A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,29

the woods seemed to push headlong, bunching closer and closer to the road, as if these woods had definite plans to reclaim the space one day, no matter who had the upper hand for now. Even without its flamboyant summer foliage the woods felt immense and solid, the tree branches making a natural latticework, forthright, impenetrable. At sporadic intervals the overhanging limbs scratched hard at the roof of Bell’s Explorer, startling her. Fingernails dragged across a front door would’ve been less menacing.

The road’s pitch was so severe that occasionally it felt almost vertical. Bell had the sensation that her Explorer could just slip off the blacktop – not skidding sideways, as it might do if the road was iced up in winter, but flipping backward, end over end, like an animal losing its grip as it shimmies up a tree, winding up a thousand feet down in a makeshift grave of sticks and leaves and dirt and fog. Lost forever.

The morning had gotten off to a rocky start.

She’d tried to awaken Carla before she left, just to say good-bye.

Bad mistake.

When Bell leaned over the couch, gently jostling the swirl of blankets and dark hair and warm flesh that constituted her sleeping daughter, Carla had twitched, cried out, and shot straight up off the couch.

‘Jesus, Mom! What the fuck—’

Flustered, startled by the jab of profanity, Bell had backed away. ‘I’m – I’m heading out now, sweetie. I have some work to do for a case,’ she said. ‘Just wanted to tell you that when you’re ready, there’s milk and cereal, or oatmeal if you’d like, and in the freezer, there’s some waff—’

‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Carla said in a foggy, seriously annoyed voice. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. She rubbed at the side of her head with the heel of her hand, breathed through her nose, coughed, then slumped back down on the couch. Her body instantly curled up again in a tight little ball, like a paramecium on a microscope slide reacting to the light.

Bell stood there for another minute. She was engaged in a furious internal debate. She wanted to ask Carla how she was doing, how she was feeling, if she’d had bad dreams, if she needed—

No. Not now.

She walked back to the foyer. A pale blue cardigan was hanging over the banister. Bell grabbed it and arranged it across the shoulders of her white oxford-cloth blouse. She smoothed down the pleated front of her black flannel trousers. Fall in West Virginia was a hard season to dress for; the day could start out crisp but end up sweltering. Fashion advice for this time of the year generally came down to one word: layers. It was critical to have options. To not commit to anything you can’t shed the instant it doesn’t work anymore.

Not such bad advice for a marriage, either, she thought.

Bell had plucked up her cell from the charging stand on the hall table. Then she took a last appraising look at herself in the mirror over the table. She frowned. She fluffed her hair with her fingertips. She used her palm to rub at a spot on her chin that ended up being a shadow. She fluffed her hair one more time. Squared her shoulders. Like every woman she’d ever known, Bell spent most of her time basically hating the way she looked, and then hating herself for hating it.

Well. It was what it was.

Thirty-nine years old. Divorced mother of a teenage daughter. Not what she had planned for. Not what she had expected.

But who got what they expected?

Bell lifted her briefcase. She opened the big front door, jiggled the knob back and forth to make sure the lock would engage when she pulled it shut behind her, jiggled it again – just making sure – and departed.

She had called Sheriff Fogelsong from the road. She knew she had to do that before she hit Route 6 and started the steep climb up the mountain. At that point, she’d need to keep her full attention on something other than a phone call: the attempt to maintain control of her SUV so that it didn’t go skittering over the narrow berm, not to be seen again until the spring thaw revealed a flattened car and her half-mummified remains.

Maybe not even then. It was a long way down.

‘Mornin’, Miss Belfa,’ Fogelsong had said, putting a lilt in his voice when he pronounced her formal name, the one guaranteed to piss her off. He’d picked up after half