A Killing in the Hills
Read A Killing in the Hills Online
Authors: Julia Keller
Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #General, #Mystery & Detective
Copyright © 2012 Julia Keller
The right of Julia Keller to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7553 9289 6
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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Contents
For my mother, Patricia, and my sisters, Catherine and Lisa – who were there, too
Acknowledgments
Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, is not on any map, although a small cadre of friends and colleagues joined me in stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that reality:
Lisa Gallagher, a woman of indefatigable energy and great passion for storytelling; Susan Phillips, best friend and honorary West Virginian; Elaine Phillips, Marja Mills, and Elizabeth Taylor, whose friendship, guidance and support are warmly appreciated; and Kelley Ragland and Vicki Mellor, publishing professionals whose rigor and wisdom make working with them a privilege and a joy.
The roads get lost in the clotted hills, in the Blue Spruce maze, the red cough, the Allegheny marl, the sulphur ooze
.
Irene McKinney, ‘Twilight in West Virginia: Six O’Clock Mine Report’
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
.
Part One
1
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.
