Summer of the Dead (28 page)

“You're wrong,” Bell said mildly. “Our conversation was over.” She was sure that Sharon had been secretly listening to every word.

“It's changed us, you know? All of us,” Sharon went on, as if Bell hadn't spoken. “Monty being so sick, I mean.” She bit her bottom lip, then released it. “I don't know if you have any children, Mrs. Elkins, but to have a sick child—it's the worst—I can't describe—” She stopped. When she spoke again, her tone was gentle and confiding; this was one friend talking to another. All defenses down. “Look, I came out here to level with you. Woman to woman. I caused Daddy a lot of pain when I was younger. Did everything I could to embarrass him. Ran around and made a damned fool of myself. I was a selfish bitch. Drank too much. Screwed every guy in sight. I hated the fact that he was in politics and we all had to be so
good
all the time. So goddamned
holy
. So I went running just as fast as I could in the other direction. I was a slut, okay? No other word for it. Wanted to embarrass him. Wanted him to suffer—and he did. He did. But no matter how bad I was, no matter how much I put Daddy through back then, it's
nothing
compared to what he's dealing with now.” Her chin quivered. “Watching his grandson get sicker, day by day.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“Just needed to say it. So that you won't judge Daddy too harshly. About—about whatever it is you came to see him for.”

“Understood,” Bell said. Sharon's speech, like portions of her father's, felt prerecorded, maybe even poll-tested. Riley Jessup was a politician—and Sharon was a politician's daughter. Slight variation of the same species.

Sharon backed away a step or two. The security guard moved forward. There was a steady, avuncular protectiveness in his bearing.

“Everything okay?” he asked Sharon.

She nodded. Gave him a brief smile. Then she turned again to Bell. “I need you to know something else. You called these men a security team. Well, that's not exactly right. Leo here is like family. I mean—yes, he protects us, but he's not just an employee. Leo's been working for my father since—well, how long has it been now, Leo?”

“Forty-six years,” he said. Bell heard the glint of pride in an otherwise bland and stolid voice.

“Leo here knows me,” Sharon said. “Knows all of us—me, my father, Montgomery. And Whit, of course.” Her husband's name sounded like an afterthought. “We've added to the staff over the years,” she went on, “but Leo—and Bob over there, and Rufus and Carl, who're out back—have been with us forever. In fact, Leo was the one who found me and brought me back, all those years ago. When I was running wild. It was Leo here who talked me into coming home.” She patted his forearm. He had no apparent reaction—no smile, no confirming nod. He didn't look at her. Yet Bell thought she detected a slight quiver in Leo's body when Sharon touched him. A faint, subtle vibration.

Opening the door of the Explorer, Bell let her eyes slide up for another glimpse at the second-floor window, toward the place where she'd seen the boy. He was gone now. The drapes were shut. She could imagine a hand—not the boy's hand, but someone else's, someone charged with keeping him safe—grabbing the fabric and giving it a hard tug, pulling it across the rod, sealing off the inside of the house the way you'd twist on the lid of a jar, securing it, making it airtight.

*   *   *

Bell was three-quarters of the way back to Acker's Gap. She drove very fast and the mountains—steep walls of green rising away from her at a dizzy pitch—flashed by. She relished the freedom and the silence.

It didn't last long. Her cell rang. She slapped the phone against her ear.

“Elkins.”

Heavy breathing. It wasn't an obscene phone call. She knew what it was: the husky aftermath of weeping. A man's weeping. Men cried differently from women; they tried to hold it back, fighting it, walling it off, and the effort ironically made the tears go on that much longer, fortified by having weathered the initial resistance. For a woman, tears came and went like a spring shower. For a man, it was more serious; a bout of weeping was like a tornado, wrecking everything he'd believed about himself and his ability to take a punch.

“Elkins,” she repeated.

The voice was laden with pain and embarrassment: “Ma'am—I'm sorry, ma'am, sorry to bother you—I oughta call Nick Fogelsong and I know that, but I—I don't want him to—I'm ashamed, I'm—”

Bell let the caller collect himself.

“Ma'am,” he started again. “This's Wally Frank. My brother Charlie—he was—he was—”

“I know,” she said. She had picked up something else in his voice, the longer he talked. His words were slightly slurred. He'd been drinking. In these parts, grief and whiskey were like best friends in elementary school: You rarely saw one without the other.

“I miss him,” Wally said. “All the time. He was a strange man, no doubt about that, and lotsa folks thought he was—well, not right in his head—but he was my brother.” A series of wet-sounding coughs. A muffled belch. “Listen, Mrs. Elkins, I can't say this to Nickie—we've known each other too damned long and I'm too ashamed of myself—but I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do. I just—”

She let his broken-off sentence hang there in space. She thought about the autopsy photos of Charlie Frank. The ghastly wounds. Until Charlie's killer was caught, she'd be getting these kinds of calls. Technically, a prosecutor didn't solve crimes; that was the sheriff's job. But in a small county, the reality was different: She was at the center of the wheel. No way out. She didn't want a way out.

“Thing is,” Wally said, and his voice sounded tinny and faraway now, as if he'd dropped the phone and picked it up again by the wrong end, “I'm no good for anybody these days. No good at work. No good for my kids. My mother looks at me with them big eyes of hers—and I don't know what the hell to say. Don't know how we're gonna take care of her. Can you—what am I gonna do, Mrs. Elkins? What am I gonna do?” She heard a sob and a click.

He'd hung up without waiting for an answer. Which was a good thing, because she didn't have one.

 

Chapter Twenty-seven

“And so I said, ‘Hey, no! Shut
up
! You'll jinx it!' And Annie said, ‘Jinx
what
?' And I said, ‘The whole summer.
Duh.
'” Carla took a breath. She'd needed one at least three sentences ago but banged right on, talking in that headlong way she did when she was happy. It was the opposite of how she acted—taciturn, the quiet closed up in her—when she was mad at Bell, or upset at the world. There was no middle ground with Carla Jean Elkins, her mother knew; she was loquacious or mute, a chatterbox or a sphinx.

They'd set up the time for the Skype chat the day before and at 4
P.M.
, Bell made sure she was seated at her desk in her courthouse office, laptop arranged so that it didn't catch the glare from the window. The image on the computer screen satisfied Bell that Carla was doing fine. Her daughter's eyes were bright, and she was as excited as Bell had ever seen her.

“So weird that it's still light there,” Carla said. She was lying on her stomach on a bed covered with a white chenille bedspread, chin propped in her palm, bare feet waving in the air behind her. Beyond her daughter's toes, Bell could make out a tall leaded window and tidy stacked squares of fuzzy darkness. It was 9
P.M.
in London. When she contemplated just how far away Carla really was—across an ocean, for God's sake, even though her presence on the screen made her seem close enough to be hanging out in the next room—Bell felt awe, followed by a wave of immense and overwhelming sadness. She had to swallow hard to keep it out of her voice.

Bell had asked her about Annie Carpenter, the other summer intern in the London office of Strong, Weatherly & Wycombe. That was the firm for which Sam Elkins made obscene amounts of money as a terrifyingly effective lobbyist.
She's okay,
Carla had replied, which was a signal to Bell that the two of them were already close. In Carla's world, “okay” was synonymous with intensely, unbelievably, eternally fabulous. Annie's only flaw, Carla added, was that she persisted in predicting that this summer would be the very best one of their entire lives—which, as Carla had quickly scolded her, officially constituted a jinx.

“How's the neighborhood where you're living?” Bell asked.

“Oh my God, Mom, it's amazing. I mean, the houses all look like they're right out of
Mary Poppins
or something. So they've got these little fences with little spikes on top and these fancy front doors. Oh, and yesterday we went to King's Cross—the train station where Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts, right? They've got this platform that's like the one he goes through. And the brick wall. Check out my Facebook page—you can see me there. Annie took the picture.”

Bell didn't want to tell Carla that she'd already seen it, that she'd been to her daughter's Facebook page dozens of times in the past few days. She didn't want to seem overprotective, like some crazy stalker mom. At the words “Harry Potter,” Bell had felt one of those acute pangs just below her rib cage that always assailed her at the moment her desperation at missing Carla reached a particularly intense pitch. Back when Carla was in middle school, Bell had read the entire Harry Potter series aloud to her, book by book, divvying up the adventures across many bedtimes. Bell could remember how it felt to have Carla nestled in the crook of her arm, while both lay in the big bed in Bell's room, as Bell opened
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
to the spot where they'd left off the night before.

There were times when Bell wasn't sure she could make it to the next moment of her life. It sounded melodramatic, but it was true; she missed Carla so much that she seemed to lose the knack of breathing. The trick of it. She had to remind herself how it was done. And the way it was done, of course, was to stop trying to do it, to let the body go about its business without any interference from conscious thought. She had to settle herself down.
Carla's fine,
Bell told herself.
She's fine and I'll see her again. She's having a great time and that's what's important. Not my neediness. Not my utter desolation because I want her here right now, right beside me.

“So we'll be doing Stonehenge next weekend,” Carla was saying. She'd gone on talking—babbling, really—oblivious to Bell's distress. Which was precisely how Bell wanted it. Carla didn't need any extra guilt to carry around with her. She already blamed herself for the death of her best friend last fall, a death that wasn't her fault but that came as the result of events she'd set into motion.

“That's great, sweetie,” Bell said, determined to keep her voice light and cheerful. “And how about the job itself? I mean, what do you do all day in the office?”

Carla shrugged. Transferred via Skype, the shrug looked like a wavy glitch on the screen.

“So I answer the phone, run errands, get lunch for the senior staff. Stuff like that. But, Mom—it really doesn't matter, because this is
London
. You know?”

“I know.”

“How're things there?” Carla asked. “How's Aunt Shirley getting along?”

There was a stretch of silence, and so Carla spoke again. “Mom? Still there? Is the connection still—?”

“Right here.” Bell was trying to figure out how to answer. “Frankly, it's been kind of rough.”

“What do you mean? Is Shirley okay?”

Her mother had been honest with Carla about some of Shirley's problems; you don't just walk out of prison and back into the world with no residual effects.

“It's not only that,” Bell said. “We've had some serious crimes this summer. Two murders. An old man and then another man.”

“Yeah.” Carla's voice was serious now. “Dad told me. Wow, Mom—it sounds bad.”

Damn you, Sam Elkins,
Bell thought savagely.
Damn you straight to hell
. She had decided not to tell Carla until now. She didn't want her to worry. Her daughter had been through too much already in her young life—the violence she had witnessed, the emotional cataclysm of the divorce. She had wanted Carla to enjoy her summer.

“So what's the deal?” Carla was asking. “Are the cases related to each other?”

“We don't know. Nick and his deputies are doing their best, but there's not a lot to go on.”

“I bet everybody's scared to death.” Carla's face was somber now. She wasn't giddy anymore about being in London; she was thinking about Acker's Gap. And Bell silently cursed her ex-husband all over again.

“Listen,” Bell said. She had promised herself she would be casual with Carla, smiling and upbeat. But now that her daughter knew the truth about what was happening here, Bell didn't have to pretend anymore. She didn't have to hide her anxiety. Bell's next words came in a rush. “I want you to be very careful. All the time. If you're out at night, make sure somebody knows where you're going and who you're with and what time you're supposed to be back. And—”

“Mom. Come on.”

“Okay. Okay. I'll stop. But there are bad things in this world, sweetie. Bad things and bad people. And you've got to be on the lookout for—”

“Hey.” Carla's voice was playful but pointed. “You said you'd stop, okay?”

“Okay. But just be careful. I mean—really, really careful.”

Carla smiled. Cocked her head. Offered a waggle-fingered wave. “Love you, too, Mom.”

*   *   *

Bell was still looking at the computer screen, even though there was nothing to see anymore. Carla had disconnected a good three minutes ago. Bell, though, had barely moved in her seat. She wanted to let the conversation with her daughter wash over her, soaking into her bones so that she'd be able to recall it in the days ahead, when the ache of missing Carla—an ache that only intensified or receded, but never went away entirely—grew unbearable.