light dawned. Bell nodded. The crawl. Got it. Dot meant the endless unspooling of sentences at the bottom of the TV screen when the set was tuned to cable news channels, the perpetual roll call of lurid crimes and celebrity breakups, the kind of information that nobody needed – but everybody wanted – to know.
‘“Triple homicide at West Virginia eatery. Suspect still at large,”’ Dot said, reciting the words she’d seen on the screen, the ones she’d instantly memorized, in a low, enthralled voice. ‘How’d they find out so fast? How’d they do that?’
Bell shrugged. Damned if she knew. Driving back to the courthouse, she’d had to weave her exasperated way around the slow-moving, antenna-topped, wide-bodied white news vans from TV stations in Charleston and Huntington and Pittsburgh. The vans were cruising around the small downtown, just as they’d probably cruised through some other tragedy-stunned downtown the day before, drawn inexorably to the world’s open wounds. Camera crews and reporters were eagerly prowling the smattering of streets in Acker’s Gap, hunting for scared-looking people to interview.
Many of those people, of course, were thrilled to oblige. Making a left turn onto Jackson Boulevard and then a quick right onto Main, Bell had seen entire families – moms, dads, grandparents, teenagers, little kids – grouped in front of Fontaine’s Funeral Home or Ike’s Diner or Cash X-Press Payday Loans, leaning into microphones wielded by pretty young women. They’d look suspiciously down at the microphone, as if half fearful that it might bite, and then shyly up at the reporter’s face and finally back down at the microphone again, after which, suddenly and mysteriously emboldened, they’d start talking, and as they did so, the older ones would pull at a pleat of loose skin hanging from their necks, a habit that seemed to enhance the thought process. The younger ones would sway back and forth as they talked, hands jammed in their pockets.
Just about everybody, Bell knew, would be insisting that they’d either left the Salty Dawg seconds before the shooting or had definitely planned on stopping by in a minute or so. I coulda been gunned down, I woulda been right there in the line of fire when that murderin’ sumbitch come in, and that woulda been it, period, end of story.
‘Look, I have to go,’ Bell said. ‘Meeting with the sheriff. Lots to do. Hell of a morning.’ She touched Dot’s forearm, throwing in a brief, tight frown.
They had known each other since high school. They hadn’t been friends, exactly; Bell didn’t have friends back then. Throughout her youth and adolescence Bell had lived with a series of foster families, and it was always made exquisitely clear to her that she was being done a favor, and she’d better not forget it, and thus any free time she had should go to chores. Not a social life. Dot Burdette was part of a group of giggling, straight-haired girls in pastel sweater sets whom Bell would pass each morning in the halls of Acker’s Gap High School, and while they weren’t mean or rude to her, they weren’t friendly either. Their eyes never exactly matched up with her eyes, not even when they spoke to her. Bell had a strange history, and everybody knew it, and nobody wanted any part of it. The rules were clear.
Now Dot was a bank vice president, and Bell, too, had a responsible position in town; they were two professional women with a lot in common, and thus a kind of fiction had grown up between them, the fiction that they were old friends. Bell went along with it. It made things easier.
She glanced at Dot and saw that she was, as always, doggedly stylish in a navy blue suit, dark hose, and black heels, her lipstick a conservative shade of muted coral instead of the come-hither red favored by some of her younger female tellers. Dot had a chin that seemed to merge directly into her neck without encountering a jawline, a pointy nose, and black eyes that sat just a shade too close together. It was the Burdette Curse. Dot’s little brother Sammy, one of three Raythune County commissioners as well as a proud representative of the Mountaintop Mutual Insurance Company, was similarly marked by a disappearing chin and too little distance between the eyes.
‘Sure,’ Dot said. ‘Just keep me posted, will you? One of my tellers said that Carla—’
‘Yeah. She was there.’ Bell read the next question right off Dot’s face; she didn’t have