Sorrow Road (38 page)

“We don't have to go door-to-door,” Jake shot back. The two of them had turned fact-gathering into a competitive sport, and Rhonda's comment was the equivalent of trash talk. “Or garage-to-garage, in this case. I put every single name associated with the accident—the paramedics who responded at the scene, the staff at the Tie Yard Tavern, the employees of the gas station that sold the deceased her gas that day—into a database to see if there were any hits. Any link between anyone associated with the deceased and a name on a title or lease for an eighteen-wheeler.”

When she heard the phrase “the deceased” repeated twice, Bell looked at Ava. No reaction.

“And?” Rhonda said.

“I got one.” Jake thumped the clipboard twice with a flat hand, like someone giving a head-pat to a spelling bee champion. “Felton Groves.”

“The trucker who found Darlene,” Bell said. “Who called the cops to the scene.”

“You got it.” Jake did not look triumphant. “I should have checked into him more thoroughly at the time. But he was helpful and cooperative—and you know what happens when somebody's friendly. You skip things. You don't mean to, but you do. It's the nasty ones who make us meticulous. Good thing the bad guys don't know a surefire method of fooling cops—be nice.”

“What's the connection?” Bell said.

“That's where I come in,” Rhonda said. “Jake asked me to do a background search on Felton Groves. Because—and I'm quoting you accurately here, right, Jake?—Jake's about as good in front of a computer as I would be in the driver's seat of an eighteen-wheeler.”

“Connection,” Bell said.

“Groves is broke,” Rhonda replied. “That accident he told us about, down in Georgia? The one where he says he came across a van in the ditch and a bunch of dead kids scattered around? He didn't ‘come across' it. He caused it. Went left of center. Served twenty-four months for involuntary vehicular manslaughter in Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. Once he was out, that's when his troubles
really
began. He was sued by relatives of the dead family. He's paying off a four-million-dollar settlement for wrongful death. The only jobs he can get now are short-hop hauls in undesirable locations—like, say, the mountains around Blythesburg.”

“So this tells us,” Bell said, “that Groves was an ideal candidate for recruitment—by somebody who wanted to make sure Darlene didn't make it down that mountain. Groves needed money. And he had the kind of vehicle that could easily run a smaller one off the road. Having Groves be the one who found the body was a nice touch—it threw us off the trail.” She pointed at Deputy Oakes. “Jake? Anything else?”

“Plenty.” He went back to his clipboard. “Got that warrant and pulled Lenny Sherrill's cell records. He's made ten calls over the past three months to the number you told me to check.”

Bell looked at Ava. “It was your home number in D.C.”

“So Lenny Sherrill,” Ava said, “was the one making the threatening calls to Darlene. Her old friend from Norbitt.”

“Looks that way. He had his number blocked so it wouldn't show up on your caller ID. And he must have used a voice changer.”

“But why would he threaten her in the first place?”

“Still working it out,” Bell replied. She gestured toward the briefcase Ava had set on the floor next to her chair. “Would you mind sharing with the others what you found in Darlene's letters?”

Ava shuffled through several before she came to the right ones.

“Harmon wrote to her constantly,” she said. “College, law school, her first years as a federal prosecutor—all through that time, he'd write these wonderful notes. When she was lonely or sad or scared, she'd read them. Over and over again. And she kept them all.” Ava paused. “She told me once that if it weren't for her father's letters, she would never have gotten sober. He never knew about her struggles with alcohol—she was very careful to keep that from him—but his letters saved her life.”

She tapped the top letter on the stack.

“This is one of the last letters that made any kind of sense,” she said, “By this time, Harmon was suffering fairly significant symptoms of Alzheimer's. I explained to Darlene what would be happening. How things were going to progress.” Ava paused again. Her pauses had a kind of gravity to them, as if, even when she was not speaking, important concepts were being conveyed.

She held up the piece of lined notebook paper and read from it. “‘My dearest Darlene, I've been having those spells again. Times when I can't. I don't know the word there I was trying to write. I'm sorry. I don't want you to worry. I am so proud of you! So glad that. So glad. Darlene, I am losing my mind. I have already lost it, I think, and only find it again from time to time. Darlene, I. When I find it, I try to do all that I need to do, before it. Darlene. We did something bad. Vic and Alvie and me, too. We were all. Darlene, I was eleven years old and about to be twelve. Vic was twelve. Alvie. The car. Nobody meant for it to happen. Nobody. Nobody's fault. Everybody's fault. It was. Oh, Darlene.'” She set down the paper. “It runs off into a sort of gibberish after that.”

“What happened?” Jake asked. “What do you think the three of them did?”

“I wondered the same thing,” Bell said. “And whether it might be relevant to what's happening at the Terrace. Harmon Strayer was born in 1926. The year he's talking about would have been 1937 or 1938. So Rhonda checked the archives of the weekly newspaper that's been published in Norbitt since 1878. Rhonda?”

“Finding the details of a car accident within a two-year window wasn't as hard as you'd think,” Rhonda said. “Not a lot of cars back then, period. At least not in Norbitt.” She took a deep breath. “So I found it. An elderly woman and her granddaughter—Gertrude and Betty Driscoll—were killed by a Ford pickup and buried in the Silent Home Cemetery near Caneytown. A man named Frank Plumley was cited for reckless driving. No criminal charges. He paid a fine.”

“Frank Plumley,” Bell said, picking up the story, “was the father of Vic Plumley. And according to what I was told at the Terrace, Vic Plumley sometimes visited Harmon Strayer. Vic was killed last year by a hit-and-run driver. That driver is still at large.”

Ava was relatching her briefcase. “What does any of this have to do with Darlene's death?”

“We don't know for sure yet,” Bell said. “But it looks likely that Felton Groves and Marcy Coates were hired to get rid of people that somebody else wanted out of the way. Groves and Coates both needed money. They had access to Darlene and her father. That access made them valuable. Groves was bribed to run Darlene off the road. He needed money to pay off his settlement.

“And Marcy Coates,” Bell went on, “needed money to pay for her granddaughter's drug rehab. Lots of it. She traded shifts to make sure she'd be taking care of Harmon. The earlier death—Margaret Jacks—was a trial run. A way to see just how meticulous the coroner was going to be with bodies that came from the Terrace. Once the answer came back—not meticulous in the least—then Marcy was free to go after Harmon. And she killed Polly Delaney to divert attention from Harmon Strayer's death.”

“That doesn't sound like the Marcy Coates my grandmother told me about,” said a clearly dismayed Rhonda. “She didn't know Marcy as well as Connie Dollar did, but still. A murderer? That sweet old lady?”

Jake spoke up. “I don't think Marcy Coates would've considered it murder. It was something else. Yes, it benefited her. But would she have gone out on her own and, say, killed somebody just for the hell of it? No. Never. This was different. These were sick old people who didn't have a lot of time left, anyway. Who were suffering.”

“So we're supposed to cut her slack?” Rhonda said. Her tone included a good deal of incredulity.

“Think of it however you have to,” Jake answered. “I'm just saying that the context is crucial. You can't judge every action by a single standard of right and wrong.”

“Funny thing for a deputy sheriff to say,” Rhonda shot back.

“You got my job title right,” he said. “But I'm a human being first and a deputy second, okay? And it seems to me that—”

“Okay, you two,” Bell said, interrupting him. “Cut it out.” Lately she had begun to see their mild quarreling as a sort of mutual flirtation. Usually it amused her, but not now. This wasn't an episode of
The Bachelor
. It was a murder investigation. “I had Buster Crutchfield look over the coroner's reports for the three deaths at the Terrace. They were pretty superficial and slapdash, he said. A lot of things could easily have been missed. There's no way to go back and confirm those specific details now, of course—it's way too late—but it does round out the picture of what might have happened.”

Ava looked as if she was processing a million pieces of information in a nanosecond, like a supercomputer in a charcoal-gray cardigan. She raised a finger, ready to ask a question, but before she could start, Rhonda's cell rang. She listened and nodded. When she ended the call and turned to the group, her eyes were bright.

“That was Kirk Avery.” Her voice bounced with excitement. “The bartender at the Tie Yard. The one who was working on the same Saturday, Bell, when you and Darlene were there. I asked him to keep an eye out for the man who was drinking with Darlene that night—the night she doubled back to the bar.”

“And?”

“And the guy just showed up again. Got the kind of face you don't forget, Kirk says, even though nobody knows his name. Semi-regular. But this is his first time back since the accident.”

Bell moved so quickly that she startled Deputy Oakes, typically a fast mover himself.

“Come on, Rhonda,” Bell said. “I'll drive.”

“Hold on, hold on.” Oakes stood up, affecting his best
I'm a deputy and you're not
pose. “You two aren't going anywhere. We've been getting reports all afternoon. Storm's a lot worse. They're shutting down the interstate in both directions.”

“Not taking the interstate,” Bell said.

“Not my point.” Oakes glared at her.

Bell glared right back. “Jake, you know as well as I do that most of our so-called ‘evidence' so far is pretty skimpy. It's all theory and conjecture. Rhonda's filing for a warrant to pull Groves's financials, to track the payoff, but that's going to take a while. Unless we can get somebody to confess, or we dig up some actual evidence, we're shut down. This could be our chance. And there's no telling how long that guy will stay at the Tie Yard tonight. We've got to get out there.”

Oakes grunted. She was right, but he did not like it. “I'd come if I could. But with these roads the way they are, and with the number of accidents that we'll surely have, I don't see how I can—”

“You're needed in Acker's Gap,” Bell said. “Sheriff Harrison would have my head if we took you out of commission right now.”

Oakes grunted again. “You stay in touch.”

Bell nodded. She turned to Ava. “Make yourself comfortable here. I insist you spend the night. Plenty of room.”

“I'd like to go with you,” Ava said. “This is the man who had a hand in killing Darlene, isn't that right? I think I should be there.”

Bell smiled. “If our intention was to go out there and string him up like a piñata, I'd say, ‘Sure.' I'd even let you have the first whack. But that's not how it works. We're going to talk to him. That's all. You need to stay here.” She indicated the staircase. “Spare room's the first one on your left. Sheets and towels in the linen closet at the end of the hall. My daughter, Carla, will be home soon. I'll text her and let her know you're here.”

Ava nodded. While the other three people in the room put on their boots and heavy coats, she appeared to be waiting to speak. Finally, when Bell, Rhonda, and Deputy Oakes were ready to go, she took her opportunity.

“Darlene never had a lot of friends. She had too many secrets. Her alcoholism, our relationship—she felt like she had to keep the world at arm's length, so that it wouldn't judge her. And once her father died, she felt more alone than ever. Yes, she had me—but that was all. She was the loneliest person I've ever known.” It was a difficult thing to say, and Ava needed a few seconds to recover her poise after she said it. “If she could see this right now—see the three of you, moving heaven and earth to find out what happened to her and her dad—I think she'd be surprised. I think she'd be moved. And I know she'd be grateful.”

*   *   *

Carla parked the Kia in the side lot. The snow was really picking up now. Her drive had included a few slides that might have ended disastrously but did not, and so in addition to her relief at arriving here she felt a certain perverse pride:
I made it, dammit.

This was crazy. Even Kayleigh Crocker thought it was crazy, and Kayleigh was usually the passionate cheerleader for any sort of wild, outlandish behavior. “I don't know, Carla,” Kayleigh had said, as Carla was leaving the apartment. “I'm not sure you should do that.”

Carla had given her friend a brief, highly edited rundown on the situation: older guy (she did not say how old), who had given her a fake name (she did not mention that he had taken the name of someone who had died in a motorcycle accident), and who she had not known very long (she skipped over the fact that it was a single twenty-minute conversation in her car in the Driftwood parking lot). And now, Carla explained, she was compelled to find out what the hell was going on. Why did he lie to her? To his employers?

Her plan was to drive out to Thornapple Terrace and find him. She would simply ask him why he was hiding who he really was. It was only four p.m. Even with the heavy snowfall and the slickening of the roads, she would be back in Acker's Gap by dinnertime. No problem.