A Killing in the Hills (27 page)

Chill had been parked out here in the alley a long time, at least a couple of hours, ever since it got dark. Waiting. Watching her. Getting a sense of her schedule, of what she did when, of who else might be around.

He’d seen her come home. He knew she lived here with her kid. A daughter, he’d heard. There was no husband, no man, which was a big relief.

He’d watched a light come on in the kitchen, then the living room, then her bedroom on the second floor. Then he saw the bedroom light snap off. The house was dark now.

Chill checked out the neighborhood. Looked left, right. Forward, backward. He couldn’t see much, on account of the darkness, but he could get a sense of it, all the same. Older homes. Older, but nice. Real nice. Big and nice. The kind of houses he’d seen sometimes when he was a kid – they’d be driving, him and his dad, looking for scrap metal, and they’d take a wrong turn and end up in a decent area – and he’d wonder who lived in those places. There wasn’t any junk stacked on the porches. Just a kid’s bike, maybe. Or there’d be a swing hanging at one end of the porch, the kind of swing you could sit on while you talked to somebody, and they’d listen to you. The yards were clean and neat. Curtains in the windows. Somebody gave a damn.

He shook his head.

Christ, his legs hurt. He wanted to stand up, stretch out, maybe run a little bit, but he couldn’t. Couldn’t get out of the car. It was too risky. As long as he sat here, slumped down, engine off, he was pretty much invisible. He could watch. Watch and learn.

He didn’t much like the new motel, the one he’d found after leaving the other one. Had to, after what he’d stuffed in the Dumpster, a little present, a little calling card. You’d think they were all alike, the motels, but they weren’t. The new one had a smell to it that disgusted him. Couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was old, like old vomit, mixed with this air-freshener crap. Plus, the TV remote didn’t work.

Damn
.

He sat up, peering up through the windshield, trying to see. She was at the bedroom window. It was her. Wasn’t it? Had to be.

No light in the room behind her, but he’d seen the sash go up. Now she leaned out. Elbows on the sill.
Jesus
. What if she looked down here? Saw his car?

He calmed himself. No way. It was too dark.

He watched her, wondering what she was thinking about.

Night noises, West Virginia style. Bell had always loved them. In the summer, it was tree frogs, cicadas, crickets, that springy chorus that sounded like sleigh bells. Any season, there was the soprano yell of a train whistle in the distance. The yap and snarl of an animal fight, off in the woods. Could be raccoons, possums. If a skunk was involved, you’d know it soon enough. Too soon.

She leaned out of her bedroom window. Chin propped up with her fist. She’d concluded the call with Sam but was still too keyed up to sleep.

Wilderness loomed just beyond the sidewalks. That’s where the racket came from, the screeches and the rustlings, all endless, mysterious. If you weren’t used to it, it could keep you awake all night. If you
were
used to it, it was a lullaby. A lullaby you found yourself longing for, when you were separated from it.

In D.C., in their first apartment on Capitol Hill, she’d had to accustom herself to a different set of night noises: sirens, revving engines that popped and snarled more obnoxiously than any wild animal, occasional screams, scraps and jabs of laughter. More sirens. Many times, she heard gunshots in the middle of the night; she’d check the paper the next day, ask the neighbors, but she rarely found out what had happened. Gunfire was not all that remarkable.

And
we’re
the backwoods rednecks?
Bell had often asked herself.
We’re the gun-toting hicks?

Once, after she and Sam had just met, they sneaked away from their respective houses in the middle of the night and spent it together – but not in the way that would intrigue most teenagers. They ended up doing plenty of that, too, God knew. But on that first night, they took a long walk, winding up in the woods. They found a massive tree, so wide that even the two of them together, with their arms outstretched, bark scraping their skin, couldn’t make it all the way around the circumference to graze the other person’s fingertips. Then they each found a spot within the giant gnarled roots that had broken through the earth in an ancient upheaval, now frozen in elaborate contortions, and they lay there, letting the night noises rise up all around them like a homemade symphony, hearing the same noises they would’ve heard in this place a hundred years ago. Two hundred.

Bell looked down at the alley that unrolled beneath her window like a dark carpet. Across the narrow dirt strip was the backyard of a house on Brandon Street, one street over from Shelton. The Clarks lived there. Ernie and Maybelle and Maybelle’s mother, Holly. Beyond Brandon was a brief succession of other streets, all laid out straight and neat and narrow until the neighborhood abruptly ended at the wood’s edge.

She couldn’t make out many particulars. Darkness had reduced the world to crude blocky shapes: Houses. Trees. Mountain.

The night noises should have been familiar, soothing. But something was bothering Bell, even beyond all the other somethings she was dealing with these days. Something closer. Closer than a stone’s throw. She couldn’t figure out what it was. She felt a chill of foreboding on her bare arms.

She shut the window.

29

God. The smell
.

It hit Bell right in the face. It was intense. And intensely familiar.

Didn’t matter how old you were, or how many years it’d been since you walked into a high school. The smell would get you every time, she thought. Ambush you.

Sweat, perfume, the cheap cleaning fluid used nightly to wash down the lockers and swab the floors. Cooked food – some of it, the worst of it, probably, emanating from the cafeteria, from the olfactory onslaught of greasy hot dogs and mushy tater tots and burned lima beans, but there was an equally foul undernote, too, from the food stuffed in lockers and left there too long, the lunches kids brought from home, the bologna sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches. Tuna and meat loaf. Rotting fruit.

And then there was the trailing scent of old socks, stray farts, hair spray, spicy deodorant, and the persistent mashing-together of all of that plus the sour, oniony smells of young bodies pressed up against each other for too many hours every day, day after day.

Last time she’d taken a good, long look at the halls of Acker’s Gap High School, she was eighteen years old and enrolled here. She’d been back a couple of times more recently, for parent-teacher conferences, but that wasn’t the same. She’d go in and out, with barely a flicker of a glance at her surroundings. She was oblivious – on purpose. Moreover, those visits came at the end of the day, when the students had mostly drained away from the yellow brick behemoth at the top of the small hill just outside town, when the last buses were grunting their way out of the parking lot and the whole place seemed to sink back with an exhausted sigh, having improbably made it through another day.

The walls were painted a bright cheery peach, Bell noted, instead of the sickly pale institutional green she remembered from her time here. The lockers were beige, not dark gray. The wooden classroom doors had been replaced with bright white aluminum ones, the top half of which were glass. And the library was not the library anymore. It was, according to the proud sign over the door,
THE MEDIA CENTER
.

Bell let her eyes slide over to Carla. Her daughter was doing her absolute best to ignore the fact that her mother was right beside her as she walked through the main hallway of Acker’s Gap High School at 8:13 on Tuesday morning.

Carla moved stiffly, eyes straight ahead. Her backpack hung clumsily off her right shoulder like an extra limb, bumping her kidney in rhythm with her jerky, preoccupied stride. At any moment the backpack seemed ready to slide off her shoulder and end up on the floor, there to be trampled and torn apart and scattered by the ordinary rampage of students racing to beat the tardy bell.

This was, Bell knew, possibly the most embarrassing moment in her daughter’s life. Carla was trying to make the best of it, though, because they both knew that the record for Most Embarrassing Moment would be a short-lived one. It would be broken in just a few minutes, when her mother rose to speak at the morning assembly.

Then
that
would become the brand-new Most Embarrassing Moment.

All around them, students surged and swirled, pinballing against each other. Locker doors were slammed, books dropped. Tennis shoes made short sharp squeals against the linoleum. Voices rose and ricocheted in a high-pitched babble, casually spiced with expletives and an occasional lick of shrieking laughter:
You are fucking kidding me, dude! No WAY. That is some crazy shit. No lie. Hey, bitch – can I take a look at your calculus homework? You’re shittin’ me – he didn’t even
call
her last night? That is cold, man. Cold
.

Bell and Carla moved steadily forward. There was a slight deference shown to them – Bell was clearly a foreign creature in this environment, an interloper, an antibody in the bloodstream of pure adolescence coursing through this hall – and the farther they progressed, the more the other students fell back, bit by bit, creating a crooked lane in the chaos through which Bell and Carla walked.

The first bell had already sounded. The second bell would ring in three minutes. If students weren’t sitting in the auditorium by then, and instead were still bouncing through the halls, hollering their hellos, digging through their lockers, they were in trouble.

Big
trouble.

Roger Jessup, the assistant principal, would come stomping through the corridors of Acker’s Gap High School, fat and fiery and cheerfully vengeful, the twin front halves of his unbuttoned plaid sport coat fluttering against an epic belly, hunting for stray students whom he could happily slap with detention slips.

‘Hey, Carla.’

Her daughter’s head turned with a snap.

‘Hey,’ Carla replied to a young woman Bell didn’t recognize.

Bell thought about Dean Streeter, a man who’d walked these same halls, who’d moved amid these same noisy streams of students, listening to their jokes, having easy and regular access to them, for all those years. She hadn’t known him; kids like her didn’t take driver’s ed. What was the point? She didn’t have a car back then, or any way to get one. She’d been lucky to have a roof over her head and shoes that almost fit.

Nice new seats – not those hideous old metal things with the paint flaking off that we were all sure would leach into our bloodstreams and give us lead poisoning
. She and Carla walked down the center aisle of the auditorium until Carla, head lowered in shame and embarrassment, broke off and joined her homeroom.

To Bell’s left and right, row after row of twitching, fidgeting, mumbling students. The hissing of hundreds of whispered conversations seemed to create a second atmosphere, one composed not of oxygen but gossip, and Bell could swear she felt the updraft from it, the rustle and the sweep.

Up on the stage, the principal of Acker’s Gap High School, Carlton Stillwagon, waited for her, hands clasped, head tilted to one side. Bell had met with Stillwagon a few times, and talked on the phone with him many more. Occasionally the interactions concerned Carla; most often, though, they constituted official court business. They were about students who faced criminal charges. Bell and her staff often needed a background report from the principal: What was the kid really like? Heading for real trouble – adult-style, felony trouble – or just temporarily sidetracked by a lack of impulse control?

Stillwagon was loud, pompous, borderline buffoonish. He was encumbered, or so Carla had once informed her mother with palpable distaste, with perpetual body odor, the kind correctable only by surgery, although Bell assumed that that piece of weirdness was just one of the ordinary slanders routinely slung at high school principals. In Bell’s day at Acker’s Gap High School, the principal had been an exceptionally tall, mannish woman named Louisa Hinkle, and the rumors persisted that she’d undergone a sex change, that she’d started out life as Louie Hinkle. The small mustache on her upper lip hadn’t helped to quell the gossip.

Stillwagon was in his late fifties. He had a snowman’s build, round belly set atop short, fat legs. Atop the torso was a big round head. The head featured the world’s most unnatural-looking comb-over, an abomination to which the eye was drawn due to the lavish application of gel to the dwindling strands. He seemed positively to relish the fact that he wielded the power of life and death over a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.

He and Bell were natural enemies. They had clashed repeatedly ever since she took office. The principal didn’t share her urgency over the prescription drug problem in Acker’s Gap High School. Had Bell believed this was an honest difference of opinion, she could have lived with it. But she always suspected that Stillwagon just didn’t give a damn, knowing that if he agreed with her, he’d have to work harder.

Their most recent tangle had come during a school board meeting late last spring.

Kids
, he’d said to her,
have always done drugs. Always have, always will. Didn’t you smoke pot in high school, Mrs Elkins?

How ’bout it?

It’s not the same
, she had replied.

Sure it is
.

No, it isn’t
, she had countered heatedly.
This isn’t the bus driver selling you a dime bag. This isn’t your cousin taking you out in the woods to sample ’shrooms. These are well-armed, highly organized, and highly efficient organizations that are destroying an entire generation of young West Virginians. They’re targeting the poor and the hopeless, and they’re
—

Hey, Mrs Elkins
, Stillwagon had interrupted, smiling, looking not at her but at the school board members, as if they surely shared his private assessment that she was a bit of a crackpot on this issue, a hysterical female.
They make decaf, you know
.