Summer of the Dead

 

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To my father, James Richard Keller (1931–1984), a son of Appalachia

 

Acknowledgments

Some years ago I met the wise and stalwart wife of a coal miner in McDowell County, West Virginia. She had created a place for her husband under the big kitchen table; because of his many years spent working underground, and injuries to his spine, he was only comfortable in a crouching position. The story has haunted me ever since, and it inspired a key element of this novel.

I am pleased to thank cherished friends Susan Phillips, Elizabeth King, Elaine Phillips, Tom Heinz, Michele Heinz, Tim Bannon, Marja Mills, and Jack Frech.

For their efforts on behalf of my work, I am profoundly grateful to Lisa Gallagher, Kelley Ragland, Hector DeJean, David Baldeosingh Rotstein and Elizabeth Lacks, along with Vicki Mellor and Ben Willis.

 

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

 

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part Two

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

 

Also by Julia Keller

About the Author

Copyright

 

For, what other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

—Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The House of the Seven Gables

 

PART ONE

 

Chapter One

The flat-roofed shack was situated along a country road sunk deep in summer darkness, the kind of darkness that comes after a day of brash sunlight and thus seems more intense and deliberate than ordinary nightfall. The lights in the small tavern made it look, by odd contrast with that shadow-blackened road, like a living thing, shimmying and caterwauling and ready to leap up and lurch away, leaving behind a shallow hole and the sullen stink of piss.

Bell Elkins knew it was an illusion. She knew the only real motion came from the quivering lights in four porthole windows across the building's front and from the ugly thuds of the live band's bass beat, a percussion that hit like a fist on the heart. Yet she hesitated anyway, remaining for a few more minutes in her vehicle at the edge of the dirt-ridged parking lot. Other cars were stuck at crazy random angles, abandoned by their drivers with don't-give-a-damn nonchalance.

It was 3:42
A.M.
on a sticky-hot Saturday night—no, Sunday morning—in the middle of June, and Bell was angry. The anger moved across her mind like a wire being threaded slowly through her veins, millimeter by millimeter. It didn't flare, the way her anger usually behaved; this time, it was gradual. A steady, ominous rise. As she reminded herself of each galling fact, the anger ticked up a notch, and then a notch past that.

Fact: Her sister Shirley hadn't been home in three days. Shirley was a grown woman, and the house rules were loose—but still. Three days. And no call, no text.

Fact: The cell on Bell's bedside table had played its perversely chipper tune just before 3
A.M
. On the other end of the line was Amanda Sturm, a deputy sheriff in Collier County. “Got a call 'bout a ruckus over at Tommy's,” Sturm said after identifying herself. She didn't have to identify Tommy's. It was a bar—this bar—out along Burnt Ridge Road, a place notorious for fights and drugs and trouble. “Looked in on things,” the deputy went on, “and got the lay of the land and then figured I oughta give you a call. Sorry 'bout the time.”

She hadn't awakened her; Bell hardly slept these days, and spent many of her nights sitting up in the battered old easy chair in her living room, reading or trying to. Tonight, she'd actually made it upstairs to bed, but sleep was a nonstarter. Still, though, the call had startled her. “What do you mean?” Bell had asked. Her cell was as light and sleek as a Hershey Bar, yet she used both hands to wrangle it, one to secure it against her ear, the other to keep the bottom half tilted against her chin.

There was a pause, and then the deputy said, “Well, ma'am, one of 'em says her sister is the Raythune County prosecutor and I better lay off. Checked her wallet and sure nuff—you're listed as contact person. Shirley Dolan's her name.”

Fact: Commingling with the clientele in a place like Tommy's could put Shirley in real danger of violating her parole.

Fact: Shirley was well aware of that. She also knew Bell was grappling with a terrible case, the brutal and apparently unprovoked murder of a retired coal miner two nights ago, right in the man's own driveway on the west side of Acker's Gap. The town was still reeling from the shock of it, from a crime that had injected a paralyzing chill into the warm, loose-limbed languor of summer in the mountains.

Fact: Shirley didn't give a rat's ass. She didn't care what sort of extra hassle she caused for Bell, what kind of shame or embarrassment or inconvenience.

Fact: Shirley was not only selfish; she was reckless, too. Dropping Bell's name to a deputy sheriff to garner special treatment was bad enough, but when you added the risk this posed to Shirley's fledgling status as a free woman—well, the whole thing made Bell so incensed that she wrapped her hands even tighter around the steering wheel of her Ford Explorer, glad to have a way to channel her rage, a place to direct it temporarily.

She'd done everything she could do for Shirley. In the three months since her sister's return, Bell had given her a place to stay, bought her clothes, tolerated her smoking. And she'd stayed out of her hair, letting Shirley make her own decisions—and by “decisions,” Bell meant “mistakes.” The two words had become synonymous in her mind, when it came to Shirley.

There'd been trouble from the start. One night, Shirley fell asleep in a kitchen chair with a burning cigarette notched between two fingers, jerking awake just in time to avert disaster, and another, she came home drunk and surly, and when Bell tried to guide the weaving woman to a bed, Shirley shook off the helping hand, and the foul word that fell out of her mouth made Bell shudder in shock, as if Shirley had coughed up a toad or a spider.

Such behavior confirmed her sister's lack of judgment, of manners, of respect, of—well, maybe Sheriff Fogelsong had nailed it. “Lack of gratitude,” he'd said to Bell when she confided her frustration about Shirley. “That's what's really eating at you. You expect her to be grateful. Even humble. For sticking by her, for waiting, for taking her in. Plus—ever held a cork underwater? And then let it go? Shoots up like a geyser. Way the hell up in the air.”

The sheriff, Bell quickly decided, had a point. “Ever get tired,” she had countered, “of being right all the damned time?”

His reply: “Oh, I'm wrong on purpose every now and again, just to keep things interesting.”

The recollection of that encounter reminded Bell of how much she missed him—and not just because she was staring straight in the face of an unsolved homicide that had left the town edgy and restive. Fogelsong had taken a month's leave of absence. He was scheduled to return in the coming week, at which point Pam Harrison would hand back over the top spot and resume her job as chief deputy—but still. Even a short spell without him was too long for Bell. Nick Fogelsong knew her better than anyone else; he understood her right down to the ground, and she appreciated his perspective. Needed it, more to the point.

Shirley, he'd gently remind Bell when her irritation got in the way of sound thinking, was a forty-six-year-old woman who'd never had a chance to be young. She'd been in prison for three decades, and in that bleak and tightly regulated place, every step was monitored, every spontaneous impulse blocked.

So Bell had cut her some slack. Backed off. Held her tongue.

But tonight an entirely new threshold had been crossed. This was the first time Shirley had stayed away for several days running. Or used Bell's name in a scrape with the law. This was disturbingly fresh territory. And it came at a time when Bell ought to be focusing on public safety in general, not a misbehaving sister in particular. If Shirley was caught up in a sweep at Tommy's—the bar's proprietor, Tommy LeSeur, was himself a convicted felon, having served four and a half years on a narcotics charge—her parole could be revoked.

“Hey, pretty lady.”

At the same moment Bell heard the words, she smelled the hot oniony stink of the man who had suddenly thrust his face in the Explorer's open window. He'd taken her by surprise, so intent was she on her thoughts as she stared at the run-down bar. But she wasn't frightened. She was pissed off. The man had a fat face, swollen to the point of resembling an allergic reaction. Bristles of beard stuck out from his round cheeks and from the undulating rolls of blubber that propped up his tiny chin. Booze, sweat, and the heavy fug of a recent bout of vomiting invaded her space.

Before Bell could react, he was talking again. He'd hooked his hands across the bottom of the window and hung on as if it were an upper-story sill.

“Lookin' for somethun?” he slurred. “Or some
body
? Wanna party?” A wicked leer seized his mouth, making both ends of it pointy. A pearl of sweat—or maybe another liquid, although who'd really want a positive ID?—was poised on the bottom rim of a nostril. His eyes were bleary. “How 'bout it, baby?”

First Bell wanted to laugh—
Oh, yeah, here I come, you're freakin' irresistible, mister
—and then the anger roared back, this time mixed with revulsion.

“Get the hell away from me,” she said. Low voice. Words measured and calm, but laced with threat. Only a fool would miss her meaning.

“C'mon, baby. Don't be doin' me like that,” the intruder said. His oily wheedle—delivered on the back of a gust of smelly breath—was enough to make Bell's stomach turn.

With a gesture so quick that it caught him in the middle of a wink, she flung open the car door. Knocked back, he teetered for a tenth of a second and then landed flat on his ample butt.

Behind him, starkly visible in the glare of the crude spotlight rigged to a corner of the building, was a stumpy ring of three men—his buddies, Bell assumed, because these types always traveled in packs. The men pointed at Fat Ass and stomped their work boots and laughed, a hard-edged, mirthless laughter that sounded like another variety of assault. They wore baseball caps and long-sleeved plaid flannel shirts with the cuffs buttoned and the shirttails flapping out behind them, even though this was the middle of summer; such, Bell knew, was the year-round uniform of the good ole boys, the kind you could find lining the back roads around here like lint on a comb.