by Julia Keller
“Tell you the truth,” Shirley said, “sounds like pretty skimpy evidence to me. Right? I mean, a pile of old bones. Could be anybody’s, really. Lotsa crazy stuff happens out in those parts of Raythune County where nobody much goes. Always has, always will.”
“They’re pretty sure,” Bell said. She was still taken aback by Shirley’s attitude and was having trouble finding her feet again in the conversation. “If they can locate any dental records, then they’ll be able to—”
“Let it go, Belfa.”
“What?”
“I said, let it go. Just walk away from it. Tell Nick Fogelsong you don’t care. You don’t want to hear any more about it.” Shirley’s voice grew more emphatic. “What’s the point of any of this? Huh? Explain that to me, okay? Explain how any of this makes a damned bit of difference at this point. To us—or to anybody. Jesus, Belfa. Daddy’s dead, and with all the things he did—and I don’t need to tell you about those things because you were right there beside me, and so you know—well, he’s burning in hell for those things, most likely. It’s done. It’s over. I mean, okay, so they found some old bones. Not our lookout.”
“For God’s sake, Shirley. She was our mother.”
Shirley’s reply struck like lightning: “You don’t even remember her.”
Bell felt a sharp hot twist in her belly, an acid-jet spike of unwelcome reminiscence. That was just what her father had said to her, all those years ago. She was five years old, standing by the dinette. Asking about her mother. Asking where she’d gone and when she’d be back. And he’d hurled the same accusation her way. You don’t even remember her. As if that canceled out her right to ask any questions. To be curious. To care.
“And what if it’s not true?” Bell said.
“Huh?”
“What if Daddy wasn’t responsible, after all? What if somebody else killed her? Don’t you want to know? Maybe that person’s still alive. The perpetrator.” The pace of Bell’s sentences accelerated. “Maybe he thinks he’s gotten by with it. But you know what? Cold cases like this one get solved every day. Modern forensics makes it a whole new ball game. Come on, Shirley. Don’t you want the killer to pay? To be brought to justice?”
Shirley laughed. The sound of it stung Bell.
“You know what?” Shirley said. After the laugh, her voice had settled in a darker place. “I think you’ve been a prosecutor way, way too long. You think that everything in the whole damned world comes down to trials and justice and all the rest of it. Well, you listen. It’s not like that, okay? People get by with really bad shit every single day. They just do. Can’t be helped.”
“I’ll grant you that it’s a long shot. But why not try? Why not at least look into it?”
Shirley’s answer came at her in a sudden thrust of blind fury. Had it been delivered in person and not during a phone call, Bell later thought, her eyebrows might have been singed:
“Because it means that you believe that lying bastard, after all. Dead as he is, you’re still giving Daddy the benefit of the doubt.”
“Shirley, listen, I don’t mean— ”
“No, you listen.” A viciousness had invaded her voice. “I know Daddy killed her. You know it, too. You’ve known it your whole damned life. But then somebody finds some old bones and now suddenly you’re thinking that maybe the crazy story he told us is actually true. That story about her running off with some roofer. Come on, Belfa. You looked into it, remember? You checked everywhere. You ran his name through about a million databases. There wasn’t any roofer. Daddy killed her. And if those bones prove anything—that’s what they prove. He hit her in the head and then he dumped the body in a grave he’d dug and he left it there. He made up some cockamamie story about her and some guy. And nobody checked it out at the time because nobody cared. Nobody cared because Donnie Dolan was a nasty sonofabitch and he and his dirt-ball family lived in a trailer—and so why should anybody take notice? A woman—the mother of two little kids—is gone, but nobody bats an eyelash. Why should they? World’s better off with one less hillbilly, anyway. Right?”
The bitterness in Shirley’s voice almost drowned out the words as she continued: “If you keep on going with this, Belfa, it tells me one thing for sure. It tells me that you trusted Daddy and his story more than you trust me right now. Because you know what happened. I’ve already told you. Mom just pissed him off one too many times—and she paid the price. She paid it, Belfa. He hit her in the head and he killed her and he buried her in the dirt. If you keep on going with this— ”
“Okay.” Bell cut her off. “Okay. Okay.”
After all these years, Shirley could still surprise her, and she had surprised her again tonight. Just when Bell thought she understood her sister, Shirley’s response to particular events in their lives—small ones as well as large ones, trivial and profound—would knock her back. And Bell would realize all over again that as close as they were, with so many essential parts of their history twined like two strands of tough rope, they were also very, very different. That rope had come unwound on the night when Shirley murdered Donnie Dolan. When they reunited after Shirley’s parole, they could look at each other and see the clear resemblance, the similarities in the eyes and the shape of the face—but in other ways, they were rank strangers, and they had to feel their way back into knowing who this other woman was, each of them stumbling along in a separate corridor of a dark cave, a shaky hand inching across the cold craggy wall, hoping, at long last, to meet.
“Let it go,” Shirley repeated.
“There’ll be an investigation. I’ve got no say in that.”
“You know what I mean, Belfa. Sure, they’ll investigate. And they won’t turn up a damned thing. But you don’t have to get involved. You can tell them to let you know when it’s concluded, and that’ll be that.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll stay away?”
“Yeah. I’ll stay away.”
Shirley laughed, a laugh that partially banished the tension between them. “You know what? You’re a piss-poor liar, little sister.”
* * *
Donnie Frazey’s expression was an unlovely combination of confusion and irritation. He had yanked up the vinyl blind on the top half of the front door, the part comprised of a rectangular plate of streaked and smeared glass, and when he saw it was Bell and not a customer with whom he’d have to feign politeness, out came his annoyed face: squashed chin, squinty eyes, flabby-lipped mouth falling into a pouty frown. He stuck out his bottom lip, which gave him the look of a kid who’d just had a butterscotch Dum·Dum sucker ripped out of his sticky hands.
He opened the door with a decided lack of vigor.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Morning, Donnie. Sorry to come by so early.”
She wasn’t really sorry, because it really wasn’t early. Last night, after hanging up with Shirley, Bell had surprised herself by enjoying a deeply satisfying sleep. This morning, she was ready to plunge right in. She’d driven into town and—just after 8 A.M.—she was rapping on the glass, the top section of which was decorated with the words
ACKER’S GAP GAZETTE/SERVING THE COMMUNITY FOR 127 YEARS
Donnie Frazey was the editor of the Gazette, a weekly newspaper that served Raythune and several adjacent counties, and the storefront on Main Street served as editorial, circulation and advertising offices, as well as Frazey’s home. The paper was printed in Beckley and then trucked back over to Acker’s Gap every Saturday night for Sunday distribution—unless Frazey was too inebriated to get the stories sent to the printer on time, in which case that week’s edition of the Gazette might not show up on porches or in mailboxes or in convenience stores until Tuesday or Wednesday. When anyone made light of Frazey’s behavior—likening it to the funny stumblings of Otis, the town drunk in The Andy Griffith Show, the reruns of which still charmed the people of Acker’s Gap—Bell had a harsh reply for them. She’d point out that over the years Frazey had shredded his marriage, forfeited visitation
rights to his children, and was skidding downhill to a painful and premature death, all on account of his unwillingness to get help for his disease. There wasn’t anything the least bit funny about it. Still, Donnie Frazey stories were part of the town’s lore.
“Whadda you want?” Frazey said. He hoisted up his right wrist and squinted at the watch face strapped there. Translation: too damned early, lady.
“I’m in a hurry this morning, Donnie. Wouldn’t be bothering you otherwise.”
“Well, come on in, I guess.”
By now Bell had ascertained that Frazey was neither drunk nor hungover. Sobriety was a rare state for him, and she was grateful. Clearly she’d awakened him with her firm knock. His thinning white hair stuck straight up in a scruffy ring around his head. He wore a red cotton pajama top and sweatpants, and he was barefoot. Gray stubble was smeared across his chin and cheeks. But he was sober. Nothing else really mattered.
In the center of the dim, wood-floored room was an oak desk with a hand-lettered sign taped to the front:
CLASSIFIED ADS MUST BE SUBMITTED IN WRITING BY 2 P.M. THURSDAY IN ORDER TO APPEAR IN NEXT WEEK’S PAPER. NO EXCEPTIONS. DON’T BOTHER TO ASK.
Dominating the top of the desk was an ancient-looking computer monitor, so big and clunky and out-of-date that Bell sometimes wondered if it came with a hand crank. Behind this room, she knew, was the cramped area in which Frazey coexisted with the sum total of his belongings: a single bed, a small microwave, a minifridge, an acoustic guitar with a painful-looking crack running right down the middle of it, and whatever was left of his ambitions for himself. The last item on that list didn’t take up much space.
“What’s the emergency?” he said.
“No emergency. Just pressed for time.”
“Okay,” he said. He rubbed at his neck, then looked at the hand that had done the rubbing. “What’s going on?”
“Need to look at your archives.”
“Public library’s got the online database.” His expression filled in the rest of the sentence: So you didn’t need to bother me this morning, after all, now, did you?
“That database was started in 1990,” Bell said. “I’m looking for something that would’ve been in the paper in the mid-1970s.”
“Gotcha.” There was forgiveness in his nod. “So you need the clip file.” Frazey pointed to the wobbly row of stacked-up boxes that rose on both sides of the narrow room. The top box on each stack scraped the pressed-tin ceiling. “They go all the way back to the late 1880s.” Before online archiving, newspapers hired workers to clip out stories and arrange them in small gray envelopes according to date, subject matter, key words, and byline. Most newspapers eventually discarded their clip files, either destroying them or donating them to libraries. Frazey did neither. The boxes containing the long decades of Gazette clip files were still here in all of their old-fashioned profusion, constituting either an historical treasure or a fire hazard, depending on your perspective.
That wasn’t what Bell was after today, either.
“I need complete copies of the paper from the 1970s,” she said.
He looked at her quizzically, so she elaborated: “Every single page of every single issue. The whole page.”
The idea had come to her early that morning, as she sat at her kitchen table and finished a second cup of coffee. Normally a relentlessly rational person, Bell had allowed herself a brief vacation from logic and reason: It was as if the bones themselves, now that they’d been lifted to the surface of the world, were speaking to her. They whispered a new plan.
As a teenager growing up in Acker’s Gap, Bell had been through the clip files many, many times, searching for any mention of a Dave Hickock. She searched under D and under H; she searched under her mother’s name and her father’s name, too. She searched under R for roofing. Under C for construction. Nothing.
But online databases and clip files both had the same flaw: You could only find what you were looking for. You had to search the index under a subject or a proper name or a keyword—but if that didn’t work, you were lost. And only the articles were archived. What didn’t get put into a clip file or an online archive was the surrounding material, the filler, the connective tissue of a newspaper: the advertisements.
Frazey dug an index finger into his right ear, moving that finger around until he’d finished with the itch. “Well, we got microfilmed copies of entire issues. But nobody looks at that shit anymore. Takes forever to open them little boxes and then load them little strips. Then you gotta twist them little black knobs back and forth and back and forth. Then you gotta stare at that big bright screen until you think you’re gonna go blind and then you gotta—”
“Do you have a microfilm reader?” Bell said, interrupting him.
“Somewhere around here, yeah.”
“Find it.” She took note of his face. He had his pride. “Please,” she added.
“Well, gimme a minute.”
While Frazey rummaged and mumbled to himself, and then rummaged and mumbled some more, Bell unpiled a stack of water-stained boxes that was blocking the microfilm cabinet in the corner. After a quick search—thank God nobody had messed up the sequential order, or she’d be here for weeks—she took out two small green cardboard boxes, the ones marked 1975 and 1976.
Twelve minutes later Frazey rolled a big black machine on a black metal cart in her direction. The cart’s tiny wheels made a drumming sound as they rode across the wavy, uneven plank floor. “Here you go,” he said. “It was behind about five layers of furniture and dirt and shit in the back. Old couches and mimeograph machines and whatnot. Think it’ll do the trick, but no promises.” He located the one decent chair in the room and, carrying it in front of him by its padded arms, placed it before the screen. “Knock yourself out.”
It was grindingly tedious work. Frazey left her alone, returning to his living quarters to perform whatever activities constituted his morning ablutions. Bell was grateful for that; she didn’t like it when people hovered.
She started with the issue of the Gazette for the last week of 1976 and worked her way backward. Page by page, week by week, the events of that year unspooled in reverse before her eyes, packed into skinny columns broken up by ads for tires sales and vacuum cleaners and pills guaranteed to restore pep and vitality. First was the national news—a murder spree by a killer known as the Son of Sam begins in New York City, Jimmy Carter defeats Gerald Ford for the presidency—and then local: Raythune County commissioners vote to build a courthouse extension. Chalmers Purcell, a senior at Acker’s Gap High School, wins third place in the state science fair. A family of four is killed in a one-car accident in the middle of the night out on Riley Pike; the driver, Melvin Lee, apparently fell asleep at the wheel of his blue-and-white VW bus and slammed into a tree. They were coming back from a trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, to see Mrs. Lee’s mother.
Two hours later, her eyes burning from reading and her wrists aching from the repetitive motion of turning the tiny dials that brought each page up on the screen, Bell finally finished with 1976. She retrieved the tape reel and placed it back in its box. Moved on to 1975.
She had just begun reading the Gazette issue from the third week of October 1975 when she found it: a small display ad in the lower left-hand corner of page 23: NEED A NEW ROOF? CALL HANEY ROOFING. There was an amateurish-looking cartoon sketch of what was surely supposed to be a frustrated homeowner, a man with a puzzled frown on his face and a big raindrop poised to drop onto his head. Below that, in small type, was a phone number and these words: Sheila Haney, Pres., Dave Hickok, project supervisor.
Now she understood why she’d never been able to discover any mention of Dave Hickok in the online archives or the clip files. Each time she’d entered his name in the search engines, she had received the dispiriting reply: RESULTS 0 out of 0. It was because he didn’t own the company. “Hickok” wasn’t part of the official name. But here he was.
Her hand trembled with excitement. This was the first
mention she’d ever unearthed of Dave Hickok. He did exist, after all. Which meant she could track him down. Interview him. Find out what he knew about her mother’s disappearance.
Bell copied the precise wording of the ad into her notebook. Then she sent a quick text to Assistant Prosecutor Rhonda Lovejoy. They might be able to trace Sheila Haney through the business records of Haney Roofing, even if the company didn’t exist anymore; the county always maintained meticulous records of businesses, because businesses meant sales taxes. Surely Haney would’ve kept in touch with her partner, right? With any luck, Haney could lead them to Dave Hickok—and to whatever he had to say about Teresa Dolan, about their relationship and about the circumstances that led to her being murdered and dumped in the ground near a lonely county road. Grim as the truth might be, Bell was already relishing the thought of questioning Hickok. She’d lived with the questions for so long that the prospect of answers was exciting.
“Pay dirt?” Frazey asked. He’d just returned from the back room. He was still in sweatpants but he’d replaced the pajama top with a flannel shirt. He peered at her, tilting his grizzled head sideways. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you look kinda happy, Mrs. Elkins. Not used to seeing you this way.”
“Yeah, I believe I’ve found—” Her cell rang. She held up a finger in Donnie’s direction. “Let me get this. Hang on.”
It was Fogelsong. “Belfa,” he said. “Don’t think that team from Virginia Tech’ll be coming back this way anytime soon. They’ve had enough.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They found another set of bones last night. Least a mile and a half away from the first one—over in the area they’ve been working ever since they had to switch locations. Looks like this victim was hit by a car. Bones’re all broken—pelvis, back, legs, arms, neck. Lab’s already made a positive ID.”
“Who was it?”
“They got lucky. He’d been in the military, so there were dental records available. Name was David Blanton Hickok.”
