Sorrow Road (2 page)

She just wanted
something
. Some reaction. And the less likely it became, the deeper her need. As time went by, as his mind continued to shrivel, the fiercer the desire grew in her. It was, she had decided, like playing tennis with no one on the other side. You kept furiously swatting balls over the net and no one ever hit them back. Again and again and again, you hit the ball with a nice clean stroke and it landed and it bounced a few more times and then it rolled harmlessly to the edge of the fence. The balls all waited there, a fuzzy yellow line of utter pointlessness.

She wanted a return hit, she wanted the chance to volley, but she got nothing. She wanted him to say what he had done to his children.

She wondered if Nelson, wherever he was, wanted it as much as she did. Or if he'd given up by now and never even thought about Bill Ferris. Janie had not spoken to her brother in twenty-five years. He never said why he was going away. She thought she understood why, without him telling her. He was a good boy. A caring boy. Sensitive, but also tough. He could endure his own wounds, as deep and indelible as they were; what he could not endure was having to look at her wounds, knowing that she suffered as much as he did. And so he had left West Virginia right after high school. She might not even recognize him anymore.

Well, if he rolled up his sleeves, she would. They could compare scars.

Did Nelson ever dream of getting a reaction from the old man, as she did? Did Nelson ever fantasize that their father would suddenly remember what he had done to them and either acknowledge it or deny it—or do
something,
something that would make revenge even possible? Did Nelson, too, yearn for payback?

Across the table, the old man continued to smile. Then he winked at her.

“Hello there, sweet thing,” Bill Ferris said.

 

Chapter One

“Drugs.”

Darlene Strayer nodded. “Copy that,” she said. “So what's second?”

“Drugs.”

“And third? Fourth? Fifth?”

“Drugs. Drugs. And drugs.”

“I'm sensing a pattern here.” Darlene offered a brief, tight smile. She picked up her shot glass and moved it around in a small level circle, making the river-brown liquid wink and shiver. The whiskey did not slosh; it trembled. Barely.

Darlene had no intention of finishing her drink. Bell Elkins was sure of it. She had used the technique herself on occasion. Order a drink—because not ordering one is too conspicuous, especially when your invitation had been casual but specific.
Hey, want to meet for a drink?
Take one tiny sip. No more. You needed to keep a clear head. Use the glass as a prop, as a thing to do with your fingers, to stop those fingers from fidgeting. Lift the glass, tilt it, let the liquid move. Lower the glass. Pretend to be just about to take a second sip. But somehow, you never do.

This little get-together, Bell had recognized right away, had nothing to do with alcohol. Or with friendship—the friendship between them was nonexistent. And it certainly had nothing to do with a desire to spend time in the Tie Yard Tavern in Blythesburg, West Virginia, a tattered, ramshackle bar as overstuffed as a sausage casing on this Saturday night in February, filled with too many people, too much bad country music, too much loud talk, and too many peanut shells on the painted concrete floor. Annoyingly, you crunched with every step.

So what
was
the actual purpose of this rendezvous, which had come about as the result of Darlene's phone call two days ago?

Bell had no idea. She was letting Darlene run things. It was her show. Her choice of venue. Bell had indulged her opening question—
What's the number one problem that county prosecutors face in the state today?
—even though they both knew what the answer would be.

It was always the same. Prescription drug abuse and its following swarm of illegal activities had upended life in the hills of Appalachia, turning ordinary people into addicts, and addicts into criminals. Unlike meth, unlike heroin or cocaine or Molly or all the other sexy-sounding, forbidden substances that people pictured when they heard the word “drugs,” pain pills had ushered in their very own, very special version of hell.

“Asked you the same thing the last time we talked,” Darlene said. “Four years ago, remember? You gave me the same answer.”

“Things stay pretty consistent around here.” Bell raised her own glass. “Consistently hopeless.” She smiled as if she was making a joke, which they both knew was not the case. Then she set the glass back down again, also without drinking from it. The liquid in her glass was clear: Tanqueray and tonic. The darker pond in Darlene's was Wild Turkey. But the differences between these two women went far beyond their choice of drinks they weren't drinking.

Bell and Darlene had been classmates at Georgetown Law. During the subsequent two decades, Darlene became a federal prosecutor based in Northern Virginia, and had handled, over the years, the kinds of major criminal cases that landed her unsmiling,
this is business
face in photographs on the front page of
The New York Times
alongside the equally grim mugs of the attorney general and the FBI director. Bell was the prosecuting attorney for Raythune County, West Virginia. The closest she had ever gotten to the front page of the
Times
was when she managed to dig up a copy in rural West Virginia and read it over breakfast.

Oddly, as Bell found herself musing now and again over the years, anyone who had known them back in law school would have expected each woman to live the other one's life. Both had grown up poor in rural areas—Bell right here in Raythune County, Darlene in Barr County—and yet it was Belfa Elkins who had seemed destined for a glittering career in a big city, surrounded by tall buildings and knotted traffic and a magisterial sense of importance, while Darlene Strayer was the misfit, the shy, slightly awkward and even somewhat gauche girl who was never able to shed the small-town veneer of earnestness and yearning. Her clothes were never quite right; her hairstyle was always a few years out of date. She had talked endlessly about returning to her hometown and using her law degree to help the people there escape the poverty and hopelessness that engulfed them.

Dang. Just look at us now,
Bell thought, glancing across the battered wooden booth at the woman who, once again, had lifted her glass in order to not drink out of it.

Darlene was the one in the cool black suit. The one who owned the elegant Massachusetts Avenue town house along Embassy Row and the Sanibel Island condo. The one whose life was as smooth as a fitted sheet.

Bell was the one in the jeans and turtleneck sweater. The one who lived in Acker's Gap, West Virginia, in a crumbling stone house built more than a century and a half ago. The one whose life was as rumpled as that same sheet, after a passel of rowdy kids has used the bed as a trampoline.

It was as if, late at night just after graduation from Georgetown, they'd met in some secret location and agreed to swap ambitions. And lives.

“I suppose I thought things had improved a little bit,” Darlene said.

“Really. That's what you thought.” Bell did not even try to keep the skepticism out of her tone. Darlene, she knew, had access to more and better crime statistics than any county prosecutor could ever hope to obtain. Those stats were grim and getting grimmer by the minute.

“Well, maybe it's what I hoped,” Darlene said. “Let's put it that way.” She started to bend two fingers around the glass one more time, preparatory to another pointless lift. But Bell had had enough. She reached across the table and stopped her hand.

“Hey,” Bell said. “Let's cut the small talk, okay? You're busy. I'm busy. You drove a long way in some pretty lousy weather to get here tonight. So come on—why am I here? What do you really want?”

“Fine.” Darlene slipped her fingers out from under Bell's grip. They did not like each other. They never had. They were cordial, but just. Two social encounters in twenty years—one in D.C. four years ago, at a class reunion, and now this—strained the outermost limits of each woman's politeness allocation.

“Truth is,” Darlene went on, “I need your help.”

“Forgive me, but I'm trying to imagine how a federal prosecutor who routinely takes on special assignments from the attorney general of the United States could
possibly
need any assistance from a small-town DA in West Virginia.”

“I'm not a federal prosecutor anymore. I resigned last month.”

“Really.”

“I'm taking a little time off, and then I'll be heading the litigation department of a D.C. law firm.” Darlene told her the name of the firm, but she didn't have to; it was exactly the sort of practice that Bell would have expected her to join. It rivaled the snooty splendor and cool exclusivity of the law firm at which Bell's ex-husband was a partner. Darlene and Sam Elkins would be like bought-and-paid-for bookends: two very talented attorneys who spent their time massaging the egos of millionaires.

It was not Bell's idea of personal satisfaction, but it didn't have to be. Free country, she reminded herself. To each her own.

Bell waited for Darlene to say more. When she did not, Bell began to speak.

“Listen, I've got to wind this up pretty soon because—”

“
Jesus,
Bell. Give me a minute, okay? Just hold on.” An exasperated Darlene shook her head. Her soft dark hair was cut so stylishly short—it looked like a velvet bathing cap, Bell had thought when she'd first spotted her across the crowded expanse of the Tie Yard Tavern—that not a strand moved. “Jesus,” Darlene repeated.

She took a brief sip of her drink. She coughed. She shook her head. Her shoulders rose and fell. She seemed to be recalibrating herself. “Look, Bell. This is about my father. Harmon Strayer.” She coughed again. Bell was surprised, but remained silent. Whatever it was that her former classmate needed to say to her, she would say it when she was good and ready.

In the back of Bell's mind there stirred a vague recollection of a story she had been told a few years ago by another Georgetown alum. A story about Darlene Strayer's father, a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, and the long, lightless road to nowhere that the disease brought about.

“He died last week,” Darlene finally said. “He was almost ninety.”

“Sorry to hear that. Always hard to lose a family member.”

“Yeah. It was rough toward the end. Hell—it was rough all the way through. He was living in Thornapple Terrace. Do you know it? An Alzheimer's care place over in Muth County. Pretty close to his home—although why that even mattered, I don't know, because he didn't have a friggin' clue where he was. He'd been there about three years. Ever since it opened.”

“I think I've heard of it.” Bell was being polite. The name meant nothing to her. That was not surprising. New elder care facilities seemed to pop up monthly; an aging population riddled with end-of-life issues such as Alzheimer's made such places the only growth area around here. Bell couldn't keep track of them all. Typically they were christened with names like Sunnyside and Brooksdale and Willow Walk and Friendship Bay—happy, soothing, cheerful names. Names that tried to gloss over the reality of what went on past the pleasant lobby and the carpeted corridors: a swan dive into decline and a ragged death. Such places were located at the end of one-way roads paved with sorrow. But that was better, she supposed, than what used to happen years ago, when a deteriorating older relative was left to rot in a back bedroom with a portable commode and the blinds pulled shut.

“Thornapple Terrace,” Darlene said, “is supposed to be one of the best.”

“You don't sound convinced.”

“For the past several months, my father had gotten more and more agitated. We used to sit in the visitors lounge, but he didn't want to go there anymore. He wanted to stay in his room. Something—or someone—was bothering him. He couldn't tell me—he didn't talk very often—but I knew. I just felt it. And when I tried to have a chat with the director about it, she—”

An argument suddenly erupted in the booth next to theirs, a tangled snarl of voices jump-started by beer and bad manners. Bell had seen the trio of twentysomethings on her way in. She could not see them now—the back of the bench seat rose too high—but she got the gist of the fight based on the spillover noise.

Two women were quarreling—shrieking, really—over whether or not the man across from them was, as one of the women had just eloquently dubbed him, a shithead, because he had been dating them simultaneously, without either one knowing about it. Until tonight. “He is
too
a shithead,” the woman said, and the other countered wittily, “Is
not
.”

This went on for a few more dreary minutes, while the man said nothing. Bell couldn't see his face, but she imagined he was lapping up the attention, even though his evening would probably end with a Bud Light bottle smashed over his head and a lot of blood loss.

Violence was always lurking just below the surface in a place like this. It made up its mind, moment by moment, whether to rise up with a bellow and a roar, or to lie in wait, biding its time, eager for an opportunity to do the most possible harm.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the loud part of the argument stopped. The voices dropped to inoffensive mumbles.

Darlene waited until she was sure it was over, and then spoke. “Anyway, it really bothered me—seeing my father upset like that. Not much I could do, though, unless I wanted to move him, which would have been a major ordeal. I didn't think he was up to that.” She paused. “It was a lot of responsibility. All the decisions were mine. I'm an only child. My mother died when I was in grade school. So it was all on my shoulders.”

“I'm sure you did your best.” Bell had no idea if Darlene had done her best or not, but it seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to say.