Evening Street (10 page)

She was dressed in a pair of red plaid flannel sweatpants and a gargantuan gray sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was rubbed clear through at both elbows, one sleeve was ripped, and the collar was unraveling. It was a look she didn't even like to share with her mirror. But it was warm, dammit. And comfortable.

It was just after 7
A.M
. She had a mug of coffee nestled in her cupped palms like a battered chalice in a low-rent religious ceremony. She tried a sip. Too hot—and so she blew on it, and then sipped again. Still too hot.

Well, no matter. Throats could heal, right? Sure they could. She needed the coffee, and she needed it now.

Down the hatch.

She winced, instantly repenting of her decision to face the pain and drink it anyway, and then, as the bitter black coffee branched through her body like a liquid wake-up call, she repented of her repentance. She was ready now. Ready to face whatever the day might bring.

She took another drink. She didn't notice the heat anymore. She had a lot on her mind, and snow was the perfect backdrop for thinking. It was the original blank canvas.

Carla would be arriving today.

Today.

The idea made Bell feel a little dizzy. There was still a slightly dreamlike quality to the idea of her daughter's return, a gauzy,
Can it really be so?
sense of unreality. The fact that the picture spreading out in front of her was so altered from its usual state—it was a tidy, homogenized wash of white sameness, not a tangled, unruly mess of brown yards and gray street and broken sidewalks—added to the surreal feeling, the feeling of a life and a landscape unplugged from their usual sources of color and noise.

Bell had yearned for Carla's return for so long now that she had forgotten what it felt like to live without that fierce desire, that ache in the very center of her being. She'd never told Carla how deeply she missed her, because she didn't want her daughter to feel guilty about her choice. Bell never discussed it with her ex-husband, either, or with her best friend, Nick Fogelsong, or even with Clay. It was the most profound truth of her life, and she had kept it hidden, as if it were a guilty secret.

And so the sadness had tunneled deeper inside her. Life closed back over it.

Carla was coming home to reassess things. Okay, not just “things”—
everything.
That's what she had told her mother last night at the tail end of their phone conversation, after announcing that she simply had to drive there Sunday. No delay. She needed new skies. Well, new-old, anyway. She'd quit her job. Found someone to sublet her room in the Arlington house. Her car was already packed. She would hit the road first thing tomorrow—which meant today—and point her Kia Soul in the direction of Acker's Gap. She knew all about driving in heavy snow, she said. She'd checked her tires, had all the fluids topped off. She'd be fine.

Bell was thrilled by the prospect of Carla's return. Of course. Of course she was.

But part of her wondered—she
had
to wonder, it was her
responsibility
to wonder—if a small, fading, isolated, and economically depressed town in West Virginia, a place from which a lot of people seemed to run screaming the second they had the chance, was really where Carla belonged, long-term.

Clearly there was a lot more to this abrupt homecoming than Carla had let on; something had happened in her daughter's life, something that Bell would have to question her about, slowly and carefully, once the young woman was settled in. It wasn't the kind of detective work that Bell relished. But it was necessary.

Carla's bombshell had shoved everything else out of her mind, including Darlene Strayer's request. Now it came back to her. She felt a touch of guilt about having forgotten so easily. She'd call Rhonda later today. Ask her to spend a few days poking around, asking questions.

Done.

Back to Carla.

She pictured her daughter's long, narrow face and short dark hair. The set of her chin. The sound of her voice. Carla had a lot of Bell in her, but she had a lot of her father in her, too. She had Bell's stubbornness and grit, but she had Sam's analytical skills. And his sense of humor. And his charm—that wondrous golden charm that accounted for so much of his success. Carla had her mother's eyes, and she had her father's chin. She had parts of both of them. The combination was mysterious and wonderful and slightly daffy and exasperating and—well, it just
was.
It was.

Her love for Carla was like an underground river, sweeping along so fast and so deep inside her that she took the slight humming sound in the background of her life for granted. It was always, always running.

Another swallow of coffee. Her throat, she hoped, had built up enough scar tissue in the last minute or so to handle the heat. Bell realized that she'd been looking at the snow without actually seeing it. Now she squinted out the window, exploring the particulars.

Not a single tire track had yet marred the street's frozen perfection. She gauged the snow's depth to be about fifteen to eighteen inches. Not impenetrable, especially not for the heavy-duty, four-wheel-drive vehicles favored by people who lived in the midst of mountains—but something you had to consider, to factor into your plans, before leaving your house. A county road crew would come along eventually. The slowpoke snowplow would do what it could. But the crew, quite rightly, would focus on the main arteries first. They might not reach the residential streets until late this afternoon.

Now there was action. Bell watched as a black Chevy Blazer fought its way through the thick drifts that striped Shelton Avenue like nature's speed bumps. Every few feet, the Blazer stalled out and fell back, stymied by ridge after ridge of frozen snow. The driver was forced to put it briefly in reverse and then attack from another angle. The sound of the engine—the chopped-up
vrrrr vrrrr
vrrrr
of its constant revving—had a kind of seething exasperation embedded in it, and an
Are you freakin'
kidding
me?
weariness, too. Bell assumed it was just channeling the feelings of the driver.

The Blazer stopped in front of her house. “Stopped” was a generous interpretation; it really just stalled out and quit. The door flapped open. A man in a thick black overcoat and knee-high black boots jumped out. He shuddered briefly at the cold. He closed the door behind him. Bell took note of what she'd seen before but had willfully chosen to ignore: the round white county seal on the door, encircled by the words
RAYTHUNE COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT.

No question about it. This was official business.

Bell scarcely had time to set her mug on the mantel and pull on a ratty, dignity-preserving bathrobe before the knocks came, a series of three serious-sounding assaults on the ancient oak door. There was a doorbell in plain sight, but for some reason, Deputy Jake Oakes—she'd recognized him as he fought his way up the long front walk, or at least up a path that constituted his best guess as to where the walk might be lurking under the snow, and then struggled up the front porch steps—always preferred to knock, loud and long. He'd been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth, he'd told her once, and she wondered if he secretly missed using his fists on a regular basis.

She opened the door. The deputy's nose and cheeks were bright red from the cold. His blue eyes watered profusely. He seemed slightly stunned by the ordeal of walking just a few yards in this weather. His lips, she saw, were cracked and split.

“Sorry to barge in on you like this,” he said.

Bell nodded. She didn't know the details of the situation that had prompted his visit, but she was sure its essence could be summarized in a single word:

Trouble.

*   *   *

The body of a woman identified as Darlene Strayer had been found just before sunrise. That's what Oakes told her, his words flat and informational. He knew she preferred to hear it that way: facts arranged in chronological sequence. She didn't like it when people hemmed and hawed and hedged, trying to pretty things up, temper the blow.

A trucker named Felton Groves had come upon the mangled wreckage off to the side of the road. Darlene had been ejected from her midnight blue Audi when the car hit a pine tree about twenty yards beyond the tight interior curve of the nasty switchback. Groves was negotiating that same help-me-Jesus stretch of the descent when he spotted the carnage, his headlights splashing up on the crusty white snow like a flung bucketful of some glittering substance.

That description, Oakes said, glancing up from his notes, came from Groves himself. The trucker fancied himself a bit of a poet.

Groves had immediately realized what he was looking at: Somebody had missed the curve. The vehicle had sailed clean off the road in a long solemn arc until the tree put a sudden stop to it. He pulled over, yanked on his emergency brake. He approached the scene. A quick glimpse was all he needed. The Audi's front end was a corrugated mess. The torqued body lay facedown on a mound of snow about ten yards from the drastically foreshortened car.

At that point, he said, all the poetry fled from his mind. He called 911. He didn't check for a pulse. “Maybe I should have,” he'd murmured uncertainly to Deputy Oakes, once the paramedics had trussed up the driver on a gurney and slotted the gurney in the back and taken off. The light on top of the van spun around and around, draping the landscape in dire pulses of red, but the paramedic behind the wheel had to exercise restraint; the road surface was compromised by the heavy snowfall as yet untouched by any plow, and by at least half an inch of ice under the snow. It was strange, Groves remarked to the deputy, to see an emergency vehicle just creeping along like that, tentative, holding back, moving in cautious fits and starts.

He still had nightmares, Groves had added—unprompted—to Deputy Oakes, from an accident scene he'd come upon near Macon, Georgia, fifteen years ago. Eight kids, two parents, nobody wearing seat belts in a van that for some unknown reason had gone left of center and ended up smashing headfirst into a tractor-trailer rig. He'd stopped his truck that time, too, and jumped out. Once again, it was before the cops had gotten there, and the air was still quivering from the ferocious impact, as if the earth itself still couldn't believe what had just happened, the violence of it, the terrible surprise. The bodies looked like laundry tossed every which way in a ditch. He'd never forget the sight.

That was why he'd kept his distance when he saw the body in the snow, he told Deputy Oakes. That was why he hadn't gone closer, hadn't looked for signs of life, hadn't called out, “Hey—you okay?” He knew the person wasn't okay. And frankly, he was worried about his sleep. For the rest of his life, he meant. He couldn't take on yet another reason for insomnia, another trigger. But it bothered him, just the same. “Maybe she was still alive. Maybe if I'd—”

“No,” Oakes had replied. He was matter-of-fact about it, tapping the top of the little pencil back into his shirt pocket and then rebuttoning his overcoat against the phenomenal cold. You couldn't use a pen in these temperatures; the ink froze. “Guaranteed—she was dead when she hit the ground. Never had a chance.”

Odd to find that consoling, Oakes would think later, once the shock wore off. Odd that instant death sounded like a blessing.

But it was. Given the condition of the body, it was. Definitely, it was.

*   *   *

They had found Bell's name on a handwritten note in the victim's coat pocket. That was why the deputy was here now. He had written down the words in his notebook; the original was in an evidence bag, stowed in a locked room at the courthouse. This wasn't a criminal investigation—it was an accident, plain and simple—but they still did things right in Raythune County.

“The paper said, ‘Bell Elkins. 8 pm. Tie Yard Tavern.' And then your cell number.” Oakes looked up from his notebook to meet Bell's eye. “Car was registered to an Alice Darlene Strayer. Nobody's made the formal ID yet—we're having a hell of a time locating a next of kin—but the body matches the photo on the driver's license. And on her federal ID. Looks like it was expired—the federal ID, not the license—but she still had it in her purse.”

“Yes,” Bell said. She was too stunned at first to offer more than one word. It was impossible to believe. Just a few hours ago, she'd been sitting with Darlene in the bar. She could remember the way her hand looked when she lifted the whiskey glass. She could remember the sound of her voice, the expression on her face. And now all of it—the hand, the voice, the face—was gone. Darlene Strayer was dead.

Bell realized that she and Oakes were standing in the foyer, facing each other, in radically different states of attire. She wore a pink chenille robe and sweats and slippers. He wore a brown uniform and a black wool greatcoat, and a black toboggan instead of his usual flat-brimmed hat. The snow was melting from his boots onto the wide-plank flooring. Already two pools had formed around his feet.

In other circumstances, the disparity would have amused them. Neither commented upon it now.

“Anyway,” he said. “Just needed to inform you. And get a few basic facts for the timeline.”

“Yes. Of course.”

He sensed her shock and kept his demeanor businesslike. Normally, Jake Oakes was a joker, a scamp, a cutup; he and Bell often clashed over his reliance on the inappropriate wisecrack as his primary communication tool. Not today. He was suitably serious. She appreciated that.

“We met at the Tie Yard,” Bell went on. “I know Darlene from law school. Haven't seen her in years. She's originally from Barr County. Lives in D.C. now. But she wanted to get together tonight. She left the bar just a few minutes before I did.” Bell realized she was still in the grip of the present tense. It was too soon to change.