Summer of the Dead (41 page)

A week had passed since the death of Odell Crabtree. Bell sat on a chair on the back stoop of the garage apartment that was now Shirley's home. The ramshackle one-story place with dented aluminum siding was located just outside Blythesburg, on a tan stretch of dirt road that stopped abruptly at the railroad tracks, the way a sentence is brought up short by a period. The road didn't continue on the other side; it simply ended.

Now that things had settled down in the prosecutor's office—Perry Crum had pleaded guilty to homicide and was awaiting sentencing, and the FBI was handling the case against the conspirators—Bell had decided to bring over the last of Shirley's things: two flannel shirts, one red and one blue, that had been in the dryer the day Shirley moved out. And a battery-powered clock radio.

On the drive over to Blythesburg, Bell's cell had sounded. It was Sheriff Fogelsong. “Finally had a chance to talk to Jason Brinkerman,” he said. “Get his account of what happened in that basement.” Bell didn't answer, so he continued. “Kid told me you were pretty rough on Perry Crum. And paramedics said he looked like he'd been run through a table saw and then finished off in a chipper-shredder. Bastard deserved it—but still. Jason said you were out of control. That you were yelling something. Something that sounded like ‘Daddy.' I told the kid he must've heard you wrong.” He waited. “Belfa?”

“Nothing to say, Nick.”

“Figured that. Just want to make sure you were still listening.” When she didn't answer, he grunted and went on. “Look. Your business. Not trying to interfere, Lord knows. But it's a funny thing. Anger's okay in small doses—it keeps people like you and me on the job, it's the reason we push back against all the crap—but it can turn against you, too. Real quick. If you're not careful. If you don't keep an eye out. Manage it properly. You don't want to end up there, Belfa. You don't want to be like some of the people on the other side of the law. Dead inside. Burned up from the inside out—on account of all the anger.”

No reply.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll leave you be. You don't have to talk about it. Seems like that's how you want it.” Still no response, and so he changed the subject. “Got some other news. Lanny Waller's dead.”

“What happened?”

“Regina Wills shot him this afternoon. Turned herself in. Used his own shotgun on the bastard. Two slugs—one in the chest, one in the gut. Took him a good hour and a half to bleed out, during which time she sat there and watched.”

Bell remembered the little speech that Riley Jessup had made her listen to that day at his mansion. The speech about rising up.
Different ways to rise up,
Bell thought. Regina had found her own way.

“From what I hear,” the sheriff continued, “Waller kept on going at those girls, night after night, even while the judge was investigating Missy Wills and her mighty mysterious change of heart. Regina finally snapped.”

“What's the charge?”

“First-degree murder. Lanny'd had the trailer hauled over to Collier County just a week or so ago, so at least it's not our lookout. Amanda Sturm made the arrest.”

“Well, I'll have a chat with Mason Dittmer,” Bell said. She had a good working relationship with the Collier County prosecutor. “If the evidence supports the facts as you've described them, I think first-degree murder's the wrong charge. Maybe Mason'll be inclined to listen.” Bell tried to find some sliver of regret for Lanny Waller's passing, to be even the tiniest bit sorry that he'd suffered what was surely an agonizingly prolonged death.
Nope,
she realized.
Let him rot in hell
.

And later on there'd be, she hoped, plenty of room in hell left over for Perry Crum and Riley Jessup and Bradley Portis and Sharon Henner. Any pity she might briefly have entertained for Sharon—a woman forced to watch her son fade away before her eyes—had vanished. Any lingering sympathy she felt toward Perry—his long sacrifice for his sister had changed him, and done it so profoundly that he probably didn't even recognize himself anymore—was already gone.

By the time she arrived at Shirley's new home, Bell was ready to talk about something other than the law and its layers. Only two chairs could fit on the stoop; both were the fold-out kind that looked as if a heavy sigh could reduce them to a pile of short aluminum poles and frayed plastic. Bolland had automatically offered the chairs to the women. He settled onto the single concrete step, guitar on his knee.

At first they sat in silence. An amiable silence, not an awkward one. From her vantage point in the chair, Bell could peer down at the top of Bolland's head. His hair looked as if it was thinning by the minute. In no time at all, he'd be totally bald on top. The gray ponytail meandered down his back; it was attached to a few loose strands that looped around his ears. He was an old man. An old man with a young man's dreams.
So this is what you want,
Bell ached to say to Shirley.
This. This life. With this man.
But she didn't say it.

Just before Bolland started his song, a whistle hooted in the distance. Last message from a departing train, a long one that had begun its journey past this spot a while ago, shortly after Bell arrived, its rusty cars packed high and tight with coal. The whistle was a way of saying good-bye. And it worked on Bell like another kind of signal, too, telling her it was time to acknowledge what she knew but had not declared outright to herself. Until now.

Carla wouldn't be coming back to Acker's Gap. Oh, she'd visit for a day or so, now and again. Maybe even stay a week. But she would never live here again. Bell was sure of it. Carla had moved past this place—the first, no doubt, of many such moves she'd be making, as the landscape of her life expanded, keeping pace with her dreams. Bell had raised her daughter to be independent and headstrong and fearless. There was a price to pay for that. And Bell was paying it.

Bell had once had a good friend who loved the poetry of John Donne, loved the way its grave sagacity and stiff ecclesiastical rhythms were sometimes broken wide open by unruly passion, and Bell recalled a verse that her friend had loved. She could still see it on the page, ancient spellings intact:

Our two soules threrefore, which are one,

Though I must goe, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion.…

If they be two, they are two so

As stiffe twin compasses are two,

Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the'other doe.

For Carla henceforth, Acker's Gap would be the fixed foot of the compass; she would spin and expand in ever-widening circles, in a profusion of possibilities. Acker's Gap was her past. Not her future.

So I'm listening to Bobo Bolland and thinking about John Donne,
Bell thought, chastising herself.
Bit of a stature gap
. Truth was, though, Bolland's music wasn't all that bad. His voice had a kind of wire-brushed melancholy to it, a toughness undermined by the tender recollection of lost loves and old woes. Bell liked his voice. And she sort of liked Bolland himself, another realization that surprised her. He'd had his problems in life, his challenges, and always would; he'd made mistakes. Big ones.
Hell,
Bell thought.
So have I. So has everybody.
And he'd make more mistakes, going forward. No doubt. Maybe even bigger ones.

Point was, he treated Shirley well. That was all that mattered. Or all that ought to.

When she'd arrived a while ago with Shirley's things, Bolland came rushing out of the flung-open screen door and grabbed the bag from her, polite and welcoming. He was nervous around Bell, and he stammered, too obsequious by half, but she could understand that. Assumed it would pass. She knew she could be intimidating. Nobody relaxed around a prosecutor. Foolish, frankly, ever to do so. The whole point of the job was to pass judgment on people.

Now they sat on the little stoop as the day's light died all around them. They didn't turn on the porch light, because they knew it would summon vigorous platoons of flying bugs. The darker the sky turned, the less visible Bolland was, and the more he seemed to morph into pure voice.

He was finishing up an original song. The melody was filled with the lilting misery of minor chords; the lyrics were grim and pessimistic, but pessimistic in that poetic way that could sound almost optimistic because—as Shirley had told Bell just the other day, musing aloud as she wedged her meager supply of clothes in a paper grocery sack—if you can sing about it, you can live through it. “Bobo taught me that. He's a wise man, Belfa. Really. He is. Give him a chance and you'll see.”

Bell looked over at Shirley. Her sister's eyes were closed and she nodded in time with the music. She wasn't smiling, but she seemed content, satisfied. Not wrought up, at least. Not churned or whirling.

As Bolland moved toward the end of the song, his voice glided upward in an unexpectedly exquisite arc, like a palm sander following the grain of quarter-sawn oak, a wood whose secret is locked away until it is stained and polished and its heart is coaxed out, brought forward for the world to see. Bolland held the final note for a long time. And in that moment, for reasons unfathomable to her, Bell felt the essence of Shirley's life as never before. She felt the yearning and the fear and the frustration—and the beauty, too, the sere and wounded grace—and she felt everything that might have been but wasn't, everything that her sister should have had but now never would: Just one clear day of pure happiness, unstreaked by pain. A single memory that wasn't marbled with loss. Shirley didn't say a word, but Bell felt as if she could hear her speaking, hear her voice falling into harmony with Bolland's last limpid note:
I'm okay now, Belfa. You don't need to look out for me anymore. You can let go.

And then, too soon, the song was over. The sun was down. And it was, Bell knew, time to go home.

 

ALSO BY JULIA KELLER

A Killing in the Hills

Bitter River

 

 

About the Author

JULIA KELLER
spent twelve years as a reporter and editor for the
Chicago Tribune
, where she won a Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, she was born in West Virginia and lives in Chicago and Ohio.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

SUMMER OF THE DEAD
. Copyright © 2014 by Julia Keller. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover designed by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

Cover photograph © Johnny Gates/ImageBrief.com

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Keller, Julia.

  Summer of the dead / Julia Keller.

         pages cm.—(Bell Elkins novels; 3)

  ISBN 978-1-250-04473-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-4318-9 (e-book)

  1.  Women private investigators—Fiction.   2.  Murder—Fiction.   3.  West Virginia—Fiction.   I.  Title.

  PS3611.E4245S86 2014

  813'.6—dc23

2014014776

eISBN 9781466843189

First Edition: August 2014