by Julia Keller
Marge closed her eyes and shuddered. “I never had anything to do with her after that. And—God help me—I surely should’ve said something to somebody. Called the authorities. Told ’em what she’d told me. But the truth is, Mrs. Elkins, I wasn’t sure I believed her. It sounded like bragging, the way she talked. Not like something she was confessing. Not like something that really happened. And that made me wonder. If I told somebody, maybe it would turn out to be a joke, after all, and Evelyn would deny she’d ever said any such thing, and they’d put me away in one of those places for people who don’t know what’s real and what’s not, and they’d forget about me there, and— ”
Marge stopped to take several breaths. Her bony shoulders lifted and fell with each breath. She gave Bell a beseeching look, a look that spoke of her desire for forgiveness. “Given what you’ve told me here today,” Marge said, “I dearly wish I’d had the courage to risk it. To alert somebody. But Evelyn scared me. Scared me something awful. She was as bad as a rabid dog—almost foaming at the mouth, when she was angry. Told me that if I ever said a word, just one word, she’d come into my room at night and she’d— ”
“Don’t fret about it,” Bell said. “It was a long time ago. Whatever evidence there might have been is gone now. No one could’ve done a thing. And you would’ve put yourself in danger for nothing.” She had a vision of Evelyn Prather, her mean little eyes and flailing fists; even at ninety-seven, she was formidable. “Wonder how she kept Enoch Wallace quiet?”
“Oh,” Marge said, “he died about three months later, Evelyn said. Bladder cancer. Then she married Artie Prather. He passed away right before she moved in here.”
Bell stood up. She could see that the old woman was getting tired; her head was bobbing forward, her chin nearly bumping her chest. Telling the terrible story had taxed her.
“Thank you,” Bell said, and she clasped Marge’s pale hand. “One more thing, just for the record. You mentioned that Evelyn called her son weak. Weak and small. But from what I’ve heard, that’s the last thing he was. He sounds pretty damned strong to me. In fact, Dave Hickock sounds like he was a hell of a man.”
Marge used the dwindling bits of her strength to nod.
Bell went down the stairs. She paused in the hallway. Evelyn Prather was close by; she could almost feel the hatred radiating from the old woman’s room. Bell had a powerful urge to barge into that room and confront her. Tell her what she knew and what she thought of her. Even if Bell couldn’t make her pay for her crime officially, she could cause her some distress. At least ruin her day.
“Evelyn,” Bell said.
She stood in the threshold of the room. Evelyn’s chair was facing the door; her body was slumped to one side, eyes pinched shut, mouth frozen in a frown. She was sleeping. Occasionally she would quiver all over, nudged by a nightmare or by a spasm of physical pain.
“Evelyn,” Bell repeated. The old woman didn’t awaken. She was completely vulnerable now, as vulnerable as Dave Hickcock and Teresa Dolan had been on that evening so very long ago, as the sun slipped behind the mountain. The last night of their lives. Prather’s vulnerability came from her age and her frailties; theirs had come from an unwillingness to believe that anyone could really do what she had done to them, that any heart could be so completely filled with hate.
Bell’s anger slowly dissipated into pity. Pity, she realized, was the most fitting vengeance of all against Evelyn Prather. The old woman would despise being pitied. She’d rather die. And death was close at hand, eager to grant that wish.
* * *
Bell and Shirley walked out of JP’s. They paused on the street. Darkness was coming earlier and earlier these days, as this part of the world descended deeper and deeper into fall.
“Need a ride home?” Bell said. She had asked Shirley to meet her here tonight and had filled her in on all that she’d learned about their mother, about Dave Hickok, about the machinations of Evelyn Prather. They’d ordered dinner but mostly ignored it while they talked. Bell had two other people to bring up to speed as well—Nick Fogelsong and Carla—but Shirley came first. She always would.
“Bobo’s picking me up,” Shirley answered. “Be here any minute. You go on. I’m fine.”
Bell didn’t move. She wasn’t ready to part from her sister. Shirley sensed that, and nodded; she’d talk, then. Back in the diner, she’d done more listening than talking.
“Wonder why Daddy never looked for her,” Shirley said. “I don’t mean because he loved her. I mean because she did the housework and cooked his meals.”
“Embarrassed, probably. She was spending a lot of time with another man. And even though it wasn’t a love affair, Daddy probably wasn’t sure about that. Bet he preferred that folks suspect him of murder than believe he couldn’t keep his wife in line.”
“Sounds about right.” Shirley put a hand on the back of her thin neck. Rubbed it. “You know what, Belfa? Part of me wants to drive over to that old folks’ home right now and jam a pillow over Evelyn Prather’s face. Two minutes is all it would take. Three, tops.”
Seeing her sister’s look of concern, Shirley quickly added, “Oh, hell, Belfa. I’m kidding. I like revenge as much as anybody else, but I’m not going back to prison for killing some old bitch who’s already got one foot in the grave and the other one on a muddy hill.”
Bell waited, and then she said, “Granted, it’s a hard thing to live with. Knowing what we know, but not being able to do anything about it.”
“Lots of things are hard to live with.”
Bell, though, still needed to justify herself. “Even if I was crazy enough to bring charges, I can’t imagine a judge letting it go to trial. She’s ninety-seven, for God’s sake. And she’d just deny everything. The things Marge Hastings told me—pure hearsay. I believe every word, but it’s still hearsay.”
Now Shirley wrapped her arms around herself, trying to thwart the chill. “Our mother was a good friend. A good woman. She didn’t run out on us. If she’d been able to, she would’ve come back home that night. Tucked us in. And maybe—one day—she would’ve found the strength to leave Daddy. To take us away. Least we know that now. It’s something.”
“No,” Bell said. The thickness had risen in her throat again. “It’s everything.”
An old man was walking past them on the street. He touched the front of his cowboy hat, without breaking stride, and nodded to them. Bell waited until he was out of earshot to continue. “Look, I know you were mad at me for pushing ahead,” she said. “You saw it as a betrayal. As me believing Daddy’s story. But that wasn’t it at all. You get that now, right? He’s still the worst bastard who ever walked the face of the earth. He did a ton of unforgivable things—he just didn’t do this unforgivable thing. He didn’t kill our mother.”
Shirley nodded. “Yeah. Suppose so. But you know what? I wanted him to be guilty. Wanted it bad. I’ve been hating him my whole life—alive or dead, it don’t make no never-mind to me—and I think that’s why I didn’t want you to look into this. I know what you’re capable of, little sister. When you put your back into it, you can move mountains. And I guess I was afraid—no, there weren’t no guessing about it, I knew—that you’d get to the bottom of it and it might turn out that Daddy didn’t do it. And that was one less thing I could hate him for.”
“Plenty of items left on the list, Shirley.”
“Yeah.”
“I really do understand, though. That passion—your hatred of Daddy—well, I think it’s a big part of what kept you going. Through all those years in prison. All those terrible years.” Bell started to put a hand on her sister’s arm, but didn’t. They rarely touched or hugged. They didn’t relate that way. They had done so long ago, when they slept side by side on a battered couch in the living room of a dilapidated trailer, but not anymore. “You know what I think, Shirley? I think everybody has to figure out what works for them. What helps them survive. Hating somebody is wrong, maybe—but not when it’s all you have. Not then.�
�
They stood together another minute or so. Neither spoke. Neither, just now, needed to. The night was clear and cold, warning of a hard winter to come. Above them was a curved sliver of moon. It was the color of bone.
Read on for an excerpt from
the first book in the series
featuring Bell Elkins
A Killing in the Hills
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Copyright © 2012 by Julia Keller
She didn’t come here often, because there was nothing left.
When she did come, it tended to be at dusk, and she would stand and look at the bare spot, at the place where the trailer had been. It was only a few dozen yards away from Comer Creek.
You could smell the creek, a damp rotting smell that was somehow also sweet, even before you could see it. The woods around it made a tight screen, as if the branches were gripping hands in a game of Red Rover. Daring you to break through. You could hear the creek, too, its nervous hum, especially in the early spring, when the frequent rains made the water run high and wild.
When she was a little girl, she would play on the banks of the creek in the summertime. Her sister Shirley kept an eye on her. In no time at all, Bell—her real name was Belfa but everybody called her Bell, because “Belfa,” Shirley had told her, sounded dowdy, old-fashioned, like a name you’d hear at a quilting bee or a taffy pull, whatever that was—would get astonishingly muddy. Not that she cared. The mud squirted between her toes and drifted under her fingernails and stuck to her hair. Somehow it got smeared behind her ears, too, and across the back of her neck. Bell could remember how glorious it felt on those summer afternoons, playing in the mud, glazing herself with it. Soft and cool. A second skin. One that made her slippery all over. Hard to catch and hold.
Safe.
Or so it seemed.
Everything was lost now. The scattered black sticks that had once been the metal frame of the trailer had gone a long time ago, breaking apart, sinking into a bath of old ashes. The brittle gray flakes were scooped up by the wind and carried away.
The woods should have taken over the spot by this time, covered it, the way the woods gradually came to cover everything else. But the ground under the trailer had been burned so badly that nothing would grow here. It was too scorched. It was a dead thing.
As dead as her childhood.
On those rare occasions when she did come back, she would stand at the spot while the West Virginia wilderness—green, brown, silver, blue, and black—turned, with the forward march of darkness, into a single color. Everything melted into one thing.
Once, standing there, she heard an owl. It wasn’t the lilting and musical Who-WHO Who-WHO of the owl’s cry in fairy tales, the sentinel voice of wisdom and patience. It was a horrible screeching, raw and stark. A red slash of sound.
She flinched, trembled. This was the scene of a terrible crime, and the owl’s cry was a warning.
She did not return often, because there was nothing here. Only the past. And for that, she knew, she did not have to come back.
Because the past traveled with her.
Chapter One
The old men sat around the little plastic table in the crowded restaurant, a trio of geezers in shiny black jackets, mumbling, chuckling, shaking their heads and then blowing across the tops of their brown cardboard cups of coffee, pushing out their flabby pink old-man lips to do so.
Then sipping. Then blowing again.
Jesus, Carla thought. What a bunch of losers.
Watching them made her feel, in every restless inch of her seventeen-year-old body, so infinitely superior to these withered fools and their pathetic little rituals that she was pretty sure it showed; she was fairly certain her contempt was half visible, rising from her skin in a skittish little shimmer. The late-morning sunshine flooding in through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls made everything look sharper, rawer, the edges more intense. You couldn’t hide a thing in here.
She would remember this moment for the rest of her life. Because it was the marker. The line.
Because at this point, she would realize later, these three old men had less than a minute to live.
One of them must’ve told a joke, because now his two buddies laughed—it sounded, Carla thought, like agitated horses, it was a kind of high-pitched, snorting, snickery thing—and they all shuffled their feet appreciatively under the table. They were flaky-bald, too, and probably incontinent and impotent and incoherent and all the rest of it.
So what’s left? That’s what Carla was wondering. After you hit forty, fifty, sixty, what’s the freakin’ point anymore, anyway?
Slumped forward, skinny elbows propped on the top of her very own little plastic table, Carla used the heel of her right hand to push a crooked slab of straight dark hair up and off her forehead. Her other hand cradled her chin.
Her nose ring itched. Actually, everything itched. Including her thoughts.
This place was called the Salty Dawg. It was a regional chain that sold burgers and fries, shakes and malts, and biscuits topped with slabs of ham or chicken and a choice of gravy: red-eye or sausage. But it didn’t sell hot dogs, which at least would’ve justified the stupid name, a charmless bit of illogic that drove Carla crazy whenever she came in here and slid into one of the crappy plastic chairs bolted to the greasy floor. If she didn’t have to, she’d never be wasting her time in this joint, and she always wondered why anybody ever came in here willingly.
Then she remembered. If you were an old fart, they gave you your coffee at a discount.
So there you go. There’s your reason to live. You get a dime off your damned coffee.
Freaks.
Carla was vaguely ashamed of the flicks of menace that roved randomly across her mind, like a street gang with its switchblades open. She knew she was being a heartless bitch—but hell, they were just thoughts, okay? It’s not like she’d ever say anything rude out loud.
She was bored, though, and speculating about the old farts was recreational.
To get a better look, without being totally obvious about it, she let her head loll casually to one side, like a flower suddenly too heavy for its stalk, and narrowed and shifted her eyes, while keeping her chin centered in her palm.
Now the old men were laughing again. They opened their mouths too wide, and she could see that some of their teeth were stained a weird greenish yellow-brown that looked like the color of the lettuce she’d sometimes find way in the back of the fridge, the kind her mom bought and then forgot about. It was, Carla thought with a shudder of oddly pleasurable repugnance, the Official Color of Old Man Teeth.
She didn’t know any of them. Or maybe she did. All old men looked alike, right? And old towns like the one she lived in—Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, or as Carla and her friends preferred to call it, The Middle of Freakin’ Nowhere—were filled with old men. With interchangeable old farts. It was just another crappy fact she had to deal with in her crappy life, on her way to what was surely an even crappier future.
Her thoughts had been leaning that way all morning long, leaning toward disgust and despair, and the constant proximity of gross old men in the Salty Dawg was one of the reasons why.
Another was that her mother was late to pick her up.
Again.
So Carla was pissed.
They had agreed on 11 A.M. It was now 11:47. And no sign of good old Mom, who also wasn’t answering her cell. Carla Elkins was forced to sit here, getting free refills on her Diet Coke and playing with her french fries, pulling them out of the red cardboard ark one by one and stacking them up like tiny salty Lincoln Logs. Building a wall. A fort, maybe. A greasy little fort. She’d just had her nails done the day before over at Le Salon, and the black polish—she was picking up another french fry now, and another, and another, and another, while her other hand continued to prop up her chin—looked even blacker by contrast
with the washed-out beige of each skinny french fry.
Her mother hated black nail polish, which was why Carla chose it. She wasn’t crazy about it herself, but if it pissed off her mom, she’d make the sacrifice.
The Salty Dawg was right down the street from the Acker’s Gap Community Resource Center—the RC, everybody called it—which was a long, square, flat-roofed dump of a place with ginormous plate-glass windows cut into three sides of the icky yellow brick. Somebody’d once told Carla that, a million years ago, the RC had been a Ford dealership.
That was Acker’s Gap for you: Everything had once been something else. There was nothing new. Nothing fresh or different. Ever.
She had to endure her court-mandated Teen Anger Management Workshop at the RC on Saturday mornings, 8:00 to 10:30, during which time the counselor would go around the circle and ask each of them what she or he was feeling. What I’m feeling, Carla wanted to say, is that this is a lame-ass way to spend a Saturday morning. But she didn’t. Usually, when her turn came, she just scooted a little bit forward and a little bit back on the chair’s tiny wheels and stared at her black fingernails and mumbled, I’m, um, feeling kind of mixed up inside. Her friend Lonnie Prince had told her once that adults want to hear that kind of thing, so that they can nod and look all concerned and show that they remember how hard it is to be a teenager, even though it was, like, a thousand years ago.
The counselor always dismissed them right at 10:30. On the dot. He didn’t want to spend one more minute with them than they wanted to spend with him. Half an hour after that, her mother was supposed to pick her up at the Salty Dawg. Her mother’s office was just up the street, in the county courthouse, and she was working this Saturday, so it was a good plan.
