The Devil's Stepdaughter: A Bell Elkins Story (Bell Elkins Novels) (4 page)

A long time went by. To occupy herself, Belfa found a strip of thin metal that was sticking out from underneath Gladys Goheen’s trailer and she played with it, watching out for the rusty tacks that perforated it at intervals, twisting the strip this way and that, rolling it up, unrolling it.

All at once she heard, from somewhere in the woods behind her, a swishing noise joined by a crackling noise, as if someone moving rapidly through the high grass was drawing closer and closer. The sudden nausea in her belly spread. She had no plan, no idea for evasive action. Desperate, frantic, Belfa repeatedly beat her fist against the side of the trailer. “Hey!” she said, as loud as she dared, hoping Crystal could hear. “Hey! Hey!”

Crystal popped out onto the stoop, scowling. “What the—”

Belfa’s voice was a strangled gasp as she pointed. “Something’s out there—I heard—”

The tops of the tall grasses rattled and swayed. Down near the ground, the grasses parted. Gladys Goheen’s fat gray cat, improbably named Pretty, skulked her way out of the woods. She passed them without breaking stride or acknowledging their existence, and moved into another section of the dense undergrowth.

“You shithead,” Crystal said. “ ‘Bout scared the crap out of me.”

“I’m sorry, I thought—and you said—”

“Forget it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“What did Gladys say?”

Crystal glared at her. “About what?”

Bell, confused, said, “About—about whatever you were going to talk to her about.” She was just making conversation, trying to distract Crystal from the error she’d made.

“Nothing.” Crystal slapped hard at a fly that had landed on her forearm. “Let’s go.”

____

Had Gladys Goheen’s daughter not decided to visit, her first trip back to West Virginia in four years, the body might have remained undiscovered for weeks.

Leonard brought them the news. He had returned from his job—on weekday afternoons he rode along with Dewey Peevey, flinging plastic bags stuffed with ads out the passenger-side window of Dewey’s Gremlin, aiming vaguely at front porches and trailer stoops—and the family was gathered, as usual, in front of the TV set, Herb and Lois on the couch, the girls stretched out on the floor, Steve sitting with his back propped up against the wall, his knees raised, his bent arms squared across them. Six days had passed since the afternoon when Crystal and Belfa visited Gladys Goheen’s trailer.

“She’s dead,” Leonard said, before the door had even closed behind him. He was breathing hard, excited by the idea of death, and by his chance to lay it before them in all of its gruesomeness. “She was covered with flies. Just covered. They was all in her eyes and whatnot.”

“Who? Who’s dead?”

It was Lois who had spoken.

“Gladys Goheen,” Leonard said. He gulped for air, his thin shoulders heaving, before he went on. “Face all smashed in with a bat. Looked like a mess of hamburger. Her daughter got there and found her dead in her bed like she’d been taking a nap or something when she got clobbered. Never knew what hit her, most likely. Never saw it coming. Daughter called the sheriff. Them flies was terrible. Dewey knew all about it. Them flies didn’t want to move on, Dewey says, even when they tried to swat ‘em away. Real disgusting, is what it was.”

By this time all of the excitement had leaked out of Leonard. He paused, waiting for someone to react to his information.

“Jesus,” Mrs. McCluskey said. The shock seemed to instantly diminish her, Belfa saw. She shrank back against the couch cushion, a hand to her mouth. The other hand was wrapped tightly around her torso, as if she was, quite literally, trying to hold herself together. “Oh, Jesus. Oh. God rest her soul.”

Tina offered a small gasp that might have been a sob, but also might not have been. Abigail’s face quivered, as if she might be about to start crying. She didn’t. Belfa wanted to look at Crystal, to see her reaction. Just one quick look. But she knew she couldn’t take the chance, in case Crystal was looking at her at the very same moment. Instead, Belfa stared hard on the TV screen.

“When’d it happen?” Mrs. McCluskey asked.

“While back,” Leonard said. “They don’t know for sure. She musta been sleeping, they say. She didn’t fight back or nothin’. Sheriff Rucker thinks somebody sneaked in and done it. Used her own bat. The one she kept under her bed. Probably over in a minute or two.”

“Old lady like that?” Steve said. He didn’t look as if he’d been paying attention, but he had; his gaze swung up at Leonard with a kind of challenging ferocity. “Shit. Who’d bother?”

Leonard licked his lips, savoring the thought of the ace still burning in his deck of fresh information. “Well, they searched that trailer and guess what.” No one ventured a guess—he was clearly disappointed at that, but had to keep going—and he said, “That money she won. Over two thousand dollars from the Lucky Stars. It was gone, Dewey says. All gone. She’d had it in cash. Her daughter’s pissed as hell. Was gonna get her mama to hand it over—that’s why she come back up here.”

Herb McCluskey didn’t shift his eyes from the TV screen. “Kept her door unlocked, I bet,” he muttered. “Dumbest damned thing you can do. Some folks around here act like it’s still the 1950s. Well, I’m here to tell you, it ain’t.” He shook his head, and then waved a hand in Leonard’s direction. “Shut up, okay? Trying to watch my show. You want to talk, you go outside.” His voice was testy, impatient. Herb was a man who loved his comforts, and his keenest irritations came when they were disrupted or delayed.

“They find anything else?”

Crystal had asked the question. Her tone was flat, ordinary, unruffled by sorrow or any real curiosity; it sounded as if she was just making conversation.

“Still looking,” Leonard said, lowering his voice so as not to rile Herb McCluskey, although it was unlikely that Herb would call down Crystal the way he’d admonished Leonard. “For clues and whatnot.”

Crystal nodded. Her attention swiveled back to the TV screen. Just like that, she had used up her shallow reservoir of interest in the old lady. There was a sort of bovine blankness in Crystal’s low-lidded expression, an absence of affect that Belfa somehow found more menacing than a sneer or a glare or a cruel remark. Recalling that expression many years later, Belfa would sometimes feel an odd prickling sensation along her spine, like a couple of fingers touching the business end of a baseball bat, measuring, calculating force and speed and trajectory.

_____

Twelve days later, just before the school year began, Belfa was sent to live with another family: Hank and Shirlene Sherber and their twelve-year-old son, Travis, in Atherton County. All at once, it was over. The knowledge she had carefully honed about the McCluskeys, the shifting and intricate strategy she had devised to cope with each of them individually and all of them collectively, now was rendered moot. She would be starting again with another family—although life in the Sherber house would prove to be very different from what it had been in the McCluskey trailer. Hank taught her to hunt and to fish, and she and Travis would discover that they liked the same books. Shirlene Sherber worked at the Atherton County Public Library, and she let Travis and Belfa check out as many books as they wanted, all at the same time—not just the four books to which patrons under the age of sixteen were officially restricted. It was Belfa’s first taste of privilege, and of the responsibilities that went along with it.

As far as she knew, no one was ever arrested for the murder of Gladys Goheen. Before Mrs. Perkins came that day and took her away, Belfa was aware of the fact that several people were interviewed about the crime—Herb and Lois McCluskey; Steve and Leonard McCluskey; a married couple who lived in a trailer located even closer to Gladys’s trailer; a drifter who went by the nickname Blackjack, who had been spotted along the highway that night; and, as a group, Abigail, Crystal and Tina McCluskey. Yet the interviews yielded nothing: No clues, no hints, no leads. Gladys’s daughter, still angry over the loss of the lottery winnings, still fuming, wildly threatening legal action against unspecified parties, finally returned to North Carolina. Gladys’s trailer was a rental, and the owner moved it to a spot in another county, leaving a small lozenge of bare, yellowish-brown ground.

Almost thirty years later, Belfa ran into Tina McCluskey. It was a Saturday night, summer again, and the air carried a heavy-handed heat that made noses and foreheads shine and caused shirts to stick to wide backs in corrugated rumples. Belfa was coming out of a Reba McEntire concert at the Charleston Civic Center, accompanied by a man named Clay Meckling, when a chubby woman in a sparkly maroon T-shirt and tight jeans, her short hair dyed bright red, earrings long and clanking, glanced at her, looked away, looked back. “Belfa?” the woman said. “Belfa Dolan?” A few awkward seconds passed before Belfa recognized her in return.

“Tina? My God—Tina McCluskey.”

They clasped hands but they didn’t hug; they were grown women now, self-conscious, and other people were pushing past them, impatient to get to the parking lot.

“Clay,” Belfa said, “this is Tina. I lived with her family when I was a kid.”

He nodded, dropping back to let the two of them talk. They had moved off to the side now, out of the way of the surging crowd. Belfa thought she ought to ask questions: How was Lois? And Leonard, Steve, Abigail? She didn’t ask about Herb. Nor did she ask—for the moment—about Crystal. Lois was fine, Tina said, although rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her fingers so severely that they looked broken; Leonard had moved to Texas; Steve lived in Kentucky with his wife and four children, Abigail in Ohio with her three.

They talked about a few other things, shaking their heads at the memory of how damned small that trailer had been—all those people, and the heat that summer!—and then it was time for Belfa to ask about Crystal.

Tina’s smile vanished. “Yeah, well,” she said. “Listen, I didn’t really stay in touch with her. None of us did.”

“You didn’t— ?” Belfa started again. “But she’s your sister.”

“Nope. She was a foster kid, just like you. She was supposed to leave when you got there. But she wouldn’t. Got real nasty about it and Daddy just said, ‘Okay, fine, let her stay.’ He was afraid of her, I think. And so was the social worker. Crystal’d gotten kicked out of the last place because she set a fire and almost burned down the whole damned house. She denied it, but nobody believed her. And before that, she’d come at a Sunday school teacher with a screwdriver.” Tina squinted at Bell. “You really thought she was
related
to us? Jesus.”

Bell didn’t know what to say. Yes, that’s what she had thought. Never occurred to her to think otherwise. Crystal’s presence in the trailer that summer had seemed organic. Natural. Maybe, Bell thought, Crystal was one of those creatures who folded instantly into her surroundings so that, within seconds of arrival, she was virtually indistinguishable from the new environment. It was a gift.

Tina was talking again, talking right over Bell’s thoughts. “She took off about a week and a half after you left,” Tina said. “Never heard from her again. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you know? That’s what we all said. Everybody knows Crystal killed that old lady and took the money.” She peered at Belfa. “You knew, right? You were a smart kid. You knew.”

When Belfa didn’t answer right away, Tina charged on. “You knew,” she repeated, canny glint in her eye. “Oh, you knew, all right.” She shrugged, giving up on the point. “Look, sweetie, it’s okay. I mean, Jesus, you were—what, nine years old? Ten? Everybody was scared shitless of Crystal.”

But
had
she known? Belfa wasn’t sure. Even before she’d landed at the McCluskeys, she had learned the knack of isolating certain episodes in her mind, separating them from everything else in her life; when she looked back, all she saw was a sleek grid composed of high-walled compartments. She couldn’t see over the tops of those walls. She didn’t want to.

Tina readjusted the thin purse strap on her beefy shoulder. She was ready for this accidental reunion to be over, and had sensed Belfa’s desire for the same thing. The two of them had nothing in common—just the one scrap of time, the random overlap. Nothing else. Chances were, they’d never see each other, ever again. “Better go find my friends,” Tina said. “Nice to meet you, Clay.” Her eyes returned to Belfa. “It’s weird, right? Kind of creepy. Not knowing where Crystal is.” She shivered, even though the night was hot. “Daddy didn’t know what to do with her. Couldn’t handle her. Nobody could. He always called her the devil’s stepdaughter. When she wasn’t around to hear it, that is.”

“Why not the devil’s daughter?”

“Well,” Tina said, “it’s pretty simple. A daughter loves her daddy—but when she’s a stepdaughter, she does more than love him. She tries to impress him. Show off for him.”

Tina gave a grim little smile and a brief wave and then moved forward into the crowd. She was instantly absorbed by the amiable chaos, leaving Belfa to contemplate the fact that Crystal, too, was surely out there somewhere, riding the crosscurrents of one shifting multitude or another, hidden in the jostle and the scrape and the flurry, watching, and waiting, and smiling.

Read on for an excerpt from
the first book in the series
featuring Bell Elkins

A Killing in the Hills

And don’t miss the rest of the books!

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juliakeller.net

Copyright © 2012 by Julia Keller

She didn’t come here often, because there was nothing left.

When she did come, it tended to be at dusk, and she would stand and look at the bare spot, at the place where the trailer had been. It was only a few dozen yards away from Comer Creek.

You could smell the creek, a damp rotting smell that was somehow also sweet, even before you could see it. The woods around it made a tight screen, as if the branches were gripping hands in a game of Red Rover. Daring you to break through. You could hear the creek, too, its nervous hum, especially in the early spring, when the frequent rains made the water run high and wild.

When she was a little girl, she would play on the banks of the creek in the summertime. Her sister Shirley kept an eye on her. In no time at all, Bell—her real name was Belfa but everybody called her Bell, because “Belfa,” Shirley had told her, sounded dowdy, old-fashioned, like a name you’d hear at a quilting bee or a taffy pull, whatever that was—would get astonishingly muddy. Not that she cared. The mud squirted between her toes and drifted under her fingernails and stuck to her hair. Somehow it got smeared behind her ears, too, and across the back of her neck. Bell could remember how glorious it felt on those summer afternoons, playing in the mud, glazing herself with it. Soft and cool. A second skin. One that made her slippery all over. Hard to catch and hold.

Safe.

Or so it seemed.

Everything was lost now. The scattered black sticks that had once been the metal frame of the trailer had gone a long time ago
,
breaking apart, sinking into a bath of old ashes. The brittle gray flakes were scooped up by the wind and carried away.

The woods should have taken over the spot by this time, covered it, the way the woods gradually came to cover everything else. But the ground under the trailer had been burned so badly that nothing would grow here. It was too scorched. It was a dead thing.

As dead as her childhood.

On those rare occasions when she did come back, she would stand at the spot while the West Virginia wilderness—green, brown, silver, blue, and black—turned, with the forward march of darkness, into a single color. Everything melted into one thing.

Once, standing there, she heard an owl. It wasn’t the lilting and musical Who-WHO Who-WHO of the owl’s cry in fairy tales, the sentinel voice of wisdom and patience. It was a horrible screeching, raw and stark. A red slash of sound.

She flinched, trembled. This was the scene of a terrible crime, and the owl’s cry was a warning.

She did not return often, because there was nothing here. Only the past. And for that, she knew, she did not have to come back.

Because the past traveled with her.

The old men sat around the little plastic table in the crowded restaurant, a trio of geezers in shiny black jackets, mumbling, chuckling, shaking their heads and then blowing across the tops of their brown cardboard cups of coffee, pushing out their flabby pink old-man lips to do so.

Then sipping. Then blowing again.

Jesus
, Carla thought.
What a bunch of losers.

Watching them made her feel, in every restless inch of her seventeen-year-old body, so infinitely superior to these withered fools and their pathetic little rituals that she was pretty sure it showed; she was fairly certain her contempt was half visible, rising from her skin in a skittish little shimmer. The late-morning sunshine flooding in through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls made everything look sharper, rawer, the edges more intense. You couldn’t hide a thing in here.

She would remember this moment for the rest of her life. Because it was the marker. The line.

Because at this point, she would realize later, these three old men had less than a minute to live.

One of them must’ve told a joke, because now his two buddies laughed—it sounded, Carla thought, like agitated horses, it was a kind of high-pitched, snorting, snickery thing—and they all shuffled their feet appreciatively under the table. They were flaky-bald, too, and probably incontinent and impotent and incoherent and all the rest of it.

So what’s left?
That’s what Carla was wondering.
After you hit forty, fifty, sixty, what’s the freakin’
point
anymore, anyway?

Slumped forward, skinny elbows propped on the top of her very own little plastic table, Carla used the heel of her right hand to push a crooked slab of straight dark hair up and off her forehead. Her other hand cradled her chin.

Her nose ring itched. Actually, everything itched. Including her thoughts.

This place was called the Salty Dawg. It was a regional chain that sold burgers and fries, shakes and malts, and biscuits topped with slabs of ham or chicken and a choice of gravy: red-eye or sausage. But it didn’t sell hot dogs, which at least would’ve justified the stupid name, a charmless bit of illogic that drove Carla crazy whenever she came in here and slid into one of the crappy plastic chairs bolted to the greasy floor. If she didn’t have to, she’d never be wasting her time in this joint, and she always wondered why anybody ever came in here willingly.

Then she remembered. If you were an old fart, they gave you your coffee at a discount.

So there you go. There’s your reason to live. You get a dime off your damned coffee.

Freaks.

Carla was vaguely ashamed of the flicks of menace that roved randomly across her mind, like a street gang with its switchblades open. She knew she was being a heartless bitch—but hell, they were just thoughts, okay? It’s not like she’d ever say anything rude out loud.

She was bored, though, and speculating about the old farts was recreational.

To get a better look, without being totally obvious about it, she let her head loll casually to one side, like a flower suddenly too heavy for its stalk, and narrowed and shifted her eyes, while keeping her chin centered in her palm.

Now the old men were laughing again. They opened their mouths too wide, and she could see that some of their teeth were stained a weird greenish yellow-brown that looked like the color of the lettuce she’d sometimes find way in the back of the fridge, the kind her mom bought and then forgot about. It was, Carla thought with a shudder of oddly pleasurable repugnance, the Official Color of Old Man Teeth.

She didn’t know any of them. Or maybe she did. All old men looked alike, right? And old towns like the one she lived in—Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, or as Carla and her friends preferred to call it,
The Middle of Freakin’ Nowhere
—were filled with old men. With interchangeable old farts. It was just another crappy fact she had to deal with in her crappy life, on her way to what was surely an even crappier future.

Her thoughts had been leaning that way all morning long, leaning toward disgust and despair, and the constant proximity of gross old men in the Salty Dawg was one of the reasons why.

Another was that her mother was late to pick her up.

Again.

So Carla was pissed.

They had agreed on 11
A.M.
It was now 11:47. And no sign of good old Mom, who also wasn’t answering her cell. Carla Elkins was forced to sit here, getting free refills on her Diet Coke and playing with her french fries, pulling them out of the red cardboard ark one by one and stacking them up like tiny salty Lincoln Logs. Building a wall. A fort, maybe. A greasy little fort. She’d just had her nails done the day before over at Le Salon, and the black polish—she was picking up another french fry now, and another, and another, and another, while her other hand continued to prop up her chin—looked even blacker by contrast with the washed-out beige of each skinny french fry.

Her mother hated black nail polish, which was why Carla chose it. She wasn’t crazy about it herself, but if it pissed off her mom, she’d make the sacrifice.

The Salty Dawg was right down the street from the Acker’s Gap Community Resource Center—the RC, everybody called it—which was a long, square, flat-roofed dump of a place with ginormous plate-glass windows cut into three sides of the icky yellow brick. Somebody’d once told Carla that, a million years ago, the RC had been a Ford dealership.

That was Acker’s Gap for you: Everything had once been something else. There was nothing new. Nothing fresh or different. Ever.

She had to endure her court-mandated Teen Anger Management Workshop at the RC on Saturday mornings, 8:00 to 10:30, during which time the counselor would go around the circle and ask each of them what she or he was feeling.
What I’m feeling
, Carla wanted to say,
is that this is a lame-ass way to spend a Saturday morning.
But she didn’t. Usually, when her turn came, she just scooted a little bit forward and a little bit back on the chair’s tiny wheels and stared at her black fingernails and mumbled,
I’m, um, feeling kind of mixed up inside.
Her friend Lonnie Prince had told her once that adults want to hear that kind of thing, so that they can nod and look all concerned and show that they remember how hard it is to be a teenager, even though it was, like, a thousand years ago.

The counselor always dismissed them right at 10:30. On the dot. He didn’t want to spend one more minute with them than they wanted to spend with him. Half an hour after that, her mother was supposed to pick her up at the Salty Dawg. Her mother’s office was just up the street, in the county courthouse, and she was working this Saturday, so it was a good plan.

Except that her mother was late. Again.

A shriek sliced through the room. It startled Carla, making her fingers twitch, which in turn caused her to demolish one entire wall of Fort French Fry.

Her head whipped around. A little girl and a man—surely the kid’s father, Carla thought, because they looked alike, they both had broad, squashed-looking noses and stick-straight, dirty-blond hair—were sitting across from each other in a booth in the corner. The little girl was screaming and pounding the tabletop with a pair of fat pink fists, flinging her head back and forth. The dad, meanwhile, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal a pair of aggressively hairy forearms, was leaning across the table, clutching a chicken biscuit with most of its yellow wrapper removed. His face was frozen in a hopeful, slightly crazed-looking smile. The girl, though—she was four, maybe five—was ignoring him and instead just kept screaming and jerking her head around. Threads of dirty-blond hair were stuck in the snot ejected by her nose in two bright tubes of ooze.

The father was panicky, confused, desperate.
Gotta be a divorced dad
, Carla surmised.
Gotta be some asshole out to bank some kid time on the weekend.
He was clearly a rookie. An amateur. He made cooing sounds, trying to do something, anything, that would stop the ferocious yowling.

Give it up, dude
, Carla thought.

She knew all about part-time dads who wanted to make up for everything in a few short hours on a Saturday morning at the Salty Dawg. She could’ve written a handbook. Offered tips. She could’ve told this jerk that he’d blown it by starting to unwrap the chicken biscuit for his daughter.
Never, never, never.
The more wounded the little girl was, the more blindsided by the divorce, the more she’d want to do everything by herself from now on. It was survival instinct. She was in training. Getting ready for the day when Daddy Dearest didn’t come around so much anymore.

Carla’s attention swiveled back to the three old men. They were still laughing, still making those horrible old-man-laughing sounds that came out like a whiny scritchy-scratch. One of them was using the back of his brown-spotted hand to dab at a happy tear that was leaking out of his disgusting-looking runny eye. After the dab he reared back his head and peered at that hand, like he wondered how he’d gotten the wet spot on it.

She saw the three old men in their matching black jackets, laughing, mouths open, faces pleated.

She saw them savoring their little joke.

Then she saw them die.

   
Pock

      
Pock

    
Pock

One shot per head.

By the time a startled Carla let go of the french fry she was holding—she’d been rebuilding Fort French Fry from scratch—the three old men were gone.

One slumped onto the little beige tabletop, knocking over his coffee. Blood and coffee, commingled, sloshed across the beveled edge. The friend sitting to his left had been smacked out of the seat by the force of the shot and deposited on the floor, faceup, his eyes and his nose replaced by a frilly spray of pink and gray. The third old man had rocked back in his chair, arms flung out to either side. A portion of his forehead was missing.