deputies about the discouraging lack of progress in the manhunt. After that, there’d been a brief conference call with the regional vice-president of the Salty Dawg chain down in Charlotte. The company wanted to establish three college scholarships for students at Acker’s Gap High School to commemorate the victims.
And then, because she and the sheriff were already so tired and heartsick and bewildered that they figured they might as well push on through, might as well bring all the bad news right out into the open, they had talked again about the theory – based on rumors, based on recent patterns of arrests and statistical data they were getting from the state police – that a lot of the prescription drug abuse in West Virginia was being coordinated out of just a handful of places.
One of those places was Raythune County.
The thought repulsed Bell, and it angered her, but the facts were persuasive. Prescription medications were showing up everywhere, but if you stood before a state map and used your finger to trace a path toward the center of one set of concentric rings, it would end up in the vicinity of Acker’s Gap.
By the time she had risen from the straight-backed chair facing the sheriff’s desk and said, ‘That’s it for me, Nick,’ fatigue was making her left eyelid twitch.
She’d rubbed at it as she had driven home, using her knuckle to dig deep, which put her left eye temporarily out of commission. But when you knew these streets as well as Bell did, you could easily drive them one-eyed.
Hell. She could probably drive them blindfolded.
Bell opened the big front door – the hinges always sounded like a cat in a catfight, no matter how often she shot WD-40 into the creases – and walked in.
An arched threshold separated the foyer from the living room on the left. Four steps later, Bell was leaning over the faded green couch. Carla was curled up in a corner of it, lying on her right side, knees at her chin, arms linked around her knees, caught in a restless sleep. Her eyelids fluttered. Her chin quivered.
‘How’s she doing?’
Bell’s whispered question was addressed to Ruthie Cox, who sat at the other end of the couch, book in her lap. Ruthie’s wrists were as thin as sticks. The eyes in her hauntingly concave face were large and dark, as if she kept them open just a little bit wider than everyone else did, so that she wouldn’t miss anything.
Ruthie was sixty-seven, but on account of her illness, could be mistaken for eighty. Fuzzy wisps of white hair dotted her scalp, like cotton balls glued to pale construction paper in a child’s art project. Her hair was struggling to grow back after repeated assaults of chemotherapy.
‘She’s okay.’ Ruthie mouthed the words.
Bell looked around the living room: Every lamp was lit.
Ruthie answered the implied question in a soft voice. ‘She didn’t want to wake up in the dark.’
Bell nodded.
The two women on this couch – her daughter, her best friend – and a third woman, the sister she hadn’t seen in almost three decades, were, along with Nick Fogelsong, all that Bell loved in the world.
That was it. Four people.
The thought made her feel vulnerable, exposed. So she shoved it aside.
The living room was small – Bell preferred to call it ‘cozy’ – with a working fireplace and a white wooden mantel, a wide front window garnished with long brown drapes that Bell generally kept pulled back and cinched at either side and, next to the couch, an overstuffed armchair. Bell had bought the chair at a Goodwill store many, many years ago, in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and it was her favorite piece of furniture in all the world precisely because of that crooked but unknown history. It was severely dilapidated. The brown plaid fabric on its arms was stained by innumerable sloshes of coffee, its back and sides sagged, the skirt around the bottom was torn and, in some spots, missing completely. Somehow, though, despite all the insults it had absorbed, the chair retained a tender, flaccid, inviting charm. Bell longed to just sink down in it, to try and forget about the day and its horrors.
Ruthie was rising. She slid the book onto the coffee table and motioned for Bell to follow her back into the foyer.
‘She’s had a few restless spells,’ Ruthie said, ‘but for the last hour or so, she’s been sleeping.’
Bell nodded.
‘I was worried when I first got here,’ Ruthie went