Sorrow Road (43 page)

But there were no other cars. Who else would be dumb enough to drive in this weather? Thus the very recklessness—or foolhardiness, as Bell knew Nick Fogelsong would dub it—of the mission tended to make it safer. They were alone out here. Sliding along sideways was fine.

“I guess I'm going to have to rethink some things,” Rhonda said, “about love and marriage, you know?”

“What?”

Bell was frantically trying to keep them upright and moving forward—and alive—for at least a little while longer. Yet Rhonda seemed oblivious to the peril.
She has more faith in my driving abilities than
I
do,
Bell thought.
God help her
.

“I was looking at Ava Hendricks tonight,” Rhonda went on. “I mean, goodness. She's an attractive woman. Even more than what her pictures show. I wanted to say to her, ‘Honey, you could have any man you wanted in Acker's Gap.'”

Bell was about to suggest that that really wasn't much of a compliment, but she had to deal with a sudden crisis. The Explorer had hit a patch of black ice. It felt as if it were levitating. The vehicle was not being steered anymore, in any real sense; it was skating all on its own, indulging in a series of wild loops. Bell kept only a minimal touch on the wheel and hoped for the best. At long last the tires seemed to find the road again. They were moving forward.

“I don't understand it—but it has to be true,” Rhonda said. She was unfazed by the near-disaster. In fact, she seemed barely aware of it. “Ava and Darlene must have really been in love. They had choices, both of them. And they chose each other.”

Bell nodded. Rhonda's sudden conversion to tolerance was a bit too abrupt to be entirely sincere. Maybe her assistant would indeed work her way toward an acceptance of the idea that people could live as they pleased. But Bell was the boss, and Rhonda knew her feelings on the subject, hence this little speech reeked of expediency. Still, Bell told herself, it was better than nothing.

After a few more miles Bell took a guess and twisted the wheel and hoped she was heading into the parking lot of Thornapple Terrace. Rhonda had tried Carla's cell multiple times. Nothing.

The building in front of them was barely visible through the continuing onslaught of snow, portions of the brick emerging now and again when a gusting wind cleared out a brief area of clarity. A few lights were on inside.

Before they could talk strategy, Bell's phone rang. She put it on speaker.

“Mrs. Elkins, this is Kayleigh Crocker. I've been trying to call Carla. So I got worried and thought maybe she'd contacted you.”

“Kayleigh, what's going on? What do you know?”

“Nothing, Mrs. Elkins. Carla and I barely got a chance to talk last night. I don't have any idea—”

“Cut the crap.” Bell's voice was as mean as she could make it. “There's no time. I got a text from her an hour and a half ago. Said she was at Thornapple Terrace. Why the hell would she be going there, Kayleigh? Tell me everything you know.
Now
.”

Kayleigh was crying. Bell did not care. She listened as the young woman took a few kittenish sniffles. Then Kayleigh said, “There's this guy she likes. An older guy. He works there.”

“What older guy?”

“Just somebody she met. At a bar. And then she found out that he'd given her a fake name. So she was driving out there this afternoon to ask him about it. Please, Mrs. Elkins, I told her not to. And I'm sorry I didn't try harder to stop her or—”

“Just sit tight, Kayleigh. I'll take care of it.”

Oh, Carla,
Bell thought.
Carla, Carla.

Her daughter's passion and impetuosity were so much a part of who she was.

But they also got her into trouble on a regular basis.
Would I,
Bell wondered,
want her to be otherwise?
A sedate, predictable Carla Elkins would not be her little girl. She would be somebody else's little girl.

Bell would stick with what she had. With Carla—and with everything that went along with her, including, at the moment, a mysterious and possibly dangerous scenario unfolding on the other side of the cascading snow.

The building was now officially invisible. Snow dominated this world, and as was its kingly prerogative, it was erasing all boundaries, taking over everything.

“So what's the plan?” Rhonda said.

“Well, we don't have any idea what's going on in there. So let's go in quietly and be ready for anything.”

They fought their way out of the Explorer—the wind desperately wanted to rip off the opened doors—and bent their heads, trudging toward what they hoped was the front door of the Terrace. Bell tried to shut off her mind during the journey, and stay focused on remaining upright against a wind intent on knocking them over and dragging them away, but she could not. She was envisioning all the terrible things they might discover within: injuries or, God forbid, fatalities; a crazed gunman with a grudge; mayhem and peril.

But when they got inside, it was not like that at all.

*   *   *

There was a small couch in the corner of the lobby, and an armchair, and that was where the people were. A soft silence permeated the room; it was not the kind of silence that occurs in the aftermath of violence, that shocked, freeze-frame stillness, but rather the silence of weariness and resignation.

Sitting on the couch was an old man. Bell knew she had seen him before. Yes—it was the old man at the reception desk the day she first visited here. The one in the driving cap. Right now he was in his pajamas, a pale green flannel pair with white piping on the sleeves. His hands were folded in his lap. He looked perfectly content. Next to him was Carla. She was obviously surprised to see her mother and Rhonda when they entered, but she did not jump up or call out. She waved them over, putting a finger against her lips to indicate they should move quietly.

An older man in gray coveralls sat in the armchair. He had pulled the chair around so that it faced the couch. He was holding something in his lap. As Bell came closer, she saw that it was a flat board with a circle of nails protruding from one end. Clearly, a weapon.

Yet the only violence right now was occurring outside the large window just over the couch. The storm was at its peak; wild gusts of snow were hurled against the glass by a manic wind, in profound contrast to this tidy pocket of calm.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Rhonda.” Carla spoke slowly and carefully. “Nelson, it's okay if I talk to them, right? I can tell them what's going on?”

The man in the chair—Bell remembered him now, he was the maintenance man here, the one who was fixing the sprinkler head on the day of her first visit—nodded. His head was tilted slightly forward. There was a compressed energy about him, a sense of coiled power, especially in his hands. The hands that held the board.

“Okay, then,” Carla said. “Mom, Rhonda—this is Nelson Ferris. And this is his father, Bill.”

Nelson did not acknowledge them. His focus was locked onto the old man.

One of Nelson's fingers twitched, the board shifted in his lap, and the atmosphere immediately changed, tensed up. But it was only that: a finger twitch.

Bell's impulse was to rush forward and grab the board from Nelson Ferris. But something in Carla's demeanor told her to hold back. Her daughter was not acting like a victim. Despite all evidence to the contrary—despite the presence of an obviously distraught man with a crude weapon—Carla seemed to be in charge.

“Everything's fine,” Carla said. “Everything's okay.”

“If everything's okay,” Bell asked her quietly, “then why didn't you return my calls? Or Kayleigh's calls?”

“Nelson didn't want me to,” Carla said. Bell thought she understood her strategy now: Make Nelson Ferris believe he was safe, that no one was challenging him. “And like I said in my text, it's all fine.”

Bell looked around the lobby. “Isn't there a security staff on duty? Where are they?” She had been visited by a sudden ugly vision of a guard tied up and tossed in a closet somewhere.

“At night,” Carla replied, in the serene, unruffled voice that was rapidly persuading Bell that her daughter would make an excellent hostage negotiator, “the security is handled by maintenance. Nelson—or as they know him here, Travis Womack—is in charge of things tonight.” She gave her mother a look that Bell immediately translated as:
Be cool. I've got this.

I've trusted her this far,
Bell thought.
In for a penny, in for a pound.

They waited.

Bill Ferris sneezed. He examined the clear goop in his hand as if he had no idea where it had come from. Then he smiled.

“Look at him,” Nelson scoffed. “Pretending to be out of his mind.”

Carla leaned forward and touched Nelson's knee. When she did that, Bell felt a jet of panic in her stomach. What if this man abruptly decided to swing that board? It was all Bell could do not to grab her girl and head for the exit.

“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.