by Julia Keller
‘Yeah.’
‘You’ve never really talked about it. About what happened, I mean. Between you and Shirley. And your father. I’ve haven’t pushed you on it, Bell. I let it be.’
Why now? Bell thought, with a trace of anger. Why the hell are you bringing this up now? But she knew why.
The violence, the lights, the sirens, the confusion: This was a lot like the night they had met, twenty-nine years ago. The echo of it had been kept alive all this time, caught on the wind, swirling in and out of sight but always there. Biding its time.
The sheriff lowered his hand, but still kept it balled in a fist. The night had quickly gone from chilly to downright freezing, and it was easier to keep a fist warm than an open hand. There was less surface area to protect.
‘We watched that fire burn,’ Nick said, ‘and then the firefighters came. When it cooled down enough, they found your father’s body. Your sister told us what she’d done. After that, everything happened so damned fast. They took her away – and I remember looking down at you and thinking, Well, what the hell? What’ll I do now?’
Bell nodded. She took up the thread of the story. ‘And Sheriff Rucker gave you the job that nobody else wanted. You had to take a traumatized ten-year-old and watch over her until somebody could rouse the social services people in the middle of the night. You took me for pie.’
‘Yeah. I did.’ He grinned and shook his head. ‘You were the skinniest thing I’d ever seen.’
‘I ate four pieces, as I recall. Three apple and one blueberry. A new house record for Ike’s. Still stands, I bet.’
‘Bell.’ He knew what she was trying to do. She wanted to sidetrack him with reminiscences, avoiding the hard things he wanted to talk about. ‘Bell,’ he repeated, ‘a lot of folks back then knew what you and your sister were going through. They knew about your father.’
‘Leave it alone, Nick.’ She turned away from him.
The siren on an ambulance parked nearby gave a single yelp, then clammed up. There wasn’t any more need for sirens now.
‘Bell.’
‘Please, Nick.’
‘Bell, listen.’
The word dug at something in her memory. Three decades ago, somebody else had said the same thing to her. Just that emphatically. Listen.
‘Way I heard it,’ he said, ‘lot of people had a hell of a good notion exactly what that bastard was doing to you girls, and they didn’t lift a hand to stop it. Didn’t bother themselves. Didn’t want to make any trouble. And they were ashamed of that fact, I guess, which is why they didn’t come forward and help your sister during the trial. They just wanted it all to go away. Be done with it. Sweep it under the damned rug.’
It was too dark now to see the mountain, the one that brooded over Acker’s Gap, the one that bordered this world. On some nights the mountain seemed to disappear, merging with the darkness, its shape gradually absorbed by the black vastness of the sky. The sky was the only thing bigger than the mountain.
Truth was, though, that anybody who’d grown up here didn’t need to see the mountain to know where it was. Day or night, eyes open or closed, you always knew. And that was the direction in which Bell now turned.
Toward the mountain.
She watched it for a few minutes, focused and resolute, almost as if she expected it to move or change. Then she spoke. Something inside her had said: It’s time.
Time to tell him the secret she’d kept for all these years
‘I was part of it, Nick.’ Her voice was steady. ‘I helped spread the gasoline. We burned down that trailer together. Me and Shirley. It was both of us.’
A minute passed, two minutes, and then Bell felt the weight of the sheriff’s arm. He was placing it around her shoulders. Drawing her toward him, toward the warmth of his big wool coat. She wasn’t ten years old anymore, she was bigger and taller, and that made it more awkward this time, it wasn’t smooth, but he didn’t seem to care. She didn’t, either.
‘Doesn’t matter, Bell,’ he said. ‘You’re not responsible. Same goes for Shirley.’
‘Not sure the law sees it that way.’
‘Hell with the law. You were a couple of lost kids. That’s what you were.’
All the lost children.
The next time Nick spoke, it was brusquely. Back to business.
‘Parole board meets the day after tomorrow. You need to be making up your mind, Bell. If you want her out, you’ll have to speak on her behalf. They’ll ask you about a plan – that’s what they call it, an approved home plan – and they’ll ask you to vouch for her.’
‘I told you, Nick. Over and over again. She doesn’t want any part of me. Won’t answer my letters. Won’t return my phone calls. I’ve tried. Tried everything I can think of. I haven’t seen her or talked to her since the night of the fire. And that’s her choice. Because I’ve given it my best shot. Time and time again.’
‘I know that.’
‘Okay, then. So what do I do? Just show up at the hearing? It’s been twenty-nine years, Nick. I won’t even know her.’
‘Here’s a hint. She’ll be the one in shackles.’
Bell groaned. ‘Christ, Nick.’
‘Sorry. But you’ve got to decide. You don’t show up, I’m not sure how it will go down. Guaranteed it won’t help her.’
Bell didn’t say anything, so he went on.
‘If you want to talk about it, we can drive on over to Ike’s right now. We can stay there all night if we have to. Mary Sue’s doing better these days. New medication. I’ll call her and tell her not to wait up. We can drink a pot of coffee and we can argue the pros and cons and then we can—’
‘No. Thanks, Nick, but no. Not this time. I have to figure this one out by myself.’
‘Okay. Change your mind – the offer stands. Anytime.’
But he didn’t have to tell her that.
56
Next morning, Bell parked her Explorer between the faded yellow lines marking off a spot in the Acker’s Gap High School parking lot. The sky was gray and white, with long skinny streaks of watery blue that looked like veins pushing through a chunk of marble.
As she opened her door, the wind caught it, nearly wrenching the thing out of her hand. She had to struggle to keep control, holding and pulling. It was like being carjacked by a ghost.
She was back to finish her speech.
It was Carla’s idea.
Bell had spent the night at Carla’s bedside in the county medical center. The diagnosis was a mild concussion, along with a badly sprained right wrist and cuts and bruises on her arms and legs, and a large ugly slash on the side of her face that required twenty-two stitches to close. The nurse had sedated her, but during Carla’s last few minutes of agitation before falling asleep, she had cried and asked her mother to hold her. ‘Lonnie,’ Carla murmured through her sobs. ‘He was my friend, Mom. No matter what, he was my friend. My friend.’ And Bell, leaning over the bed to embrace her, had felt the slender body shudder, had felt Carla’s tears dampening her neck.
In a few short sentences, spoken softly into her daughter’s ear, Bell had given Carla the gist of what had transpired that night. She’d fill in the details later.
Very early in the morning, with the window of Carla’s hospital room still a tall black rectangle, her mother heard her stir. Bell had slept in a chair next to the bed, sideways body bunched in the shape of a comma, coat rolled up and angled between her neck and the wooden armrest. One arm was thrust straight out toward the bed so that she could keep contact with the young woman’s pale forearm all night long.
‘Mom.’
Bell, instantly awake, unkinked herself and stood up. Pain poked at her shoulders and tweaked her knees, the inevitable residue of having slept at a crazy angle in a chair – and being thirty-nine years old to boot, Bell thought with a wince.
The only light in the room came from the rack of small bulbs illuminating the monitors on the wall above Carla’s bed. But it was enough. Bell looked at her daughter�
��s face. She wanted to touch that face, to stroke it, but she held off, knowing that it would hurt.
Carla’s hair had been shaved on one side. A crooked ladder of stitches ran across that half of her scalp. Both eyes were ringed in black. The remainder of her face was massively swollen, with splotches of brazen purple and sickly yellow. It would stay that way, the nurse had said, for weeks.
‘Sweetie,’ Bell whispered. ‘Shhhhh. Settle down. It’s still early.’
‘You have to go back.’ Carla’s hoarse voice was emphatic. ‘You promised. You promised them you’d go back. So you have to.’
‘Back where, sweetie?’
‘To school.’ Carla struggled to sit up, flailing at the IV line that ran from the crook of her arm to the tall metal pole alongside her bed, shoving it away as if it were a pesky branch encountered on a jungle march.
‘Carla, sweetie—’
‘Mom.’
‘Sweetie,’ Bell said, ‘you had a terrible ordeal last night.’ She tried to make her voice light with exaggerated incredulity, playful, to settle her down. ‘And the first thing you think of this morning is – me going back to your school? Really?’
‘Mom. Please.’ Carla’s head fell back on her pillow. She was too tired to hold it up. But her eyes never left her mother’s eyes, never broke off their intense focus.
‘Sweetie, I really think it’s best if I—’
‘Mom, it’s my fault. All of this. I knew him. I’d seen him before – the shooter in the Salty Dawg. But I couldn’t tell you. Because he was at this party, and there were drugs, and—’
‘Shhh, sweetie.’
‘No, Mom, I have to tell you. I screwed up so bad. Please, Mom. If you can just go back and finish your speech, it’s like – like everything will start to be okay again.’
‘Carla—’
‘Dad’s on his way, right? I heard you on the phone with him last night. He can stay here with me until you get back.’
‘Carla, sweetie, I’m just not sure.’
‘Please. Please, Mom. Just go.’
So now Bell knew for sure. It was confirmed. She’d passed it on to her daughter: The gene for stubbornness.
Nick would get a kick out of that when she told him what he probably already knew: Think I’m trouble? Think I’m hard to handle? Just wait’ll you tangle with Carla when she gets up a head of steam.
The students sat quietly, displaying a stark attentiveness that had nothing to do with Bell’s title or with the presence of a teacher at the end of every row.
Most of them, Bell was certain, had already heard about what happened at the RC last night. News traveled fast in a small town, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it or even slow it down. They knew about the secret life of Tom Cox. A much-respected man. Hell, she might as well concede it: a beloved one.
Bell had already received two hectic messages on her cell from Dot Burdette, hungry for details. She’d return the calls later that day, telling Dot about the extent of Tom’s operation. The audacious scope of it. Rhonda and Hick, working all night, making phone calls that woke up anybody they needed to reach and offering only a quick insincere apology, had pieced together a good part of it. Tom Cox had met Charles Sowards while volunteering his vet services at the county animal shelter. Sowards worked there as a day laborer, hosing out cages, spreading straw. Sowards had become a small part of Tom’s business, just one of dozens of young unemployed West Virginians who’d signed up to distribute pills or to punish anyone who crossed the boss, or to do whatever else Tom asked of him. Because it meant a pay-check. Because they were broke and bored.
Like, perhaps, some of these kids, too, Bell thought, looking out across the auditorium at all of the faces.
Stillwagon gripped Bell’s cool hand in his own moist pudgy one, welcoming her to the stage. Just like last time. Except that, between then and now, so much had changed.
‘Once again,’ the principal said, looming so low over the lectern that his big chin bumped the microphone, the gelled threads of his hair gleaming wetly beneath the stage lights, ‘we have Raythune County Prosecuting Attorney Belfa Elkins. Mrs Elkins?’
She hesitated. What could she say that these students hadn’t already heard a hundred times before from parents, grandparents, teachers, preachers? What could she say that would make any damned difference? She wanted to tell them that they held a precious thing in their hands – this one life, the only one anybody ever got – and that they should cherish it. She wanted to tell them about the choices they’d be required to make, and about the fact that even if they made no choice – even if they let their lives just happen to them, as if that life was just a scrap of notebook paper blown around the school parking lot by a ravenous wind – then that, too, was a choice.
It wouldn’t work. They’d never listen. Platitudes were pointless. You couldn’t tell other people how to live. If some adult had tried to do that back when she was sitting in a morning assembly at Acker’s Gap High School – well, she would’ve snickered and rolled her eyes, and the phrase know-it-all asshole jerk would’ve been the dominant element in her mind, blocking everything else, bringing all of her thinking to a halt like a big piece of furniture stuck in the doorway on moving day.
She was here. Maybe that was the most important thing. Not what she had to say – but the fact that she’d bothered to show up to say it.
In the end, each person had to find her own path out of the mountains.
And sometimes, her own path back again.
Her speech was brief. She told them about the drug operation, about how one of her best friends had been in charge of it. She told them what else she knew: that many of them had bought pills from one of their teachers, Dean Streeter. What he did was wrong. But he’d tried to change his life. And died for that decision.
Afterward, as the students bumped and shuffled out of the auditorium, Bell lingered at the foot of the stage. Several parents came by to thank her, and to tell her how glad they were that she and her daughter were safe, that they’d survived the ordeal of the night before.
Bell turned to go. Along the wall, looking shy and uncertain, was an older woman, thickset, with a messy thatch of short gray hair.
The woman walked with a slight limp. She was dressed in work pants and a baggy gray sweatshirt bearing the oval logo CLAUSEN JANITORIAL SERVICES. Between two big hands, she twisted a black baseball cap with CJS in gold letters on the crown.
‘Wanted to tell you,’ the woman said, ‘that this is a good thing you done here today. Talking to these kids.’
‘Well,’ Bell said, ‘I’m not sure they were listening.’
‘Don’t matter. You gotta try.’ The woman twisted the cap a few more turns. ‘So I just wanted to thank you – and to tell you ’bout my girl. Couple of years ago, she was sitting here, too. She was a good girl. She was. But then come the drugs. They took hold of her. Got so she’d do anything for the money. I mean anything.’ The woman dropped her head. ‘Wasn’t nothing nobody could do. I lost my sweet little girl forever.’
‘What was your daughter’s name?’ Bell said softly.
The woman raised her head. She seemed grateful for the chance to speak it, to let her child’s name live out loud in the world again just one more time, during the instant it took to say the syllables. She swallowed hard.
‘Lorene,’ the woman said. ‘Her name was Lorene.’
57
One day later Bell drove the Explorer as far as she could go into the woods and then stopped. She climbed out. She’d walk the rest of the way.
The forest was filling up with the prelude to its winter music. The creak of high-up tree limbs rubbing together, the low groan of the wind, the sporadic crackle of the thick underbrush as small creatures moved across it in a rhythmless series of abrupt jumps.
Bell arrived at the spot where the trailer had been. There was nothing here. Only a black gash on a blank patch of cold ground.
She sometimes thought she could hear voices out here,
shouts and cries of pain, echoes of the anguish that had lived in this space so long ago, still revolving slowly, slowly, in the singed air, an endless upward spiral of loss. But she knew it was just her imagination. Because there was nothing left.
She wouldn’t come here again.
She was finished with this place. And it, she hoped, was finished with her.
Bell walked back to the Explorer. Reaching the hard road, she shifted into park and waited, leaning forward in her seat, arms folded across the top of the wheel.
One direction led to the rambling old house back in Acker’s Gap. To the big chair in the living room. A cold bottle of Rolling Rock. The world as she knew it. But even that was changing, of course. Carla was leaving. Going to live with her father.
The other direction led to Lakin Correctional Center and the parole hearing. If she started right now, she could make it there for the 2 P.M. start.
Bell shoved the car into gear and headed toward Lakin.
The hearing felt like a formality. The only witnesses were Bell and the prison psychiatrist, a small-shouldered, broad-bottomed man in a shiny black suit. His hard black shoes had a slight squeak to them as he walked from the row of folding chairs at the back of the room to the single chair at the wooden table. On the other side of that table were the nine members of the parole board.
The psychiatrist’s testimony was brief and perfunctory: Shirley Abigail Dolan, prisoner number 3476213, incarcerated for manslaughter and arson for twenty-nine years, four months and seventeen days, was, in his opinion, no longer a threat to society. Bell’s testimony was also short; she was asked if she would help her sister become readjusted to society, provide a home and job placement assistance, and she said yes. Yes, she would.
And then Shirley Dolan was led into the room, an emaciated figure in a blue jumpsuit, stooped-over, with long gray hair pulled into a ponytail that hung nearly to her waist. She had hooded gray eyes and a putty-blob of a nose that looked as if it had been broken multiple times. She was only six years older than Bell, she was only forty-five, but she could have passed for sixty. Her skin was yellow-pale. Her face was marked by deep creases. Like an old map that had been folded too many times and stuffed in the back of a drawer.
