Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  “Can’t say.”

  Bell put her left hand on the newel post of the stair railing close to where she stood. She needed to hold on to something. Oakes knew better than to offer assistance.

  “What was the cause, Jake? I mean—yeah, the roads were in bad shape, with the snow and all. That switchback can be a bitch. And it was dark. But Darlene knows her way around these mountains. Was there anything else? Any other contributing factors?”

  Oakes looked at her.

  “Ma’am?” he said. He seemed slightly perplexed.

  Bell waited. She did not know what was going on, and waited for him to enlighten her.

  “Ma’am,” Oakes repeated. He was tentative now, as if she might be testing him. “We don’t have the toxicology report yet, of course, but it’s an easy guess. There was a strong smell of alcohol on the body. And vomit in the car. She was drunk. That’s how she lost control and hit the tree. She was impaired.”

  “No.” Bell’s objection was sharp and quick. “No way. I was with her. She had a few sips from one drink. That’s it. She was definitely not drunk.”

  “Ma’am, I’ve already checked with the bartender at the Tie Yard. He was none too happy to have to answer his door first thing on a Sunday morning, but he remembered her right away. Recognized the picture. He served her four shots in a row. Some guy came in and sat down next to her at the bar, he said. Looked like they hit it off right away. The guy bought her a few more. By that time, she was slurring her words. Bartender finally had to cut her off.”

  Bell was irritated now. “And I’m telling you he’s wrong. I was there, Jake. He’s got her confused with somebody else. Darlene had one drink. And we walked out together—just the two of us. She was fine. Totally sober.”

  The deputy flipped a few pages in his notebook, finding the passage he wanted. “What time did you leave the bar?”

  “Nine thirty at the latest. I was home by ten forty-five.”

  “Well, that’s our problem, right there.” He tapped the page. “Bartender says he came on duty about ten. She was already there, shotgunning her drinks. She didn’t clear out until after one. She was pissed as hell when he told her she’d had enough.”

  Bell let the information settle. “She must have gone back. She must have pulled over somewhere and waited for me to pass—and then doubled back. Returned to the bar.”

  “Could be.”

  “Still doesn’t make sense. Even back in law school, I never saw Darlene touch so much as a beer. I mean—never. And nobody gossiped about her having a problem with alcohol, either. Believe me—if she did, there would have been talk.”

  Oakes frowned. “Okay, well—there was something in her other coat pocket. A blue coin. About the size of a poker chip.”

  “What was it?”

  “A sobriety medallion. From Alcoholics Anonymous. Represents one year’s sobriety. Looks like your friend might have been hiding a secret or two.”

  Aren’t we all, Bell thought grimly. Aren’t we all.

  Three Boys

  1938

  Their names were Harmon Strayer, Vic Plumley, and Alvie Sherrill, and they were always together.

  If you saw Harm, you knew you’d see Alvie, and if you saw Vic, you could set your watch by the fact that Alvie and Harm would be coming along less than a minute later. They lived on the same block and they were roughly the same age. They had each been born in 1926, and so the milestones of life—first day of school, first paying job, first kiss—came to them at the same time. They were each other’s reference points and touchstones of memory. Later, when they were middle-aged men, if one of them blanked on a date or a detail, one of the other two could fill it in for him. So nothing was forgotten.

  They lived in Norbitt, West Virginia. It was a small town and a dingy one, the county seat of Barr County. Barr County, too, was small and dingy. Town and county echoed each other’s insignificance, like two smudged mirrors set face-to-face, forever reflecting back a third-rate version of eternity.

  It was a town that did not matter, in a county nobody cared about, in a state that people overlooked except when they were making jokes about it.

  But that was about to change.

  There was a darkness gathering in the skies, a darkness that soon would swallow up the world. Places like Norbitt were about to become as important as the great cities—London, Paris, Vienna, Moscow—because the men who rescued the future were born here. They were born in the small towns of West Virginia, and in the small towns of Kentucky and Arkansas and Kansas and Maine and Oklahoma and Montana and Pennsylvania. The fact that most of the world had never heard of these towns would not matter anymore.

  These three boys, like boys from other threadbare, soiled towns in threadbare, soiled states, were just a few years away from the great adventure of their lives: saving the world.

  Vic Plumley was the restless one. The hungry one. The one with the most potential. He was big and handsome, with thick dark hair and eyes that had started out as pale, almost translucent blue, but by the time he was in junior high school, had turned a deep indigo shade that made the things he said seem earnest and sincere, even profound, if he looked at you a certain way when he was saying them.

  His father, Frank Plumley, was a salesman, and he was richer and more successful than the other fathers. His mother, Vivian, was prettier than the other mothers. So Vic had a sense of himself as himself—as, that is, a real person, a person with desires and a destiny. And he wanted out. He had been led to believe that he could achieve things in the world, real things. Norbitt would never be big enough for him. Barr County would not be big enough, either. The whole state of West Virginia, as a matter of fact, was too small to hold all of Vic Plumley’s aspirations. He once complained to Harm that being born in West Virginia was like buying the wrong-sized suitcase. You got it home and then you looked at everything you needed to fit in there, and you realized you’d made a mistake. You needed something bigger. It was infuriating.

  On the day of Vic’s twelfth birthday—Alvie had turned twelve the month before, and Harmon would turn twelve in a few months—the three of them sat on the back stoop of Vic’s house. It was a Saturday morning in the early spring. The air felt rinsed and clean, which was unusual; typically the air in Norbitt smelled as if it carried flecks of something foul in it. Some of the mothers wouldn’t even hang their family’s wet clothes outside to dry on the line because, they said, the smell would get in there and stick. You’d have to wash those clothes all over again. And again after that. But today—ah, today was glorious, as if a seine net had been dragged across the sky, catching all the dark particles, separating them out, leaving only the clarity, the sparkle.

  In the distance, the mountains were silver-black triangles. The peaks looked as if they had been dusted with confectioner’s sugar.

  Three boys: Vic, Harm, and Alvie.

  Vic was short for Victor. Harmon was commonly known as Harm. Alvie, though, was always Alvie. Some people thought it was a nickname—a diminutive for Albert, say, or Alfred or Alvin—but it was not. The name on his birth certificate was Alvie Sherrill. No middle name. The Sherrills did not believe in middle names. Middle names were too fancy. Too showy. Too sissified. Alvie’s father, Leonard Sherrill, was a Baptist minister, and he knew the devil could smell pride on a person, and use it to get his red hooks into that person’s soul, the way a wild animal is instantly aware of a garbage can with the lid left off, even if it’s miles away.

  Vic had already gotten his birthday present from his father: a two-year-old Ford pickup. Vic had been driving since he was nine years old. His father would put a Charleston phone book on the seat so that Vic could see over the dashboard of the family Packard. Frank Plumley rode along, too, on those initial journeys, sitting sideways in the passenger seat so that he could watch his boy at the wheel. Frank kept his right arm thrust straight out, bracing himself against the dash. Just in case. He had a lot of faith in Vic’s abilities—the kid had great reflexes and crack eye
sight—but still. Nine years old.

  Now Vic was twelve, and there would be no stopping him. First thing that morning, as he had just related to his two best friends, his father had come downstairs and sort of burst into the kitchen. He threw something at him. Vic did not know what it was, and so he turned his head, not wanting to get beaned, and the keys landed in his corn flakes. The milk splashed all over the tablecloth.

  “You’re kidding,” Alvie said. He laughed through his nose, in and out, like a snorting horse rejecting his feed. “What’d your mom say?”

  “She was damned upset, tell you that,” Vic replied. The cursing he had always done in private had recently made its debut in public. Harm and Alvie were deeply admiring; they, too, often said damn or hell or shit or cock or fuck or even the most taboo of all—goddamn, notorious for its blasphemy—in conversation with each other, but they still lacked the courage to utter a curse word out in the wide world. At school, for instance. It was an especially high hurdle for Alvie, the preacher’s son.

  But Vic had done it. He had started a few weeks ago, and now every other sentence was spiced with a damn or a hell. He didn’t care who was listening. His foul mouth just added to his legend.

  “And then what?” Harm said.

  “My old man said, ‘Whaddaya think those keys go to, son?’”

  “And what did you say?” The question came from Alvie.

  “I said, ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me, Pop?’”

  Alvie squirmed a little in his place on the stoop, half in pleasure, half in apprehension. He knew what would have happened if he had ever talked that way to his own father, and he could not help but picture it. The Reverend Sherrill would have unloaded on him. No question. Alvie had been warned to keep a civil tongue in his head. To speak with respect to his elders. Something as fresh as “Why don’t you tell me, Pop?” would have netted him a fist-sized welt on the side of his face, a face so gray and narrow that Alvie had been told more than once that he looked like a rat. And he did, too, but not just because of the color and shape of his face. His front teeth protruded brashly, and he had small eyes and a pointy nose.

  “And what did your father say to that?” Harm said. He, too, was enthralled.

  Vic leaned back. He was on the second step from the top, and he arched his back against the front edge of the top step and spread his elbows, balancing himself. He stretched out his legs and kicked the back of his sneakers against the wood of the third step down. First one shoe, and then the other shoe. Harm and Alvie sat on the top step, on either side of Vic. They scooted over, to give him room to sprawl. Vic liked to sprawl.

  “Pop said, ‘Well sir, I heard a rumor it was somebody’s birthday. That true?’”

  “And what did you say to that?” Harm asked.

  “Lemme guess,” Alvie said, breaking in eagerly before Vic could answer. He was giddy with certainty. “I bet you said, ‘Hell, yes, it’s somebody’s birthday. It’s my fucking birthday.’ Right? Ain’t that what you said?”

  Alvie had overstepped. He had gotten caught up in the story and forgotten himself. He knew it right away. Vic did not say anything for a long time. It was probably no more than a minute, but it felt like forever to Alvie. He could swear he felt his life leaking away, like a glass of milk he’d accidentally knocked over. He’d have to make it up to Vic somehow. He was a fool.

  “No,” Vic said. His voice was no longer lazy and no longer amused. It was cold. “That’s not what I said. What I said was, ‘You know whose birthday it is, you fat old man, and if those keys belong to a car, it damned well better have gas in the tank.’ That’s what I said.”

  Neither Harm nor Alvie believed for a second that Vic Plumley had talked that way to his father. Vic was just showing off. But you could not challenge him.

  “And then,” Vic said, and once again his voice had that smug, lazy sound to it, “he took me outside and he showed me what was parked in the driveway.” Vic sat up straight. “He’d parked it right over there. So’s I could see it, first thing.”

  They all looked. They were awestruck, just as they’d been when they arrived here today and Vic came out the back door, slamming the door behind him, and they saw what was sitting in the Plumley driveway, the widest driveway on the whole block: a cream-colored 1936 Ford pickup with red trim. It was a beaut. That was the word Harm used when he first spotted it, and Alvie started to make fun of the word but then Vic said, “I like that word, Harm. A beaut. That’s just what it is,” and so Alvie had to say that he liked the word, too. It was the perfect word: beaut. Vic’s birthday present was a beaut.

  The pickup had a flathead V8 with a three-speed transmission and a 12-volt electrical system. Its top speed was just over 80 mph. It was not brand new, but it was only two years old, and that was fine. That was plenty close enough to new.

  Harm and Alvie were agog. They had not even ridden in it yet, and they were almost speechless with admiration.

  There were only two rules, Vic told them: He had to let his father know when he was going to drive it. And he couldn’t take it past the Norbitt city limits unless his father was with him.

  The legalities of a twelve-year-old driving a car were not a concern. The state of West Virginia had been issuing driver’s licenses since 1917, but only began testing drivers—the test was a formality, nothing more—in 1931. You were supposed to be sixteen to get a license, but driving without one was a ho-hum offense. The deputies didn’t care. They had other things on their minds. Besides, if you were wealthy enough to have a car, then you—and your family—were the kind of people whom the deputies went out of their way to please.

  Suddenly Vic’s mother was there. She startled them, opening the screen door and initiating the drawn-out creak of its tired hinges. They had been gazing at the Ford and were ignorant of her presence until they heard that creak. Then they turned and looked up, taking in the shape of her, the way she held her arm out straight to prop open the door. Her other hand was curled and perched on her hip. Her hair was long and thick and blond. Harm felt his heart jump in his chest like a fish.

  “You boys have your breakfast yet?” she said. She had a low, soft voice, a voice with a purr in it. That voice had a peculiar effect on Harm. He felt, along with the flopping heart, the heat rising in his cheeks and a flush moving across the back of his neck. And that was not the only thing that happened to his body when he was in the presence of Vic’s mother. The other thing he couldn’t talk about, not even with Alvie—and God knows he would never discuss it with Vic.

  Harm’s mother, Sylvia, swore that Vivian Plumley rehearsed that voice of hers, trained it, so that it would sound sexy and “drive the men wild.” That was Sylvia’s exact phrase: “drive the men wild.” Like most of the women in Norbitt, Sylvia did not like Vivian Plumley. Harm had overhead his mother and some of the other mothers talking about Vivian, claiming that she had been observed at the edge of the woods a few months back, standing by her car, shouting until she was hoarse, trying to permanently lower her voice. Make it sexier. Was it true? Maybe. Harm didn’t know. But the other things about her—her jutting breasts and her full hips and her mouth, a mouth that was never without a generous splash of red lipstick—had nothing to do with shouting at the woods.

  Harm could not think about her too much. If he did, things happened to him, confusing things. Things he could not control.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Alvie said. “I had my breakfast.”

  “Harmon? How about you?” Vivian Plumley said, looking down at him.

  “Me, too, ma’am.”

  She seemed a little disappointed. Harm wondered if he should have said no. If he had lied, she would have invited him into the kitchen and he could have been in the same room with her for as long as it took him to eat a second breakfast. Oatmeal, probably, is what it would have been. Or maybe pancakes. Hard to say.

  The screen door closed. She did not slam it. Only kids slammed screen doors, Harm thought.

  For some reason, he wished
she had slammed it. Just let it go. That would have put something final and absolute between the moment when Vivian Plumley was there, and the next moment, when she wasn’t there. A dividing line. A boundary. But without the slam, it was as if she might still be there behind him, waiting at the screen door, watching. He knew she wasn’t—she never spied on them, not like his own mother did—but without the slam, she could be. She could still be standing there, with that slight smile on her lips, a smile of faint amusement but not ridicule or mockery. Without the slam, she continued to be present. It was as if she spent the day with him. Invisible—but still there. Distracting him.

  Harm thought about Vivian Plumley lots of days, of course, but this day was one that he would remember for as long as he remembered things.

  Because this day—the day of Vic’s twelfth birthday—was the day they committed murder. The three of them did it. Each boy was equally responsible.

  Okay, well. Maybe Vic was a little more responsible. That’s what Harm and Alvie both thought later, and who could say it wasn’t so, but they kept that conclusion to themselves. Because it seemed grubby and small and disloyal. In the event, they agreed that the blame would be apportioned equally, that they would think of it one way and one way only, and that was how they would learn to live with what they had done.

  Chapter Three

  The snow rose high on both sides of the road. The plow had been out here early, its blade pushing back a thick continuous curl of snow like a razor slicing through shaving cream on pitted gray skin. Carla had not actually seen the plow—that was hours ago—but she could imagine it doing its work based on the size of the ramparts lining the road: the heavy scraping sound, the patient, straight-ahead effort.

  She was grateful for the clear road. She needed to make this journey in a hurry, before she changed her mind.

  She had stopped just once.

  “All outta Diet Dr Pepper.” The old woman behind the counter at the little store had offered five words and no smile. She wore an oversized flannel shirt. Her hair was a runaway blaze of white fuzz. She looked very tired. Everything sagged—her face, her breasts, the skin on her neck. “Got Coke and Sprite and Dew, though.”