Sorrow Road (20 page)

As long as she ignored it, she could pretend (a) she had not received any messages from anybody back in D.C. and (b) nothing had happened that would have caused her to
expect
to receive any messages from anybody back in D.C. and (c) she had made a clean escape, and the past was past.

None of the three was true. And (c) was the least true of all.

It was late Friday afternoon, and she had just finished her final interview in Raythune County. Next week she would be moving on to Muth County. She sat in her car, head back against the headrest. Seconds ago, she had wedged the clipboard and the recorder into her backpack. She looked over at the apartment complex from which she had just departed.

She had spent the last two and a half hours interviewing the sole resident of Apartment 2-B, an eighty-eight-year-old retired railroad brakeman named Julius Jones. He was an African American. It was her favorite interview so far. Jones told wonderful stories, and when he came to the big finish, he sat back in his oak rocker, tucked his thumbs under his bright red suspenders, pulled the strips forward, and then let them go. They snapped back onto his belly with a deeply satisfying sound, as if he were sending forth the story into the world with a smack on its bottom, like you'd do to a dawdling child.

He told her tales about midnight rides around treacherous curves and across bottomless-seeming gorges, and about a time in the winter in the early 1950s when the tracks were blocked with snow. How much snow? So much snow, Jones explained, that they might as well have been facing the mountain itself—that's how little chance the locomotive had of pushing through the massive chunk, of tunneling out the other side.

So that was that, Julius Jones said. The train stopped and stayed there. He explained things to the passengers, many of whom had places they needed to be that night, important appointments, people to see, businesses to run. But you could not argue with a wall of snow that was taller than the train itself. Frustration gradually gave way to a sort of madcap frivolity. Men in nice suits, men with a net worth of millions of dollars, got out in the deep snow beside the tracks and played with the children, ruining their expensive shoes but laughing about it. They built snowmen and snowwomen (the upper half of the snowwomen, Julius Jones explained with a courtly dip of his head, were covered with shawls borrowed from the elderly female passengers, so as not to confront the indelicate issue of anatomical correctness) and snowchildren. There was a rousing but harmless snowball fight. The adults let the children win, but not so obviously that the children noticed. Finally, energy spent, everyone came back aboard the train and made passable beds out of seats and out of cushions arranged in the aisles. By noontime of the next day, the temperature had risen high enough to enable Julius Jones and the rest of the crew to clear a great deal of snow from the tracks. The train got a running start, and managed to push on through.

The funny thing, he said, was that by the time they got to Pittsburgh, the businessmen were all serious again, and arrogant and buttoned-up and ill-tempered, and when the train pulled into the station they shoved rudely past the same children they had played with so merrily the night before, as if those children were rank strangers, and just obstacles that stood between them and their profits. It was hard to watch, Julius Jones said. He had come to believe in the years since, however, that maybe the night had its own special kind of magic, and constituted an enchanted place, and so it had to stay sealed off forever, and end the way it did: with the businessmen going back to being their mean old narrow-souled selves. It could not last, that magic.

“If we'd tried to make it last,” Jones said, rearing back in his rocker, snapping his suspenders, “it wouldn't have been magic. Magic's temporary. Has to be. If it lasts, it ain't magic. It's only reality.”

Carla was not sure she understood the logic, but no matter. She loved the story. She could see it, too, in her mind's eye: the vast blackness of night in the mountains; the unassailable citadel of snow that rose up before the stopped train and its astonished engineer; the kids and the businessmen running around, squealing and shouting and bending down to craft yet another snowball, packing it tight, hurling it with giddy joy; the only light coming from lanterns hooked to the outside of the train and from a high yellow moon; and Julius Jones, watching it all, knowing it won't last, knowing it can't last, and knowing, too, that it is the very fact of its not lasting that gives the moment its joy, its singular splendor.

“So why did you stay in West Virginia?” Carla finally asked him. She realized she needed to get back to her script.

“That's a question,” he said.

She waited. Finally he started talking again, but he did not pull at his suspenders this time. “I intended to leave. I did leave. Once. Had some relatives in Chicago. We all came from Mississippi, you see. Most of my family kept on moving, and ended up in Chicago. I stayed here, though. And when I visited them, I saw that they didn't have it one bit better than I did. The North was supposed to be so superior to the South, right? Well, that was a lie. I took the train to Chicago. Came into Union Station. Tried to hail a taxicab to get to where my family lived, down in Englewood. No taxicab would stop. They'd just go right on past me. I tried for an hour and forty-five minutes.” He stopped. He moved his tongue around his mouth as if he was trying to clear a sour taste from it. “That's right. One hour and forty-five minutes. I finally just started walking. I knew how to do that.”

“So you decided to stay in West Virginia.”

He nodded. “It's not perfect, Lord knows. And there's never been a lot of folks around here who look like me. I had a good job, though, a job I loved, and I guess that's what matters.”

Carla was a little disappointed at his conclusion—she had expected a big dramatic finish, filled with noble words about human equality—but of course she did not say anything about her disappointment. She thanked him and shut off the recorder. She gathered up her materials. She thanked him again.

And then, just as she was leaving his tiny, overstuffed and overheated apartment, Julius Jones said, “One more thing, miss. About my staying. There's this, too. A lot of my friends—they don't remember anymore. You try to remind them about something that happened, and they just look at you. They're losing their memories. I'm okay, though. For now. I remember almost everything. Especially from the old days. So I'm glad I stayed—because I have to do all the remembering now. For the others. Somebody's got to do the remembering.”

Now Carla sat in her car. To her surprise, she was feeling pretty good. She had not had a serious headache in two days. Her appetite was back. At least her appetite for Cap'n Crunch. And that was a start, right? Her mother was going through a rough time—everybody was talking about the two old ladies who had gotten killed, and there was a ton of other stuff going on, too—but the truth was, there was
always
a ton of stuff going on with her mother's job. Her mother could handle it.

In the library the other day, when Carla was giving her daily report to Sally McArdle, she had seen a guy she'd gone to high school with. Charlie Crawford. And it was fine. It wasn't embarrassing at all. Or awkward. Charlie said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey” back, and that was that. He was not any more inclined to stick around and answer questions from her about
his
present life than she was inclined to answer questions from him about hers. She had been dreading an encounter like that one, with somebody who'd known her before, but it was okay. It was really okay.

And then, because she was feeling good, because she was feeling stronger and more centered and focused, and much calmer, even, than she'd been feeling in a long,
long
time, she decided to listen to her messages.

It was a mistake.

The first one was time-stamped on Monday, the day after she'd left Virginia. It was from Skylar: “Okay, like, I've been calling and
calling
. You don't answer. You don't want to talk to me? Fine. But I thought we were
friends,
Carla. What the hell is going on? Some kind of investigator showed up here today. From the prosecutor's office. Kurt got rid of them. He told them we don't know where you are. But they'll be back. They said so. And they have your cell number, okay? I don't know how—I sure as hell didn't give it to them, and I didn't confirm it was right when they rattled it off—but they've got it. And so they'll be calling you, too.”

There was also a nervous-sounding message from later in the week from the highly excitable Kurt: “You've been getting a
shitload
of calls here. I need to know what to tell them, okay? I mean—I'm totally in the dark. Which is okay. It's your choice. But these people are
serious
. What the hell did you
do,
girl?”

A flurry of additional messages had come in just a few hours ago. The first one was from a sergeant with the Arlington, Virginia, police department.

So was the second. And the third, fourth, and fifth.

*   *   *

Bell sat at her kitchen table. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—she liked to sit in the dark. The thickness of it, the way it surrounded her on all sides, helped to direct and clarify her thinking. No distractions.

It was just after eight on Friday night. She did not know what time Carla would be coming home. House rules were still in the discussion phase. Bell had suggested a midnight curfew—“curfew” was not the right word, because Carla was an adult, but Bell had pointed out that she would prefer not to be awakened out of a sound sleep by the noise of the front door opening and closing, and be forced to wonder if it was her daughter or an ax-wielding maniac. So if Carla intended to stay out later than midnight, fine—but Bell expected a courtesy text with an ETA. Fair?

Sorta, Carla had answered. Could they maybe talk about it again later? Renegotiate?

Bell agreed, but in the meantime: midnight. Or a text that indicated approximately when.

She had only been home herself for about ten minutes, just long enough to pry off her boots and dump her coat and briefcase and then head in here. She had started to switch on the overhead lights, but didn't. She'd considered making dinner, but realized she wasn't hungry.

She had an image in her mind. She needed to go over it again, every detail. Interrogating it, in effect, by giving it close attention.

It was a silver-framed photo of Marcy Coates and her granddaughter, Lorilee. A latex-gloved Deputy Oakes, assisting the crime-scene unit sent over from Charleston, had taken it from a table in Marcy's house. The actual photo resided in a locked room at the courthouse where evidence was stored for trials, but Bell did not need the actual photo. The picture was in her head. It would always be in her head from now on, because it was the kind of image that stuck with her. It was so vividly emblematic of this region and its tight family bonds, those sticky connections that could be either uplifting and inspiring—or grim and imprisoning:

A stubby, heavyset woman with short gray hair and a round red face, smiling broadly and hopefully, dressed in a pink smock and white Dickies pants and white lace-up shoes—the uniform she wears at Thornapple Terrace. Her right arm is locked around the frail, knobby shoulders of her granddaughter. Lorilee's head is tilted away from her grandmother and her skinny face is puckered, as if she's smelling the contents of a backed-up sewer drain. The tiny hands at her side are drawn up into fists. Her body has that
Wish I was anywhere but here
shudder to it. She is wearing a tight white T-shirt with a ripped collar and denim short-shorts. Her face is thickened with rouge, eyeliner. Her sloppy mascara is clumping so badly that it looks as if she is weeping toxic sludge in lieu of tears.

The two women seem to be occupying different universes. Granny, heavy and rooted, as stolid as a fence post; Lorilee, fragile and skittish, ready to bolt.

And yet of the two, it is Marcy Coates who is gone, while Lorilee lives. Lorilee, in the end, is the tough one. The survivor. Marcy is the vulnerable one, the one at risk.

Bell shook her head. She had to let Sheriff Harrison and her deputies do their work. It was their investigation. She had already called Jake Oakes and passed along what she had learned in her conversation with Lorilee. He would check out the granddaughter's known associates, he said. Find out if maybe one of her skanky pals had stopped in to paw through Granny's cookie jar for spare change—and while there had committed double homicide.

Sure, Lorilee had claimed that Marcy was broke, and doubtless passed along the intel to her jittery brethren. But junkies don't trust other junkies. They know—far better than non-junkies—what desperation can do. A lie about Granny's finances would hardly constitute breaking news in Lorilee's dark world.

So if it wasn't just a random crime of opportunity—if the killer had not just blundered along that road until he saw the light from Marcy's window and decided to take advantage of the house's isolation—then why? Why had Marcy Coates been chosen? Who stood to gain from her death?

And was Connie Dollar an intentional target? Or had it been just a case of wrong place, wrong time? They both worked at Thornapple Terrace. Was that a factor or—

A knock at the back door.

Bell was startled. Could it be Carla? No, she'd use the front. And anyway, Carla had a key.

She opened the door. She'd forgotten to turn on the back porch light, and so she based her instant identification of the visitor solely on his silhouette. Clay Meckling was six feet four and a half. And lean. His physique was a direct consequence of hauling around roof trusses and eighty-pound bags of Quikrete all day long.

She flipped on the outside light. The switch for the kitchen light was right next to it. She flipped that on, too.