Sorrow Road (10 page)

She did not mean it, and Bell knew she did not mean it, but an important part of parenting was stopping yourself from saying, “You don't mean it.” Because an even more important part of parenting was perpetual hopefulness, the abiding belief that Carla really
would
decide eventually to tell her what was going on in her life.

Bell listened to her daughter's steps as she climbed to the second floor. Those steps sounded slow and ponderous and heavy—heavier, certainly, than should have been the case for someone as light as Carla, someone who used to make short work of that staircase, taking two and three steps at a time, never touching the handrail, a lively, black-haired blur on fire with ideas and passions and crushes and
everything,
everything that caught her eye or snagged her heart, which could mean a book or a boy or a song or a social cause or all of the above.

Not now. Now she moved with a dull, deliberate plod that sounded like the aural embodiment of dread. She was carrying a lot more these days, Bell thought uneasily, than just a backpack.

Only one thing could account for the invisible weight. Only one thing was substantial enough to be burdening Carla to this extent: a secret. Or several secrets.

*   *   *

What the—

Bell, blindly thrashing, knocked the alarm clock off her bedside table. Her head was still under the covers. She had heard the landline ring once, twice, three times, and then on the fourth ring, her right arm poked out from under the edge of the blanket and began swiping the air in wild pissed-off arcs. She struck the clock. It made a solid
thunk
when it hit the hardwood floor. Finally she located the receiver.

“Elkins,” she muttered.

She heard breathing, and then a slight rustle. The breathing was thick and clotted. The caller had been weeping. Bell knew that sound well. Once, just for sport, she'd tallied up the number of times that a crying person had called her; the total was in the double digits. County prosecutors were akin to priests, in some people's eyes, and the phone was as good as a confessional.

“Elkins,” she repeated. She did not say it impatiently; she wanted to give the person time to recover. She looked around the dark room, seeing nothing. God, it had to be the freaking middle of the freaking night. Another time, she'd added up the number of occasions that she'd been yanked out of a heavy sleep by a phone call.

Again: double digits.

“I need to talk to you,” the caller said. “It's urgent.”

“Who's this?”

“You don't know me.” A slow intake of breath. “My name is Ava Hendricks.” Another pause. “Darlene Strayer was my partner. We'd been together for fourteen years. And she told me that if anything ever happened to her, I should get in touch with you right away. You'd know what to do.” Another deep breath and then a much longer pause, as if more courage had to be retrieved from some distant storeroom in order for her to continue. “I just got the notification about Darlene. I wasn't home and they had to find me first. Track me down.” She stopped talking. Her breathing was heavy, rusty-sounding.

“I'm very sorry for your loss.” Bell sat up, pushing away the blanket. Her thoughts were starting to clear, like a foggy windshield after the defrost has been activated. “Where were you? Why couldn't anyone reach you?”

The caller's voice snapped to attention. Gone was the soft anguish. “I'm a neurosurgeon, Mrs. Elkins. I spent the day removing a glioblastoma multiforme from the brain of an eight-year-old girl. It was an extremely complicated procedure. I wasn't reachable until an hour ago.”

Bell switched on the lamp by her bed. Instantly a small area of light leapt to life inside the black room, like a struck match held between cupped hands.

“I'm so sorry about Darlene,” Bell said. “Never easy to get that kind of news.”

Her mind was working fast: Had she known Darlene was involved with a woman? Or with anyone, for that matter? No. She hadn't. It did not matter, one way or another, but it reminded Bell all over again how little information she had ever really had about her former classmate. The alcoholism wasn't the only surprise on this night of surprises.

And the surprises just kept on coming.

“The thing is, Mrs. Elkins,” Hendricks said, “Darlene was convinced that someone wanted to kill her. The same person who killed her father. This wasn't an accident.” No emotion in her voice. Just a cold certainty.

Suspicion kicked in. How could Bell be sure this woman was who she said she was? Anyone might call her and claim a close association with Darlene Strayer. Until she had confirmation, she would only say what was already public record.

“Look,” Bell said. “The facts are pretty clear here. Darlene missed a turn on a snowy road and crashed into a tree.” She did not mention the blood alcohol level. She wouldn't, unless Hendricks persisted. Hendricks surely knew about Darlene's issues, and there was no point in piling on until she had the lab report in hand and could use it to swat away the protests and denials. “That's all. And I've not had a chance yet to look into her concerns about her father's passing. I will. But for now, all I can offer you are my condolences.”

“That's not enough.”

“Well, it'll have to be. I hope you'll let me know when any services are planned. I'd like to attend. And if you want a copy of the accident report, you're welcome to call my office at the Raythune County Courthouse and request one. My secretary's name is Lee Ann Fri—”

“No.” It was a slap, not a word. “And frankly, I'm rather surprised at your attitude. Darlene always said you didn't like her. I told her that probably wasn't true. Now I believe it.”

Hendricks might have been a neurosurgeon, but she would've made a dandy psychiatrist, Bell would decide later, when she looked back upon this conversation—one that proved to be so crucial to all that came after.

Because nothing got to Bell Elkins faster than the galling accusation that she was letting her emotions cloud her professional judgment. Nothing riled her up quite so much. Or guaranteed that she would do everything she possibly could to prove it wasn't so—to prove that she took each case as it came, and made her decisions about it based on rigor and cool rationality, on evidence and precedent, and not on the wildfire of her feelings.

Hendricks had sensed that. Or maybe Darlene had told her enough about Bell for her to figure it out. In any case, Ava Hendricks played her. It was for a good cause, as Bell would later acknowledge to herself—and to Hendricks, too—but she had played her, just the same. Hendricks knew exactly which buttons to push, and she pushed them at exactly the right moment.

“You don't have
any idea
how I felt about Darlene,” Bell snapped. She couldn't keep the fury out of her voice. “And it doesn't matter, anyway. It doesn't matter
who
is involved. If there's even a hint of a crime—if there's even a single unanswered question—we investigate.”

“Prove it.”

“I will.” And just like that, Bell realized, she had committed herself to taking a second look at the death of Darlene Strayer.

 

Chapter Five

Rhonda Lovejoy leaned over Bell's desk from the opposite side and deftly executed a document dump. The tall stack of printouts hit with a wallop. The top several pages slid to one side like a drifting snowbank, bumping up against Bell's coffee mug.

“Everything you ever wanted to know about Ava Hendricks,” Rhonda declared.

It was just after eight on Monday morning. The overnight snow hadn't materialized, after all. Good thing: The town was still digging out from under what was now commonly referred to as the Saturday Night Massacre. It snowed every winter in these mountain valleys, but rarely did it snow this much all in one go.

In the downtown area, the plow had pushed the snow into tall piles that brooded over the corners of major intersections, creating a mini-Stonehenge effect. Driving to the courthouse that morning, Bell could have sworn she saw a couple of Druids chanting and gesturing oddly at the base of an obelisk, but it turned out to be adolescents in gray hoodies with floppy sleeves who were posing for selfies next to snow piles.

“And by the way,” Rhonda added. “Real sorry about your friend. That road's bad news in the ice and snow. Curves'll sneak up on you.”

“Thanks.” Bell moved the mug so that it wouldn't be in the way if the stack shifted again. “What'd you find out?”

“Hendricks is a big deal. Head of neurosurgery at George Washington University Hospital. Pretty amazing credentials. I found a ton of stuff on the Internet—interviews, profiles, award citations.”

“So she's solid.”

“Solid? Yeah, I'd say so.” Rhonda lifted her eyebrows and lowered her chin, her standard
Wait'll you get a load of this
pose. “Born in Boston. Everybody in the family's a doctor. Even the cat, I bet. Oh, and then there's—um, let me see here—oh, yeah. Columbia med school, residency at Mass General, surgical fellowship at Johns Hopkins. A ton of commendations for community service. There aren't a lot of neurosurgeons, period. And
female
neurosurgeons? We're talking
really
rare. Endangered-species rare.”

Two chairs faced Bell's desk. Rhonda picked the one on the left. She was a large woman who moved with nimbleness and grace. If Bell had been asked to come up with a phrase that defined her assistant, she would have said that Rhonda was comfortable in her own skin. She possessed a distinctive sense of style that Bell admired without ever feeling the slightest desire to emulate. Today her assistant wore a white wool cable-knit sweater with flecks of red and gold thread, an orange scarf, and purple wool slacks. Her bright blond hair was stacked on top of her head and secured there by a combination of hope and hair spray.

After a brief pause to enable Rhonda to situate herself, Bell spoke.

“Did you enjoy your weekend?” The topic-switch was abrupt. And the words sounded rehearsed, because they were. Bell was trying to be friendlier to her staff these days. Lee Ann Frickie had recently used the words “prickly” and “moody” to describe Bell's behavior as a boss, and it bothered her, so much so that she had lashed out at Lee Ann—thereby proving her secretary's point.

“I mean,” Bell added, “with the snow and all.”

Rhonda was flummoxed, and looked it. Bell did not make small talk, especially small talk about the
weather,
for God's sake, and this felt an awful lot like small talk. About the weather, no less.

What was going on?

“It was fine,” Rhonda said. Cautiously.

“Good.” Social niceties over, they could get back to business. Bell placed a hand on top of the stack. “Looks like you were thorough.”

“I brought you anything even remotely relevant. Hick finally fixed the printer in our office, so I didn't have to run all over the courthouse looking for one I could cabbage onto. Last week they almost threw me out of the assessor's office. I tied up their printer for an hour and a half, trying to print out all those motions in the Vickers case.”

Hickey Leonard was Raythune County's other assistant prosecutor. Bell was fortunate to have two. Most West Virginia counties as small as this one had only a prosecutor and no assistants at all. It wasn't a question of workload; there were always plenty of cases. It was a question of money. Pressured by a steady drop in revenue as coal mines shut down and businesses closed up and families moved away in multiples, the majority of counties could not afford the luxury of assistant prosecutors.

But Bell was lucky: Two-thirds of the Raythune County commissioners owed their political success to Hickey Leonard, and he never let them forget it. He had lived every second of his sixty-seven years in Acker's Gap, as had his father and mother before him. He knew which skeletons rattled in which closets belonging to which commissioners, and if there was ever any talk about cutting the budget for the prosecutor's office and maybe getting rid of him or Rhonda, all Hick had to do was show up at a commission meeting and, while the minutes of the last meeting were being read, tug a small spiral-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit coat and thumb through the first few pages he came to, brow furrowed, mouth bunched in a thoughtful frown as if he had forgotten the particulars of some especially heinous incident but—oh, my!—here those particulars were, written down in all of their lurid shamefulness. And then he would look up and catch the eye of one of the commissioners—Bucky Barnes, say, or Sammy Burdette or Carl Gilmore or Pearl Sykes—and, still holding the eyes of that suddenly nervous person, he would lick his finger and use it to turn to yet another page of the notebook, slowly, slowly, while shaking his head ever so slightly as if to say,
You think you know a person, but no. No, you don't. Not when you see what they're truly capable of, when no one's looking. Or at least when they
think
no one's looking.

It was a form of soft blackmail that once upon a time would have disgusted Bell, but she was a different person now from the one she had been when she first came back to Acker's Gap, stuffed uncomfortably full of idealism and judgment, in addition to being headstrong, snippy, and quickly notorious as a know-it-all. She had changed. She had been forced to change, if she wanted to accomplish anything. Now she appreciated Hick's regularly scheduled performance. It meant that Bell was able to keep him and Rhonda Lovejoy on the payroll, and she needed them. More to the point, the county needed them.

And besides: She'd had a peek at that notebook of his. The pages were blank.

“I appreciate you pulling all this together so fast this morning,” Bell said. “I'm sure Dr. Hendricks will be paying us a visit. Apparently she and Darlene were together a long time. And a grieving spouse is going to want some answers.”