Fast Falls the Night

by Julia Keller

  He was wrong.

  Bell

  1:58 A.M.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept through the night. Surely at some point she had experienced a golden, unbroken road of sleep—everyone had, right? At least once? As a child, perhaps? As a teenager, when she had exhausted herself by a constant headlong flight from anything that threatened to touch her, tame her, hold her back? There must have been a night when she slept long and seamlessly and well. But she had no memory of such a thing.

  Bell Elkins placed the bookmark in her book and closed it. Had anyone asked her just then, she could not have come up with a single detail about the plot of the paperback with the shiny, curled-back cover currently perched on her right knee, the story she had allegedly been absorbing for the past hour. Nor named a single character. Her eyes had moved methodically over the pages, but nothing stuck. Late-night reading, reading undertaken in lieu of sleep, could be like that. It was empty, pointless motion, a surface activity that never engaged the depths of her mind. Busywork, aimed at passing the time.

  And speaking of time: What time was it?

  She looked up at the wooden case clock on the mantel. She had sensed that it was after midnight because—well, because even without a clock she could always feel when midnight slipped by, like a dark wind brushing her cheek. But after that milestone, the rest of the night fell back into a blur.

  The clock settled the matter. Not quite two.

  She was disappointed. She had hoped that more of the night would have vanished by now, without her having to know about it. That was the trouble with insomnia—along with all of the other things, of course, such as the fact that it left her weary and grumpy during the subsequent workday. It made her hyperaware of the passing of the minutes, the hours. Time was a great problem for Bell Elkins. She had trouble chopping it up into its constituent elements—past, present, future—because time to her was a continuous black ribbon and she couldn’t figure out where to make the cut.

  One night, she had watched the second hand on that mantel clock perform its dutiful loops until she realized—startling herself—that twenty-four minutes had gone by. She had been thinking about the past. She did that a lot. The process always reminded her of washing out a filthy bucket, one crusted with mud and sticks and sadness. She scrubbed it and soaked it, and then she filled it with water and swirled the water around in it, and then scrubbed it and soaked it again, over and over, knowing—well, hoping—that sooner or later it would rinse clear.

  She could not identify the precise origin of tonight’s insomnia. Sometimes it was easy. She was a county prosecutor, and there was always something to worry about. Always a case pending, always a judge to be placated or a jury to be persuaded. She was always facing a can’t-put-it-off-any-longer decision about whether to charge a certain defendant and, if she charged her or him, what that charge ought to be. She always had to balance the probability of success against the expenditure of resources—because Raythune was a small, poor county. Her staff consisted of two assistant prosecutors and one secretary. They had to count every paper clip.

  But the sleeplessness that bedeviled her at present might not be about work at all. There were other possibilities. She lived with a constant sense of apprehension, a kind of itchy, nervous, fluttery buzz that, at some point, had been inserted under her skin without her knowledge or consent. Her older sister, Shirley, lived with it as well. They had discussed it many times. Neither had been able to shed the vestiges of a violent past, vestiges that included a fear-induced vigilance. And vigilance was a hard habit to break. Relaxation felt dangerous. If they let down their guard, they were asking for trouble—and they would have no right to complain about that trouble, after the fact, because they had made themselves vulnerable. And they had done it voluntarily.

  Then again, her restlessness might emanate from the ongoing quarrel she was having with her boyfriend, Clay Meckling. “Boyfriend” was a ridiculous word. But the other words didn’t work, either. “Partner” was jumping the gun. “My guy” sounded like a 1950s song lyric. “Gentleman caller” was ludicrous and Victorian. “Lover”? Not lately. Neither one of them had been in the mood. Not while Clay’s challenge still echoed: So what’s the deal, Bell? I want to marry you. I’ve said it until I’m tired of saying it. If you don’t see that happening, you need to tell me so. He didn’t want to wait anymore. She couldn’t blame him.

  But she also couldn’t get herself there. By all rights, she should cut him loose, let him find someone else. Someone who would make him happy.

  So why didn’t she do that?

  It was 2:03 now.

  She unhitched her gaze from the clock so that she could look around the living room. She liked everything she saw. Other people might not understand that, given its degree of dishevelment, from the battered brown couch to the coffee table with the nicked edges, to the lamp with the frayed and cockeyed plum-colored shade, to the cracked and slanting hardwood floor, and then on to the low arch, its beige plaster chipped and flaking, that linked the living room and the foyer, and over to the weather-warped front door. The sole item of furniture in the foyer was an antique desk—“antique” being a nicer way of putting it than “older than dirt”—and sitting in the middle of that desk was a stout manual typewriter with CORONA stamped above the top row of keys in dull gold. The typewriter was a gift from Ruthie Cox, who had been her best friend in Acker’s Gap. Ruthie died last year, leaving Bell the beautiful machine. They had shared a wariness of technology, an unease about the liberties it took in so many lives.

  This house always seemed smaller at night, and pugnacious in the way of all runts, as if the corners drew themselves in ever so slightly to make a tighter seal against the pressure of the dark. The house had her back. It protected her. If the house could somehow figure out how to keep her anxieties on the other side of its walls, it would do so. She was sure of it.

  This was the first house she had ever owned by herself. The others had been jointly owned with her husband—now ex-husband—Sam Elkins, and they were in various upscale sections of the Washington, D.C. area, where she had lived during her marriage, and where Sam still lived. This house was considerably smaller and shabbier than any of those. And it happened to be located in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, not some fancy suburb in Virginia or Maryland. But she didn’t care. She reveled again and again in the simple forthright joy of the realization that this was hers—all of it, every nail, every plank and stone, every tile and joist and dusty corner, every scratch and stain, everything from the faulty furnace to the disintegrating roof to the lopsided front porch to the rickety back stoop. She didn’t care about any of those flaws. She cared about the fact that this house belonged to her. And to no one else.

  So things weren’t altogether terrible. She had much to be grateful for. Her daughter, Carla, had ended a period of restlessness and enrolled at George Washington University. She was undecided about her major—which was another way of saying that she was majoring in everything. Her e-mails to her mother were filled with the verbal sunbursts that came from a newly awakened and continually challenged mind. Bell knew better than to tell her how much she loved those e-mails and looked forward to receiving them. That would make Carla far too self-conscious.

  Her gaze switched back to the mantel clock: 2:05 A.M.

  She heard a train whistle in the distance. It was a stretched-out, lonely-sounding moan that tailed off into a sigh of solemn wistfulness. Something clunked against the roof; chances were, it was a black walnut released from the tree that hung over the back half of the old house. On late-summer mornings she would find the fist-sized yellow balls dotting the yard. Sometimes the hard shells split open from the impact of the long fall, and chips and shreds of black nut meat littered the grass like the visible remnants of her dark dreams.

  The minute hand shifted: 2:06 A.M.

  She had returned to Acker’s Gap eight years ago, law degree in hand. It was a rescue mission. Her hometown was in tr
ouble, slammed by unemployment as the coal mines shut down, one by one, and ripped up by drug addiction and stunned into lethargy by—the worst foe of all—hopelessness. By the cast-iron conviction that nothing would ever go right around here. It wouldn’t because it couldn’t. It couldn’t because it wasn’t meant to. It wasn’t meant to because—well, look around. Just look around. Could you doubt it? The circular logic of despair kept the people dizzy, turning around and around on the same small patch of muddy ground instead of moving forward.

  She lived her life amid lives that didn’t seem to matter to the outside world. Lives that didn’t seem to matter, either, to the people who were living them. And that was one of the chief reasons why Bell had come back, and why she had chosen to run for prosecutor. The highest compliment you could pay to a place and its people, she believed, was to insist on justice. On the rule of law. To say to the dark anarchical currents that were always threatening to overwhelm this area: No. I won’t let that happen.

  She had done her best. Yet West Virginia still had the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the nation. Raythune County Sheriff Pam Harrison would stop by the prosecutor’s office every few days and share a grim statistic or two, just in case Bell had dared to let some optimism trickle into her mood. Newly emboldened gangs of drug suppliers continued their regular sweeps through the mountains, sowing their poison in the creases in the land, tempting discouraged people with a quick and easy bliss. A few days ago, a bedraggled old man—he had a scraggly beard and a too-big Army jacket and droopy pants and a lost look in his bleary eyes—had been hanging out in front of the courthouse, and when Bell went by he grabbed her by the sleeve and shouted in her face, “It’s coming! It’s coming!” She shook him off, but it was unsettling. She had never seen him before, but the old man seemed to be channeling her own grave apprehensions and clinging doubts. He reminded her of a soothsayer from a fairy tale, the kind she used to read to Carla when her daughter was a little girl, only far more sinister. His warning was strange and vague, but it matched up with Bell’s growing sense of dread about Acker’s Gap, her feeling that some final, terrible reckoning was at hand.

  The clock hand jumped forward again: 2:08 A.M.

  For a time, when she worked with the former sheriff, Nick Fogelsong, she had believed they were making progress. Then the heroin took hold. But she didn’t give up; she fought back. Hard. She was still fighting, every damned day. She did what she could to help the new sheriff, Pam Harrison, hunt down the suppliers and get help for the addicts—but she had no answer for the despondency that made people reach for drugs in the first place. Sometimes she felt as if she was knee-deep in rapidly rising water on the lower deck of the Titanic, bailing it out with a rusty teaspoon.

  If people did not care about their lives, about their health and their future, you could not make them care. Could you?

  A glance at the mantel: 2:10 A.M.

  Two days ago, she had received a phone call from an old friend in D.C. Elaine Mitford was a classmate from Georgetown University Law Center. Intimidatingly smart. Formidably successful. Dazzlingly well-connected. With two other classmates, Grady Fiske and Abigail McElroy, Elaine was starting her own firm. She had leased office space on K Street. Prospects were bright. She wanted a fourth partner. “Mitford, Fiske, McElroy, and Elkins—how does that sound?” Elaine had said, putting a lively curl in her voice, a brisk shiver of enticement.

  A year ago, maybe even a few months ago, Bell would have turned her down flat.

  But now …

  “Let me think about it,” Bell had replied.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Not to pressure you, but we need to move quickly.” There was even more excitement in Elaine’s voice. “God, Bell—this would be terrific. Frankly, I didn’t think we had a shot. If you’re serious, though, I’ll send you a detailed proposal.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Am I really ready to jump ship? That was the question she couldn’t shake tonight. It blocked every path to sleep. She thought about Clay. She thought about a lot of things. Finally she made a bargain with herself: She would put off considering Elaine’s offer for another day or so. And then she would make up her mind for good, having let all the probabilities and contingencies and pro-and-con arguments move around in her head unchaperoned for a short while.

  She didn’t want to give up on West Virginia. Yet sometimes it seemed to her that the mountains were slowly closing over her head, the peaks meeting and sealing. If she waited too long to leave, she would be trapped. When she had that vision, she had trouble catching her breath; she felt a little faint, a touch claustrophobic. Maybe the solution was simple: She needed to get out while she still could.

  Jake

  2:17 A.M.

  Molly Drucker was pretty, but not in a conventional way. Not in the way that usually mattered around here. She was a little heavier than she ought to be, and she never wore makeup. Jake could not imagine her with lipstick or mascara, the massive application of which was the usual standard of feminine beauty in Acker’s Gap.

  He hated the fact that he was even thinking about her looks right now. It was crassly inappropriate. It made him feel oafish and small-souled and irredeemably male. He didn’t mind that last one—totally out of his hands—but he didn’t much like the first two. He wasn’t a saint. But that didn’t mean he had to be a jerk.

  Still, he found Molly attractive. He always had. He had never counted, but he had probably worked at least two hundred accident scenes with her over the past four years, the length of time he had been employed by the Raythune County Sheriff’s Department, and he never failed to think: Damn, she’s a good-looking woman. He kept the thought to himself. She might be spoken for. He had no clue about her personal life. She didn’t wear a ring, but that meant nothing. Paramedics—the savvy ones, at least—did not. Rings made it hard to put on latex gloves. And rings got in the way of the work. They could even be dangerous. If you found yourself inching down a rope into a well in which some toddler had tumbled—that had happened, just last summer—a ring could catch on something. It was a fast way to lose a finger.

  So even without a ring, she might have a partner. He was too shy to ask. But he thought about her more often than he ought to, and in ways he probably shouldn’t. She had a broad, serious face and lively black eyes and spirited-looking black hair that she kept clear of her field of vision with a blue bandana. Several hours into her shift, her hair would start to spring loose from that mooring of fabric, licks of it standing up around her face like a fierce dark corona. Jake put her age at about thirty-five. She had been a paramedic for ten years—he had asked her once, among the very few times he had risked a personal question—and she was good at her job. She was smart and she was poised and she was resourceful.

  She was also African-American, which made her a distinct minority in this part of West Virginia. Yet the nature of her job meant that few people reacted to her race when she showed up at an emergency. Any reservations based on the color of her skin—and that was an unfortunate possibility in regions such as these, where it was, Jake knew, something they didn’t see every day—were automatically pushed aside in deference to the fact that she was there to save a life.

  Or at least to try.

  Sometimes—tonight, for instance—she was too late.

  Molly crouched next to the young woman in the Marathon bathroom. Jake stood behind her. There wasn’t anything for him to do right now. For the time being, this was the sovereign territory of the paramedics. Molly’s actions were quietly aggressive, even though the outcome was obvious. It had been obvious from the moment she had barreled in here, dropping the red plastic case filled with supplies onto the filthy yellow tile, checking for a pulse, attaching the bag-valve mask to the woman’s face. Molly wore dark blue Dickies trousers, a light blue polo shirt, and black Converse sneakers. Her squad partner, Ernie Edmonds, was still out at the big, square, white-sided ambulance parked in front of the station
, yanking the gurney out of the back. Jake was sure of Ernie’s activity without actually witnessing it because he had worked scenes like this so many times with the two of them. The division of labor was practiced, absolute. Their routine almost never varied.

  Gray skin. Needle marks. Feeble pulse.

  Molly, Jake knew, was reading what she saw on the bathroom floor the way somebody else might speed-read a paperback thriller, alert for clues and patterns and spoilers. She whipped out a syringe and injected the contents of a yellow-capped vial of naloxone into the victim’s thigh.

  Victim, Jake thought. Really? Victim? She did this to herself.

  He told himself to knock it off. Not my call to make. And not an observation appropriate to entertain if your job was public safety.

  Rule number one: You don’t judge.

  At least not out loud.

  He had sent Danny back up to the front counter. Danny hadn’t liked that—he had scowled, twisting his lip—but Jake didn’t care. This wasn’t a circus. Plus, Danny needed to do his job, even if the kid would clearly rather be part of the excitement that went along with a dead body on the bathroom floor. There might be customers to attend to—although the presence of an ambulance in front of the station, its engine huffing like an overtaxed buffalo, the perky light on its top slathering everything in the vicinity with a relentless red pulse, would probably cut down on business.

  “Pull the surveillance tape from when she first came in,” Jake had called out to Danny’s back as the young man clomped away. “Might need it for evidence.”

  Only half-turning his head to reply, Danny had mumbled over his shoulder, “Camera’s just for show. Never did work. Ain’t no tape.”

  Figures, Jake thought wearily.

  He resumed his focus on Molly. He loved watching her work. She evaluated. She measured. She administered another shot of naloxone. She didn’t make any noise, aside from a single grunt when she lifted and tilted the girl’s head to check for injuries on the back of the skull, which could have occurred when she collapsed. Molly had already questioned Jake as he followed her in here, gathering the relevant facts without breaking stride: How long had she been in the bathroom? Forty or forty-five minutes, tops. ID? Unknown. Other information that might help? Nope. Sorry.