Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

“Where did you get the money to bribe Groves and Marcy Coates?” Bell asked.

  Lenny shrugged. He was an explorer at the mouth of a cave, deciding how far to proceed. Checking his flashlight. Calculating odds. Okay: Just go.

  “Me and some buddies, we been holding up gas stations all over the county. Works real good. Saved every penny of my share for this—to get those folks to do what my dad wanted ’em to. That church—it don’t pay him shit. So I had to help.”

  “How did you know Darlene would be here that night?”

  “She told me.”

  “She told you?”

  “Yeah. We’d been getting together to talk sometimes, when she was back in Muth County to visit her dad. Like in the old days.” He looked down. He did not like this part. “My dad told me to keep in touch with her. Then she told me that she was coming to the Tie Yard on Saturday night to meet an old friend. She meant you, I guess.” He changed his position on the bar stool, shifting his bony butt in a doomed attempt to find some comfort. “So I got here, too. Stayed out of sight. Watched you two from over there.” He jerked his head in the direction of a booth in the corner, across the room from the one in which Bell and Darlene had sat.

  “And after that,” Bell said. “Once she’d left at the same time I did—how did you get her to drive back?”

  “I called her. She’d given me her cell number when her dad was first getting sick. Asked me to keep an eye on him when she couldn’t be there.” His mouth twitched. “She was driving down the mountain. I told her I was real bad off. Told her I was thinking about killing myself. Just getting a shotgun and doing it. I knew that would get her back here. She was softhearted that way. When she got my call she pulled over into a patch of woods. Turned off her lights and waited for you to go by. She told me about all that, once she’d gotten back. We sat at the other end of the bar. Right over there.” He scooted the empty bottle around on the soaked coaster. Bits of wet cardboard were tearing off. “She always felt guilty about leaving Norbitt.”

  “Darlene was your friend, Lenny,” Bell said. She said it quietly, forcing Lenny to lean in to hear her. She needed him close for the next few questions. “So why did you want her to die?”

  “I didn’t. It was my dad.”

  “But you went along with it.”

  “My dad—he runs the show, okay? You don’t go against him. Not if you know what’s good for you. He said Darlene was asking too many questions at that Thornapple place. Things that oughta just be left alone.”

  Bell shook her head. “I don’t buy it. You do a lot for your dad—but causing the death of your best friend? No. What’s the real reason, Lenny?”

  “I told you.”

  “And I said I don’t believe you.”

  The standoff wasn’t much of a standoff. A petulant Lenny shoved away the empty bottle that he’d been playing with. It nearly capsized.

  “The bitch left,” he said. His voice was bitter. He kept his eyes on the bottle. “Just up and left. Went away to college—but promised to come back. Went to law school—and did it again. Swore she’d be coming back. But she never did.” He nodded grimly to himself. “What happened to her—she deserved it.”

  “Because she left you.”

  “No.” Lenny shook his head. “Because she left me alone with him.”

  Bell was just about finished. She would have to do this all over again at the courthouse, and by that time, Lenny might very well have changed his mind about that lawyer. She had a few more things she wanted to know before Deputy Oakes arrived.

  “And the drinking binge? Darlene had been doing so well. Carried her sobriety chip with her.” Bell wanted to add: And so not only did you kill her, but you also made sure her last moments were filled with shame and self-loathing.

  Lenny looked away. It was as if he had heard the addendum.

  “Wasn’t too hard,” he said. “I knew how to do it, because I knew her better’n anybody else. All I had to do was start talking about our dads. And about the old days. The days that ain’t coming back. That kind of thing, it liked to tear her to pieces. Thinking about the past can open up a hole in some people that’s so damned big they can’t find nothing to fill it. They try, though. They try and they try. That’s how they get to be drunks.”

  * * *

  Bell received Carla’s text about twenty minutes after Deputy Oakes arrived and began the familiar ritual with Lenny Sherrill: cuffs, another Miranda, perp walk through a thickening haze of determined snow that was already ankle-high. Jake did not want any trouble from the bar crowd—liquid courage and the current epidemic of anti-cop sentiment being a troublesome mix—and so he handled everything through the back door, discreetly. He draped Lenny’s coat over his shackled hands and led him out to the Blazer. Most of the clientele in the Tie Yard Tavern did not even realize what was happening.

  By now Bell and Rhonda were outside, too, standing beside the Explorer. The snow was falling even faster now. The wind had a spiteful streak. They waved at the Blazer as it went by, Jake hunched over in his seat like a ship’s captain lashed to the wheel, Lenny Sherrill in the back, his face unreadable behind the glass in the brief flash of visibility afforded by the sole light in the parking lot. Jake’s intense focus was necessary; he had a long drive back to the Raythune County Courthouse. Most of Lenny’s crimes had occurred in Muth County, and Bell would have to sort it all out with Steve Black, but that was down the road. Right now, they had their man—or one of their men, because she was already contemplating ways to charge Alvie Sherrill as well as his son. For a moment, all was well in the world.

  And then she read Carla’s text:

  Hey, mom. I’m at TT. All fine. C U later

  “Problem,” Bell said.

  “What?”

  Bell held up her cell and waggled it. “This isn’t okay. Carla’s trying to tell me something.”

  Rhonda leaned over and read the text. “Sounds pretty straightforward to me. She says she’s fine.”

  “Right. That’s the problem. ‘All fine’ is not something Carla would text if everything was fine.”

  “Because?”

  “Because she’s the daughter of two lawyers. And whether she was at Sam’s house or here with me in Acker’s Gap, she grew up hearing both of us say the same thing, over and over again: ‘Never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.’ I didn’t text her and ask if she was fine. She volunteered the information. Something is definitely amiss.”

  Rhonda tucked a gloved hand up under its opposite armpit. She was shivering. “Could we maybe discuss this inside the car?”

  The heater took a while to warm up. While it fought the good fight, Bell read the text several more times. She texted back: What’s going on??

  In five minutes, when there had been no reply, she called Jake Oakes.

  “We’re driving out to Thornapple Terrace,” she said. “Just wanted you to be aware in case we need backup.”

  “You can’t do that.” Jake was adamant. “Can’t get out there. Not now. Roads’re totally covered. You can’t even see where there was a road anymore.”

  Bell did not care what he said. She was going. All she could think about were the similarities between this night and the one four years ago, when Carla had been kidnapped by a man who called himself Chill. He was a pathetic, two-bit hoodlum, but he was a pathetic, two-bit hoodlum with a gun—and that changed everything.

  It was all happening again. Carla was in trouble, and Bell was trying desperately to get to her. No, not trying: She would get to her.

  “Bell? Did you hear me? Don’t do it,” Jake barked at her. “I’ve got a buddy who’s a deputy in Muth County. I’ll call and get him to go by the Terrace. Check things out. But you can’t go. You’ll never make it.”

  “Watch me,” she said. She ended the call. The bravado was less about convincing Jake Oakes than it was about convincing herself.

  She turned to Rhonda: “You don’t have to go. I can drop you off somewhere on the way. At a relative’s
house, maybe. I know you’ve got ’em everywhere.”

  Rhonda rubbed her hands in front of the dash heater. “Maybe it’s a measure of the basically nonexistent social life I’ve had lately,” she said, “but right now, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than drive through a blinding snowstorm to get to an old folks’ home. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  It was the hardest trek Bell had ever attempted. She had driven through snow before, and she had driven over ice, and she had nearly rolled an SUV once when tornado-force winds gripped the vehicle like a gang of hooligans trying to upend it, but this was different, by several orders of magnitude.

  As Jake had warned her, the road had simply vanished. No magician could have done a better job of it. In lieu of a road, there was a minefield of white across which the Explorer churned, and the trick was to go fast enough not to get stuck in the rising snow but slow enough to keep from spinning out. At one point, Bell was suddenly going sideways; she had tapped the brake and her rear wheels took offense. They skidded dramatically to the right in a lively swoop, producing just the kind of feeling, she thought, that people pay good money for in amusement parks. Had any other cars been present, they would have been doomed. She had no functional control of the Explorer, except to will it to go in the right direction.

  But there were no other cars. Who else would be dumb enough to drive in this weather? Thus the very recklessness—or foolhardiness, as Bell knew Nick Fogelsong would dub it—of the mission tended to make it safer. They were alone out here. Sliding along sideways was fine.

  “I guess I’m going to have to rethink some things,” Rhonda said, “about love and marriage, you know?”

  “What?”

  Bell was frantically trying to keep them upright and moving forward—and alive—for at least a little while longer. Yet Rhonda seemed oblivious to the peril. She has more faith in my driving abilities than I do, Bell thought. God help her.

  “I was looking at Ava Hendricks tonight,” Rhonda went on. “I mean, goodness. She’s an attractive woman. Even more than what her pictures show. I wanted to say to her, ‘Honey, you could have any man you wanted in Acker’s Gap.’”

  Bell was about to suggest that that really wasn’t much of a compliment, but she had to deal with a sudden crisis. The Explorer had hit a patch of black ice. It felt as if it were levitating. The vehicle was not being steered anymore, in any real sense; it was skating all on its own, indulging in a series of wild loops. Bell kept only a minimal touch on the wheel and hoped for the best. At long last the tires seemed to find the road again. They were moving forward.

  “I don’t understand it—but it has to be true,” Rhonda said. She was unfazed by the near-disaster. In fact, she seemed barely aware of it. “Ava and Darlene must have really been in love. They had choices, both of them. And they chose each other.”

  Bell nodded. Rhonda’s sudden conversion to tolerance was a bit too abrupt to be entirely sincere. Maybe her assistant would indeed work her way toward an acceptance of the idea that people could live as they pleased. But Bell was the boss, and Rhonda knew her feelings on the subject, hence this little speech reeked of expediency. Still, Bell told herself, it was better than nothing.

  After a few more miles Bell took a guess and twisted the wheel and hoped she was heading into the parking lot of Thornapple Terrace. Rhonda had tried Carla’s cell multiple times. Nothing.

  The building in front of them was barely visible through the continuing onslaught of snow, portions of the brick emerging now and again when a gusting wind cleared out a brief area of clarity. A few lights were on inside.

  Before they could talk strategy, Bell’s phone rang. She put it on speaker.

  “Mrs. Elkins, this is Kayleigh Crocker. I’ve been trying to call Carla. So I got worried and thought maybe she’d contacted you.”

  “Kayleigh, what’s going on? What do you know?”

  “Nothing, Mrs. Elkins. Carla and I barely got a chance to talk last night. I don’t have any idea—”

  “Cut the crap.” Bell’s voice was as mean as she could make it. “There’s no time. I got a text from her an hour and a half ago. Said she was at Thornapple Terrace. Why the hell would she be going there, Kayleigh? Tell me everything you know. Now.”

  Kayleigh was crying. Bell did not care. She listened as the young woman took a few kittenish sniffles. Then Kayleigh said, “There’s this guy she likes. An older guy. He works there.”

  “What older guy?”

  “Just somebody she met. At a bar. And then she found out that he’d given her a fake name. So she was driving out there this afternoon to ask him about it. Please, Mrs. Elkins, I told her not to. And I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to stop her or—”

  “Just sit tight, Kayleigh. I’ll take care of it.”

  Oh, Carla, Bell thought. Carla, Carla.

  Her daughter’s passion and impetuosity were so much a part of who she was.

  But they also got her into trouble on a regular basis. Would I, Bell wondered, want her to be otherwise? A sedate, predictable Carla Elkins would not be her little girl. She would be somebody else’s little girl.

  Bell would stick with what she had. With Carla—and with everything that went along with her, including, at the moment, a mysterious and possibly dangerous scenario unfolding on the other side of the cascading snow.

  The building was now officially invisible. Snow dominated this world, and as was its kingly prerogative, it was erasing all boundaries, taking over everything.

  “So what’s the plan?” Rhonda said.

  “Well, we don’t have any idea what’s going on in there. So let’s go in quietly and be ready for anything.”

  They fought their way out of the Explorer—the wind desperately wanted to rip off the opened doors—and bent their heads, trudging toward what they hoped was the front door of the Terrace. Bell tried to shut off her mind during the journey, and stay focused on remaining upright against a wind intent on knocking them over and dragging them away, but she could not. She was envisioning all the terrible things they might discover within: injuries or, God forbid, fatalities; a crazed gunman with a grudge; mayhem and peril.

  But when they got inside, it was not like that at all.

  * * *

  There was a small couch in the corner of the lobby, and an armchair, and that was where the people were. A soft silence permeated the room; it was not the kind of silence that occurs in the aftermath of violence, that shocked, freeze-frame stillness, but rather the silence of weariness and resignation.

  Sitting on the couch was an old man. Bell knew she had seen him before. Yes—it was the old man at the reception desk the day she first visited here. The one in the driving cap. Right now he was in his pajamas, a pale green flannel pair with white piping on the sleeves. His hands were folded in his lap. He looked perfectly content. Next to him was Carla. She was obviously surprised to see her mother and Rhonda when they entered, but she did not jump up or call out. She waved them over, putting a finger against her lips to indicate they should move quietly.

  An older man in gray coveralls sat in the armchair. He had pulled the chair around so that it faced the couch. He was holding something in his lap. As Bell came closer, she saw that it was a flat board with a circle of nails protruding from one end. Clearly, a weapon.

  Yet the only violence right now was occurring outside the large window just over the couch. The storm was at its peak; wild gusts of snow were hurled against the glass by a manic wind, in profound contrast to this tidy pocket of calm.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Rhonda.” Carla spoke slowly and carefully. “Nelson, it’s okay if I talk to them, right? I can tell them what’s going on?”

  The man in the chair—Bell remembered him now, he was the maintenance man here, the one who was fixing the sprinkler head on the day of her first visit—nodded. His head was tilted slightly forward. There was a compressed energy about him, a sense of coiled power, especially in his hands. The hands that held the board.

/>   “Okay, then,” Carla said. “Mom, Rhonda—this is Nelson Ferris. And this is his father, Bill.”

  Nelson did not acknowledge them. His focus was locked onto the old man.

  One of Nelson’s fingers twitched, the board shifted in his lap, and the atmosphere immediately changed, tensed up. But it was only that: a finger twitch.

  Bell’s impulse was to rush forward and grab the board from Nelson Ferris. But something in Carla’s demeanor told her to hold back. Her daughter was not acting like a victim. Despite all evidence to the contrary—despite the presence of an obviously distraught man with a crude weapon—Carla seemed to be in charge.

  “Everything’s fine,” Carla said. “Everything’s okay.”

  “If everything’s okay,” Bell asked her quietly, “then why didn’t you return my calls? Or Kayleigh’s calls?”

  “Nelson didn’t want me to,” Carla said. Bell thought she understood her strategy now: Make Nelson Ferris believe he was safe, that no one was challenging him. “And like I said in my text, it’s all fine.”

  Bell looked around the lobby. “Isn’t there a security staff on duty? Where are they?” She had been visited by a sudden ugly vision of a guard tied up and tossed in a closet somewhere.

  “At night,” Carla replied, in the serene, unruffled voice that was rapidly persuading Bell that her daughter would make an excellent hostage negotiator, “the security is handled by maintenance. Nelson—or as they know him here, Travis Womack—is in charge of things tonight.” She gave her mother a look that Bell immediately translated as: Be cool. I’ve got this.

  I’ve trusted her this far, Bell thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  They waited.

  Bill Ferris sneezed. He examined the clear goop in his hand as if he had no idea where it had come from. Then he smiled.

  “Look at him,” Nelson scoffed. “Pretending to be out of his mind.”

  Carla leaned forward and touched Nelson’s knee. When she did that, Bell felt a jet of panic in her stomach. What if this man abruptly decided to swing that board? It was all Bell could do not to grab her girl and head for the exit.