A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  The name he’d just given her – could it be true?

  His blank eyes, eyes from which the spirit had just fled to wherever it was that spirits like his went, offered up the answer.

  Yes.

  Sheriff Fogelsong and Deputy Harrison loomed above her. Because her knees were flush with the floor, Bell could feel the vibrations from the paramedics as they converged, the quick-step crunch of boots, the humming roll of gurney wheels.

  Too late, Bell thought. Way too late to help this kid.

  It would have been too late years ago. Too late, maybe, from the day he was born.

  The sheriff and Harrison guided Bell to her feet. She didn’t need them, not really, she could’ve gotten up on her own – but it was good, just now, to feel the firmness of their grip, the sureness. She needed to be in touch with something solid. Because everything else Bell had thought she could believe in, everything she’d trusted, had just been obliterated by what the young man had told her.

  By a name.

  She watched the paramedics work on him, snapping through their routines, ignoring the hopelessness of it all. They probed and they jostled and they set up a portable IV, readying his body for transport. They fought on because, Bell knew, it was what they did.

  ‘Bell.’

  The sheriff was beside her. He still held her arm, from when he’d helped her up. Harrison had stepped forward to assist the paramedics, but Nick was still there, still holding her. Centering her.

  ‘We’re through here, Bell. We can meet them at the hospital.’

  ‘No. There’s one more stop we have to make.’

  ‘There is?’

  ‘He told me, Nick. Just before he died. I know who he was working for. I know who’s running the drug operation. And who must’ve ordered the killing of Dean Streeter.’

  The sheriff’s face was as cold and dead as an abandoned house in the middle of winter. He tightened his grip on her arm.

  There would, she knew, be a bruise there tomorrow. That was how hard Nick Fogelsong clutched her. That was how fiercely he was concentrating on every word she said.

  ‘Where, Bell? Where do we need to go?’

  ‘To Ruthie and Tom’s.’

  53

  A single light burned.

  Bell knew this house so well, she had been here so often, that she could picture the very lamp that was emitting the gentle glow visible in the front window. The shade was a mosaic of bits of colored glass, green and brown and yellow, the base a small circle of polished brass. Tom had picked it up in an antiques store in Virginia. A gift for Ruthie. He’d brought it home, set it on one of the small tables flanking the couch. The light from it looked as warm and formless as spilled honey.

  The sheriff sat beside her in the Blazer. They’d come with no sirens. On the way over, he had called two of his deputies. Told them to move into place discreetly in the alley behind the Cox home.

  ‘How do you know it’s not Ruthie, too?’ Nick said quietly. ‘That she’s not involved?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t make sense, Bell. None of it.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t. Ready to go?’

  ‘Must feel like a punch in the gut to you. Your best friend, doing this kind of—’

  ‘Nick,’ she said, interrupting him.

  That was all it took. He nodded. ‘Do they keep their front door locked, Bell?’

  He was sure she’d know; he knew how close she was to Tom and Ruthie Cox. The answer would determine his approach.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They don’t.’

  They slid out of the Blazer, carefully latching the heavy black doors instead of slamming them, and approached the house. The sheriff went first, hand hovering over his holster. Bell moved quickly behind him.

  Along the gently twisting front walk, beneath the bare reaching branches of the dogwood trees.

  Up the short rise of steps.

  Across the rattan carpet spread on the porch.

  Painted on a small oval ceramic plaque above the doorbell, in the delicate filigree of calligraphy, were the words THOMAS F. COX DVM and on the line below that RUTH A. COX MD. Fogelsong reached for the heavy brass doorknob. A quick twist, then he shouldered his way inside.

  Tom and Ruthie were sitting on the couch. She was asleep, her head propped on Tom’s shoulder while he read, but at the sound of the door crashing open, she’d jerked awake, startled, alarmed.

  Tom looked up from his book. He blinked, an expression of faint bemusement on his face. Unlike Ruthie, he didn’t seem in the least surprised. That told Bell what she needed to know. Ruthie looked stricken and shocked; Tom almost seemed to have been awaiting their arrival.

  ‘Bell? Nick?’ Ruthie cried. ‘My God, what’s going on?’

  The sheriff kept his gun out in front of him, right hand on the grip and the other supporting his right wrist, arms slightly bent at the elbow. With a shake of his tilted head, he indicated to Bell that she should stay back, stay behind him.

  No chance of that.

  She bolted forward, drawing even with Nick.

  Tom had closed his book – first retrieving the bookmark from a back page and carefully placing it on the page he’d been reading when they interrupted him – and centered it on his lap. He folded his hands atop the book and looked up at them inquisitively.

  In contrast to their agitation, he was calm and self-possessed. He was wearing the maroon wool cardigan that Bell had seen him wear dozens of times before, times when they’d sat in this very room, sipping tea or wine, talking about books and ideas, talking about their gardens, about politics, talking about all the things friends talk about, small things and big things, everything from a new Winston Churchill biography to a recipe for blueberry scones.

  She had a moment of doubt – what if this was all a grotesque mistake, what if she’d misunderstood the dying man, what if the dying man had been lying? – because this was, after all, Tom Cox. Her friend.

  She knew him. Didn’t she?

  But if a terrible error had been made, then why wasn’t Tom leaping to his feet and demanding an explanation? They’d broken into his home. Smashed through his front door. Why was there no wild surprise in his eyes, as there was in Ruthie’s?

  ‘Nick,’ Bell said. Even though she was speaking to the sheriff, she didn’t take her eyes off Tom. ‘I think you can lower your weapon now. I don’t think Tom is going to give us a problem. Are you, Tom?’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ There was amiability in Tom’s voice. A reasonableness strangely at odds with what Bell now knew. But then again, he must be accustomed to maintaining that facade. To controlling himself.

  ‘Tommy?’ Ruthie said. Confusion made her eyes look even bigger in her thin face. ‘Tommy, what’s going on?’

  Sheriff Fogelsong had ignored Bell’s advice, leaving his sidearm right where it was, level with Tom’s face. He hadn’t backed off an inch. ‘Don’t move,’ he said, in a low, solemn voice. ‘You don’t make another move until I tell you to, buddy. You hear? I want you to stand up – but do it slowly. Keep your hands where I can see them.’

  Tom laughed a dry one-note laugh. A hard, bitter flake of sound.

  ‘Christ, Nick,’ he said scornfully, ‘can’t you be more original than that? “Keep your hands where I can see them” – what is this, Dirty Harry? And what’s with this “buddy” business?’

  ‘Tommy,’ Ruthie said, ‘Tommy darling, I can’t – I don’t understand, I don’t know what – I don’t know—’

  Tom twisted in her direction, his motion so abrupt that the book slid off his lap. His voice was gentle again, calm. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he said, ‘but you do know, don’t you? Don’t you really? Haven’t you known all along? Perhaps not consciously, perhaps not in the form of an actual suspicion – but as a vague, unsettling notion? A dark hunch, perhaps?’

  Ruthie stared at him. ‘I’m confused, I don’t – I can’t—’

  ‘Please, Ruthie,’ he went on. ‘If you don’t m
ind, I’d prefer not to have some dramatic scene right now that will embarrass us all – including our good friend Bell, who’s had a very long night already. Isn’t that right, Bell?’

  Tom turned, looking back up at her. ‘You understand,’ he said. ‘Don’t you? You know what we’ve gone through. More than anyone else, you know. Ruthie’s been so sick.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bell answered. ‘Yes, Tom, you’ve both been through so much.’ She wanted him to talk. She didn’t read him his rights because this wasn’t for the case. This was for her. She wanted him to say whatever he had to say. This moment would not come again. She’d gone with Nick so many times to serve arrest warrants and she’d heard people carefully explaining themselves, justifying their actions, people who realized it was their final chance to talk without being shushed by a lawyer or interrupted by a judge.

  They have the stage. One last time. And they make the most of it.

  Because everybody has a reason.

  Tom had turned back to Ruthie. ‘You were so terribly sick. And I had to look at you every day. Had to watch you dying a little more, minute by minute, getting worse and worse, getting weaker and sicker. And your friends, too. The ones in your group. I saw the suffering. I saw you counting off the hours in your head – the minutes, the seconds – until you could have more pain pills.’

  ‘So you wrote the prescriptions,’ Bell said. She said it softly, to keep him going. No judgment in her voice. No condemnation. Nothing that would shut him down. ‘Is that it, Tom? Is that how it started? You used Ruthie’s prescription pad – because you couldn’t stand to see them suffer.’

  ‘Yes.’ A modest nod. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But how, Tom,’ Bell said, moving a step closer to the couch, moving casually, so casually, as if she just needed to stretch her legs, having stood in one position too long, ‘did it turn into what it did? How? I don’t understand.’

  Tom hadn’t raised his head again. His chin still rested on his chest. When he finally did look up, his eyes locked on to Ruthie’s eyes.

  ‘If someone like Ruthie can get so sick,’ Tom said, ‘someone good and decent, then what really matters? How can we make any claims for a just and rational universe, if this – this catastrophe – can drop into our lives with no warning?’

  Ruthie had begun to cry silently. The tears worked their fitful way down her emaciated face, while she stared at her husband, listened to him.

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to return here in the first place,’ Tom said. ‘It was yours, Ruthie, isn’t that right? We’d done very well for ourselves in Columbus. As far as I was concerned, we could’ve stayed there and continued to live our quite comfortable lives. But that wasn’t enough for you, my dear. You wanted to come back to West Virginia. To do what we could. And what, pray tell, was our reward for that self-sacrifice? For returning to the very place from which we had worked so long and so hard to escape? Your mortal illness, my dear. That was our reward. That was our little jackpot.’

  He raised his gaze from Ruthie to the sheriff and Bell. ‘Call it a moral awakening. Call it an epiphany. Call it whatever you like – but I realized, as I obtained what Ruthie and her friends needed, that I didn’t have to stop. I could continue writing prescriptions. Enough to sell. Enough, over the last few years, to establish quite a tidy little business. Ruthie here, of course, was too sick at the time to notice. OxyContin, Vicodin – the markup is stunning, as I’m sure both of you know. And the market? Endless. I was astonished at the opportunities. So I brought in more. Added to the product line. I professionalized all of this. Do you understand? The distribution networks were so sloppy, so disorganized, so haphazard. I had to do what I did. It was a matter of pride. By the time Ruthie felt a bit better, I was well past requiring her prescription pad.’

  ‘You had everything you needed,’ Bell said.

  ‘Yes. Yes I did.’ Tom gave her a grateful smile. She seemed to be following his logic. ‘I had the office out back. I had the skills. I had the vision and the discipline. And it wasn’t difficult to get people to work for me. Particularly people like Dean Streeter, with that readymade pipeline to students. Because he was the same as me, Bell. Do you see? His world was shattered.’

  Tom sighed and shook his head before continuing. ‘My God, how that man loved his daughter. It was – it was beautiful, and it was also terrifying and sad. He had to watch someone he loved die. Right before his eyes. Just like me. It makes you—’ Tom wanted to get the phrase just right. ‘It untethers you, I suppose I’d say. Releases you from the ordinary prohibitions on behavior. It frees you. You do things you could never have imagined yourself doing. Because none of it matters, you see? All those nice, tidy little rules, the ones you’ve followed all your life, turn out not to have made a damned bit of difference. Nothing makes sense anymore – and if nothing makes sense, nothing matters.’

  ‘Why was Streeter killed?’ Bell said. Tom had paused again, and she was afraid he would stop talking. She wanted him to keep going. She wanted to get it all.

  ‘Changed his mind. Tried to back out.’ Tom shrugged. ‘He was going to expose me. After all I’d done for him, he was ready to destroy everything. He simply had to be stopped. It was unfortunate that I had to send that ridiculous young man, and that he proved to be so grotesquely sloppy, but I really had no choice.’

  ‘Tommy,’ Ruthie said. She had found her voice again, and she was trying to reach him. ‘Tommy, Tommy, my darling – this is all wrong. How could you ever—’

  ‘Wrong?’

  His formerly placid face was now livid with incredulity.

  ‘You have the goddamned nerve,’ Tom continued, staring at her, fury in his eye, voice tightening, ‘to tell me what’s wrong? I watch you suffer, I watch everything we hoped to have in our lives – days and days, all those golden days we’d planned on, all that we’d counted on, dreamed about – I see that just explode in our faces on the day of your diagnosis, and so I do the best I can to deal with it, and you’re going to lecture me about right and wrong?’

  ‘But Tommy, I’m better. They said I’m better. They said—’

  ‘No. No. No,’ he said testily, interrupting her. ‘You’re just in remission. Everybody knows the cancer is coming back. Cancer always comes back. You’re going to die, Ruthie.’

  ‘Tommy.’ Ruthie’s voice was a whisper now, and barely that.

  Sheriff Fogelsong had heard enough. ‘Thomas Cox,’ he declared, ‘you’re under arrest for solicitation of capital murder. For possession of controlled substances with intent to distribute. You have the right to remain—’

  ‘Spare me the boilerplate,’ Tom countered, cutting him off impatiently. ‘None of that will be necessary, Nick.’ He switched his gaze from the sheriff to Bell, giving her a thoughtful frown, like a professor whose favorite pupil has disappointed him. ‘You know, Bell, I never really understood this little crusade of yours. You can’t possibly win. You must see that. You’re an intelligent woman. You know about Sisyphus. You surely understand that once I’m gone, there will be someone else to take my place. And someone else after that. You do know that, don’t you? We’re all doomed.’ He shook his head. ‘As doomed, really, as Ruthie here. We just don’t have a neat little medical diagnosis to make it official.’

  ‘Tom.’ Ruthie said his name once again. That was all. Simply his name, an ordinary word spoken with soft and beguiling anguish.

  Her tone apparently touched some long-buried part of him, found some small pure space that had remained untainted by all that he had done. Because Tom Cox turned to his wife and suddenly there was just the two of them, sitting side by side, the way they’d sat a half a century ago when they first met, on a front porch on a summer’s day back in Beckley, West Virginia.

  ‘Ruthie,’ he said, ‘do you remember? “But I’ll undo the world by dying; because love dies too. Then all your beauties will be no more worth than gold in mines, where none doth draw it forth.”’

  ‘I remember, Tom,’ she said.

  Only later w
ould Bell appreciate just how meticulously he must’ve planned what happened next. He was an organized man, a methodical man. Ready for all contingencies. A man who would leave no loose ends, no dangling threads.

  Tom, she realized, must have practiced retrieving the gun from deep in the couch, reaching down and drawing it out in a smooth and fluid arc, again and again and again, getting faster each time, more sure-handed, until finally he had it just right, until the gesture – which required, after all, a combination of strength and fine-motor skills and no small amount of sheer nerve – was completely natural.

  Because when he performed it right now, the motion was swift and supple. And fast. There was no hesitation. No fumbling. No chance for the sheriff to react.

  Bell saw the weapon in Tom’s hand. Her eyes jumped from the gun to his eyes, trying to find him, to reach him.

  Tom fired.

  54

  1981

  Shirley was sleeping. So Belfa saw him first.

  Sometimes he went through spells when he bothered Shirley every night, night after night. ‘Bothering’ was Shirley’s word. Belfa knew what it meant. They had no other word for it. They didn’t need another word for it.

  Belfa kept her eyes closed when he came to Shirley like that, pretending to be asleep, but her father knew she was awake. Belfa was sure he knew. He knew everything.

  ‘Bothering’ meant the times that he kneeled down in front of the couch and put his thick hand on Shirley’s back, patting, stroking, patting, stroking.

  In bigger and bigger circles, circles moving downward, the bottom of each circle dipping slightly lower than the one just before it. The back of Shirley’s T-shirt gradually bunching and twisting from the persistence of the stroking, from the repetition.

  With a finger, he’d play with the waistband of her underwear. Picking at it, twisting it. And then with a single hard yank he’d have her underwear down, down around her knees, and then she was really helpless.