A Killing in the Hills (46 page)

She was back to finish her speech.

It was Carla’s idea.

Bell had spent the night at Carla’s bedside in the county medical center. The diagnosis was a mild concussion, along with a badly sprained right wrist and cuts and bruises on her arms and legs, and a large ugly slash on the side of her face that required twenty-two stitches to close. The nurse had sedated her, but during Carla’s last few minutes of agitation before falling asleep, she had cried and asked her mother to hold her. ‘Lonnie,’ Carla murmured through her sobs. ‘He was my friend, Mom. No matter what, he was my friend. My
friend
.’ And Bell, leaning over the bed to embrace her, had felt the slender body shudder, had felt Carla’s tears dampening her neck.

In a few short sentences, spoken softly into her daughter’s ear, Bell had given Carla the gist of what had transpired that night. She’d fill in the details later.

Very early in the morning, with the window of Carla’s hospital room still a tall black rectangle, her mother heard her stir. Bell had slept in a chair next to the bed, sideways body bunched in the shape of a comma, coat rolled up and angled between her neck and the wooden armrest. One arm was thrust straight out toward the bed so that she could keep contact with the young woman’s pale forearm all night long.

‘Mom.’

Bell, instantly awake, unkinked herself and stood up. Pain poked at her shoulders and tweaked her knees, the inevitable residue of having slept at a crazy angle in a chair –
and being thirty-nine years old to boot
, Bell thought with a wince.

The only light in the room came from the rack of small bulbs illuminating the monitors on the wall above Carla’s bed. But it was enough. Bell looked at her daughter’s face. She wanted to touch that face, to stroke it, but she held off, knowing that it would hurt.

Carla’s hair had been shaved on one side. A crooked ladder of stitches ran across that half of her scalp. Both eyes were ringed in black. The remainder of her face was massively swollen, with splotches of brazen purple and sickly yellow. It would stay that way, the nurse had said, for weeks.

‘Sweetie,’ Bell whispered. ‘Shhhhh. Settle down. It’s still early.’

‘You have to go back.’ Carla’s hoarse voice was emphatic. ‘You promised. You promised them you’d go back. So you have to.’

‘Back where, sweetie?’

‘To
school
.’ Carla struggled to sit up, flailing at the IV line that ran from the crook of her arm to the tall metal pole alongside her bed, shoving it away as if it were a pesky branch encountered on a jungle march.

‘Carla, sweetie—’

‘Mom.’

‘Sweetie,’ Bell said, ‘you had a terrible ordeal last night.’ She tried to make her voice light with exaggerated incredulity, playful, to settle her down. ‘And the first thing you think of this morning is – me going back to your school? Really?’

‘Mom. Please.’ Carla’s head fell back on her pillow. She was too tired to hold it up. But her eyes never left her mother’s eyes, never broke off their intense focus.

‘Sweetie, I really think it’s best if I—’

‘Mom, it’s my fault. All of this. I knew him. I’d seen him before – the shooter in the Salty Dawg. But I couldn’t tell you. Because he was at this party, and there were drugs, and—’

‘Shhh, sweetie.’

‘No, Mom, I have to tell you. I screwed up so bad. Please, Mom. If you can just go back and finish your speech, it’s like – like everything will start to be okay again.’

‘Carla—’

‘Dad’s on his way, right? I heard you on the phone with him last night. He can stay here with me until you get back.’

‘Carla, sweetie, I’m just not sure.’

‘Please. Please, Mom. Just go.’

So now Bell knew for sure. It was confirmed. She’d passed it on to her daughter: The gene for stubbornness.

Nick would get a kick out of that when she told him what he probably already knew:
Think
I’m
trouble? Think
I’m
hard to handle? Just wait’ll you tangle with Carla when she gets up a head of steam
.

The students sat quietly, displaying a stark attentiveness that had nothing to do with Bell’s title or with the presence of a teacher at the end of every row.

Most of them, Bell was certain, had already heard about what happened at the RC last night. News traveled fast in a small town, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it or even slow it down. They knew about the secret life of Tom Cox. A much-respected man. Hell, she might as well concede it: a beloved one.

Bell had already received two hectic messages on her cell from Dot Burdette, hungry for details. She’d return the calls later that day, telling Dot about the extent of Tom’s operation. The audacious scope of it. Rhonda and Hick, working all night, making phone calls that woke up anybody they needed to reach and offering only a quick insincere apology, had pieced together a good part of it. Tom Cox had met Charles Sowards while volunteering his vet services at the county animal shelter. Sowards worked there as a day laborer, hosing out cages, spreading straw. Sowards had become a small part of Tom’s business, just one of dozens of young unemployed West Virginians who’d signed up to distribute pills or to punish anyone who crossed the boss, or to do whatever else Tom asked of him. Because it meant a pay-check. Because they were broke and bored.

Like, perhaps, some of these kids, too, Bell thought, looking out across the auditorium at all of the faces.

Stillwagon gripped Bell’s cool hand in his own moist pudgy one, welcoming her to the stage. Just like last time. Except that, between then and now, so much had changed.

‘Once again,’ the principal said, looming so low over the lectern that his big chin bumped the microphone, the gelled threads of his hair gleaming wetly beneath the stage lights, ‘we have Raythune County Prosecuting Attorney Belfa Elkins. Mrs Elkins?’

She hesitated. What could she say that these students hadn’t already heard a hundred times before from parents, grandparents, teachers, preachers? What could she say that would make any damned difference? She wanted to tell them that they held a precious thing in their hands – this one life, the only one anybody ever got – and that they should cherish it. She wanted to tell them about the choices they’d be required to make, and about the fact that even if they made
no
choice – even if they let their lives just happen to them, as if that life was just a scrap of notebook paper blown around the school parking lot by a ravenous wind – then that, too, was a choice.

It wouldn’t work. They’d never listen. Platitudes were pointless. You couldn’t tell other people how to live. If some adult had tried to do that back when
she
was sitting in a morning assembly at Acker’s Gap High School – well, she would’ve snickered and rolled her eyes, and the phrase
know-it-all asshole jerk
would’ve been the dominant element in her mind, blocking everything else, bringing all of her thinking to a halt like a big piece of furniture stuck in the doorway on moving day.

She was here. Maybe that was the most important thing. Not what she had to say – but the fact that she’d bothered to show up to say it.

In the end, each person had to find her own path out of the mountains.

And sometimes, her own path back again.

Her speech was brief. She told them about the drug operation, about how one of her best friends had been in charge of it. She told them what else she knew: that many of them had bought pills from one of their teachers, Dean Streeter. What he did was wrong. But he’d tried to change his life. And died for that decision.

Afterward, as the students bumped and shuffled out of the auditorium, Bell lingered at the foot of the stage. Several parents came by to thank her, and to tell her how glad they were that she and her daughter were safe, that they’d survived the ordeal of the night before.

Bell turned to go. Along the wall, looking shy and uncertain, was an older woman, thickset, with a messy thatch of short gray hair.

The woman walked with a slight limp. She was dressed in work pants and a baggy gray sweatshirt bearing the oval logo
CLAUSEN JANITORIAL SERVICES
. Between two big hands, she twisted a black baseball cap with
CJS
in gold letters on the crown.

‘Wanted to tell you,’ the woman said, ‘that this is a good thing you done here today. Talking to these kids.’

‘Well,’ Bell said, ‘I’m not sure they were listening.’

‘Don’t matter. You gotta try.’ The woman twisted the cap a few more turns. ‘So I just wanted to thank you – and to tell you ’bout my girl. Couple of years ago, she was sitting here, too. She was a good girl. She was. But then come the drugs. They took hold of her. Got so she’d do anything for the money. I mean anything.’ The woman dropped her head. ‘Wasn’t nothing nobody could do. I lost my sweet little girl forever.’

‘What was your daughter’s name?’ Bell said softly.

The woman raised her head. She seemed grateful for the chance to speak it, to let her child’s name live out loud in the world again just one more time, during the instant it took to say the syllables. She swallowed hard.

‘Lorene,’ the woman said. ‘Her name was Lorene.’

57

One day later Bell drove the Explorer as far as she could go into the woods and then stopped. She climbed out. She’d walk the rest of the way.

The forest was filling up with the prelude to its winter music. The creak of high-up tree limbs rubbing together, the low groan of the wind, the sporadic crackle of the thick underbrush as small creatures moved across it in a rhythmless series of abrupt jumps.

Bell arrived at the spot where the trailer had been. There was nothing here. Only a black gash on a blank patch of cold ground.

She sometimes thought she could hear voices out here, shouts and cries of pain, echoes of the anguish that had lived in this space so long ago, still revolving slowly, slowly, in the singed air, an endless upward spiral of loss. But she knew it was just her imagination. Because there was nothing left.

She wouldn’t come here again.

She was finished with this place. And it, she hoped, was finished with her.

Bell walked back to the Explorer. Reaching the hard road, she shifted into park and waited, leaning forward in her seat, arms folded across the top of the wheel.

One direction led to the rambling old house back in Acker’s Gap. To the big chair in the living room. A cold bottle of Rolling Rock. The world as she knew it. But even that was changing, of course. Carla was leaving. Going to live with her father.

The other direction led to Lakin Correctional Center and the parole hearing. If she started right now, she could make it there for the 2
P.M.
start.

Bell shoved the car into gear and headed toward Lakin.

The hearing felt like a formality. The only witnesses were Bell and the prison psychiatrist, a small-shouldered, broad-bottomed man in a shiny black suit. His hard black shoes had a slight squeak to them as he walked from the row of folding chairs at the back of the room to the single chair at the wooden table. On the other side of that table were the nine members of the parole board.

The psychiatrist’s testimony was brief and perfunctory: Shirley Abigail Dolan, prisoner number 3476213, incarcerated for manslaughter and arson for twenty-nine years, four months and seventeen days, was, in his opinion, no longer a threat to society. Bell’s testimony was also short; she was asked if she would help her sister become readjusted to society, provide a home and job placement assistance, and she said yes. Yes, she would.

And then Shirley Dolan was led into the room, an emaciated figure in a blue jumpsuit, stooped-over, with long gray hair pulled into a ponytail that hung nearly to her waist. She had hooded gray eyes and a putty-blob of a nose that looked as if it had been broken multiple times. She was only six years older than Bell, she was only forty-five, but she could have passed for sixty. Her skin was yellow-pale. Her face was marked by deep creases. Like an old map that had been folded too many times and stuffed in the back of a drawer.

She answered the questions posed by the board members in a voice so frail and quavering that she was often asked to repeat herself. Yes, she felt remorse. Yes, she planned to get a job.

By unanimous vote, parole was granted to Shirley Abigail Dolan, prisoner number 3476213. She would be released in ten days.

Bell had less than a minute to talk to her, before her sister was led away again. There was so much Bell wanted to say, so many questions she wanted to ask, so much she wanted to tell her. But they would have time for all of that later. For now, she settled for the first thing that came into her head.

‘Shirley,’ Bell said, ‘it’s going to be okay now.’

On the morning of Shirley’s release, Bell wanted to get an early start on the drive to Lakin. She was nervous, apprehensive, but also excited. She’d called Dot Burdette and asked her to come keep Carla company, and when Dot arrived she asked Bell if she and Carla could bake a cake to mark the day. Have it ready for their return.

At first Bell said no – she didn’t want any fuss, she didn’t want anything that might make Shirley self-conscious – but then she thought about it and said, Sure. Okay.

As long as it’s chocolate.

Bell headed out to the interstate and then on to West Virginia Route 62, driving down through Ripley and Mason, past the redbud trees, now just skinny bundles of sticks dreaming of spring. The road clung to the Ohio River, like two friends linking arms on a long, long walk. At the big curve just above Point Pleasant was Lakin Correctional Center. A series of single-story square buildings of pale yellow brick, with scribbles of barbed wire arranged across the top of the fences. Behind the prison, the black mountain kept a close watch on it.

‘I’m here for Shirley Dolan.’

The woman at the reception desk shuffled through papers, exchanging one clipboard for another.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘What is it?’

‘She’s gone. She left about an hour and a half ago.’

‘No, no, there’s been a mistake,’ Bell said patiently. ‘Can you check again, please? Shirley Dolan. D-O-L-A-N.’