Sorrow Road (18 page)

And then, the evidence appeared to show, they had understood that they were not going to be able to escape. At that point, they had turned and faced their attacker. They joined hands. Connie's friends would smile at that detail—later, months later, once those friends had gotten over the shock and the grief and could finally contemplate a thing like smiling, which at first had seemed impossible—and say,
Yes, that's our Connie, that's exactly what Connie would have done.
With the end so near, with death a certainty, she would have reached out her hand and taken her friend's hand, so that neither one of them would face it alone. Connie's husband Luke Dollar said so, too. She'd have done that. That was pure Connie, he said.

Holding hands, looking their killer straight in the eye through the whispery scrim of snow, they waited for the shotgun blasts that had not been long in coming—or so their loved ones hoped, knowing the agony of anticipating the grimly inevitable.

 

Chapter Eight

She needed to talk to Nick.

Two days had passed since the night when Connie Dollar and Marcy Coates were found dead at the base of the tree. Heavy snowfall had obscured any usable clues. A search of the house and repeated sweeps of the area had turned up nothing.

The conviction had gripped Bell suddenly:
I have to talk to Nick Fogelsong.
So even though she had just settled herself at her desk on Friday morning, she sprang up again, pulling on her coat, ignoring Lee Ann's perplexed and even slightly alarmed look as she left.

She parked in front of the long, low, cedar-shingled house and walked around the north side, heading for the backyard. The walks bore no evidence of the week's repeated bouts of snow; they were cleaned down to the quick. Nick was a demon with a shovel.

She was not in the least concerned when she heard the
pop!
of a gunshot as she rounded the back corner. She had expected it. It was the quality of the sound, not its presence, that intrigued her. Cold air changed everything. Sound waves traveled faster in warmer air than in cooler; the cold muddied the sounds, knocking the sharpness out of them. She heard another
pop!
and then two more in succession:
pop-pop!

The regularity of the shots—the way they were spaced out, the orderly rhythm of them—meant target practice, not random gunfire. Nick was trying to get his marksmanship skills back. A year ago he'd had an injury, a serious one, and the nerve damage in his right arm was a hill he just might not be able to climb. Ever. But no one said that to his face.

“Hey,” Bell called out. She knew better than to sneak up on a man with a gun. You made your presence known, loud and clear and often. If she'd had a bugle, she would have tooted it.

He lowered his weapon. He turned around. He grunted a greeting.

Nick was wearing a gray plaid Woolrich coat and boots, a workingman's clothes, but the dress pants were the giveaway. He had a desk job now, an executive position. Until recently, he had been sheriff of Raythune County. He had held that position for many years, and for the last portion of them, he had been Bell's confidante and partner in keeping peace in the region—but not anymore. He had gone another way. She had finally forgiven him, but it was a long time coming.

“Heard about those poor old ladies out on Hanging Rock Road,” he said. “Any leads?”

“No.” She crossed her arms, jamming her hands up into her armpits. “It's damned cold out here, Nick. Can we go inside to talk?”

He nodded. “One more?”

“Sure.”

He turned back to the cardboard target he had suspended from a pair of thin black cables that traversed the back of his property. On the target was a sketch of the top half of a man's body; the man was crouching, a revolver in his hand. Tiny circles with numbers on them radiated out from the man's center of gravity, the numbers getting smaller as the size of the circles increased. Nick bent his knees, brought both hands up on the Glock, held his arms out in front of his body—not rigid, but relaxed and natural—and aimed and fired. The
pop!
ricocheted off the white-hooded mountains in the distance, but in the frigid air, it never achieved the wincing sharpness of a classic echo.

The target jumped and shuddered. He holstered his pistol and pulled at the parallel cables, hand over hand, until the target came close enough for him to snatch it off the line. He checked it out. He had hit it very close to the center.

“Not bad,” Bell said. With Nick Fogelsong, you had to keep the compliments to a minimum. Anything that reeked of gratuitous praise would send him into a two-day brood. She had learned that the hard way.

He shrugged. It was good. He knew it was good. But he also knew that it did not really mean anything. Not yet. He had a long, long way to go before he was anywhere close to where he had been as a marksman. He was fifty-six years old. Even without the injury that had almost taken his life—he had been shot last year by a drug dealer—he would be fighting time. The fine motor skills that had made him a crack shot were the first to go. He hated that. But hating a fact did not make it any less true.

They sat down in the kitchen. It was a bright, well-kept one, with clean countertops and a white tile floor. Bell piled up her outerwear on a third chair. Nick gestured toward the coffeepot. She shook her head.

“Already had a full pot before I left home this morning. 'Bout to float away as it is,” she said. “Where's Mary Sue?”

“She's been volunteering at the school.” He did not need to specify which school; Bell knew he meant Acker's Gap Elementary. His wife had taught third grade there for many years until mental illness forced her to take disability leave. She was doing better now, with the right balance of medication. And with a diligent daily attention to routines, such as keeping a kitchen spotless. But she wasn't able to teach third grade anymore.

“She likes being back there,” Nick went on. “Helps out with the math classes. Goes in on Fridays, when I'm home in the morning. I give myself a half-day off. She claims that otherwise we'd be tripping all over each other, both of us home on a weekday morning. Probably true.” He was head of security for the Highway Haven chain—a good job, a job coveted by a lot of people, but not the one he'd done for most of his adult life. And not the one he wanted.

It struck Bell—not for the first time, certainly, but with a poignant force today that she had not felt before—that Nick and Mary Sue were in the same boat now, trying to work their way back into their former lives, trying to recover some essential part of themselves that they had lost along the way. There was a kind of quiet heroism about that. But at what point, she had begun to wonder, did it start to be counterproductive, robbing the present because your hopes were fixed so passionately on the future?

Unclear. And frankly, she knew she was in no position to be giving life advice to anyone.

“I need your help, Nick,” she said. “I'm just frustrated as all get-out.”

“This about the old ladies?”

“Sort of. Pam Harrison is pretty well convinced it was the same perpetrator who's been holding up gas stations in Muth County.” Harrison had been deputy sheriff under Nick Fogelsong, and then, with his endorsement, was elected to the top spot.

“And you're not.”

“That's a hell of an upgrade—going from robbing gas stations to committing murder,” Bell declared. “And why take the chance? Marcy Coates's house was a run-down piece of crap. Her TV set was about a thousand years old. And there were no other electronics. No jewelry. Who'd target her in the first place?”

“What does Harrison say?”

“She says beggars can't be choosers. She says the assailant probably just found himself out there on Hanging Rock Road. Maybe he was cold and hungry. Maybe he saw the light in Marcy's window. Stopped by to take what he could get. Maybe they resisted. And that's what got them killed.”

“Two old ladies. Resisted.”

“Exactly,” Bell said, smacking the tabletop. “You see my point. Those women were—and forgive my bluntness here—old and fat and helpless. The chances of either one of them putting up a fight? Nonexistent. And anyway, these were good people we're talking about here. If a stranger came along and asked for a sandwich, they'd fire up the stove and ask him if he wanted his grilled cheese on white or wheat.”

“So you figure it was on purpose. Somebody wanted one or both of them dead.”

“Maybe. Makes more sense, anyway, than the idea of two old ladies sneering at a knife-wielding, gun-toting maniac and saying, ‘Make my day.' I mean, come on.” She shook her head. “The good news is that Jake Oakes isn't giving up. He pointed out that the killer would have had to check and make sure Coates and Dollar were really dead. Couldn't take a chance on surviving witnesses. So our man might have gotten some of their blood on his shoes when he did that. Just a drop or two, maybe—and he could very well have burned his shoes afterward—but it might give us an angle if we take someone into custody.”

She filled him in on her visit to Thornapple Terrace, and on the fact that Marcy Coates was the aide who had found each of the three deceased residents. He knew about Darlene Strayer's death on Saturday night; Bell had mentioned her name to him in the past, when Darlene was involved in a run of big cases.

“I'd been meaning to give you a call about that,” Nick said. “Express my condolences.”

“Well, now you've got a chance to do more than just mumble some empty platitudes in my direction,” she shot back. She knew he would not get mad, but instead would appreciate the point of her visit. “Help me think this through, Nick. Did Marcy's job at the Terrace have something to do with her death? It's tempting to think so—but how to prove it? And even if there
is
a connection somewhere, and Marcy gave Mother Nature a little nudge, so what? Three old people with late-stage Alzheimer's die in their sleep. Not exactly hot news, you know? Not even much of a tragedy. More like mercy.”

“And you've still got Darlene's death. And her suspicions about her father's passing.” Nick's voice was ruminative.

“Yes. But the truth is, every single thing that has happened—Darlene's accident, the deaths at the Terrace, even the murder of the two old women—could have another explanation entirely. They might not be linked at all. It
sounds
like a lot of bodies, but except for the deaths of Marcy Coates and Connie Dollar, these are probably not criminal justice matters at all. Just happenstance. Inevitability.”

“What does your staff say about it?” Nick believed that most people in the world were fundamentally overrated, but he had an abiding respect for Rhonda Lovejoy and Hickey Leonard. He had worked with them on enough cases over the years to know who they were.

“Wish I knew,” Bell said.

“Pardon?”

“We haven't had a staff meeting in a while. Rhonda was getting ready to try the Charlie Vickers case, but she needed an emergency family leave. So Hick took over for her. He's up to his ears in trial prep, trying to be ready for next week.”

“What's going on with Rhonda?”

“Her grandmother had a stroke on Tuesday night—the night they found the bodies. Not expected to make it. The news was just too much for her to handle. Grandma Lovejoy was best friends with Connie Dollar. Blames herself, apparently, for not trying to reach Connie earlier.” Bell shook her head. “She's Rhonda's paternal grandmother. Rhonda's been really close to her since she was a little girl. And you know Rhonda—her family is her life. There's no way I wouldn't grant her the leave.”

“Well,” he said. “At least you've got the sheriff to talk it over with. Discuss strategy.”

Bell grimaced. “I respect the hell out of Pam, but you know how she operates. Makes up her mind early. After that, it takes an act of God or Congress to get her to change it. And neither one of those parties is much concerning themselves with the deaths of a bunch of old folks in West Virginia.” Last year, Pam Harrison had persuaded Bell to prosecute a man for a murder that, evidence later proved, he did not commit. The rush to judgment was a habit to which Harrison seemed permanently inclined. It was her only significant flaw, as Bell saw it—but it was a doozy. From that moment on, Bell had relied less and less on Harrison's instincts and perspective. Harrison would never be to Bell what Nick Fogelsong had been. Never again would Bell bring her into the innermost circle of her thoughts.

“And the sheriff,” Nick says, “believes it was a crime of opportunity.”

“Yes.”

“Even though Marcy Coates worked at the Terrace.”

“Yes.” Bell's frustration showed through in her voice. “I'm going to keep pushing, of course. Talk to Marcy's family. Find out the circumstances surrounding her discovery of those three bodies at the Terrace. But I sure wish I had Rhonda and Hick to help me think it through.”

“It's a shame you can't rely on Clay. He's got a good head on his shoulders, that one. But he's a civilian.” A slight chuckle. “Hell, so am I, come to that. Better watch what you tell me, young lady. Professional ethics and all.”

She was quiet.

“Hey,” he said. “I was kidding. I'm grandfathered in, right? As the former sheriff?”

“Right.”

Her mind was elsewhere. Should she tell him? Jesus, she wanted to. She wanted to tell him the whole story, right here and right now, because Nick would listen, and he would guide her toward the correct course of action, and she could finally go one way or the other way. She could forgive Clay or she could tell him that she
couldn't
forgive him—not now, not ever—and that they needed to move on, both of them, in separate directions, toward separate futures. No hard feelings.

Feelings. Those were the real culprits. Those were the guilty parties in this mess. If she did not feel what she felt for Clay Meckling—a lively and beguiling sexual attraction, an immense respect for his intelligence and his work ethic and his ambitions, plus a quiet comfort in just being in his presence, all of which added up to the simple fact that she was in love with the man—if she didn't have
that
to reckon with, she would not be in this fix in the first place.