Sorrow Road (34 page)

Before Carla could ask the next question, there was a commotion at the checkerboard table. The daughter was jabbing a finger at the old man. She was not shouting, but her voice had the menacing, escalating edge that was well on its way to a shout: “You
fucker
. I
know
you fucking remember. I
know
it.”

The aide tapped the woman's shoulder. Time to settle down. But the woman shook her off and continued to heckle the old guy: “What about me? What about Nelson, wherever he is? What are we supposed to
do,
huh? With the rest of our lives? After what you did to us?”

The woman abruptly broke off her rant, lowered her head, and thrust it in her hands. She was not crying; her grief struck Carla as something that had ranged beyond the ability to be expressed in mere sobs a long time ago. It was part of her being now, fossilized inside the larger universe of everything she did and said and was. In the meantime, the old man gazed serenely across the table. He smiled a tiny little smile.

Arlene turned back around to Carla. She had been watching the drama with a relish that made Carla want to offer to go fetch popcorn. “We get that all the time,” Arlene muttered. With a naughty grin, she added, “Usually, though, it's the
patients
who act up—not the visitors.” She squared herself in her chair, ready to get back to it. “Fire away.”

“What's your favorite childhood memory?” Carla asked.

Arlene pondered the question for a very long time. “I don't remember very much about my childhood. I used to—but I don't anymore.”

Carla looked concerned. Her face made Arlene snicker and sweep a pudgy hand around the lounge, where three more patients had wandered in, shuffling along like lost zombies. They stood in a row by the wall, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

“Oh, honey—not like
those
poor folks,” Arlene exclaimed. “Not
that
kind of ‘I can't remember.' What I mean is that I don't
want
to remember it, so I just don't. I keep it off to the side of my brain. See, we were pretty poor, and my parents went hungry a lot of times themselves so that us kids could eat. I don't really like remembering how my mother would stand by the table, thin as a corpse although not quite as talkative, and spoon another helping of oatmeal into my brother Leroy's bowl. Leroy would eat it right up. He was too young to realize that my mother was giving him
her
helping.” Arlene shook her head. Carla started to point out that she had just recounted a scene from a childhood she claimed she did not remember, but held back. Arlene was an intelligent woman. If there was irony in the vicinity, she would know it. She didn't need Carla to circle it with a Sharpie.

“Memory's a tricky thing,” Arlene said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, take that lady who was sitting at the table over there with Bill Ferris.”

Carla looked. The table was now vacant. Both Scowler and Driving Cap were gone. Only the aide remained, still picking at the spot on her smock, digging in.

“That lady,” Arlene continued, “comes here
all
the time. Lives pretty far away, but makes the drive, no problem. And it's like she's trying to get old Bill to remember something. But he won't. Like you saw, she gets real mad at him. Got so mad once she went a little crazy. It was way worse than today. We had to pull her off of him. Me and Lester, another aide who works the same shift as I do.

“It's gotten so bad with Bill's daughter now, you know, that Ms. Layman said she can't be left alone with him. Has to have an escort. That's why Peggy's over there. Today was her turn to make sure that crazy lady didn't take a swing at her own flesh and blood.”

“If she hates him that much, then why does she have him in a place like this? Gotta be pretty expensive.”

“Guess so,” Arlene said, bobbing her head. Her frizzy hair bounced up and down like dandelion fluff in a mild breeze. “But it's sure as hell better than having him live with
her,
I bet.”

“So does he know her? His daughter, I mean? Does he know who's visiting him?”

Arlene shrugged. Then she grinned. “My medical degree's a little outdated, hon, but okay, here goes. Based on what I see around here, the older memories stick. It's the newer ones that don't get stored. The older stuff—that's generally all they
do
remember. With old Bill—well, I can't say. But he's not that far along. It's weird that he can seem to remember stuff from forty, fifty years ago. I mean, ask him to tell you today's date, and he'll look at you like you told him to speak French. That's understandable. But the older things—he ought to remember them. Then again, like I said, memory's a tricky thing.”

Carla needed to wind this up. She had three other interviews to do before she left the Terrace. But she had one more question. She'd been trying to figure out a way to ask Arlene about Travis Womack without arousing the woman's suspicions. “A friend of mine went to school with a guy who works here,” Carla said. “Or at least he
did
work here, last time she checked. She was hoping to get in touch. Guy named—wait, was it, I don't know, maybe Tom? No—it was Travis.”

“Travis Womack.”

“Yeah. That's it.” Carla was terrified that she might be blushing. Her face did feel a little hot. But then again, Thornapple Terrace was overheated, like every old folks' home, right?

Arlene gave her a
listen, sister
look. “Honey,” she said, “I'd put you at about twenty-one, twenty-two years old, if you're a day. Travis Womack has got to be pushing fifty. How could a friend of yours—somebody your age—have gone to school with him?”

Carla was too embarrassed to answer, so Arlene patted her knee. “Had a crush on him myself a while back, hon. Don't blame you a bit. It's those eyes. Deep as a river.”

*   *   *

Bell sat at her desk. The courthouse was busier today than it had been for almost two weeks. Along with the slightly better weather had come an influx of people with business to conduct here, business they had put off because of the bad roads but could put off no longer. Property tax bills were due; the grumblers with jury duty summonses were entitled to a fair shot at wheedling their way out of it; parking tickets had to be argued over. As Bell had learned when she first undertook this job seven years ago, a county courthouse in a small town was a sort of secular sanctuary, a place where everyone eventually came to plead their case to a higher authority.

Arranged across her desk were the three pages of the coroner's report for Harmon Strayer. At the bottom of the first page, on the right-hand side, was the requisite sketch of the front and back view of a human body. Typically the coroner would have marked what he found on the body he was analyzing, and where: entrance or exit points for bullets or knife wounds, bruises, any sort of abnormalities.

On this report, the sketch was bare. Nothing at all had been marked.

In the general summary at the top of the page, under the heading
Strayer, Harmon Arthur, aged 89 years,
in the box labeled
Cause of death,
was this:
Complications from late-stage Alzheimer's.

Next she shuffled through a stack of papers at her left elbow. She drew out the coroner's reports for the deaths of Polly Delaney and Margaret Jacks. She found the same omission: The front- and side-view sketches of a human body had not been filled out. And the cause of death was listed as
late-stage Alzheimer's
.

She called out to Lee Ann, who sat at her desk in the outer office: “Can you get me Buster Crutchfield on the phone?”

Crutchfield, the Raythune County coroner, sounded jovial. “Ever since they invented those dang fax machines, I don't get as many visitors as I used to,” he said. “You oughta come by and see me now and again, Miss Belfa. Pick up the paperwork in person, instead of relying on those fancy boxes of yours.” Crutchfield was seventy-two, and he liked to play the curmudgeonly Luddite. Truth was, he kept up with the latest advances in pathology, and his lab was as up-to-date technologically as his budget would allow. “How're you doin'?”

“Fine, Buster. Hey, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“How well do you know the Muth County coroner?”

“Ernie Burson. Well, lemme see. I guess he's doing a mite better. Still at the rehab place, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ernie had a stroke about four months ago. Not back to work yet, but he's hopeful.”

“So who's been doing his job?”

“The load's shared. County calls upon any physicians in the area who have a free moment or two and are willing to pitch in.”

Securing the phone between her ear and an upraised shoulder, she turned to the final page of each coroner's report. She had not noticed it before, but each one had a different scrawled signature—and none of those signatures read:
Ernest T. Burson, MD.

“Those helpful physicians might very well have been rushed, then,” Bell said. “Busy with their own practices. And maybe inclined to wrap up a case as quickly as possible.”

“I suppose so, yes. Although I can't imagine that any reputable physician would do shoddy work just because—”

“It happens, Buster,” she said, cutting him off. “You and I both know that. A big caseload, a lot of extra work—and the next thing you know, you're not quite as rigorous as you ought to be. It's not incompetence. It's fatigue and expediency.” And it happens to prosecutors, she reminded herself, as often as it does to physicians. It happens to everybody.

“Is there something I can review for you?” Buster said.

“I'd appreciate it. I can fax over the paperwork in a few minutes. If, that is, you don't mind the use of newfangled technology.” Buster, she knew, expected to be teased. If you did not tease him, he would think you were mad at him.

“I'll overlook it this once.” He chuckled. Then he was serious again. “Give me a quick sense of what I'm looking for.” He and Bell had worked together for many years, and they had learned to shuttle quickly from jocular to grim as the situation required.

“Three elderly people, all with late-stage Alzheimer's as well as other significant health issues—diabetes, cardiac and respiratory issues. All died at a care facility over in Muth County within the last few months. Given those circumstances, how diligent would a coroner be about searching for evidence of foul play?”

Buster slowly took in a long breath of air and then expelled it, even more slowly.

“I'll be honest with you, Belfa. But if you quote me in public, I'll deny it. If word got out that I was casting aspersions on the professionalism of my colleagues—”

“Not asking you to testify in open court, Buster,” she said, interrupting him. “I'm just asking for your opinion. Off the record.”

“Okay, then. You're right. They wouldn't be looking. Now, if it was something big and obvious—ligature marks on the neck or any evidence of physical assault—sure, they'd see that and write it down. But overall, no. No, they wouldn't be quite as attentive as they might be if the deceased were young and healthy.”

“What would slip through the cracks?”

Buster paused. He was thinking about it. “Well, with a helpless older person, I'd probably be looking for evidence of suffocation. Mucus at the back of the mouth. Trace fibers around the nose and mouth area, from whatever was used to restrict the airway—a pillow, say, or a scarf.”

“To look for those things, though, you'd first have to suspect that a crime had occurred.”

“Yes. But it's too late, Belfa. If you're trying to build a case, that kind of evidence would have to be collected at the original autopsy. Once the body is released to the funeral home, you're screwed. And if the deceased was cremated, then you're
doubly
screwed. And even if the body
wasn't
cremated, you can't go back and—”

“I know, Buster. I know.”

“Does this mean a murderer got away with it?”

“No,” Bell said. Her next words would confuse him, but so be it. “She didn't.”

*   *   *

Carla had just settled into her Kia. The car was very cold—not surprising, because it had been sitting in the Thornapple Terrace parking lot for the past three hours. Before she left, however, she took a few seconds to savor the day.

She was still excited from the interviews she'd completed this afternoon. Her mind was busy with ways to organize the material. Sure, they could just post transcripts of the individual interviews, one by one, but she also hoped to create other ways to search the archive: train stories, say. Or courtship stories. Stories about the land itself—rugged land that had nourished the people here for hundreds of years. Yet the very things that made that land beautiful were also the things that doomed those same people to poverty and despair. These mountains protected you, but they also isolated you.

The people she'd interviewed knew that—knew it in their bones, because the mountains
were
their bones, the strong framework that underlay all that they did, all that they might do. And yet when outsiders wrote about Appalachia, they assumed that the people here were oblivious to the tragic ironies of the place, to the fact that its major industries—coal mining, and chemical plants that damaged fragile rivers—provided a living, but not a life. Only a half-life. The shadow of a life. The truth was, of course, that the residents knew that very well. They did not just know it—they
lived
it.

Those were just a few of the things that Carla had learned in the course of her work thus far. She looked out the windshield at Thornapple Terrace. It was a graveyard for the past. At times today, she'd had to turn away from the specter of blank-eyed residents who seemed to float slightly above the corridors, helpless and hapless, borne aloft by all the memories that had fallen out of their minds but still followed them, murmuring elusive hints about things they used to know. But the interviews with staff members had rescued Carla, reminding her of why she was doing this: So that even if the individual person lost her memory, there would still be a place for those memories to live.