Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  “Nelson,” Carla said. “I don’t think he’s pretending, okay? He has Alzheimer’s. You know that.” She looked up at Bell. “We’ve been sitting here for a while. We just needed a little bit of quiet time. Nelson has to figure some things out. He woke up Bill in his room and brought him out here. Now he has to choose.”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Nelson said. His matter-of-fact tone concerned Bell far more than a raging snarl would have.

  “No,” Carla said. “No, you’re not. That’s not who you are, Nelson—I know it’s not. That’s not who you want to be. That’s not—”

  “You don’t understand,” Nelson cried out. He gripped the board harder. Bell realized that every muscle in her body was tensed to spring. If he so much as lifted that board half an inch, she would go after him, getting between that weapon and her daughter howsoever she could, no matter the price.

  “I’m trying to understand,” Carla said. “I’m really trying. But he’s sick, Nelson. He doesn’t know who you are. You’ve been working here for months, going past him every day, and does he ever seem to know you? Does he show the slightest recognition?”

  Nelson did not answer. He stared at the old man. The old man was smiling, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be sitting in his pajamas in the lobby after midnight. His face looked rinsed clean of thought.

  “Nelson,” Carla said, “let’s take him back to his room, okay? My mom and Rhonda will help. This doesn’t have to get any worse. We can just help him up and—”

  “No,” Nelson said, interrupting her. He shook his head. “Do you know what he did to my sister and me? The horrible fucking things he did? It won’t leave me alone—it’s with me every day. It’s always right in front of me. I can’t forget.” He was struck by the irony and he laughed. “He can’t remember. And I can’t forget.”

  “What do you really want, Nelson?” Carla said.

  “I want him to know what he did. I want him to remember it the way I have to remember it—every day, every hour, every fucking minute. Because if he can’t remember it—how can I hate him? How can I hate this…” Nelson nodded toward Bill Ferris, who had a whimsical look on his face, as if he were strolling in the park on a sunny day. “… this blob, this thing that doesn’t know its own name? How can I hate this? This man isn’t the one who did that to us, who made my childhood and my sister’s childhood an absolute fucking nightmare. The man who did that is gone. He escaped.” Nelson gave Carla a look of piercing anguish. “He got away. He never had to pay for what he did.”

  “That’s right, Nelson,” Carla said quietly. “You said it yourself. This man isn’t the one you hate. He’s not the one you want to kill. You don’t even know this man. And he doesn’t know you.”

  Nelson looked at her, and then he looked at Bill Ferris. His fingers slowly relaxed their grip on the board. It slid out of his lap and hit the floor with a brief clatter. He slumped over in his chair. He was crying, but it was such a noiseless and subdued kind of crying that only someone standing close to him would even know he was doing it.

  Carla rose from her seat. She picked up the spiked board, keeping it well out of Nelson’s reach, and she handed it carefully to her mother, who would safeguard it. Then she moved over to stand beside Nelson’s chair. She took his head in her hands. She held his head while he cried. He cried very quietly. He was crying for his lost childhood, and for all that he might have been if he had had love in his life, all that he would have done if once—just once—he had come into a room as a little boy and had known by the light in someone’s eyes that they were glad to see him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A week had passed since the night at Thornapple Terrace. The cold had finally broken. It was a temporary reprieve. Bell knew that. She was determined to take advantage of it, though, and enjoy this relatively mild day and the nearly clear roads.

  She asked Carla to come along. She did not tell her where they were going. Carla, of course, asked several times during the drive.

  “Be patient,” Bell said.

  They traveled along a narrow two-lane road that went up and down like a sine curve. Farms, or in some cases what was left of farms, spread out on both sides of the road. Bell could sense Carla’s growing puzzlement, and she could also sense that it was gradually giving way to irritation. Mysterious errands were only fun for the person in charge, the person who knew where you were going.

  The legalities were still being sorted out. Felton Groves had been located and arrested three days ago in Valdosta, Georgia, and would be extradited to West Virginia to face felony charges for vehicular assault on Darlene Strayer and for a accepting a bribe to commit a felony. Lenny Sherrill had been transferred to the Muth County Jail; he would be arraigned for the murders of Vic Plumley, Marcy Coates, and Connie Dollar, and for conspiracy to solicit the murders of Darlene and Harmon Strayer. Alvie Sherrill was also in custody for accessory to murder. Muth County Prosecutor Steve Black had agreed to drop charges of attempted kidnapping against Nelson Ferris, if Ferris underwent mandatory inpatient treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at a mental health facility. Bell had requested that, knowing she would pay the price later for Black’s granting her the favor: insinuating phone calls from the prosecutor, the kind that left Black with a wide swath of deniability—and left her with an intense desire for a shower.

  Well, so be it, was Bell’s rueful thought at the time she made the deal. Sam Elkins—and Frank Plumley, God knows—aren’t the only ones who understand the necessity of bargains.

  Bargains. The word made her think about Clay Meckling, and the unspoken but clearly understood limits of their bond. They were in a committed relationship, yes, but the truth was that she had kept him at arm’s length for almost four years now. He did not complain—well, sometimes he did, but Bell had mastered the art of deflecting questions that involved the future. Their future. Yet she often wondered how long they could dance this careful dance.

  Did she want to marry Clay? No. She did not want to marry anyone. Clay knew that and accepted it—or at least he said he did. For now.

  Carla spoke again. Her voice revealed a troubled mind. She had visited Nelson Ferris in jail the day before, and heard more details about his early life.

  “So many horrible fathers,” she said. “Seems like that’s all we ever hear about. Aren’t there any good guys out there?”

  “Sure. Harmon Strayer was one.”

  “Yeah. One.”

  “And your dad. He and I may not be together anymore, but he’s a great dad, right?”

  “Yeah, okay. That’s two. But how about your father? Or Bill Ferris? Or Alvie Sherrill? Seems like all you ever deal with are the selfish assholes. The ones who wreck their kids’ lives. And other people’s lives, too.”

  “That’s because of where I’m standing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a prosecutor, sweetie. Selfish assholes are my stock in trade. Comes with the job. I mean, the good guys don’t often cross my path—not professionally, that is. I get the bad guys. Sometimes that makes the world seem pretty lopsided. Out of balance.”

  “So what do you do? To restore the balance, I mean. So that you don’t get, like, really, really depressed. What do you do?”

  Her daughter had a real knack for digging to the crux of things, Bell reflected. She recalled how Carla had expertly defused the situation with Nelson Ferris in the lobby of Thornapple Terrace. And now she was using her skills on her family.

  “I do this.” Bell swept a hand toward the windshield, indicating the breadth of the land that held them, land that unrolled like a dark carpet at the foot of a somber mountain range. This territory was battered and wind-torn, still suffering from repeated maulings by the severe and prolonged winter, but when the sun struck it at a certain angle, you could envision the spring to come. You could imagine the way those fields would fill up with growing things, the way the woods would jump to life. “I get out of the office,” Bell went on, “a
nd try to remember that there’s a whole world out here. Filled with decent people. People who love their children. People who try their best to take care of them.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” Carla said. “I mean, those are the kind of people I’ve been meeting on my interviews. I really love talking to them. I go to Collier County tomorrow. It’s all gone by so fast.” She swiveled her head around repeatedly, trying to get a sense of their location. “So where are we?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Carla uttered a theatrical sigh and let her head flop back against the seat.

  “Mom?” she said, after a minute or so had passed. “I want you to know something.” A pause. “I’m going to be okay.”

  Bell glanced at her, and then retuned her eyes to the road. She did not interrupt. A faux-casual Tell me more would, at this point, have had precisely the opposite effect, and Bell knew it.

  “I wasn’t okay before,” Carla continued. “I was about as far from okay as it’s possible to be and not be like Nelson—out of control, I mean, with my emotions running so far out in front of me that I couldn’t get hold of them and bring them back. At least I still had a grip. Well, sort of. Until that day at the mall.” She hesitated, waiting for the words to settle out in her mind so that she could select the right ones. “I think that’s what I sensed in Nelson, you know? Somebody else who was so good at holding it together, at fooling people into thinking he was just this guy. But I—I got it, you know? First time I met him, it’s like I had this quick glimpse into his soul.” She laughed. “Whoa. That’s pretty lame. Like you can peek into somebody’s soul after a few minutes in a bar.”

  “In a bar, it’s not the soul that most people want a peek at.”

  “Mom.” Carla laughed again. Then her voice grew somber. “Just want you to know that I’m getting there. I really like the new therapist Dad found for me. He’s weird as hell, but I like him. And I’m going to keep in touch with Nelson. I know he’ll be okay, too. Takes time, though.”

  “It does.”

  They traveled a few more miles. Finally Bell turned onto an unpaved road, its entrance almost lost amidst the wild woods trying to enfold it, reclaim it. She knew where to go because Rhonda had helped her by making calls, by checking records. By doing the thing that only Rhonda could do this well: linking the past and the present through the difficult, unforgiving geography of this place. Finding the right road into that past.

  As they turned, Carla read out loud the message on a small wooden sign almost completely engulfed by unruly bushes and out-of-control vines. CANEYTOWN 3 MILES AHEAD, it said, in flaking red letters, along with a skinny arrow.

  Bell drove for another ten minutes or so. She had to go slow, to preserve her tires and her shock absorbers.

  At last she saw it, off to the right in a white tangle of woods. The words SILENT HOME CEMETERY were spelled out in wrought iron across the top of an arch. Seasons of hard weather had turned the arch a distressed-looking gray. Bell drove under it and parked along the rutted lane.

  She and Carla climbed out. The markers here were small and unassuming, with none of the fancy granite angels or mammoth marble praying hands that Bell had seen in cemeteries that were the permanent resting places of the more affluent. These headstones were so thin and spindly, and rubbed raw by wind and by rain, that on the oldest graves—some dated back to the mid 1800s—the writing was unintelligible.

  Bell opened the back of the Explorer. She took out a pair of small, tidy bouquets. The flowers were pink and delicate. It was still much too cold for flowers to survive outdoors for any length of time, but Bell did not mind; longevity was not what she was after.

  She moved along the rows. Carla trailed behind her. Once Bell found the graves she was seeking, she stopped. She knelt down on the frozen ground and placed one of the bouquets in front of the headstone where the faint letters read GERTRUDE ELOSIE DRISCOLL. 1865–1938.

  She handed the second bouquet to Carla. Carla knelt down in front of the grave next door, placing it against the headstone reading BETTY GERTRUDE DRISCOLL. 1933–1938.

  They stood up. They walked a little farther down the lane, mother and daughter. They did not talk. The sky somehow felt closer out here than it did in town, not in a meddlesome, overbearing way but in a way that seemed to offer a strong opinion about the need to connect things, to knit separate elements into a larger timeless whole. Between the earth and the sky were the mountains—gray, distant, brittle-looking in this temperature, still tipped with frost. The mountains had been here a long, long time. They would last even longer than the memories did, all memories, the good and the bad, the wounding ones and the healing ones, too.

  * * *

  On a summer day in 1944, three boys gazed out across the choppy, nettlesome ocean. It was gray in every direction: gray sky, gray sea, gray beach, gray horizon. The same gray as the mountains back home. They had never been here before, but they were in familiar territory.

  Even in the midst of this tumult and uncertainty, their lives seemed to spread out before them, rich with promise. An immense vista drew them forward, whispering its secret promise of tomorrow. They had done their duty, and they had survived.

  The war was winding down. Soon they would return to West Virginia and pick up the stories of their lives. Along the way they would try to forgive themselves for the things they had done, the shameful things, the things that were unworthy of them and the great gifts they had been given—the gift of being alive, the gift of possibility.

  They had started out wild. Wild and selfish. They were troublemakers. They were imperfect. They made mistakes. They had a past—oh, Lord, did they ever. But when it counted, they were there. That was what they would tell themselves in the following years, when life sometimes looked bleak, when they suffered failures and setbacks and disappointments, when they doubted themselves: I was there. The call went out, and I raised my hand, and I was there.

  Three boys.

  One of them was different, and for him, all roads were narrow and dark. But the other two believed that the road ahead would always look brighter and wider than the road behind. Those two were changing, and they were growing. It would take them a long, long time, it would take them decades, but they would get there.

  The three boys came home from the war. They settled down. They took care of their families. They lived and they loved and they dreamed and, for as long as they were able, they remembered.

  Acknowledgments

  From this remove, the profound sacrifices of the men and women who fought in World War II are difficult to fully appreciate. In the prime of their lives, they left familiar circumstances to plunge headlong into a distant conflict whose outcome was far from certain. To help me come a bit closer to the experience of D-Day—a core moment in this novel—I studied many histories of World War II including, most fruitfully, D-Day: The Normandy Landing in the Words of Those Who Took Part, edited by Jon E. Lewis. The anecdote about General Eisenhower comes from this splendid oral history.

  I also drew upon the recollections of my late stepfather, Donald C. Weed, who, like the three young men in this story, was a wide-eyed kid from West Virginia who joined the U.S. Navy after Pearl Harbor and served on a vessel assigned to search for bodies in the waters off Normandy. The memory of spotting a possible survivor was his.

  To better understand Alzheimer’s, another facet of this novel, I returned to a book I have read multiple times, and that always strikes me anew with its grace, its thoroughness, and its abiding humanity. The book is The Forgetting: Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic by David Shenk.

  ALSO BY JULIA KELLER

  A Killing in the Hills

  Bitter River

  Summer of the Dead

  Last Ragged Breath

  About the Author

  JULIA KELLER spent twelve years as a reporter and editor for the Chicago Tribune, where she won a Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, she was born in West Virginia and li
ves in Chicago and Ohio. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Julia Keller

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SORROW ROAD. Copyright © 2016 by Julia Keller. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design by James Iacobelli

  Cover photographs: snowy winter road © Alison Burford / Arcangel; woman with umbrella © Ilona Wellmann / Trevillion Images

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Keller, Julia.

  Title: Sorrow road / Julia Keller.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Minotaur Books, 2016. | Series: Bell Elkins novels ; 5