A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  Chess broke off his sentence and shook his head. ‘No way,’ he declared, fighting back a wave of emotion that seemed to pain him. ‘No way.’

  The sheriff looked back down at the notebook page. ‘I believe you, son. I do.’

  When the front door opened, a high-pitched creak from oil-starved hinges broke sharply against the chilly air. The sheriff and Bell turned to see an older woman – Eloise Rader, no doubt – start across the porch, clutching both halves of a jean jacket that refused to close over her pendulous breasts and round stomach. Her long black corduroy skirt trailed heavily along the porch floor.

  ‘Chess,’ the woman said. Suspicion turned the word into a whip crack. ‘What’s goin’ on?’

  ‘This here’s the sheriff, Mama, and this is the lady who’s gonna get Grandpa’s killer,’ he said.

  Bell liked Chess’s simple description. He’d grasped the essentials. Now all she had to do was live up to it.

  She looked more closely at the woman on the porch. It was a peculiar kind of obesity. It was as if Eloise Rader were in the grip of something outside her control. The excess weight seemed to be pulling her down, down, as if dark forces were reaching up from the earth itself to catch her, trip her up, hold her back. Her face was a large dollop of shifting, jiggling flesh in which the features had long ago been lost, like delicate pieces of jewelry in a churning vat of cake batter. She’d been crying, Bell saw; her massive cheeks were wet. The high collar of an enormous corduroy shirt – it was the color of rust – hid her chin. The untucked shirttail bumped over her knees.

  ‘Okay. Well, then,’ the woman said, ‘I’m Eloise Rader. Lee Rader was my daddy.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘I’d invite you in, but the house is a mess. If you don’t mind, we can just talk out here.’

  ‘Don’t mind at all,’ the sheriff said. ‘Been a pretty nice fall, ’cept for all the rain. You’d hardly know it was November today, would you?’

  ‘No,’ said Eloise Rader, joining him in the face-saving lie. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  The four of them stood there silently for a moment, the fat woman on the porch, and out in the yard, her son and Sheriff Fogelsong and Bell. One of the things Bell loved best about Nick Fogelsong was just this: He understood people like Eloise Rader right down to the bone. He realized right away that to not invite visitors inside, to not be hospitable, to not offer them something to eat and drink, was humiliating to Eloise Rader. Yet she had no choice. The inside of her house would be much worse than the outside of her house. And she wasn’t able to offer them refreshments because she couldn’t afford it. She had nothing to spare.

  Fogelsong had picked up on it right away, far quicker than Bell had: These people were struggling. Struggling hard. Living on the perilous edge of disaster. Lee Rader’s Social Security check was surely all that had kept them from complete economic collapse. They’d probably have to sell something to give him a decent burial.

  ‘First of all, I’m sorry for your loss, Ms Rader,’ the sheriff said. ‘Leroy was a good man.’

  She nodded. Her eyes filled up again. Her chin trembled. But she didn’t say anything, so Fogelsong went on. ‘I know my deputies were out here on Saturday, talking to you right after the shooting,’ he said. ‘All we’re doing here today is tying up some loose ends.’

  Chess Rader laughed. ‘They’re callin’ it “loose ends,” Mama, but what the man really means is that they want to see if we had anything to do with Grandpa’s murder. Like, were we mad at him? Did we go all crazy and send somebody after him?’

  The sheriff looked gravely at Chess. ‘That’s not even close to accurate, son. But if you want to upset your mother even more than she already is, then sure. Go ahead. Keep talking.’

  Chess dropped his head, ashamed. But Bell silently admired him: He had guts. She’d give him that. Because he’d identified the true nature of their errand today. Maybe something a family member had done – maybe something in which Chess or Alma were involved, up to their gray necks – had brought down a bloody wrath on Leroy Rader.

  And on his two closest friends.

  ‘Don’t mind Chess, Sheriff,’ Eloise said. ‘He’s hurting. We’re all hurting. We don’t know what to say or what to do. Daddy was a big part of our lives. Now he’s gone – and not the way we thought it would be, not from the cancer or a heart attack or something, but in this terrible, terrible way. I can’t even stand to think about it.’ She began to sob. There was no preliminary sniffle, no wind-up; she just fell facefirst into a violent storm of weeping.

  With two pudgy hands, she reached out and grabbed the single wooden rail across the front of the porch, steadying herself while she rocked and moaned.

  The sheriff waited. Before Eloise had recovered herself, the door opened again and her daughter, Chess’s sister Alma, joined her mother on the porch. She was a chunky, unsmiling young woman in a dark green hoodie and black bell-bottom pants that rode low on her meaty hips. She was two years older than Chess, Bell recalled from the file, and like him, she was unemployed. She had the same dirty-blond hair that her brother did. And the same intelligent eyes.

  ‘Mama,’ Alma said.

  ‘I’m okay, baby. I’ll be okay. Just can’t think about your grandpa without getting all upset.’ Eloise reached over and drew her daughter closer to her. Alma patted the denim that covered her mother’s wide arm while Eloise coughed, caught her breath, then resumed speaking.

  ‘Sheriff,’ Eloise said. ‘Tell me how we can help. We sure do want you to find whoever did this to Daddy and his friends. It just don’t make no sense.’

  ‘We agree,’ Fogelsong said. ‘In fact, we came back out here today, Ms Rader, for just that reason. To try to find a connection between your father’s murder and – well, and anything else in his life. I don’t mean to be insulting to you or your children, but it seems to us that maybe somebody was sending your family – or the McClurg or Streeter families or maybe all three – a message.’

  Chess used a boot heel to dig in the mud that served as their front yard. ‘Whaddaya mean?’

  ‘Like trying to get back at somebody,’ Fogelsong said. ‘Like maybe you or your sister. And using the murder of three innocent old men to do it.’

  Chess lifted his head from his earnest contemplation of the ground. ‘I know what you’re saying, Sheriff. You think maybe Alma or me might’ve been working for one of them drug gangs and we got ourselves into some kind of bad trouble. Well, once again, you didn’t know Grandpa very well. If me or Alma had been doing anything like that – I mean anything – Grandpa would’ve locked us up and thrown away the damned key.’ He shook his head.

  Alma picked up where her brother left off. ‘Grandpa wouldn’t have put up with nothing like that around him. If he’d thought for a second that me or Chess was selling drugs, that would’ve been the end of us. He hated drugs. Hated ’em. Thought they were ruining the whole state. If he’d caught us doing something like that, he would’ve told Mama to toss us out of this house. And if she wouldn’t do it, well sir, he would’ve moved out hisself. Before you could say “Boo.” Right, Mama?’

  Eloise Rader nodded. She had curled her bottom lip under her top one, to keep her sobs in check. Her chin quivered from the effort.

  Bell decided she’d been quiet long enough. ‘So how do you know for sure?’ she said to Chess and Alma, moving her gaze between them. ‘How can you be certain that your grandfather hated the drug gangs?’

  Alma’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s easy, lady,’ she declared. ‘He was just about to lose one of his best friends over it. That good enough for you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Saturday morning was gonna be his last time meeting his buddies like that at the Salty Dawg,’ Alma said. ‘Which is part of what makes this whole thing so awful for us. After Saturday, he wasn’t gonna go there anymore. He’d made up his mind. I’d heard him on the phone that morning before he left, talking to one of the other guys.’

  Sheriff Fogelsong’s tone was urgent. ‘Wh
at did he say?’

  ‘He said something like, “Selling them drugs is wrong and I’ve told him so and I won’t sit there every damned Saturday with the man, pretending it’s right. So if he don’t quit, then I’m through. I’ll drink my damned coffee at home. This is it.”’

  ‘Who was he talking to?’ Bell said.

  Alma shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It was either Shorty McClurg or Dean Streeter. One of them other two. So now do you believe me? If me or Chess was selling drugs and Grandpa knew about it, he’d a-never put up with it. We would’ve been kicked outta here a long time ago. Ain’t that right, Mama?’

  27

  On the drive back into Acker’s Gap, when the companionable silence descended once more inside the Blazer, a phrase tolled in Bell’s head:

  Twenty-nine years.

  In all that time, Shirley Dolan hadn’t answered a single letter from her. Not one. When Bell had tried, over and over again, year after year, to see her sister during visiting hours at Lakin Correctional Center, the answer that came back was always the same one:

  No.

  The bleak sameness of the county’s back roads churned by the windows like dirty smoke. Bell was thinking about Lee Rader and about the shooting, and about the man still at large, the man who’d walked into a restaurant and opened fire, and she was thinking about Albie Sheets and Tyler Bevins – but she was never not thinking about her sister as well. And about the parole hearing.

  People always talked about multitasking as if it were a desirable skill. A valuable technique. An asset. But it wasn’t, Bell knew. It wasn’t a choice. It was a curse. You couldn’t not do it.

  She looked over at Nick Fogelsong. His hat was off, flung into the backseat when he’d first climbed in, but he’d left his coat on. Hunched over the steering wheel as if he were protecting it from insult, he glared straight ahead at the perforated road, the way he tended to do, Bell knew, when he was engaged in serious and protracted thinking of his own. His musing-mosaic was different from hers – its pieces surely included his wife’s illness, and other things of which she was unaware – but there were also areas where the two pictures overlapped, places where Bell’s thoughts convened with his.

  ‘Ever wonder?’ he said.

  She waited for him to explain.

  ‘I mean, your sister not wanting to keep in touch,’ Nick went on. ‘You think it’s guilt over what she did? Or not wanting to drag you down with her? Or what?’

  ‘Don’t know, Nick.’

  ‘You’ve thought about it.’

  ‘Well, sure.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I don’t know.’

  He nodded.

  He was the only one who could get by with asking her about it. Because he’d earned the right. Because at every important event in Bell’s life, the ones where her sister would have been, he was there. When she’d stood on the podium at each of her three graduations, high school and college and then law school, elbow to robe-rustling elbow with her classmates, it was Nick’s face she looked for first, even before she looked for Sam’s. She’d scanned the crowd, bobbing and swaying and rising up on tiptoes while she kept a hand on the mortarboard to keep it from sliding off her head, and then when she picked him out, when she spotted Nick’s big open face and the brush-cut hair, she forgot decorum and poise and she waved a big hearty wave, and she mouthed Thank you.

  Bell was fairly certain that Nick sometimes still saw her as that scared ten-year-old, standing in the dark by a smoldering trailer. The one who needed him.

  Who needed somebody.

  ‘Got to follow up,’ the sheriff said, ‘on the info from Alma Rader. Might not pan out, but it’s something.’

  Bell generally allowed herself one cliché every six months or so. She decided to indulge. ‘Well, something’s definitely better than nothing.’

  He dropped her off at the courthouse. He had his rounds to make on the other side of the county. And she needed to brief Rhonda and Hick about what they’d learned from the trip.

  She would send her assistants out the next day with a couple of Nick’s deputies to reinterview Marlene Streeter and Fanny McClurg, hoping to determine which man’s behavior had so infuriated Lee Rader. Which of his two friends did Rader believe was involved in illegal drug sales? And for Christ’s sake, a weary and baffled Nick had put it, as Bell climbed out of the Blazer in front of the great gray pile of the courthouse, why the hell would some old guy with more’n half his life behind him get mixed up in that kind of thing, anyway? Drugs and all the rest of it?

  Bell worked in her office until just after 7:30 P.M. Then she turned off the lamp on her desk and nodded good-bye to the night custodian, Janet Leftwich, a petite black woman who had come into the office a few minutes before to empty the trash cans into the large wheeled garbage container. Leftwich had a withered right arm, and that made it hard for her to lift the cans, but you did not offer to help. All of the courthouse employees knew that. Leftwich wanted to do her job. She took quick offense if you suggested, by your offer, that she couldn’t do it herself.

  Bell stopped at Ike’s to pick up two dinners to go. Fried chicken with green beans and mashed potatoes for her, a grilled cheese sandwich and fries for Carla. She finally made it home by 8:15.

  Carla was in the living room, jammed against the far end of the couch with her knees folded up under her chin, watching TV. Or at least pretending to. It was some kind of reality show, with tanned people in bright bandanas yelling at each other for being stupid. Bell had only been in the room a few seconds when Carla clicked it off and rose from the couch, using the floppy cuffs of her long-sleeved T-shirt to rub at her cheeks.

  Not hungry, she said.

  Muttering something about a ‘ton of homework,’ Carla headed to her room, clumping her way up the stairs.

  She stopped halfway.

  ‘Hey, Mom. Any leads on the shooter?’

  Bell wished she had news. But she didn’t.

  ‘Not yet, sweetie.’

  No reply. Bell knew better than to push, to ask her how she was feeling or about how the school day had gone.

  There was a pause before the clumping resumed.

  Bell decided she wasn’t hungry, either, so she shoved both white Styrofoam containers in the fridge. She had to wedge them between two stacks of Tupperware containers. She’d forgotten about the casseroles.

  She returned to the TV set. She found a cop show, which usually amused her. All that lovely, endless time they were able to lavish on a single case. And all the fancy, expensive equipment. And all those wisecracking coroners and playful ballistics experts, just standing around, waiting to help. Bell scooted deeper in her chair, hunching her shoulders, crossing her arms in front of her chest. Her mind drifted. She’d lose the thread of the plot, grope for it, find it, and then lose it again. Finally, she gave up. Switched it off, even before the killer was identified.

  She’d live with the mystery.

  What was one more, after all the others she’d learned to live with?

  Bell had to talk to someone.

  Not about her work. She had plenty of people for that. There was Hickey Leonard, Judge Tolliver, Lee Ann Frickie. And – oh, what the hell – Rhonda Lovejoy. Plus prosecutors in adjacent counties. Friends from law school.

  As she stood in her bedroom ten minutes later, she realized how much she needed to talk to someone about her sister’s parole hearing. Someone other than Nick, who was too close to things. And too protective of her. His advice was always tainted by too much concern. Too little objectivity.

  Ruthie? Tom?

  No. They knew some of the story about Comer Creek, but not all of it.

  She knew whom she had to call. Because it was possible to detest someone but still respect his opinion.

  Bell closed her bedroom door. She listened. Heard nothing from Carla’s room.

  She didn’t turn on the light. She didn’t need to. She knew where everything was. She flipped off her shoes, exchanged her slacks for the swea
tpants that hung on a hook on the back of the door. Tugged off her blouse and replaced it with an old white T-shirt, gloriously tattered, deliciously broken in, that lived on the same hook.

  She climbed into the king-sized bed. She’d bought this extra-big bed when they moved here; she wanted Carla to join her at night, whenever she was scared or lonely or confused or distraught. Or just because she wanted to.

  When Carla was twelve, that happened often. They’d talk long into the night. Or Bell would read to her. The Hobbit. A Wrinkle in Time. The Harry Potter books.

  At fourteen, Carla had stopped coming. Just like that.

  Bell sat back against the headboard, legs crossed at the ankle. She pushed a number on her speed dial.

  He answered before the end of the first ring.

  ‘Bell – is everything okay? Is Carla—?’

  ‘She’s fine, Sam. Just fine.’ A pause. ‘I need to talk.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sam’s voice changed. Bell heard him speak in a low tone to someone else, someone who was right beside him: ‘Gotta take this, honey. I’ll go downstairs. Be back soon.’

  Through the phone line, Bell was aware of a door closing. Footsteps. The creak of chair leather.

  Then he was back on the line with her again: ‘Yes?’

  ‘Didn’t mean to cause a problem for you there, Sam. Really.’

  ‘Glenna was just startled when my cell rang. That’s all.’

  Bell hesitated.

  All at once it felt odd to be talking to him in the dark – even though they were separated by many miles, by dozens of bitter arguments, by a divorce decree.

  It was still dark. And they were still talking.