A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  Sam gave her an indulgent smile, the kind that used to enrage her during the dwindling days of their marriage. It was the equivalent of a head pat. She wasn’t even worth arguing with.

  She found herself wishing, like she always did, that he’d gotten fat or ugly or bald. Even a small cold sore would’ve made her day. But, no. He took great care of himself. Even at forty, Sam looked as if he could return to his old job at Walter Meckling’s remodeling business, the job he’d had in high school and during his summers home from college. The job he’d been doing when he and Bell had first gotten together.

  That was a very long time ago.

  ‘So things are pretty bad around here?’ he asked.

  ‘Terrible. It’s a fight, Sam. Every day.’

  ‘Too bad. But in that case,’ he said, his smile now broad enough to concern her, the smile of a man springing a trap, ‘you won’t mind the fact that Carla wants to come live with me in D.C. Right after the first of the year. That’s what we were talking about when you walked in.’

  Confused, Bell looked at Carla.

  ‘Sweetie?’

  Carla wouldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

  Sam pulled Carla closer and again kissed the top of her head. Again, she didn’t pull away. Okay, Bell thought. So that’s where we are. It’s two against one.

  Carla’s attitude toward her father varied from week to week, day to day, Bell knew. Occasionally, hour to hour. Sometimes Carla seemed to resent the hell out of him, sneering at his attempts to keep her up to date on his life or his ladyfriend du jour. Other times, though, Carla adored him. Daddy’s little girl could pop up from out of nowhere. And the Mustang had been a master stroke. A seventeen-year-old couldn’t resist that kind of blatant bribery.

  Hell. Nobody could.

  But go live with Sam? Leave her, leave Acker’s Gap, and go live with him?

  Bell felt sucker-punched.

  ‘She told me right after I got here today,’ Sam said. Affable voice, as if it wasn’t a big deal. He knew better. ‘She doesn’t feel safe anymore in this town, Bell – which is understandable, I think, under the circumstances – and she misses her dad. She’d like to give it a try, living with me.

  ‘And as I recall,’ he went on, lifting his hand from Carla’s shoulder and placing it on the top of her head, ‘we agreed that it was her choice, once she turned sixteen.’

  Bell didn’t take her eyes off her daughter. She ignored Sam. Let him feel victorious, let him score his little points. She didn’t care about him.

  She cared about Carla.

  ‘Honey?’ Bell said again. ‘What’s going on?’

  Carla wouldn’t look at her.

  Bell didn’t understand anything, but she understood everything. She didn’t know the particulars of what was bothering Carla, but she knew something was. She knew it because she’d been a little like Carla – no, a lot like Carla – when she was younger. She, too, had felt fury and longing and frustration, as well as a conviction that things would be better somewhere else.

  Anywhere else.

  ‘Carla,’ Bell said gently. She would talk, even if her daughter didn’t. ‘You can move in with your dad if you want to, I won’t stand in your way, but I’d like to know what’s really going on.’

  Carla bit her bottom lip. She sniffed. With the back of her small hand, she vigorously rubbed her nose. ‘The thing is—’ She paused, tried again. ‘I think that maybe I—’

  The ping! of a text.

  Bell and Sam frowned, looking at Carla in unison. Had to be her cell.

  Carla shook her head. Her cell was on the coffee table, propped up against her calculus book, a red silo of Pringles, and two Diet Coke cans.

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ she said.

  Bell touched the lump in her pocket, which she now realized was vibrating. She pulled out her cell and scanned the message.

  It was from Hick Leonard, one of her assistants: AS ill. trial start postponed min. 1 week. HL

  Bell texted back: K.

  Staring at the tiny screen, Bell wondered what had happened to Albie Sheets. How serious it was. Trial postponements weren’t terribly rare, but the last time she’d seen Albie, he looked fine. Then her thoughts moved on to Sheriff Fogelsong and the investigation of the shooting. With the Sheets trial briefly on hold, she now would have time to help Nick. They needed to find out a lot more about the three victims and why somebody wanted them dead.

  Three harmless old men. It didn’t make sense. Crimes, even crimes of passion, had a logic to them, a rationale, even if it was a murky one. They had to find it. Dig it out from the forest of facts already in evidence. I’ll call Nick, pick a time to meet for a strategy session and then . . .

  She looked up.

  Her daughter and her ex-husband were staring at her. Briefly, Bell felt as if she were the seventeen-year-old, the troublemaker, the rule-breaker, and they were the authority figures. Explanations began to form in her head, justifications, rationalizations: Look, we’re getting ready to go to trial in the Sheets case, and I told my staff to contact me right away if there were any developments, and so naturally—

  ‘Sorry,’ Bell said. ‘Work thing.’ She pushed the cell back in her pocket.

  ‘Can’t you turn that off?’ Sam said. He might have meant her cell, but he also could have meant her passion for her job. Ever since she’d become prosecuting attorney, he’d complained about it. She was paid too little, he scoffed, for what the office required, the long hours, the constant aggravation.

  ‘This is our child, Belfa,’ Sam went on piously. ‘Our little girl. She wants to talk to us. Seems pretty important.’ He paused. ‘At least it is to me.’

  Bell gave him a slit-eyed stare. In years past they’d been interrupted many, many times during important family conferences by his cell, his work, his ‘emergencies’ – she couldn’t even think the word without attaching pincers to it, the invisible grappling hooks of sarcasm – and he had the nerve to criticize her?

  At least her calls were about things that mattered. They were about people’s lives. Not last-minute details about some golf junket for a bunch of on-the-take congressmen, some trip bankrolled by a pharmaceutical company desperate for FDA approval for some new anti-cellulite pill that was going to make somebody a gazillion bucks. Which constituted Sam’s main business these days, the splendid use to which he was putting his law degree: smoothing the road for rich guys to get richer, courtesy of the United States government. Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe was a top lobbying firm in D.C. One-stop shopping for any company seeking inroads with Congress, the regulatory agencies, even the president – and willing to pay for it.

  Sam was a lawyer. A damned good one. He had the skill and the knowledge to help people, to level things up just a bit in a world that was relentlessly slanted. Instead he’d gone for the big payday.

  There was little left in him of the man Bell had married.

  It wasn’t the only reason they had divorced – Sam’s occasional infidelities also put a crimp in things – but for Bell, it was right up there near the top. It might have been even more crucial and damning than the affairs, which Sam seemed to regard as additional fringe benefits of being rich and successful, like two-hundred-dollar haircuts and bespoke suits, affairs which never bothered Bell as much as other people told her they ought to.

  Now she refocused on her daughter. She leaned forward and smiled, feeling the pinch in her shoulder but realizing that the other pinch – the one that came in her heart when she looked at Carla’s sour wounded face – felt worse.

  ‘Sweetie,’ Bell said, ‘why don’t you tell me what you wanted to—’

  ‘Forget it,’ Carla snapped. ‘Just forget it.’

  Carla knew she sounded mean and that was perfectly fine, because she wanted to sound mean. Her mom didn’t care about her. That much was obvious. All she cared about was work, the stupid cases and the stupid people and all the stupid lawyer stuff. Carla was sick of her mom’s job. Sick of Acker’s Gap. And behind all
that, fueling it, pushing it, causing it, really, although Carla didn’t want to admit it, she was scared of what she knew about the shooting and even more scared of telling her mother how she’d come to know it.

  Carla realized, even as she was letting the bitter thoughts about her mother unspool in her head, that they were unfair and inaccurate; the thing about irrational anger, though, was that it satisfied. It was like a sugar rush. Temporarily, it felt damned good. To hell with the aftermath.

  Carla had been teetering. Hadn’t been able to make up her mind. The text her mother received was just the nudge Carla needed. She doesn’t care about me. Never did. Never will.

  And that was why, when she saw her mother’s face, earnest and concerned, with a kind of melting softness in her eyes, Carla felt something twist inside her, something that hurt, burned, because of course she knew that her mother did care, did love her, loved her more than anything else in the world, and that made it worse somehow. All Carla could think of was that she wanted to punish her mom, to make her pay, make her pay for loving Carla so much and for letting things get to be so complicated and difficult and confusing, for putting this hot twisty thing in Carla’s stomach – and Carla knew how to do that. She knew how to hurt her mom.

  Her dad had told her right when he got there today that his offer was still in effect – she could leave West Virginia and go live with him, could start all over again – and that would solve everything, Carla thought, and that’s exactly what she would do, even though she knew it would break her mother’s heart.

  ‘Just figured I oughta let you know that I’ve made up my mind,’ Carla said, ripping through the words as if she were pulling things out of a drawer without even looking at them, flinging them over her shoulder, hasty and heedless. ‘I’m going to go live with Dad. Just as soon as I can. I’m outta here.’

  14

  Chill was impressed. He was also pissed.

  She was a hell of a driver, and he respected that. But he was also annoyed that she had outfoxed him. It made his job a lot harder.

  Following her up the mountain and then back down again had been his own inspiration. When Chill finally got around to telling the boss about it, he might like it, might not. Chill couldn’t predict. But he knew that the boss would’ve been a hell of a lot happier if it had worked. A car accident was perfect. Nobody would question it.

  Chill was back in the motel room. It was a good hour-and-a-half drive from Acker’s Gap. Needed to be. He had to be more careful now, in case somebody recognized him from the shooting. Going after the Elkins bitch that way, in broad daylight, had been risky, sure. But risk was his specialty. He had a reputation. Or was getting one. Gradually.

  Chill was sitting on the bed. He hadn’t bothered to yank off his boots when he came in. He’d just slammed the door shut behind him, headed for the bathroom to take a piss, then stumbled out into the crummy little room and heaved himself down on the bed.

  He turned and scooted around and angled his back against the pillows. He’d bunched them up, both of them, mashed and pummeled them against the headboard so that he could sit up and smoke. He’d already had a warning from the management. One of the maids must’ve ratted him out. So sue me. The cigarette wobbled on his lip. He took a long, slow pull on it and then blew out the smoke from the opposite corner of his mouth, and the cigarette wobbled a little more. Chill could smoke an entire cigarette and never touch the damned thing.

  God, he hated Sunday afternoons. They were the worst. He’d always thought so. Even as a kid, he hated Sunday afternoons. His daddy would sleep all day, usually, because he’d been out all of Saturday night, and then he’d fall in through the front door on Sunday morning and just lie there on the floor in a swamp of his own piss and puke, drunk as a goddamned skunk, and if you talked too loud or turned on the TV – well, the memory made Chill shudder. He’d done that once, as a kid. Eight years old. He’d come in the living room and tried to move real quiet and he’d turned on the TV set because he wanted to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers game. It was after 2 P.M., for Christ’s sake, and you would’ve thought that was okay, but his daddy rolled over and woke up and before Chill knew what was happening, before he even realized that the snoring had stopped, his daddy had picked up one of his boots, the big, heavy kind of boots, size 14, and he’d flung it at Chill’s head. Chill didn’t see it coming. It caught him on the side of his head and damned near took out his eye. The sharp part of the heel hit the little crease in the corner of his left eye and hooked something there, tore something, and for a couple of months Chill couldn’t make out a goddamned thing with that eye. Everything looked mushy and cloudy, like he was trying to see through a plastic bag or a dirty window. Plus, that side of his head was all swollen up, all yellow and purple, and when he went back to school on Monday, he had to say he’d run into the open truck door. That was what his daddy told him to say. Don’t want no goddamned meddlers coming round and telling me how to raise up my own kids, his daddy had said. So you tell ’em that you done run into the truck door, you hear? You got that, Charlie?

  Chill knew that none of the teachers believed the story about the truck door, but he also knew that nobody was going to challenge him on it, either. Who wanted the aggravation? His daddy was a violent man, big, prideful, easily riled, like a saucepan kept on a low boil, always hoping somebody will come along and crank up the flame and give him an excuse to blow. Nobody messed with him. Lanny Sowards didn’t have a real job; he mainly just picked up metal scrap on the road and sold it to the recycling place in Piketon. And he got drunk. That was his job. That was what he devoted himself to.

  There was never enough money in the house for shoes or food or other regular things. One day when Chill was six years old, he had argued with the man from the gas company who’d come to turn off the gas. Chill ran out into the side yard and called the man a goddamned fucking sonofabitch and kicked at the man’s left shin, hard, over and over again. The man was so startled to hear that kind of language coming out of a little kid – startled, and amused, too, because it really did sound funny, that kind of garbage-mouth on a kid, a kid so small that the kicks didn’t even hurt – that he stopped what he was doing and just stood there. Then he left. But he came back the next day, when Chill was gone, and turned off the gas anyway.

  His daddy ended up not mattering for very much longer, though, because when Chill was ten years old, Lanny Sowards wrapped his truck around a tree on one of those crazy Saturday nights when he was driving blind drunk, and there wasn’t a piece of him left that was big enough to bury. That was how Chill’s brother Steve had put it, saying the words gleefully, almost in awe: They couldn’t find a whole piece of him nowheres. He was spread out all over the place. Looked like a bag of laundry somebody’d dumped along the road. Dang. It was a while before Chill could believe that Lanny Sowards was really dead. It didn’t seem possible. He was afraid that if he believed it too readily, if he let his guard down, his daddy would show up again, take him by surprise, bushwhack him, having heard everything Chill had said about him in the meantime, and he’d make him pay. It took months for Chill to accept it. His daddy was too big for something as small and weak and dumb as death to get the better of him. When he thought about his daddy, Chill still had to resist the strong urge to duck. He could still sense that big boot flying at him, sharp edge leading the way, and hear his daddy’s bull roar, a sound as big as the world itself.

  So Chill still hated Sunday afternoons. Always would.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Startled but not surprised – he was expecting it, but didn’t know just when it would come – Chill mashed out his cigarette on the jar lid that he kept on the nightstand. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up, buttoned his jeans. With his right hand he smoothed back the hair on one side of his head. The hair felt greasy and clotted beneath his palm.

  The knock came again.

  15

  Bell looked at her daughter. The living room suddenly felt
colder, even though the afternoon sunlight was cruising in through the large picture window, filling the house with a casual radiance, turning the rundown chair and the worn carpet and the chipped mantel into brighter, brasher versions of themselves.

  ‘So you want to go live in D.C.?’

  Carla shrugged.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I do.’

  ‘What about school? And your friends?’

  ‘There are schools over there.’ Carla said it quietly, seriously, not in the smart-ass way that Bell had anticipated. ‘I’ll make new friends.’

  Bell let some time go by. Sam didn’t speak either. He sat back on the couch, the ankle of one leg balanced on the knee of the other leg, and he fingered the pressed hem of his slacks.

  If Carla truly didn’t want to be in Acker’s Gap, then Bell wouldn’t keep her here. She had made a promise to her daughter. She didn’t want West Virginia to seem like a prison. If you felt that you were trapped here, it could seem like the worst place in the world. If you stayed voluntarily, it could be the best.

  Sam and Carla had discussed the logistics before Bell had arrived home. Just in case, Sam had said. Just in case Carla decided to do it. She could finish out the semester at Acker’s Gap High School. After the Christmas break, she would move into her father’s condo. And enroll at a high school in Alexandria.

  The three of them stood in the front hallway. Sam needed to get back to D.C. There was, he said, an important meeting that night at the office, a conference call with Dubai.

  ‘With who?’ Carla said.

  ‘Dubai.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a place, honey, not a person. Better Google it. I spend a lot of time there these days.’