by Julia Keller
Bell reached over to her nightstand and switched on the lamp. Better, she thought. That’s better.
‘Just needed a little advice, Sam.’
‘Sure. Absolutely.’
He was in his element now. Giving advice was what he did best, dispensing it with a calm, smooth, practiced authority. The Voice of Reason. As he had explained once to Bell, the secret was that people want to be bullied. They want to be told what to do. Gets them off the hook.
‘Is it about tracking down that killer with the fine law enforcement professionals of Acker’s Gap?’ Sam said. He was making fun of her, making fun of the town, and his voice – it rose and fell in dramatic swoops – sounded like the guy at the Raythune County Fair who sold blenders out of the back of an El Camino. ‘Tell me they slapped the cuffs on him and he’s awaiting trial. Or tell me that Andy and Barney – wait, I mean Nick and one of his deputies – managed to take him out in a blazing gun battle. Tell me that’s what happened, Bell.’
‘Don’t make me wish I hadn’t called, okay?’
‘Okay.’ His voice shifted.
He knew how to be a jackass. He also knew how not to be one.
He waited. He didn’t rush her. The thing was, Sam Elkins had known her longer and better than anybody else in her life, except for her sister and Nick Fogelsong. And there were things she’d shared with Sam that she hadn’t shared with Nick – because Sam had been her lover, her husband, her partner, the father of her child. At one time, she thought she’d be spending the rest of her life with him, and that meant he needed to know.
She’d told him everything about that night in 1981.
She settled back against the headboard.
‘Turns out,’ she said, ‘Shirley is coming up for parole again. Hearing’s in two days.’
‘Can’t be. No way. It’s too early.’
‘Nick got the call. They’re moving up some of the hearings. The prison’s busting at the seams and they’re worried about federal oversight. So they’re going through the list a lot faster these days.’
‘Hell. Just what you need, on top of everything else.’
She nodded, then she realized he couldn’t see her nod.
‘So what do you think, Sam? Should I testify? If Shirley will let me, I mean. I don’t have a lot of time to make up my mind.’
‘Hell,’ he repeated.
The word was his shorthand way of acknowledging how difficult this was for her, how there was no right answer. How he wished she didn’t have to deal with this now, while she was also working on two major cases and adjusting to the fact that Carla would be moving out just after Christmas.
‘Will there be any publicity?’ he said. ‘Anybody put the names together yet?’
‘Don’t think so. It was a long time ago, Sam.’
‘Yeah, but all it would take is one bored reporter, hanging out at the parole hearings, to do some checking and figure out that a county prosecutor is there to give testimony on behalf of her killer sister.’
‘Don’t call her that. Please.’
‘I’m just telling you what others are going to say, Bell. You know that.’
‘Yes. I do.’ She sighed. She wondered how the sigh sounded at his end, after it had traveled all those miles, after it had been translated by different kinds of distance – the geographical kind, the chronological kind, the emotional kind.
‘Listen, Bell. You want my opinion? I’ll give it to you. Don’t do it. Don’t go anywhere near this. You’ve had no contact with her all these years – I know it was her choice, I know she cut you off, I know you tried and tried – and it’s worked out okay. Hasn’t it? You’ve built a new life for yourself. Nobody remembers where you came from. It was – thank God – before Google. That trailer doesn’t even exist anymore. So don’t go back there, okay? Don’t do it. Don’t testify.
‘Because you know what, Bell? This is how your sister wants it. She’s made that clear. She wants the past to stay past. For whatever reason, she’s never explained herself, never talked about that miserable bastard that you two were unfortunate enough to have as a dad. You need to honor her choice, Bell.’
‘Honor her choice.’ Bell repeated his words not because she was questioning them, but because she wanted to feel them on her own tongue.
‘Yeah. Honor her sacrifice. Because if you go charging in there now, you’ll be doing it against her wishes. You’ll be making the last thirty years of her life meaningless. It’ll count for nothing. So stay away from it, Bell. Do what Shirley wants you to do. Forget her. Forget Comer Creek. Move on.’
Bell waited.
‘Thanks, Sam,’ she finally said. ‘Really – I appreciate it.’ She spotted the red numbers on her digital bedside clock. ‘Better go. Early day tomorrow. Have to give a speech.’
‘Rotary Club? Kiwanis?’
‘Acker’s Gap High School. The drug issue.’
‘Bet Carla’s thrilled.’ There was amusement in his voice.
‘Oh, yes. Absolutely.’ There was sarcasm in hers.
‘Seriously, though, I’m glad you’re doing that. Hard to believe how quickly it’s taken over the high schools around there. What a damned shame. Thank God Carla has steered clear of it. For the most part.’
‘We’re lucky, Sam. We may have a few problems with her now and then, but basically, we have a good kid.’
‘We do, don’t we?’ he said, and there was a touch of awe in her ex-husband’s voice, and humility, and maybe a hint of gratitude, too, and they were all qualities she seldom heard there. ‘Lots of the credit for that goes to you, Bell.’
She didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to.
28
Chill saw the bedroom light go out.
He was parked at the far end of the alley. There were a lot of other cars around, new ones and clunkers too, old beaters, and garbage cans, so he felt safe. They screened him. Hard for anybody to notice this car and remember it.
No lights in any of the houses.
He knew he was taking a chance, pushing his luck, but there was another part of him that loved it just because of that very thing. Risks kept him from getting bored.
The boredom. That was what people didn’t understand: how goddamned boring it could be. He wished he could say to people You think it’s cool, you stupid fucking loser, because you’ve seen way too many movies, you think you’re Johnny Fucking Depp in Blow or something, but you don’t get it – it’s boring. Okay? Most of the time, you know what you’ll be doing? You’ll be sitting around waiting for stuff to happen. Waiting for a delivery. Waiting for the boss. Waiting for somebody to show up. Waiting to get paid. Waiting.
Hell, they’d figure it out for themselves. Everybody did. He never got much chance to meet the other people, anyway. The boss kept everybody separated. Like, maybe the boss was afraid that if they got together and compared notes, they’d be harder to deal with.
Chill had been parked out here in the alley a long time, at least a couple of hours, ever since it got dark. Waiting. Watching her. Getting a sense of her schedule, of what she did when, of who else might be around.
He’d seen her come home. He knew she lived here with her kid. A daughter, he’d heard. There was no husband, no man, which was a big relief.
He’d watched a light come on in the kitchen, then the living room, then her bedroom on the second floor. Then he saw the bedroom light snap off. The house was dark now.
Chill checked out the neighborhood. Looked left, right. Forward, backward. He couldn’t see much, on account of the darkness, but he could get a sense of it, all the same. Older homes. Older, but nice. Real nice. Big and nice. The kind of houses he’d seen sometimes when he was a kid – they’d be driving, him and his dad, looking for scrap metal, and they’d take a wrong turn and end up in a decent area – and he’d wonder who lived in those places. There wasn’t any junk stacked on the porches. Just a kid’s bike, maybe. Or there’d be a swing hanging at one end of the porch, the kind of swing you could sit on while you tal
ked to somebody, and they’d listen to you. The yards were clean and neat. Curtains in the windows. Somebody gave a damn.
He shook his head.
Christ, his legs hurt. He wanted to stand up, stretch out, maybe run a little bit, but he couldn’t. Couldn’t get out of the car. It was too risky. As long as he sat here, slumped down, engine off, he was pretty much invisible. He could watch. Watch and learn.
He didn’t much like the new motel, the one he’d found after leaving the other one. Had to, after what he’d stuffed in the Dumpster, a little present, a little calling card. You’d think they were all alike, the motels, but they weren’t. The new one had a smell to it that disgusted him. Couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was old, like old vomit, mixed with this air-freshener crap. Plus, the TV remote didn’t work.
Damn.
He sat up, peering up through the windshield, trying to see. She was at the bedroom window. It was her. Wasn’t it? Had to be.
No light in the room behind her, but he’d seen the sash go up. Now she leaned out. Elbows on the sill. Jesus. What if she looked down here? Saw his car?
He calmed himself. No way. It was too dark.
He watched her, wondering what she was thinking about.
Night noises, West Virginia style. Bell had always loved them. In the summer, it was tree frogs, cicadas, crickets, that springy chorus that sounded like sleigh bells. Any season, there was the soprano yell of a train whistle in the distance. The yap and snarl of an animal fight, off in the woods. Could be raccoons, possums. If a skunk was involved, you’d know it soon enough. Too soon.
She leaned out of her bedroom window. Chin propped up with her fist. She’d concluded the call with Sam but was still too keyed up to sleep.
Wilderness loomed just beyond the sidewalks. That’s where the racket came from, the screeches and the rustlings, all endless, mysterious. If you weren’t used to it, it could keep you awake all night. If you were used to it, it was a lullaby. A lullaby you found yourself longing for, when you were separated from it.
In D.C., in their first apartment on Capitol Hill, she’d had to accustom herself to a different set of night noises: sirens, revving engines that popped and snarled more obnoxiously than any wild animal, occasional screams, scraps and jabs of laughter. More sirens. Many times, she heard gunshots in the middle of the night; she’d check the paper the next day, ask the neighbors, but she rarely found out what had happened. Gunfire was not all that remarkable.
And we’re the backwoods rednecks? Bell had often asked herself. We’re the gun-toting hicks?
Once, after she and Sam had just met, they sneaked away from their respective houses in the middle of the night and spent it together – but not in the way that would intrigue most teenagers. They ended up doing plenty of that, too, God knew. But on that first night, they took a long walk, winding up in the woods. They found a massive tree, so wide that even the two of them together, with their arms outstretched, bark scraping their skin, couldn’t make it all the way around the circumference to graze the other person’s fingertips. Then they each found a spot within the giant gnarled roots that had broken through the earth in an ancient upheaval, now frozen in elaborate contortions, and they lay there, letting the night noises rise up all around them like a homemade symphony, hearing the same noises they would’ve heard in this place a hundred years ago. Two hundred.
Bell looked down at the alley that unrolled beneath her window like a dark carpet. Across the narrow dirt strip was the backyard of a house on Brandon Street, one street over from Shelton. The Clarks lived there. Ernie and Maybelle and Maybelle’s mother, Holly. Beyond Brandon was a brief succession of other streets, all laid out straight and neat and narrow until the neighborhood abruptly ended at the wood’s edge.
She couldn’t make out many particulars. Darkness had reduced the world to crude blocky shapes: Houses. Trees. Mountain.
The night noises should have been familiar, soothing. But something was bothering Bell, even beyond all the other somethings she was dealing with these days. Something closer. Closer than a stone’s throw. She couldn’t figure out what it was. She felt a chill of foreboding on her bare arms.
She shut the window.
29
God. The smell.
It hit Bell right in the face. It was intense. And intensely familiar.
Didn’t matter how old you were, or how many years it’d been since you walked into a high school. The smell would get you every time, she thought. Ambush you.
Sweat, perfume, the cheap cleaning fluid used nightly to wash down the lockers and swab the floors. Cooked food – some of it, the worst of it, probably, emanating from the cafeteria, from the olfactory onslaught of greasy hot dogs and mushy tater tots and burned lima beans, but there was an equally foul undernote, too, from the food stuffed in lockers and left there too long, the lunches kids brought from home, the bologna sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches. Tuna and meat loaf. Rotting fruit.
And then there was the trailing scent of old socks, stray farts, hair spray, spicy deodorant, and the persistent mashing-together of all of that plus the sour, oniony smells of young bodies pressed up against each other for too many hours every day, day after day.
Last time she’d taken a good, long look at the halls of Acker’s Gap High School, she was eighteen years old and enrolled here. She’d been back a couple of times more recently, for parent-teacher conferences, but that wasn’t the same. She’d go in and out, with barely a flicker of a glance at her surroundings. She was oblivious – on purpose. Moreover, those visits came at the end of the day, when the students had mostly drained away from the yellow brick behemoth at the top of the small hill just outside town, when the last buses were grunting their way out of the parking lot and the whole place seemed to sink back with an exhausted sigh, having improbably made it through another day.
The walls were painted a bright cheery peach, Bell noted, instead of the sickly pale institutional green she remembered from her time here. The lockers were beige, not dark gray. The wooden classroom doors had been replaced with bright white aluminum ones, the top half of which were glass. And the library was not the library anymore. It was, according to the proud sign over the door, THE MEDIA CENTER.
Bell let her eyes slide over to Carla. Her daughter was doing her absolute best to ignore the fact that her mother was right beside her as she walked through the main hallway of Acker’s Gap High School at 8:13 on Tuesday morning.
Carla moved stiffly, eyes straight ahead. Her backpack hung clumsily off her right shoulder like an extra limb, bumping her kidney in rhythm with her jerky, preoccupied stride. At any moment the backpack seemed ready to slide off her shoulder and end up on the floor, there to be trampled and torn apart and scattered by the ordinary rampage of students racing to beat the tardy bell.
This was, Bell knew, possibly the most embarrassing moment in her daughter’s life. Carla was trying to make the best of it, though, because they both knew that the record for Most Embarrassing Moment would be a short-lived one. It would be broken in just a few minutes, when her mother rose to speak at the morning assembly.
Then that would become the brand-new Most Embarrassing Moment.
All around them, students surged and swirled, pinballing against each other. Locker doors were slammed, books dropped. Tennis shoes made short sharp squeals against the linoleum. Voices rose and ricocheted in a high-pitched babble, casually spiced with expletives and an occasional lick of shrieking laughter: You are fucking kidding me, dude! No WAY. That is some crazy shit. No lie. Hey, bitch – can I take a look at your calculus homework? You’re shittin’ me – he didn’t even call her last night? That is cold, man. Cold.
Bell and Carla moved steadily forward. There was a slight deference shown to them – Bell was clearly a foreign creature in this environment, an interloper, an antibody in the bloodstream of pure adolescence coursing through this hall – and the farther they progressed, the more the other students fell back, bit by bit, creating a cr
ooked lane in the chaos through which Bell and Carla walked.
The first bell had already sounded. The second bell would ring in three minutes. If students weren’t sitting in the auditorium by then, and instead were still bouncing through the halls, hollering their hellos, digging through their lockers, they were in trouble.
Big trouble.
Roger Jessup, the assistant principal, would come stomping through the corridors of Acker’s Gap High School, fat and fiery and cheerfully vengeful, the twin front halves of his unbuttoned plaid sport coat fluttering against an epic belly, hunting for stray students whom he could happily slap with detention slips.
‘Hey, Carla.’
Her daughter’s head turned with a snap.
‘Hey,’ Carla replied to a young woman Bell didn’t recognize.
Bell thought about Dean Streeter, a man who’d walked these same halls, who’d moved amid these same noisy streams of students, listening to their jokes, having easy and regular access to them, for all those years. She hadn’t known him; kids like her didn’t take driver’s ed. What was the point? She didn’t have a car back then, or any way to get one. She’d been lucky to have a roof over her head and shoes that almost fit.
Nice new seats – not those hideous old metal things with the paint flaking off that we were all sure would leach into our bloodstreams and give us lead poisoning. She and Carla walked down the center aisle of the auditorium until Carla, head lowered in shame and embarrassment, broke off and joined her homeroom.
To Bell’s left and right, row after row of twitching, fidgeting, mumbling students. The hissing of hundreds of whispered conversations seemed to create a second atmosphere, one composed not of oxygen but gossip, and Bell could swear she felt the updraft from it, the rustle and the sweep.
Up on the stage, the principal of Acker’s Gap High School, Carlton Stillwagon, waited for her, hands clasped, head tilted to one side. Bell had met with Stillwagon a few times, and talked on the phone with him many more. Occasionally the interactions concerned Carla; most often, though, they constituted official court business. They were about students who faced criminal charges. Bell and her staff often needed a background report from the principal: What was the kid really like? Heading for real trouble – adult-style, felony trouble – or just temporarily sidetracked by a lack of impulse control?
