Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,11
the Audi when it slammed into a pine tree about twenty yards beyond the tight interior curve of the nasty switchback. Groves was negotiating that same Help me Jesus stretch of the descent when he spotted the carnage, his headlights splashing up on the crusty white snow like a flung bucketful of some glittering substance.
That description, Oakes said, glancing up from his notes, had come from Groves himself. The trucker fancied himself a bit of a poet.
Groves had immediately realized what he was looking at: a driver’s fatal misjudgment. The vehicle, going too fast around the curve, had sailed clean off the road in a long solemn arc until the tree put a sudden stop to its progress. Groves pulled over, yanked on his emergency brake. He approached the scene. One quick glimpse was all he needed. The Audi’s front end was a corrugated mess. A torqued body lay facedown on a mound of snow about ten yards from the drastically foreshortened car.
At that point, Groves said, all the poetry fled from his mind. He called 911. He did not check for a pulse. “Maybe I should have,” he’d murmured uncertainly to Deputy Oakes, once the paramedics had trussed up the driver on a gurney and slotted the gurney in the back and taken off. The light on top of the van spun around and around, draping the landscape in dire pulses of red, but the paramedic behind the wheel had to exercise restraint; the road surface was compromised by the heavy snowfall as yet untouched by any plow, and by at least an inch of ice under the snow. It was strange, Groves remarked to the deputy, to see an emergency vehicle just creeping along like that, tentative, reined in, only moving forward in small cautious spurts. “Yeah,” Oakes had said. “Sure is.”
He still had nightmares, Groves had added—unprompted—to Oakes, on account of an accident scene he’d once come upon near Macon, Georgia, fifteen years ago. Eight kids, two parents, nobody wearing seat belts in a van that for some unknown reason had gone left of center and ended up smashing headfirst into a tractor-trailer rig. He’d stopped his truck that time, too, and jumped out. Once again, it was before the cops had gotten there, and the air was still quivering from the ferocious impact, as if the earth itself still could not believe what had just happened, the violence of it, the terrible surprise. The bodies looked like laundry tossed every which way in a ditch. He would never forget the sight.
That was why he’d kept his distance when he saw the body in the snow, he told Deputy Oakes. That was why he hadn’t gone closer, hadn’t looked for signs of life, hadn’t called out, “Hey—you okay?” He knew she wasn’t okay. And frankly, he was worried about his sleep. For the rest of his life. He could not take on yet another reason for insomnia, another trigger. But it bothered him, just the same. “Maybe she was still alive. Maybe if I’d…”
“No,” Oakes had replied. He was matter-of-fact about it, tapping the eraser end of the little pencil back into his shirt pocket, and then rebuttoning his overcoat against the phenomenal cold. You could not use a pen in these temperatures; the ink froze. “Guaranteed—she was dead when she hit the ground. Never had a chance.”
Odd to find that consoling, Oakes would think later. Odd that instant death sounded like a blessing.
But it was. Given the condition of the body, it was. Definitely, it was.
* * *
They had found Bell’s name on a handwritten note in the victim’s coat pocket. That was why the deputy was here now. He had written down the words of the note in his little spiral-bound book; the original was in an evidence bag, stowed in a locked room at the courthouse. This was not a criminal investigation—it was an accident, plain and simple—but they did things right in Raythune County.
“The paper said, ‘Bell Elkins. Eight p.m. Tie Yard Tavern.’ And then your cell number.” Oakes looked up from his notebook to meet Bell’s eye. “Car was registered to an Alice Darlene Strayer. Nobody’s made the formal ID yet—we’re having a hell of a time locating a next of kin, there’s no answer on the home phone—but the body matches the photo on the driver’s license. And on her federal ID. Looks like it was expired—the federal ID, not the license—but she still had it in her purse.”