on. ‘She was pretty agitated. I was just about to call Tom and ask him to bring over my prescription pad. Rest is what she needs. I was thinking about a sedative. But then she just dropped off. With any luck, she’ll sleep through the night.’
‘I can’t thank you enough, Ruthie, for coming over and for—’
Ruthie shook her head so swiftly and emphatically that Bell had to stop talking.
‘Hush,’ Ruthie said. ‘You know there’s nowhere else I’d want to be. Just here. So you hush.’
Bell bit her lower lip, to keep the emotion from showing. She realized she was still holding her car keys and briefcase and coffee mug, and so she took a few steps over to the hall table. On the wall above it, the oval mirror played a nasty trick: It told the truth. Her shoulders were slumped. Her skin tone, sallow. Her eye sockets looked as if they’d been pushed too far back in her head.
‘Still,’ Bell said, setting down her cargo. She didn’t want to look at Ruthie. If she lost herself in her friend’s kind face right now, if she let go, she would relinquish the equilibrium she had maintained so carefully throughout the long day, the perfect wall of composure. ‘It was sweet of you. She needed you tonight, Ruthie. And I needed you.’
She and Ruthie Cox had been best friends for five years, ever since Bell had returned to her hometown and moved into the neighborhood. Back then Bell was a divorced mother with a twelve-year-old-daughter, a law degree she hadn’t yet put to much use, and the vague, outlandish idea that someday she might want to run for Raythune County prosecuting attorney.
One year later, the incumbent, Bobby Lee Mercer, was forced to resign after a scandal involving his romantic liaison with the choir director over at Good Hope Baptist Church – Mercer was the married father of six children – and Belfa Elkins put her name on the ballot. During the campaign for the special election a few stories flared up about her past, some dark mutterings, and a couple of ugly, innuendo-laced missives ran in the letters-to-the-editor section of the Acker’s Gap Gazette, alluding to what had happened twenty-nine years ago in the trailer at Comer Creek, but most people were willing to judge Belfa Elkins by who she was.
Not who she’d been. And not who her family was.
When Sheriff Fogelsong announced his support for Bell, it was a done deal: She crushed Hickey Leonard by a three-to-one margin. Now Hick worked for her as an assistant prosecutor, along with Rhonda Lovejoy.
Ruthie and Tom Cox had supported Bell’s bid as well. And in the years since Bell and Carla had moved into the stone house on Shelton Avenue, the older couple had become a very big part of their lives. Ruthie was a semi-retired physician. Tom was a vet who still practiced, still ran his hands several times a week down the quivering length of golden retrievers and Border collies and sleek Labradors while murmuring, ‘There’s a good dog. Easy, girl,’ feeling for lumps or tender places, keeping eye contact with the dog’s owners as he stroked, so that they would know from the slight rise of his brows – never altering his voice, never frightening the animal – that he had found something, and that it might be serious.
Even though they were two decades older than Bell and old enough to be Carla’s grandparents, Tom and Ruthie were the best friends she’d ever had. Was that the right phrase for it, though? ‘Friend’ seemed too small a word, too ordinary, to contain the essence of what they meant to her. Too common. There was a calmness to Ruthie and Tom, a stability, a rootedness, that was so different from what Bell had known for most of her life. She rejected the idea that she’d been drawn to them because she was searching for parent figures to replace the ones she had lost. She despised that kind of trite psychology. But she had a hunger for something solid, dependable, and when she looked at Tom’s hands or when she looked into Ruthie’s eyes, eyes that never judged, eyes that seemed timeless with an expansive understanding, Bell felt, at long last, that she belonged somewhere.
From the living room, they heard Carla stir, utter a brief moan.
‘How are you doing, honey?’ Bell asked. She’d circled the couch again and now bent over it.
‘I’m okay,’ Carla said, but there was an edge to