A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  An arched threshold separated the foyer from the living room on the left. Four steps later, Bell was leaning over the faded green couch. Carla was curled up in a corner of it, lying on her right side, knees at her chin, arms linked around her knees, caught in a restless sleep. Her eyelids fluttered. Her chin quivered.

  ‘How’s she doing?’

  Bell’s whispered question was addressed to Ruthie Cox, who sat at the other end of the couch, book in her lap. Ruthie’s wrists were as thin as sticks. The eyes in her hauntingly concave face were large and dark, as if she kept them open just a little bit wider than everyone else did, so that she wouldn’t miss anything.

  Ruthie was sixty-seven, but on account of her illness, could be mistaken for eighty. Fuzzy wisps of white hair dotted her scalp, like cotton balls glued to pale construction paper in a child’s art project. Her hair was struggling to grow back after repeated assaults of chemotherapy.

  ‘She’s okay.’ Ruthie mouthed the words.

  Bell looked around the living room: Every lamp was lit.

  Ruthie answered the implied question in a soft voice. ‘She didn’t want to wake up in the dark.’

  Bell nodded.

  The two women on this couch – her daughter, her best friend – and a third woman, the sister she hadn’t seen in almost three decades, were, along with Nick Fogelsong, all that Bell loved in the world.

  That was it. Four people.

  The thought made her feel vulnerable, exposed. So she shoved it aside.

  The living room was small – Bell preferred to call it ‘cozy’ – with a working fireplace and a white wooden mantel, a wide front window garnished with long brown drapes that Bell generally kept pulled back and cinched at either side and, next to the couch, an overstuffed armchair. Bell had bought the chair at a Goodwill store many, many years ago, in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and it was her favorite piece of furniture in all the world precisely because of that crooked but unknown history. It was severely dilapidated. The brown plaid fabric on its arms was stained by innumerable sloshes of coffee, its back and sides sagged, the skirt around the bottom was torn and, in some spots, missing completely. Somehow, though, despite all the insults it had absorbed, the chair retained a tender, flaccid, inviting charm. Bell longed to just sink down in it, to try and forget about the day and its horrors.

  Ruthie was rising. She slid the book onto the coffee table and motioned for Bell to follow her back into the foyer.

  ‘She’s had a few restless spells,’ Ruthie said, ‘but for the last hour or so, she’s been sleeping.’

  Bell nodded.

  ‘I was worried when I first got here,’ Ruthie went on. ‘She was pretty agitated. I was just about to call Tom and ask him to bring over my prescription pad. Rest is what she needs. I was thinking about a sedative. But then she just dropped off. With any luck, she’ll sleep through the night.’

  ‘I can’t thank you enough, Ruthie, for coming over and for—’

  Ruthie shook her head so swiftly and emphatically that Bell had to stop talking.

  ‘Hush,’ Ruthie said. ‘You know there’s nowhere else I’d want to be. Just here. So you hush.’

  Bell bit her lower lip, to keep the emotion from showing. She realized she was still holding her car keys and briefcase and coffee mug, and so she took a few steps over to the hall table. On the wall above it, the oval mirror played a nasty trick: It told the truth. Her shoulders were slumped. Her skin tone, sallow. Her eye sockets looked as if they’d been pushed too far back in her head.

  ‘Still,’ Bell said, setting down her cargo. She didn’t want to look at Ruthie. If she lost herself in her friend’s kind face right now, if she let go, she would relinquish the equilibrium she had maintained so carefully throughout the long day, the perfect wall of composure. ‘It was sweet of you. She needed you tonight, Ruthie. And I needed you.’

  She and Ruthie Cox had been best friends for five years, ever since Bell had returned to her hometown and moved into the neighborhood. Back then Bell was a divorced mother with a twelve-year-old-daughter, a law degree she hadn’t yet put to much use, and the vague, outlandish idea that someday she might want to run for Raythune County prosecuting attorney.

  One year later, the incumbent, Bobby Lee Mercer, was forced to resign after a scandal involving his romantic liaison with the choir director over at Good Hope Baptist Church – Mercer was the married father of six children – and Belfa Elkins put her name on the ballot. During the campaign for the special election a few stories flared up about her past, some dark mutterings, and a couple of ugly, innuendo-laced missives ran in the letters-to-the-editor section of the Acker’s Gap Gazette, alluding to what had happened twenty-nine years ago in the trailer at Comer Creek, but most people were willing to judge Belfa Elkins by who she was.

  Not who she’d been. And not who her family was.

  When Sheriff Fogelsong announced his support for Bell, it was a done deal: She crushed Hickey Leonard by a three-to-one margin. Now Hick worked for her as an assistant prosecutor, along with Rhonda Lovejoy.

  Ruthie and Tom Cox had supported Bell’s bid as well. And in the years since Bell and Carla had moved into the stone house on Shelton Avenue, the older couple had become a very big part of their lives. Ruthie was a semi-retired physician. Tom was a vet who still practiced, still ran his hands several times a week down the quivering length of golden retrievers and Border collies and sleek Labradors while murmuring, ‘There’s a good dog. Easy, girl,’ feeling for lumps or tender places, keeping eye contact with the dog’s owners as he stroked, so that they would know from the slight rise of his brows – never altering his voice, never frightening the animal – that he had found something, and that it might be serious.

  Even though they were two decades older than Bell and old enough to be Carla’s grandparents, Tom and Ruthie were the best friends she’d ever had. Was that the right phrase for it, though? ‘Friend’ seemed too small a word, too ordinary, to contain the essence of what they meant to her. Too common. There was a calmness to Ruthie and Tom, a stability, a rootedness, that was so different from what Bell had known for most of her life. She rejected the idea that she’d been drawn to them because she was searching for parent figures to replace the ones she had lost. She despised that kind of trite psychology. But she had a hunger for something solid, dependable, and when she looked at Tom’s hands or when she looked into Ruthie’s eyes, eyes that never judged, eyes that seemed timeless with an expansive understanding, Bell felt, at long last, that she belonged somewhere.

  From the living room, they heard Carla stir, utter a brief moan.

  ‘How are you doing, honey?’ Bell asked. She’d circled the couch again and now bent over it.

  ‘I’m okay,’ Carla said, but there was an edge to her voice.

  Abruptly the young woman sat up, pushing the hair out of her face with the heel of her hand. Her cheeks were flushed. Eyes blood-shot.

  ‘Sure about that, sweetie? You’ve been through a lot,’ Bell said.

  A strand of Carla’s hair had strayed onto her forehead. Bell tried to smooth it back out of her eyes.

  Carla flinched violently at her mother’s touch.

  ‘I know that, Mom,’ she snapped, pushing away Bell’s hand. ‘Jesus. Can you lay off for a little while? Maybe give me a break? Not treat me like I’m five freakin’ years old or something?’

  Bell was startled. But knew she shouldn’t be. The Carla she’d seen that morning, the gentle Carla, the Carla who’d been frightened and needy in the wake of a terrible event, was temporary. An aberration.

  In the past year or so, Bell’s earnest, good-natured little girl had somehow morphed into a sour, bitter, rude smart-ass, suspended twice so far this year from Acker’s Gap High School – once for smoking in the girls’ bathroom, once for mouthing off to her math teacher.

  And then came the night a month and a half ago when Carla rammed a tree with her car over on Riley Pike. Bell’s ex-husband Sam had bought her a bright red Mustang.
The car, Bell thought, was a ridiculous, shortsighted, show-off gesture that had concerned her from the moment Sam had delivered it, dangling the keys in front of Carla’s face and chuckling when she tried to catch them between her smacking hands, like a happy kid chasing a firefly.

  Carla wasn’t hurt in the accident, but she had screamed obscenities at the deputy who’d arrived on the scene within minutes. The reason for her outburst was quickly determined: Three ounces of pot were found in the glove compartment.

  Along with suspending her license and requiring her to perform forty hours of community service, Judge Terrence Tolliver had ordered Carla to attend the Teen Anger Management Workshop at the RC for the rest of the school year.

  All of which had only enraged Carla even more, because she couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t intervene with the judge. ‘You know Tolliver,’ Carla had said on the night of the verdict, her voice a pissed-off hiss, eyes narrowed, fists bunched and held tightly at her sides, like two grenades with the pins already pulled. ‘You know the guy. Like, personally. You’ve gone to lunch with him. And you couldn’t have asked for a favor? One lousy freakin’ favor? I mean, it’s not like I’m this big criminal or something.’

  Carla’s tone had grown even darker, marbled with bitterness. ‘Oh, right – you’re so worried about what people in this craphole of a town think of you. You’ve got to be Ms Perfect all the time. You’re better than everybody else, aren’t you? It was a little bit of pot, Mom. Like, a handful. And a freakin’ fender bender. Jesus. You couldn’t have, like, just asked him to go easy on me?’

  The reason Bell didn’t call Terry Tolliver and ask him to cut Carla some slack – which he surely would’ve done had she requested it – had nothing to do with appearances, nothing to do with her reputation, nothing to do with her job as prosecuting attorney, nothing to do with justice or fairness or reelection campaigns.

  Carla was at a crossroads.

  Bell knew it, just as surely as she knew that the sun would rise over the mountains in the morning, painting Acker’s Gap in colors of peach and gold and pink. One nudge in the wrong direction – the slightest indication that shortcuts were permissible, that she didn’t have to answer for her actions – and Carla could fall right off the edge of her own life.

  Everybody’s life had that kind of moment. A moment when the world hesitates, when the future is not quite set. Still a mix of brilliant possibilities. A moment when things can go either way. Right or wrong. Up or down.

  Bell could point out just such a moment in the backstories of a great many of the criminals, punks, and bad-asses she dealt with. The thieves, the drug dealers, the people whose lives were shaped and fired and glazed by violence.

  There was always a moment when things could’ve turned out differently. Always a moment when a life was up for grabs.

  She’d be damned if she would let her little girl slip away, just because it was easier, in the short run, to give in.

  Carla coughed. With a bare foot she kicked at the brown wool blanket, the one Ruthie had tucked around her shoulders earlier that evening and that now trailed off the couch onto the floor.

  ‘Well,’ Ruthie said. ‘Your mom’s home, Carla, so I can head out. Oh – before I forget – Bell, you need to know that about a million people dropped by with casseroles. Check your fridge. You’ve got enough mac and cheese in there to last through Christmas. Next Christmas, I mean, not the one coming up.’ She smiled, sending a spray of wrinkles jetting across her tanned face.

  Ruthie spent a lot of time outdoors, riding her bike, poking around her garden with a shiny trowel, walking Hoover, her Jack Russell terrier. The breast cancer and the harsh means of fighting it had taken a lot of things away from her – hair, flesh, energy, a still-unknown number of tomorrows – but one of the things it had given back was a capacity for appreciation. She couldn’t get enough of the world, now that she’d been granted more time to enjoy it.

  Many mornings, when Bell hurried out the front door and headed for her SUV, she’d see Ruthie Cox, buttoned up in her moss-green quilted jacket, red baseball cap, corduroy trousers, and hiking boots, rounding the corner of Shelton Avenue, while beside her marched the snooty, imperial-looking Hoover, legs scissoring importantly back and forth, his head high, his brown-and-white coat looking polished and handsome in the clear air.

  ‘You two take it easy tonight,’ Ruthie said. She put a hand on Carla’s shoulder. Carla let it stay there.

  ‘Carla,’ Ruthie said. And that was all she said.

  Carla nodded.

  Bell walked Ruthie back to the front door. The moment they crossed the threshold between the living room and the foyer, they heard the TV set. Igniting the aggressive sound level conveyed Carla’s sour, bristling message: Don’t give a damn what you two are talking about. Don’t even care enough to eavesdrop.

  ‘Any progress in finding the guy who did it?’ Ruthie said. ‘Anything at all?’

  ‘No.’

  Bell was suddenly exhausted. She felt as if her hand were pressed against a wall, and if she dropped her arm, everything would collapse: wall, house, town, world. ‘People are really shaken up,’ she said. ‘And why shouldn’t they be? A terrible killing like this – right out in public. It’s just unthinkable. Might as well be New York or Chicago or D.C. We’re not used to this. Hope to God we never do get used to it.’

  ‘Well, if anybody can solve this thing, you and Nick can.’ Ruthie paused. ‘I knew one of them, Bell. One of the victims.’

  Bell wasn’t surprised. In a small town, the proverbial six degrees of separation was reduced to one or two degrees. Or sometimes, half a degree.

  Her ex-husband Sam Elkins had always hated that. It was one of the things that drove him away. Everybody lives in everybody else’s damned pockets, he would say, back when he and Bell were still married and still living in D.C. and he was trying to explain all the reasons why he absolutely could not return to Acker’s Gap. No way in hell.

  Bell hated it, too. Except that she also kind of loved it. In fact, that’s how she had responded to Sam: You know what I hate about our hometown? Everybody knows everybody else and always has.

  You know what I love about our hometown?

  Everybody knows everybody else and always has.

  ‘Dean Streeter,’ Ruthie went on. ‘Well, truth be told, I didn’t know Dean all that well. Or his wife Marlene. It was their daughter, Cherry. She was in my support group for cancer survivors. She’s the one I knew.’

  ‘I see.’ Bell was never certain how to react when Ruthie brought up her illness. It had been such a grueling ordeal for her and Tom. Ruthie’s gradual recovery had left Bell almost speechless with gratitude. Her joy at Ruthie’s survival was something that Bell just carried inside; she didn’t even try anymore to express it in words. It had no firm borders. It resisted the limits of language.

  ‘We lost Cherry six months ago,’ Ruthie said. ‘I can’t imagine what this is going to be like for Marlene. First her daughter – and now her husband.’ She shook her head. ‘The things people have to endure. That’s what astonishes me in my medical practice, Bell. You know what I mean? The challenges people face – terrible grief, grief past all imagining. But they do get over it. I don’t know how exactly, but they do. They go on. I’m sure you and Nick see that as well. Living in a small town like this – well, we all know each other’s sorrows, don’t we? There’s nowhere to hide. We’re all a part of each other’s lives.’ Ruthie touched Bell’s hand. ‘I really do mean what I said before. You and Nick will get to the bottom of this. I’m certain of it.’

  Bell nodded. It was true that she and the sheriff made an effective team. They’d handled killings before. Brutal, horrendous ones.

  Last year, an eighteen-year-old, floppy-haired, vacant-eyed punk named Kyle Waller – definitively rejected earlier that evening by Tiffany Amber Porter, aged seventeen, on account of his drug use and general good-for-nothingness – had expressed his humiliation and rage by murdering four people
in a trailer park over by the interstate, driving his point home by killing, in addition to the lovely Miss Tiffany herself, the girl’s parents and her toddler niece with a semiautomatic weapon that turned the inside of that trailer into a compact slaughterhouse, a red metal tube of death. A semiautomatic wielded by an eighteen-year-old, Bell had thought at the time, shocked despite herself. In Raythune County, West Virginia. Every year, the river of violence rose, the river that swept in from the big cities and the faraway places, and now it was washing up at the edges of Acker’s Gap.

  It was coming. You could smell it, Bell thought. You could feel it.

  Today’s violence, though, was far more ominous than Kyle Waller’s rampage. Waller was a kid, and his act came from a moment’s whim, for which he’d pay a lifetime’s penance. But what had happened in the Salty Dawg that morning seemed to have nothing to do with passion. It was cold. Methodical. Carefully planned.

  That much had been clear to Bell and the sheriff as they’d gone over details of the case, again and again and again. They’d compared witness statements, noting the fact that he didn’t try to rob the place or anybody in it. They’d reenacted the shooter’s movements, from his casual entrance to his precise aim to his calm getaway.

  Why in the world, though, would anybody want to kill three harmless old men?

  Ruthie opened the big front door. The hinges yelped, but complied. ‘Call me if you need to, Bell,’ she said. ‘Day or night. You know that.’

  ‘I do. We’ll talk soon. And thanks again for coming over.’

  The overhead light suddenly flickered. It lasted less than a second, just a slight dimming before returning to full strength, but Bell muttered, ‘Damn this old house.’

  ‘Thought you just had all the wiring redone.’

  ‘I did. By Walter Meckling and his crew,’ Bell said, naming the best-known general contractor in Raythune County. ‘Good thing it’s still under warranty. Walter’s supposed to be sending somebody over to take a look at it.’ She shook her head. It wasn’t the wiring that was bothering her. ‘Hell, Ruthie, can’t anything go right around here? Just one damned thing. That’s all I ask. Just one.’