A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,13

ones who, he sensed, cultivated their fierceness like a cash crop. Depended on it. That fierceness, he speculated, went a long way toward accounting for their survival.

Bell had mellowed some over the years, no doubt about it; he’d known her since she was a child, and naturally people changed. Hell, she was a prosecutor now, a public official, an arm of the law, same as he was. She’d learned to handle herself. She’d had to. But at the back of it all, he knew, the fierceness was still there, biding its time.

He hadn’t been in favor of her running for prosecutor. When she’d first brought it up, he’d argued with her, he’d met her in Ike’s Diner night after night and penciled hasty lists of the pros and cons on a fresh page in one of his little notebooks, and then he’d turned the notebook around and pushed it across the table at her, poking a finger at the page, because the ‘con’ list was so much longer. He’d fought her – but not because he didn’t think she was capable.

She was.

In fact, he knew that Belfa Elkins would do wonders for Raythune County. Her stubbornness would be an asset. Even a blessing. She was exactly the kind of strong, capable prosecutor that the place craved, as it stared down the barrel of problems that had come crashing into these mountain valleys, problems that, when Nick Fogelsong was a younger man, rarely had seemed to manifest themselves outside of big cities and more heavily populated states.

Bell was just what the town needed. It wasn’t the town that Nick Fogelsong was worried about, with Bell Elkins in the prosecutor’s office.

It was Bell herself.

A lot of people in town knew bits of her history, the floating fragments of innuendo, the snipped-off ends of gossip, but he knew more. He knew how those bits fit together, all the dark shards and sordid corners, all that she had endured. The things she never talked about – not with him, and probably not, he speculated, with anybody. Things that doubtless made Bell Elkins the excellent prosecutor she was – because, he speculated further, nothing shocked her or disgusted her. She was never appalled. There was no degree of human depravity that could rattle her. She did her job.

Fogelsong often fingered the particulars in his mind, especially when he was irked with her. He had to remind himself of what she’d been through.

Bell’s mother had abandoned the family when Bell was a small child. When she was ten years old and her sister Shirley was sixteen, their father was murdered. The trailer in which the family lived – a rust-savaged piece of swaybacked junk parked out by Comer Creek – had burned down on the night of his death.

Bell grew up in a series of foster families. Some were decent, some were marginal – and some weren’t even that.

Nick Fogelsong knew about the night when Bell’s life changed forever. He knew because it was the first big case he’d worked. He had just joined the sheriff’s office back then, and he was a plump, pink-cheeked, fresh-scrubbed young deputy, given to admiring himself and his fancy new brown uniform in any handy reflective surface. He was stuffed full of self-righteousness and good intentions and his mama’s fried chicken – and too much of all three, he scolded himself later. Way too much of all three.

He’d taken the 911 call. Rushed to the scene in the shiny blue-and-silver patrol car he was so proud of, lights flashing a lurid red, siren screaming in the black Appalachian night. And then he’d stood by the trailer at Comer Creek, watching it burn. Wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

Two girls stood with him, one on either side. He’d found them at the scene, wandering around barefoot in raggedy T-shirts and cutoffs, and he’d pulled them away from the trailer, yelling at them – he had to yell, they looked too dazed to comprehend anything – to get back and stay back. At some point, while the trailer disintegrated in the tremendous heat, while the bright blue-yellow flames streaked high and the noxious burning smell gouged at their eyes, the younger girl – Belfa was ten years old, he discovered later, although she was so small that he would’ve guessed seven or eight – slipped her hand into his.

She didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at her. They watched the trailer burn. It was a long time