Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,13

to the bar.”

“Could be.”

“Still doesn’t make sense. Even back in law school, I never saw Darlene touch so much as a beer. I mean—never. And nobody gossiped about her having a problem with alcohol, either. Believe me—if she did, there would have been talk.”

Oakes frowned. “Okay, well—there was something in her other coat pocket. A blue coin. About the size of a poker chip.”

“What was it?”

“A sobriety medallion. From Alcoholics Anonymous. Represents one year’s sobriety. Looks like your friend might have been hiding a secret or two.”

Aren’t we all, Bell thought grimly. Aren’t we all.

Three Boys

1938

Their names were Harmon Strayer, Vic Plumley, and Alvie Sherrill, and they were always together.

If you saw Harm, you knew you’d see Alvie, and if you saw Vic, you could set your watch by the fact that Alvie and Harm would be coming along less than a minute later. They lived on the same block and they were roughly the same age. They had each been born in 1926, and so the milestones of life—first day of school, first paying job, first kiss—came to them at the same time. They were each other’s reference points and touchstones of memory. Later, when they were middle-aged men, if one of them blanked on a date or a detail, one of the other two could fill it in for him. So nothing was forgotten.

They lived in Norbitt, West Virginia. It was a small town and a dingy one, the county seat of Barr County. Barr County, too, was small and dingy. Town and county echoed each other’s insignificance, like two smudged mirrors set face-to-face, forever reflecting back a third-rate version of eternity.

It was a town that did not matter, in a county nobody cared about, in a state that people overlooked except when they were making jokes about it.

But that was about to change.

There was a darkness gathering in the skies, a darkness that soon would swallow up the world. Places like Norbitt were about to become as important as the great cities—London, Paris, Vienna, Moscow—because the men who rescued the future were born here. They were born in the small towns of West Virginia, and in the small towns of Kentucky and Arkansas and Kansas and Maine and Oklahoma and Montana and Pennsylvania. The fact that most of the world had never heard of these towns would not matter anymore.

These three boys, like boys from other threadbare, soiled towns in threadbare, soiled states, were just a few years away from the great adventure of their lives: saving the world.

Vic Plumley was the restless one. The hungry one. The one with the most potential. He was big and handsome, with thick dark hair and eyes that had started out as pale, almost translucent blue, but by the time he was in junior high school, had turned a deep indigo shade that made the things he said seem earnest and sincere, even profound, if he looked at you a certain way when he was saying them.

His father, Frank Plumley, was a salesman, and he was richer and more successful than the other fathers. His mother, Vivian, was prettier than the other mothers. So Vic had a sense of himself as himself—as, that is, a real person, a person with desires and a destiny. And he wanted out. He had been led to believe that he could achieve things in the world, real things. Norbitt would never be big enough for him. Barr County would not be big enough, either. The whole state of West Virginia, as a matter of fact, was too small to hold all of Vic Plumley’s aspirations. He once complained to Harm that being born in West Virginia was like buying the wrong-sized suitcase. You got it home and then you looked at everything you needed to fit in there, and you realized you’d made a mistake. You needed something bigger. It was infuriating.

On the day of Vic’s twelfth birthday—Alvie had turned twelve the month before, and Harmon would turn twelve in a few months—the three of them sat on the back stoop of Vic’s house. It was a Saturday morning in the early spring. The air felt rinsed and clean, which was unusual; typically the air in Norbitt smelled as if it carried flecks of something foul in it. Some of the mothers wouldn’t even hang their family’s wet clothes outside to dry on the line because, they said, the smell would get in there and stick. You’d have to wash those clothes all over