every morning. “We’re going to put the Ten Commandments on that pillar and it’s going to have these big Roman numerals in front of each commandment. We have to remind people, Rhonda. Remind them of what we’ve all forgotten about. And this way—putting it on the courthouse lawn—everybody’ll see it.” She paused, needing to reacquire some oxygen, and then plunged right back in. “We need your support. If we can tell people that the prosecutor is on our side—it would go a long way toward—”
&n
bsp; “Lee Ann.” Rhonda interrupted her, but she did it gently. She looked into her friend’s eyes. She reached across the table, putting a hand atop Lee Ann’s spindly, arthritic one. “You know I can’t do that.”
“I don’t know it.” Lee Ann’s voice had an odd pitch to it. “I don’t know that at all.” Abruptly she pulled her hand out from under Rhonda’s. Then she turned her head, looking out the large window along the front wall of the diner that offered a cloudy view of Main Street.
Rhonda suddenly realized, to her astonishment, that the old woman was crying. She did so quietly, but there was no mistaking it: a tear slipped slowly down the side of her face that was visible to Rhonda.
In all of the years she had known Lee Ann Frickie—and that was her entire life, because Lee Ann was already the secretary in the prosecutor’s office the year Rhonda was born—Rhonda had never seen her cry. Never. Not even once.
Not when she was almost hit by a bullet that came crashing through the courthouse window.
Not when Charlie Mathers, a retired deputy and a good friend, was killed three years ago during a drug raid.
By now the lone tear had been bolstered by others. Rhonda didn’t know what to say or do—Lee Ann was the proudest woman she had ever known, and the notion of an emotional display in public would, at least in times past, have been as painful to her as an attack of sciatica.
And so Rhonda took another drink of her coffee.
Lee Ann wasn’t looking out the window anymore. She unsnapped the black patent leather purse on the bench seat beside her. She drew out a small package of tissues. A few sniffles and dainty nose-wipings later, she had recovered.
“They told me you would say that,” Lee Ann murmured. “The other ladies told me, but I said—no, no, she won’t, because Rhonda’s a good girl. And she loves the Lord. She goes to our church. She’ll help us. She’ll find a way.”
“You know it as well as I do, Lee Ann—the courthouse is a public facility. There can’t be any religious displays there. Because the First Amendment to the Constitution says—”
