Sorrow Road (26 page)

That's what I would have done,
Bell told herself. If someone had confronted her with something she had done, something inexplicable, she would have booked. Instantly. That was her modus operandi—just take off. When things became too real, too hard, too emotional, she withdrew. She fled.

It was how she'd handled her relationship with Clay, after all. Until tonight. Wasn't it?

So Bell had let things slide. She had not questioned Carla closely about the reason she'd left D.C. The thought that kept rolling around Bell's head was this:
She will tell me when she's ready. She's a good kid. A levelheaded kid. A responsible kid.

Except that she's
not
a kid,
Bell corrected herself. Not anymore. Carla was an adult, with adult problems and adult consequences to her behavior.

And there was more. Bell could not let herself off the hook. It was too easy that way. She knew that her non-interference in Carla's life was more than just a desire not to alienate her daughter. There was another reason that she had not gotten in Carla's face and declared, “I want some answers—
now
.” Bell was busy with her own affairs—with Darlene's accident, with the deaths at Thornapple Terrace, with the murder of two defenseless women. Her job was always in the picture. Always trying to own her complete focus.

It was her job that had put Carla in danger in the first place.

When Carla was seventeen, she was among the witnesses to the murder of three old men in a restaurant in Acker's Gap. Carla thought she had recognized the shooter. She could not reveal that to Bell, however, because of where she knew him from: a party at which drugs had been present. He was a dealer, intent on drumming up new business. Carla should not have been there in the first place. Her mother was a prosecuting attorney, sworn to eradicate the drug trade in Raythune County. Carla was ashamed of having been at that party.

And so she had tried to track down the killer herself. She had enlisted the help of her best friend, Lonnie Prince. And in their confrontation with the drug dealer, Lonnie was shot dead and Carla was kidnapped. Carla narrowly escaped with her life, after a gun battle in an abandoned building.

It was the kind of searing emotional trauma from which Bell had tried so desperately to protect her child. Because she knew those wounds never washed out. She knew about shock and terror. She knew how it felt to stare into the face of an evil that seemed to drench the world in endless darkness. Bell's own childhood—thanks to her father, Donnie Dolan—had been lived in daily proximity to that kind of evil, that degree of darkness. She had promised herself that Carla would never, never know it.

I failed,
Bell thought.
I failed my child
.

Her sweet girl already knew the truth about the world: that while it had joy in it, and good people, and hope, it also was a place of sadness and suffering.

Bell thought she might understand why Carla had done what she had done in that store. They had not talked about it, but Bell got it: Sometimes the only way to make the roaring chaos inside your head go away was to create a rhyming chaos on the outside. Match frenzy with frenzy, anarchy with anarchy.

I used to do that, too,
Bell thought.

In her case, she did it with running. Endless, insane amounts of running. In high school, in college, she would go for long runs along fearsomely steep mountain roads until she was slammed with exhaustion, half-delirious with dehydration, her legs too weak and wobbly to stand. Until finally she could feel the faint stirrings of an inner peace, an eye-of-the-hurricane calm carved right out of the middle of the emotional maelstrom.

Her little girl, her beautiful daughter, had wrecked a store in a mall for the same reason that Bell had run up and down mountains: to try to heal herself.

She lowered the cell. She did not need to read any more of the police report.

Sam would be arriving in a few hours to drive Carla back to Arlington. Bell wanted to come as well, but her ex-husband had said:
Listen. Maybe it's better to let Carla handle the problem on her own. Face the mess she's created.

Okay,
Bell had replied. She was glad to have Sam make the decisions. Her own judgment seemed highly suspect to her these days.

Sam had spent most of Friday evening, he told Bell, working the phones. Working his sources. Pulling strings and trading a favor now for a reciprocal one to be named later. Warren Etherington, chief counsel for the development company that owned the mall? An old pal from Sam's earliest days as a D.C. lawyer. If the store was reimbursed for the cost of the damaged merchandise, they would agree to drop the shoplifting and vandalism charges. “And if the judge is in a good mood and overlooks the fact that Carla missed the preliminary hearing,” Sam went on, “we can probably get her off with some community service.” No felony arrest record. A record which could, Bell knew, stand squarely in the way of so many things Carla might want to do with her life someday—law school, business school, law enforcement, a teaching career.

So Bell was relieved. Sort of.

If Sam fixed this for her, smoothed it over, would Carla assume she would never have to atone for the bad choices she made? Would she become chronically irresponsible? Was Sam—with Bell's blessing—dooming their daughter to a life of excuses and underachievement? Or would Carla make this moment a turning point, and deal with the painful flashbacks, and never get into serious trouble again? There was no way to know. No certainty.

To intervene or not to intervene: That was always the question with someone you loved. Were you creating a monster—or enabling a fulfilling life?

Her cell rang. It was Clay, she saw.

“Hey,” she said. She spoke softly, even though there was no one else in the house, no one she would be disturbing. She had a powerful sense-memory of Clay's body next to hers, and the memory made her want to keep her voice silky-low. “You make it home okay?”

“Only spun out half a dozen times. Only got stuck in a few ditches. I'm fine.”

She laughed. “Good. I don't know what I'd do without you.”

“Do you mean that, Bell?”

She had intended it as the cliché it was, as a throwaway line, and he had taken it seriously. As a declaration. But the fact was, she could not handle that—she could not handle any sort of discussion of their relationship—right now. She had to deal with her daughter.

She ignored his question. “Sleep well,” she said, in an even softer voice. He would understand.

“Everything okay with Carla?”

“It will be.”

A few minutes later Bell heard a sound from the front of the house. It was a light step, hitting the porch. Carla was home.

*   *   *

Bell watched Sam's car all the way to the end of Shelton Avenue. It was astonishingly cold out here on the porch at this early hour, but she had bundled up for it, knowing she would want to wave until her husband and her daughter were officially out of sight; it made her happy to see Carla turning around in her seat and waving back, the gesture just barely visible through a rear windshield stamped with frost.

The car rounded the corner, and then it was as if it had never been here at all. Only the parallel tire marks in the new snow—that narrow herringbone pattern made by the expensive tires on Sam's Lexus—remained behind to suggest that a vehicle had come and gone. Otherwise the world did not stir, locked as it was in the deep freeze of a winter dawn. The neighborhood was still under wraps, the roofs submerged under snow, the yards entombed in it, the curtains shut tight to keep in the heat provided by beleaguered furnaces. No lights were on behind those curtains.

Before Sam had arrived to ferry Carla back to Arlington, she and Bell had had a chance to talk. They assumed their usual positions in the living room—Bell in her run-down chair, Carla cross-legged on the couch—and tried to sort through the last few days.

“You should have told me,” Bell said. She kept her voice calm and even. Losing her temper with Carla would accomplish nothing. “Right when you got here. You should have told me what you're dealing with.”

“I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“You're not the easiest person in the world to talk to, Mom.” Carla settled her head back against the couch cushion. She seemed fascinated by the living room ceiling.

“How so?”

Carla hesitated. “Because nothing I've ever experienced—no matter how bad—can ever be as terrible as what you went through as a kid, okay? Aunt Shirley, too. And you both survived. So it's pretty lame of me to complain about the kind of shit that's been coming my way.”

Bell was startled. She had never considered trauma a competitive sport. And it had never occurred to her that Carla might think of Bell's own resiliency as intimidating.

“You can always talk to me,” Bell said. “About anything.”

Carla lowered her gaze from the ceiling, but still didn't look her mother in the eye. “I didn't want to disappoint you.”

“Sweetie, you could never—”

“I did. I
did
disappoint you. And I've embarrassed you, too. You and Dad. Because I'm a complete and total screwup, okay? I know that. I
know
that.” The tears came in a great gush. Bell rose and in an instant was sitting beside her daughter, gathering her in, cradling her head, stroking her shoulder.

“Carla,” Bell murmured. “My sweet girl.” There was too much to say—there was always too much to say—so Bell said nothing, but she continued to stroke Carla's shoulder and to try to wish her pain away.

Waiting for Sam, they had fallen asleep on the couch, Carla stretched out with her head on her mother's lap. Bell kept a hand on Carla's shoulder. It should have been terrifically uncomfortable for Bell, sleeping whilst in a sitting position, but it was not. Holding her daughter, touching her, keeping physical contact with her just as she had done when Carla was an infant, would make this—despite everything that was going on, despite all the questions about Carla's conduct and choices—one of the best times of Bell's life. She was able to keep her daughter safe, even for just a few hushed hours, deep in a winter's night.

And then Sam showed up. He stayed less than fifteen minutes. Not only did he want to get Carla back, he explained, but he had a full slate of his own meetings to deal with. He politely refused Bell's offer to fill a thermos for them.

“I can get coffee on the road,” he said.

“Can't be as good as mine. Mine's strong enough to eat through the bottom of a Styrofoam cup. Try finding
that
at the Highway Haven.”

He laughed, and some of the awkwardness vanished. But even as he was laughing, he was putting his coat back on. Sam Elkins was a man in a hurry. He would always be a man in a hurry.

Bell watched them go. The sun was mere seconds from clearing the top of the mountains, whereupon it would fill the world with light but no heat. She stood on the porch as long as she could stand it. Finally the cold was just too much for her, and she went back inside.

She had finished her first cup of coffee—Sam didn't know what he was missing—when her cell rang. Caller ID told her it was Deputy Oakes.

“Hey.” His voice had a quality to it that Bell rarely heard from him: a kind of keen excitement. Typically he cultivated nonchalance.

“Morning, Jake. What's going on?”

“Heard back from Leroy.” She did not respond, and so he added, “About the car. The one Darlene Strayer was driving.”

“Right.” She had not exactly forgotten about her request to Oakes to get an expert report on the Audi, but neither was it in the front of her mind. She had assumed—well, hoped—that he was calling about a breakthrough in the investigation of the deaths of Marcy Coates and Connie Dollar.

“And so,” Oakes said, “he checked all the usual places—brakes, engine, tires. Everything was fine. Nothing suspicious. Nothing that might suggest any kind of tampering or foul play.”

“Okay.”
So why are you calling?
she wanted to add, but knew she didn't have to. Oakes would not leave her in suspense for long. He was busier than she was. The county had two deputies who were forced to do the work of five. He did not waste time—neither his own nor anyone else's.

“But Leroy did find something on the rear bumper,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Paint chip. From another vehicle. Meaning the Audi might have been pushed from behind. Maybe just a nudge. But a nudge on an icy mountain road at those speeds is serious business. I've already sent off the chip to the state crime lab. Maybe they can tell us the make and model of the vehicle it came from. It's a place to start, anyway.”

Bell's skepticism showed through in her voice. “No telling when the paint first got there. She had made a long drive that day. Came over from D.C. Somebody could have backed into her car the week before in a Whole Foods lot.”

“True. I pointed out the same thing to Leroy. Without the Whole Foods reference, that is. Wouldn't want to confuse old Leroy. He'd be wondering if there's a Half Foods out there somewhere, too.”

“And?”

“And he agreed. Might not be relevant at all. But he thought you'd want to know.”

She did. She absolutely did want to know, even though it added another complication to an already puzzling set of circumstances. And even though it tended to validate the fiercely held opinion of Ava Hendricks, whose dark solemn eyes Bell could still picture, as she stared at Bell in the prosecutor's office four days ago, incensed that her lover's death had been deemed an accident.

If Darlene's car indeed had been pushed into the curve, it could mean that the two women—one dead, and one very much alive and very pissed off at Bell for not investigating further—had been right all along.