Summer of the Dead (6 page)

“Yeah.” She didn't elaborate, because she didn't trust his sudden concern. Could be some kind of trick. She was used to fending off the clumsy advances of men like Newspaper Guy. She'd had to develop a strategy. Because—despite the fact that she thought about her looks only every six weeks or so, when she got her reddish-blond hair cut over in Swanville and had to stare in the stupid mirror—Lindy was an attractive young woman. She'd had to come to terms with it. She was slender, with small hands and feet, but she had large, high-riding breasts. So unlike her mother's small bustline.

One of the last conversations she'd had with her mother embarrassed them both, but it had been necessary: “Men'll be after you, my girl,” Margaret Crabtree said to Lindy on her fourteenth birthday. “Don't mean to make you self-conscious, but you're growing up now, and you gotta face it. They'll stare at your chest. Some'll make rude comments. You'll have to reckon with that. Way of the world, sorry to say.” A few days later, her mother died from the ovarian cancer that had been diagnosed only two months before.

Lindy made a habit of wearing loose-fitting men's shirts and no makeup. She kept her hair cut short and she acted the part of a hard-ass, never speaking if a bored shrug or a quick noncommittal laugh would suffice. Mostly, it worked. The men who came into the station to pay for their gas or their six-packs rarely looked at her long enough to get an inkling of what might exist beneath that billowing flannel shirt. One rainy night, it was true, Jason had given her a sideways stare of peculiar intensity; she'd had to check on a pump and she came racing back inside, shirt sticking to her skin, revealing the full and perfect outline of her breasts. Jason had started to say something, and then didn't. Just looked at her. Lindy's return glare had been enough to enforce his silence. Still, she'd felt his attraction to her. She didn't want any part of it, but it was there. So far, it hadn't interfered with their working relationship.

“Okay, then,” Newspaper Guy said. He sneezed. It made Lindy want to laugh, but she didn't. He even sneezed like an old guy: His whole face wrinkled up like a used washrag, his nose scrunched to a button as he bent over at the waist, catching the residue in two scaly hands.
Gross,
Lindy thought. She wondered why he didn't just use the sleeve of his raincoat. Surely wouldn't have been the first time.

“Okay,” Newspaper Guy repeated. Looked over toward the coffee section. Jason hadn't even turned around to acknowledge his presence. “Hey, kid. You there. I'm talking to you, too.”

Jason continued to fuss with the cups. Still didn't turn around. “Yeah. What.”

“Just making sure you can protect this girl here,” Newspaper Guy said. “It's important. You know what's going on, right? Out there in the dark?”

Jason made a sound, a combination of “huh” and “yeah” and a snickering noise in the back of his throat. Now he was playing with the little plastic tubs of nondairy creamer, building a pyramid on the coffee counter.

“I'm
talking
to you, fuckface,” Newspaper Guy went on. The agitation in his voice had ratcheted up several degrees. “Least you can do is look me in the eye.”

Right before Lindy started to intervene—she didn't want any trouble—Jason turned. “Okay,” he said. “I'm looking.”

“Good.” Newspaper Guy settled down. “Listen to me. Both of you kids. There's trouble out there. Bad trouble. Things're happening. You heard, right? Old man got attacked. His head was split wide open. Right in his own driveway. So you two better watch out.”

Jason grinned. “Oh, yeah. We'll watch out, all right.”

Newspaper Guy's head whipped around. He glared at Jason. The glare was packed with such pure and earnest hate that Lindy was rattled by it, even though it wasn't directed at her.

The
ding-ding
sound startled Lindy. Someone had pulled up to the pumps outside.

Newspaper Guy took a few hectic shallow breaths. “Okay, then,” he said. “Long as you got a way to get help out here. You watch yourselves, hear me?”

He pushed at the glass door and departed. As soon as his decrepit orange car had coughed and swayed and grumbled away, Jason laughed. “Crazy bastard. Yeah, we'll keep a lookout—we'll be looking out for assholes like
you
.” He laughed again.

Lindy didn't comment. From her outpost behind the counter she rose up on tiptoes, in order to see over the cardboard ramparts of Diet Pepsi and Mountain Dew twelve-packs that were stacked on both sides of the doorway. She needed to keep an eye on the customer out at the pumps. This building, though, featured glass walls, so that when she looked out into the darkness from the lighted spot, the thing she always saw first was her own reflection.

 

Chapter Six

Deputy Mathers finally left her office. Bell looked at her watch. It was still far too early to disturb anyone for whom you had the slightest shred of affection or respect—which made it the ideal moment to call her ex-husband.

She had tried to reach him twice yesterday and once the day before. Her calls went straight to voice mail. No return call. Which wasn't a surprise: Sam Elkins believed that only losers made themselves accessible. Winners should be perennially hard to reach.

This time, he answered after three rings. “I was getting ready to call you back, Belfa,” he said.

“Sure you were. How's Carla?”

“Not packed yet, if that's what you mean.” Sam sounded touchy and defensive, as always. “She'll be ready by Saturday, though.”

“Are you driving her over?”

“No. Can't get away. I got her a flight into Charleston, then booked a limo from there over to Acker's Gap.”

“A
limo
? Jesus, Sam, I could've picked her up.”

“She'll enjoy it. Make her feel like a celebrity. Like Miley Cyrus.”

“Great. Just the role model I was hoping for.” Bell didn't want to argue with him about the limo. It was a ridiculous, extravagant gesture, but it was also his decision. And he could afford it, so what the hell.

When Sam spoke again, his voice was different; it had shed a bit of its edge. “Heard about Freddie Arnett. My great-aunt Thelma called and told me. Good God. Totally unbelievable. And no suspects, right?”

“Not yet.” She didn't want to discuss it with him. There was a time when she'd looked forward to talking over her cases with Sam Elkins—but not anymore. He didn't deserve it. He'd demonstrated to her, too many times, his contempt for Acker's Gap, even though it was his hometown as well as hers.

“I'm just counting the hours,” Bell added, “until Nick gets back.”

“Won't matter, Belfa. You know that. Nobody can stop it. The violence—it's everywhere now. People are scared as hell.”

Her ex-husband had a knack for stating the obvious as if it were an original insight. Bell waited, giving her anger a chance to dissipate. Yes, the crime rate in Acker's Gap and the surrounding vicinity was far worse than it ought to be, given the population; that was due in large part to the thriving trade in illegal prescription drugs. Sam knew the cause as well as she did. He also knew that a great many small towns in Appalachia suffered from a similar blight. But he still hinted that Acker's Gap was worse somehow, a sad, sick, pitiful little place, filled with danger and mayhem and despair. He seemed to believe that Acker's Gap was uniquely cursed. It was special, and not in the way that anybody or anything wanted to be special.

What bothered Bell most of all, of course, was the fact that these days, she was half-inclined to agree with him.

“Gotta go.” She ended the call before he did, which would, she knew, infuriate him. Sam liked to run things, liked to decide when a conversation was over, liked to be seen as the busy one forced to go because he had another call coming in or somebody waiting in his office or an appointment on tap—something, anything, that would prove his superiority. Bell knew she'd annoyed him by turning the tables; his annoyance, in turn, pleased her unduly. It was petty, sure. Pettiness, she'd discovered, was an occupational hazard when dealing with an ex-spouse. She didn't fight it anymore.

She and Sam had grown up together here, but always dreamed of leaving. And they had done just that, moving to the D.C. area after Sam's graduation from West Virginia University College of Law. Then Bell, going slowly out of her mind with boredom as a stay-at-home mom, had enrolled in law school herself, at Georgetown; shortly before graduation, she began to feel the urgent tug of home. After the divorce, she'd returned here, bought a house, made a successful run for prosecutor. Bell still didn't know—and frankly had no idea if it was ever something you
could
know with any certainty, any finality—if coming back to Acker's Gap had been the right decision. Right for her, right for Carla.

Right for Shirley.

Shirley
. Bell reached down and retrieved the briefcase at her feet. She had delayed as long as possible, but now she had to go home. Home to deal with her sister. Home to try, one more time, to get Shirley to open up to her, to admit what she was feeling. To talk about all those years in prison. Or to go back even further: to talk about the night three decades ago in the ragtag trailer by Comer Creek, when everything changed. Each time Bell tried to persuade Shirley to confide in her, to have a real conversation about real things, her sister had put her off.
Later,
Shirley would say.
Real tired right now. Gonna take myself a little nap. That okay with you?
Which meant that Bell still didn't know—she could guess, of course, but guessing wasn't the same as knowing, and she needed to hear Shirley say the words—why her sister had broken off contact with her all those years ago, why she had sent back Bell's letters without opening them, why she had refused Bell's visits and phone calls.

Why. Why. Why
. Sometimes it still could drive Bell crazy, her sister's boarded-up face and silent stare when the conversation turned to the past. But Bell would keep trying. She had to. The past, she'd decided, was like one of those stumbling, dead-eyed creatures in a zombie movie, the kind that Carla and her friends loved and dreaded in equal measure: You could pretend to ignore it, you could try to bury it, but it wouldn't stay in the grave. It always came back—stronger each time, and in a meaner mood. Aware of its power.

Bell locked her office door. The courthouse was closed to the public on Sundays; hence, the corridor was empty. Her steps sounded like a series of crisp earnest smacks. Back when Carla still lived in Acker's Gap, back when she was twelve and thirteen years old, she'd accompany her mother here on weekends, and while Bell worked at her desk, Carla would race up and down the long empty halls, arms outstretched, swooping and turning and relishing the clacking cascade of echoes.

Bell pushed open one side of the heavy courthouse doors. She paused on the threshold. By now the sun's face had popped beyond the top of the mountain, a familiar but still spectacular sight.

Darkness gathered at her back, forming the cool shadows in the long main corridor of the courthouse, but in front of her, the light spread itself evenly across sidewalks and storefronts, across bricks and picture windows and lampposts and rooftops. The same elements that she had been seeing—save for her years away at college and her brief time in D.C.—for her entire life. Forty years. Sometimes that sameness exasperated her, because nothing ever changed around here; other times, it gave her solace. And no matter how it seemed, Acker's Gap did indeed change. Too much. A terrible explosion in the spring, a drug-related triple homicide the year before, a murder two nights ago and another one just down the road from it: Acker's Gap had joined the world, and all portions of the world were connected now, the moving parts of a volatile whole. The town Bell saw from the courthouse doorway this morning was sun-glazed, shadow-striped, a cupped hand that offered up an unknown share of future trouble, but right now, it looked calm and drowsy and benign. Heat rapidly stacked up in the deserted blocks.

Not entirely deserted: Her gaze was caught by a small black dog of indeterminate breed, trotting along on the other side of the street. His graying face wore the wise contemplative expression in which old dogs specialized, that look of universal tolerance and patience. Seeing the rich oily sheen on the dog's lean flank made Bell feel even hotter.

She had many things on her mind, but the murder of Freddie Arnett was foremost in the mix. The crime seemed incongruous, coming as it did in summer. Winter seemed by far the more likely season for evil. Winter with its early-onset darkness, its stranglehold grip of cold, its icy malice. Summer was too bright, too amiable, too easygoing for anything mendacious to have dominion. Everything was right out here in the open, simple and guileless.

But she knew that wasn't really true. There was nothing innocent about summer. Nothing soft or simple. The notion that summer held no peril had been exposed, two nights ago, as a cruel and dangerous illusion.

Abruptly, Bell changed her mind. She wouldn't go home to Shirley just yet. She had one more stop to make first.

 

Chapter Seven

The small living room had a buttoned-up, desert-dry, closed-in feel. The drapes, delicate and diaphanous as pink tissue paper and faintly printed with the repeating shapes of roses, were shut, yet they only marginally impeded the sunlight and its attendant heat. From the clock on the weathered white mantel came a regular series of ticks that sounded less like time passing and more like the work of a small pickax as it tunneled through an impossibly large slab of some impossibly hard material; there was an endlessness embedded in the rhythm, and a hopelessness, too.

The old woman sat in the straight-backed wooden chair. She wore a gray linen dress that might once have fit, but now swallowed her up. Her vacant eyes were an almost translucent shade of blue; her cheeks were markedly hollow, falling back into her face. Her long white hair was parted in the middle. It broke across her bony shoulders like water split by a rock.