from the street and the sidewalks, but never went away entirely, because modest snowfalls had arrived continually on the heels of the major ones. Snow defined the world at this time of year, outlining the contours, keeping a hand in.
She had not slept well. In her head she had assembled some of the puzzle pieces, but that only meant she now knew more profoundly than ever just where the blank spaces were, the places where knowledge ran out and she had to rely on intuition—or as Nick Fogelsong liked to call it, on guesswork. And intuition was not the same thing as knowledge. Having to rely on it was like switching to an auxiliary gas tank during a flight emergency, and discovering that the second tank was dry.
She needed help, and she knew it. So she had called the people she trusted most in the world—well, two of them, anyway, because Nick was off the list, given his civilian status—along with Ava Hendricks. Bell asked them to come by her house today. She promised two things: a lot of coffee and a lot of questions. The time the meeting would commence depended on how soon Ava could make it to Acker’s Gap from Washington, D.C. A colleague of Ava’s had agreed to take over her most pressing cases for the next few weeks, leaving her free to travel to West Virginia at will.
The silence this morning was a bit unnerving, Bell thought. Usually she relished this kind of natural pause in the world’s busyness; usually it was excessive noise that made her anxious. But today, as faint white shoots of almost-daylight slowly materialized in the sky, she was struck by how long this winter had lingered, and how tired she was of snow and ice and cold.
And the questions: She was tired of those, too. Damned tired.
* * *
Carla was not sure what she ought to be feeling. Hurt? Duh. Betrayal? Well, that was a tricky one. Could you be betrayed by someone who had never made any sort of promise to you in the first place?
Finding out that Travis Womack was not Travis Womack had jolted her, to be sure. But after thinking about it a while, she decided that maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world—somebody giving her a phony ID. How many phony IDs had she handed out when she was sixteen or seventeen years old, to gain admittance to some bar that Kayleigh Crocker insisted would be so much fun? Or to buy a hard pack of Marlboros, so that she could cough her lungs out and look cool while doing it? Plenty, that’s how many.
In a sense, then, Travis-or-Whoever-You-Are had done what she’d done, only for different reasons. Maybe he had a few drug arrests under his real name. That was always a possibility. She wanted to know. No: She had to know. Because if he needed help, she wanted to be there.
And so she had green-lighted the plot.
It had started with spending the night at Kayleigh Crocker’s apartment. Carla had her mother’s blessing—well, not exactly her blessing, and not exactly her permission, either, because she did not really need that, given the fact that Carla was twenty-one. What she had was Bell’s reluctant-sounding “okay” on the phone. What she had was her mother’s toneless acknowledgment that Carla had informed her of her plans.
It was a practical choice, though. Logistics-wise. Kayleigh lived with her father—her parents had been divorced a long time, and her mom was always either going into rehab or just coming out, so Kayleigh’s dad had been the custodial parent since Kayleigh and Carla were in middle school—in an apartment in Wyatt Heights, a small town between Swanville and Acker’s Gap. Last night, Carla had her first appointment with a new therapist, one whose office was in Swanville. The therapist’s name was Blake Eiler. Her dad had set it up, just as he’d promised the court he would. For the first week, Eiler told her, they would be meeting daily.
Daily. Carla could not believe what she had just heard. But apparently the man was serious, because when she said, “What!?” in a voice that combined outraged disbelief with you can’t make me rebelliousness, he had ignored that altogether and handed her a slip of paper with the next several appointment times.
One session a day, for the next seven days. Including Saturday and Sunday.
Carla had explained to Bell, during their somewhat tense call, that Kayleigh’s apartment was a lot closer to