Fast Falls the Night

by Julia Keller

  As bright as it was in there, it was still a lonely scene. One guy, working by himself all night long. You’d think Danny would be a little more nervous and jittery, given what had happened here last night. Especially with the video surveillance system on the fritz.

  You’d think that, wouldn’t you?

  Jake cursed himself. Of course.

  A gas station was a crossroads. People traipsed in and out all the time. It was a perfect distribution point. There was a good reason why Danny hadn’t insisted that the owner fix the busted video camera. This way, nobody knew who came and went, or what business they transacted with Danny Lukens while they were in there.

  Danny had his days free. So when he wasn’t at the station, he could still be doing business, selling to anybody who didn’t make it by the Marathon at night. Everybody knew Danny Lukens; he could move around Acker’s Gap in an easy way, slick and frictionless, palming a packet of heroin into a customer’s hand.

  Right?

  Yes. Right.

  If Jake hadn’t been so preoccupied with his feelings for Molly, if he hadn’t been acting like a damned stupid lovesick puppy, if he hadn’t been showing off for her by going after the Starliner gang with only his old buddy as backup, he would have made the link much sooner. If he’d done his job, this might have been over hours ago.

  Jake made a quick call to the sheriff. Her tone was cold, professional—and why wouldn’t it be, after what he’d done?—but this was business, and she listened to him. He told her what he’d figured out about Danny. He was going in. He needed backup, just in case. She would leave the courthouse right now, she told him. She would be there in minutes. No reason for him to wait for her; he could handle it. When she got there, she would help him secure the scene.

  He reached for his hat on the seat beside him.

  Bell

  11:56 P.M.

  “You’ve been here all this time?”

  “Sure,” Shirley said. “Enjoyed it. Real peaceful. Got to admit I dozed off there for a while. What time is it?”

  “Midnight. Or thereabouts.”

  “Lord. Bet you’re glad this day is almost over, little sister.”

  Bell nodded. She had paused at the foot of the steps. The porch light was off, and no light burned in any house on the street. People in Acker’s Gap started their days early and ended them that way, too. Still, Bell could see everything plainly: steps and pillar and porch and swing. And Shirley.

  Her sister sat at the far right end of the swing, left hand in her lap, the thumb of her right hand rubbing the metal chain that held up her side of it, massaging the linked rings.

  Shirley patted the place next to her. “So where’d you go? I tell you my news and you go flying out of here. I was hoping we could talk about it.”

  “We can.” Bell crossed the porch, sat down. “But at first I couldn’t…” She tried again. “You’re the only family I have. Something happens to you—I’m alone.” She shook her head. “Listen to me, will you? Pretty damned selfish. You’re the one who’s sick. Good God.”

  “No. Not selfish. Just human.” A beat. “So where did you go?”

  “Long story.”

  Shirley smiled. “It always is.”

  So Bell filled her in. She told her about Charlie’s death in the course of the raid on the Starliner. She told her about the thirty-three overdoses and the three fatalities. She told her about locking up the drug gang, and about still not finding the local dealer.

  “Really sorry about your friend,” Shirley said. “I remember meeting him once. In your office. Seemed like a real nice fella.”

  Bell nodded but didn’t say anything, and so Shirley added, “This place.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And this night.”

  They sat in silence for a moment or two.

  “I’m glad you have Clay around,” Shirley said. “Especially now. Because the day is going to come when I won’t be—”

  Bell interrupted her with a ferocity that clearly startled Shirley: “No. No. No. Don’t you say it. We’re going to get you the best treatment available. Wherever they’re doing the cutting-edge research—that’s where you’ll go. Columbus, New York, Houston—the best. No argument.”

  Shirley laughed softy. “I figured out a long time ago not to argue with the likes of you. No percentage in it.”

  “Good. So that’s settled.”

  Bell had a fleeting impulse to bring her up to date on her relationship with Clay. It was well and truly over. It had to be.

  She said nothing. Shirley had enough to deal with right now.

  Shirley was talking again. “I’ll try to beat this. Promise. But I think we need to be honest with each other, Belfa. Not a lot of people survive lung cancer. This time next year I might not—”

  “No.” Bell was feeling panicky again. “We’re going to fight. Fight hard. And if it turns out that the best doctors are in D.C., well—that’s great. Because I just might be moving back there.”

  “Really?”

  “A classmate of mine is starting a new firm. She asked me to join her. And after a day like today—it sounds mighty attractive.”

  “Bet so.” Shirley paused. “I have something else to talk to you about, too. But it can keep if you’re too tired.”

  “I’m okay. I got a second wind. But how about you? You’ve got to be pretty whipped yourself. Hope you plan on spending the night.”

  Shirley was rubbing at the chain again with her thumb. Up and down, up and down. She looked at the chain, not at Bell. “Something I’ve got to say here. Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

  “I have no idea what you’re—”

  “That night.” Shirley stopped rubbing the chain. She still wouldn’t look at her sister.

  “What night?”

  “You know which night.”

  And Bell did know. Of course she did. There was only one night in both of their lives. It had happened a long time ago and it had never really ended.

  Bell stood up. She wanted to be able to face Shirley. She looked down at her sister, who sat very still in the swing.

  “We don’t talk about that,” Bell said. “We agreed.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t keep the agreement. Not anymore.”

  Bell’s perplexity turned to annoyance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And this is a hell of a time to go there.”

  “It’s the perfect time. There’s never going to be a better time.” Shirley patted the seat beside her once again. “Come on. Sit back down. We need to talk about it. About what happened. About Daddy’s death.”

  Bell hesitated, but finally complied.

  “When I got my diagnosis,” Shirley said, “it was like a light had found me. It had picked me out, that light, and it was shining directly on me. It made me realize some things, Belfa. Things I never would’ve realized otherwise. I have to say the truth. I have to. I can’t leave this world with that kind of lie trailing behind me.”

  And she told her sister the story of that night. The real story—not the one they had made up together. Not the one that Shirley forced Bell to memorize, repeating it over and over until it had soaked into her soul. Not the one that sent Shirley to prison for a crime she did not commit.

  Bell listened. And as she listened, the words made a picture in her mind. The terrifying plausibility of it all, a deeply visceral remembrance of three and a half decades ago, descended on her.

  “Belfa—what did you do…”

  Belfa stood in the middle of a kitchen lit only by moonlight. Next to her, their father’s motionless body was sprawled in a dinette chair, his arms limp at this sides, his legs sticking out in front of him, his head thrown back, his fat neck torn open and wet with blood.

  Shirley’s eyes came back to Belfa.

  “What did you do?” Shirley repeated, keeping her voice soft, not wanting to startle her. “What did you do?”

  “He was coming afte
r me. I stopped him. I had to.”

  That didn’t make sense. A ten-year-old girl, overpowering a grown man? That could not be true. So what was true?

  Shirley had just arrived home. She had gone out with friends. She had never had friends before—but for the first time, she did. And they asked her to go to a movie. A movie. With friends. Unthinkable. Not something she had ever done. She was sixteen years old and she had never been to a movie.

  Until tonight.

  “Belfa,” Shirley said. “What do you mean? How did you—”

  “Right after you left. He came after me. He tried to do things. You know.” Belfa’s stare was intense and solemn. “You know, Shirley. You know what I mean.”

  Belfa’s hands. How had Shirley not noticed her little sister’s hands until just now? The small palms were matted with something dark and sticky-looking. The fingertips, too. The back of the wrist.

  A knife lay on the floor at her feet. The wet blade glittered in the moonlight.

  “I waited for him to fall asleep,” Belfa said. “In the chair. You know how he does.”

  Yes. Shirley knew how he did. Donnie Dolan spent more nights sleeping upright in a kitchen chair than he did on the smelly, tattered mattress in his room. Sometimes it was because he had been drinking and he had passed out at the table; sometimes it was just out of laziness. He ate and he fell asleep, crumbs on his chest, greasy smear of food on his chin. The trailer only had one bedroom and it was his. The girls slept on the couch in the living room.

  “He was asleep,” Shirley said. “So why did you have to do this?”

  Shirley opened her hands to identify the “this”: The horror that spread out in the room all around them, a picture silvered by moonlight but still black and unfathomable.

  “Because,” Belfa said, “I knew he would be coming back.”

  And then they went to work. They found the gasoline that their father kept under the porch in the red metal cans. They splashed it around the trailer: first the inside, then the outside. The next-to-last thing Shirley did was call 911 and report a fire.

  The last thing she did—they were standing outside now—was to light a book of matches and toss it toward the trailer.

  They stood and watched the flames devour everything they had ever had in their lives, everything they had ever known, all vestiges of familiarity. All the while, Shirley talked very fast to Belfa, in a low, urgent voice. She put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. She would not let Belfa turn away from the fire. She wanted to use the fire to cauterize the lie, to seal it inside both of them. The heat would fuse the seam. It would turn the lie into the truth.

  “I killed him,” Shirley said. “I did it. I cut his throat with the knife. Do you hear? It was me. Not you—me.”

  She chanted it a dozen times—two dozen, maybe, or three, it didn’t matter—and Belfa did not say a word. The little girl’s eyes were wide. She did not blink. The trailer was far away from the main road and so Shirley knew she had time. She had time to let Belfa get accustomed to the lie, to memorize it. To learn how to believe it.

  Finally, with the up-and-down scream of the siren growing closer, Belfa looked at Shirley. Her lips parted. She tried to speak. She couldn’t.

  The ambulance was there. A sheriff’s car was right behind it. People were jumping out of vehicles, slamming doors, shouting, demanding that the girls back away, BACK AWAY. A deputy sheriff was coming toward them, and despite the urgency and the thunder and the chaos of the moment, he had a kind face, Shirley saw, and that made her happy, because she would be putting Belfa in his hands, hoping for the best. Maybe they had gotten lucky, just this once. Maybe he was the one who would do it, who would help Belfa.

  Just before the deputy reached them, Belfa said, “You cut his throat with a knife. It was you.” And Shirley felt a relief so tremendous and overpowering that she wanted to cry, she wanted to fall to the ground, but she did neither of those things, because she had to be strong, she had to be tough, she had to persuade the world that she was mean enough and hard enough and cold enough to have slaughtered her own father.

  “I don’t remember,” Bell murmured. “I swear to God I don’t remember.”

  Shirley reached out her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I had to say the truth, after all these years.”

  Bell began to weep. She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had cried in her life; crying was useless, and she had figured that out while still a child. Crying made you feel weak, and look weak.

  Tonight that did not matter.

  She had to let the tears subside before she could speak.

  “Don’t ever be sorry for saying the truth,” Bell said.

  Shirley still held her sister’s hand. She gently squeezed it. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe it’s enough that we’ve said it out loud. Just to ourselves. So maybe no one else has to know. Maybe we can just—”

  “No.” Bell drew her hand out of Shirley’s grasp. “It can’t be that way. Everything is—everything is different now. It has to be. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. They’ll have to reopen the case. I’ll confess. I have to.”

  Shirley’s voice had a panicked edge. “Belfa, no. No. I never meant—”

  “Funny thing about the truth. You can’t go halfway.”

  The night air had changed. It was charged now with a kind of desperate electricity that surrounded them, holding them fast within this endless moment of their past. The facts were slowly making their way into Bell’s mind; half-remembered shapes and vague sounds and almost-recollected impulses stirred in the wake of Shirley’s narrative, resuming their rightful place, pushing aside the false memories.

  It was true. It was all true.

  She had suppressed the truth all these years, letting Shirley’s made-up version be the one they told the world, the one they lived by. She had let her sister go to prison on her behalf. Bell hadn’t done it consciously, perhaps—but that was the effect. She had allowed Shirley to give up her life for her.

  Bell knew what she had to do. She stood up. She walked to the front door.

  “Belfa? Where are you going?”

  She turned around. “To write my letter of resignation. I can’t be a prosecutor anymore. Not after confessing to felony murder. You’ll be exonerated, Shirley. You have to be.” Rising in Bell’s mind were the faces of the people she loved as much as she loved Shirley: her daughter, Carla, and Nick Fogelsong. He was old now, but once upon a time, he had been the young deputy. The one who had taken care of her that night, and who believed in her thereafter, and who insisted she go to college and work hard and create something good and golden of her life, a life that had begun in such pain and violence. Because of him, Shirley’s sacrifice had been worthwhile.

  Tonight it was all coming undone, unraveling before her eyes. Bell’s life was spinning backward, hurtling her into a past she had tried so desperately hard to escape.

  Now she knew: The past always has the last word.

  Danny

  11:58 P.M.

  A little less than twenty-four hours before this moment, a young woman had walked out of the night and into the artificial brightness of the Marathon station. She wore cutoff denim shorts and a black T-shirt with the word PINK spelled out across the front in pink letters.

  Danny knew what she needed.

  She had asked to use the bathroom, and he pointed the way. She said, “Okay, thanks.” Their eyes locked. Still looking at her, he reached under the counter. His hand brushed against the key to the bathroom door, hanging from the bent nail, and then it brushed against the cold edge of the revolver. Just past the gun, he found it: one of six small, cloudy-white packets that he had picked up at the Starliner Motel earlier in the day.

  He had passed the packet to her. She’d handed him a wadded-up bill. A twenty. The bill was wet with the sweat from her hands. While shoving the bill in the front pocket of his jeans, he’d watched her make her way to the bathroom.

  That was then. Right
now, however, he wasn’t thinking about the girl, the one who had died in the bathroom last night. He was thinking about Jake Oakes, who was sitting in his Blazer. He’d be coming in soon, no doubt.

  Danny liked him, but there were things about Jake that bothered him, too. Jake didn’t really know him at all. Jake underestimated him. Jake thought Danny was just a clerk at a gas station, standing behind the counter and watching the night go by, watching his life go by. The word “loser” seemed to live in the general vicinity of Jake’s attitude toward him. Well, fine. Fine and dandy. Because you know what? Jake Oakes was the loser. He was the moron who didn’t know what was really going on. Someday he would figure it out. But by then, Danny would be long gone. Where? Didn’t matter. Somewhere. Somewhere else.

  He looked out the window again. Jake’s Blazer was in the same spot in which he had parked it the night before, after Danny called him. After that skank—the one with the PINK shirt—had locked herself in the bathroom. Tonight the deputy had arrived on his own, without Danny’s summons. Things were back to normal. They’d laugh, joke around. Shoot the shit.

  Danny waved. Jake waved back. It looked as if Jake was on the phone. He’d be coming inside soon enough, jonesing for his free Snickers. And wanting to use the can. Same as always.

  Danny finished restocking the wire rack of Skoal tins. It wasn’t like he was happy about what had happened to that girl. Or to the others. But nobody forced them to buy from him. Business was business.

  One more glance out the window. By now Jake had finished his call and was heading his way. The moment the deputy passed under the light that hung from the awning, Danny got a better look at him; even though Jake had his hat on Danny could see the expression on his face, and it was taut, closed. Not friendly. Not like it usually was. That was mildly surprising, but then again, Jake probably had a lot on his mind tonight. Everybody was talking about the overdoses. About how the whole place was going to hell in a hurry.

  And all at once it seemed to Danny as if Jake, who by now had pushed open one side of the glass double doors and was moving relentlessly toward the counter, had somehow materialized out of the night itself, like a piece snapped off from a solid object. It was too dark to see the mountains in the distance but Danny knew they were back there, darkness rising behind darkness. Those mountains had been lording it over him his whole life, reminding him how puny he was, how insignificant. It was little wonder that nobody Danny knew gave a damn about anything. Those mountains cast a spell. They kept you in your place, here in what his grandma used to call this beautiful heartbreak of a world. He wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that. She was just a crazy old lady. Not smart like him.