A Killing in the Hills (35 page)

Bell didn’t hand her another tissue. She had no desire to be reassuring. Her question had been a shot in the dark. A hunch. She and Lee Ann had been thinking along the same lines.

‘I know what we were told,’ Bell said.

Deanna’s delicate jaw muscles twitched, ever so slightly.

‘Mrs Elkins,’ she said, after a pause during which she seemed to compose herself, ‘let me tell you. I never thought it would come to this. Never thought Albie would still be in jail. They said it wouldn’t happen that way. Because Albie was simple. They said he wouldn’t be punished. They said folks’d understand.’

‘Who gave you that information?’ Bell said.

Deanna shook her head. She lowered her face.

When she raised it again, Bell saw, to her dismay, that a stubbornness had set in. Bell knew what that meant. She wouldn’t get any more information out of Deanna Sheets right now. The door had closed.

‘Deanna, why did you come here today?’

‘To ask you not to hurt my big brother.’ The reply was quick. ‘Albie didn’t know what he was doing. He wouldn’t know when he was going too far. He and Tyler always played rough-like. They’d wrestle around like that. Albie just got too rough that day. That’s what everybody’s told you and it’s the truth, Mrs Elkins. It’s the God’s honest truth.’

When there was no response from Bell, Deanna reached for her purse. ‘Well, okay, then. I gotta go. I was just downtown to pick up some things for my mama. Thought I’d stop in and talk to you about Albie. He’s a good boy. He didn’t mean to hurt nobody.’

Bell decided to make one last try.

‘Deanna, we’re going to find out what happened in that basement. I promise you that we will. Whoever you think you’re protecting – it’s not worth it.’

Something flashed in Deanna’s eyes – whether fear, guilt, apprehension, or confusion, Bell couldn’t tell – but then the bravado reasserted itself. The defiance. Deanna stood up and arranged her purse strap on her shoulder.

‘Only person I’m trying to protect, Mrs Elkins, is my brother Albie. I just want him to get a fair shake. I gotta look out for Albie.’

‘Is that why you and your mother made him eat soap the other day? So we’d have to postpone the trial? Is that the kind of protection you mean?’

That one stung. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Deanna snapped. ‘Nobody made Albie do nothin’ like that. That’s crazy. That’s just—’

‘Never mind, Deanna.’ Bell began dividing files on her desk, turning two tall stacks into four shorter ones. ‘Thanks for stopping by. When it comes to delaying tactics, I suppose this is better than feeding Albie another bar of soap.’

In a mellower tone, Deanna said, ‘I love my brother, Mrs Elkins. He’s like a little baby. And babies need to be looked out for, don’t they? They need somebody on their side?’

‘We all do,’ Bell said, but her eyes stayed on her files. She was finished with Deanna Sheets. For now.

40

Lee Ann Frickie had started the day’s third pot of coffee. She stood by the small table, watching the liquid twist into the glass carafe in a thin dark stream. Her fists were curled against her hips, a favorite posture for cogitation. She was peering over the top of her glasses, another mind-clearing technique.

Observing the process by which dry brown crumbles in a paper filter are transformed into a life-enhancing libation was, Lee Ann often told Bell, better than a Zen garden for meditation purposes. Lee Ann was an expert at keeping her spirit calm through idiosyncratic ways. She didn’t knit or do needlepoint. She didn’t pray or read self-help books. She didn’t go to yoga classes, even though they were offered for senior citizens on Tuesday nights over at the RC, in the same cavernous space in which Carla Elkins’s Teen Anger Management workshop was held on Saturday mornings.

Instead, she made a ritual out of carefully watching certain processes: coffee being made, leaves skittering in front of a frantic push of wind, the sun dropping behind the western edge of the mountains at day’s end, a variety of vehicles rolling fitfully past the courthouse toward the four-way stop at the corner.

‘Hey, Lee Ann,’ Bell said. She’d been sitting at her desk ever since Deanna left, flicking her pencil against a stack of files, resulting in the infliction of several random gray dashes on the edge of those files.

‘Yes?’

‘Need to call the Bevins home,’ Bell said.

Lee Ann went back to her desk in the outer office. With a slight shift of her mouse and a few keystrokes, she fetched up a directory and found the number. A moment later she called out to Bell, ‘It’s ringing. Line three.’

Bell picked up her phone and pushed the lighted button on the console. The ringing was interrupted by the voice of Linda Bevins.

‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Bevins, this is Belfa Elkins. I’m the prosecuting attorney.’

‘Yes? Yes, what is it?’

Linda Bevins sounded slightly flustered. But then again, who wouldn’t be? Her six-year-old son had recently died. And she surely knew about her husband and Deanna Sheets.

Wives always know. That was Bell’s philosophy. They know, even if they don’t know they know. Wives, husbands – and the parents of teenagers – had a knowledge that went beyond verifiable fact and time-stamped photos. When you loved someone, you could read them, sense their emotions, feel when things had changed in their hearts.

‘Mrs Bevins, I need to reach your husband.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘I’d let you talk to him if he was here. But he’s working. He had to take a lot of time off just after—’ She stopped. ‘After Tyler died. There was so much to do. All the arrangements. So much. So much to do. So now he works double-hard.’

Bell waited. She assumed Linda Bevins would ask her about the case, about when Albie Sheets would go to trial for killing her son.

She didn’t. The silence widened.

Finally, Bell said, ‘Well, I really do need to speak with him, Mrs Bevins, so if you could just give me a number at which your husband can be contacted, I’ll take it from there.’

‘He’s out of town. On business. He travels, you know. These days, more than ever. He’s a salesman for Bellwood Plastics and they’re trying to get some business in other regions. Out west, mainly. Since things have been so slow around here. He’s been going to the same place once or twice a month for a good little while now.’

‘Where is he, Mrs Bevins?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Your husband. Where’s he been going so often lately?’

‘Las Vegas.’

41

Three days a week, Charlie Mathers was required to take a morning shift at the Raythune County Jail, just like every other deputy. But it bothered Charlie a lot more than it did his colleagues. He wasn’t some lard-ass prison guard, brushing away the doughnut crumbs piling up on his shirtfront, smacking the inmates’ knuckles when they sassed him, smuggling in cigarettes and copies of
Maxim
in exchange for greasy twenty-dollar bills. He was a law enforcement professional. Wasn’t fair that Charlie had to fill a slot at the jail on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, just like the others.

Because he
wasn’t
like the others.

But here he sat, regardless. Pointing to the logbook. Reciting the spiel he was forced to recite, even though Bell knew it by heart, just as well as he did.

‘Every visitor has to sign in,’ Charlie said in a bored, robotic voice that he hoped was able to convey his disgust with this tedious ritual. ‘Name. Time of day. And the prisoner you wish to see.’

He was sitting behind the black metal desk in the outer office of the jail. The logbook and a ballpoint pen were the only items on the top of the desk. The office was austere, stripped down to the essentials, because Sheriff Fogelsong believed that jails shouldn’t be warm and homey. They ought to be what they were: holding pens for people whose screwups were now costing the taxpayers money, minute by minute, for the troublemakers’ upkeep. Three meals a day, plus heat and light.

Bell bent over the logbook to put in her signature and
4:30 p.m
. Beside that, she wrote,
Albie Sheets
.

Serena Crumpler would be arriving in a few minutes. Bell had called her with an unusual proposition:
Let me talk to Albie, and we’ll consider lessening the charge against him
.

What Bell didn’t say – but could have said – was, ‘Actually, we’re considering dropping the charges altogether.’ Serena would’ve assumed she was playing a game.

And maybe she was.

Earlier that afternoon, Bell had made the trip out to the Bevins home. She didn’t go alone.

Just before leaving the courthouse, she’d pushed aside a stack of long-held doubts and lingering reservations and piled-up irritations and called Rhonda, asking her to come along.

The assistant prosecutors shared a tiny office in the medieval catacomb known as the courthouse basement. It was a dank, grimy space just off the boiler room. It featured a couple of desks shoved together, a single rotary-dial phone, a battered fax machine of such ancient vintage that Hick swore it had once been used by Honest Abe to send messages to General Raythune on the battlefield, and one wobbly, half-broken-legged chair for visitors. If any of those visitors weighed in excess of about sixty-five pounds, Hick warned, they were taking their lives in their hands if they parked their backsides on its frayed cloth seat.

The cramped cubbyhole was almost as cold and bare and ugly as Fogelsong’s jail. And it was, at most, a four-minute walk from there to the prosecuting attorney’s office on the first floor.

Rhonda didn’t show up for twenty.

Bell was waiting in front of her desk, coat buttoned, briefcase dangling from her rigid grip.

‘How long does it take to climb a flight of stairs?’ Bell said icily.

‘Oh, shucks. Didn’t realize we were in
that
big of a hurry, boss. I had to call my cousin Aldora. Her boy Cody got his teeth knocked out at football practice yesterday. Needed to hear how he was doing, the poor thing.’ She sighed. ‘Just got his braces off, too. Shame.’

Rhonda was punching her fists into the armholes of her down coat, scurrying to keep up with Bell as she whisked out the front door of the courthouse, moving rapidly toward the Explorer. By the time Bell spoke again, they were halfway to the Bevins home.

‘You’ve got great instincts about people.’ Bell kept her eyes locked on the road, her voice flat. This wasn’t conversation. It was strategy. ‘You’re much better at reading them than I could ever be. So I want you to do what you do best. I want you to watch Linda Bevins while I talk to her. I want you to figure out what’s really going on there. I think she’s hiding something. I think, in fact, that a lot of the people in this case have been hiding things, starting with Lori and Deanna Sheets. And Bob Bevins too, of course.’

They were quiet for a moment, as the gray-and-gold-flecked scenery of rural Raythune County fled past them. Late fall was a stunning season in West Virginia, except that it also wasn’t. The paradox, Bell thought, smacked you in the face whenever you became too dreamy-eyed and hopeful about the place. Yes, the bright shouts of color that came in the form of dying leaves – the crazy reds and headlong yellows and rich liquid browns – were gorgeous to behold. The shades were transporting, almost voluptuous. And the mountain had its own grave, austere loveliness. But all of that natural beauty was undercut by the plight of the human beings forced to live in the midst of it. By the persistent poverty.

By the squalid shacks that showed up in empty spots in the woods.

By the roadside stands hawking hubcaps and homemade pies and trail bologna and plaster lawn ornaments, from birdbaths to praying angels.

By the boarded-up entrances to the used-up mines, mines that had meant mortal danger and dire health risks – and good-paying jobs, jobs that would never come back.

The paradox is always within arm’s reach around here
, Bell told herself as she drove, fighting the mild depression that lingered in the air like a gas leak. She felt it every time she looked at West Virginia too long and too hard.

She tried to call Carla on her cell, to see how her day was going. There was no answer. Bell didn’t leave a message.

Then she wished she had, so once again she pressed No. 1 on her speed dial, listened through four rings and Carla’s brief digital greeting, and said, ‘Hi, sweetie, it’s Mom. Just checking in. Call me if you get a sec. Love you.’

‘It’s right over there,’ Rhonda said, pointing, alert as a bird dog.

The Bevins family lived in a housing development in the mountain’s wide shadow, one of several such clusters of homes that had been built in the mid-nineties during a brief misleading spell of prosperity. Bell had taken the Explorer through a winding series of streets until Rhonda spotted the address: 564 Stonewall Jackson Lane.

They parked and walked toward the house. It was a split-level brick with a small tree in the front yard. Attached to one side was a two-car garage. Both doors were closed. Along the edge of the driveway was a skinny pole featuring a basketball backboard and its orange metal hoop. The white nylon net was being bullied by the cold breeze. It twisted and wrapped itself around the hoop until it was pinned there, and then, when the wind shifted, tore itself away again.

Bell could imagine Tyler and Albie shooting baskets out here: Tyler dribbling furiously, circling his big friend’s clumsy feet, then hoisting up a shot – and Albie blocking that shot with one lazy swat of his massive hand. She imagined Tyler, running for the rebound. The boys – and they were both boys, no matter how old Albie was – had probably giggled their way through hundreds of games out here, hundreds of early-morning, mid-afternoon, and after-dinner games, hundreds of heaved-up shots and lazy blocks and wild scrambles for the rebounds.

Hundreds of games of H-O-R-S-E.

‘Bell?’ Rhonda said.

They stood on the front porch. Rhonda’s knuckles were poised to knock, but she wanted to make sure Bell was ready.

‘Let’s go,’ Bell said.

A few minutes later Linda Bevins was escorting them into her kitchen. She’d been surprised, when answering the knock, to find the prosecuting attorney and her assistant on her doorstep. There was a moment when it seemed to Bell as if Linda seriously considered simply closing the door again, right in their faces. Then she’d shrugged and opened it wider, a passive way of inviting them in.