Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,24

to Darlene, Harmon Strayer could have checked the box.

Now Darlene herself had died violently, victim of a fate that Bell would never have foreseen for such a careful, conscientious woman. She had died on a road she knew well, during conditions she had endured many times before. If the toxicology report backed up Deputy Oakes’s surmise, then Darlene had succumbed to an old demon, a secret one, one she had kept hidden from Bell and from other classmates at Georgetown.

But why had she slipped back into her addiction last night, of all nights? Was it sorrow over her father’s death? What had sent her over the edge—in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the phrase?

“Hey there.”

The familiar voice belonged to her neighbor on the other side, Larry Jenrette, a systems analyst for the gas company. He’d come out on his front porch while Bell was contemplating Darlene Strayer’s fate.

He had a desk-sitter’s body: pendulous gut, soft hands, rear end that seemed to spread wider by the week. He took a deep, shoulder-raising breath and surveyed the white tomb that the world had become. He held his shovel out to one side, as if he wasn’t quite certain what he was supposed to do with it and didn’t want it too close.

“Morning, Larry,” Bell said. “You and Angie okay?”

Angie, his wife, had multiple sclerosis. She had recently given in and started using a wheelchair, a concession to reality that did worse things to her spirit, Bell knew, than anything the MS could do to her central nervous system.

“Fine and dandy,” Larry said, as he always did. Then he grimaced, but in a comical way to let her know he was teasing. “Well, it’s colder than bejesus out here, but other than that—fine and dandy. Heard your shovel scraping the walk and figured I better not shame myself in the eyes of my neighbors.” He pulled a red stocking cap out of his coat pocket and used it to smother most of his head, including the entirety of his ears. “We’ll just be doing it all over again tomorrow morning, way I hear it. Coupla feet more supposed to be comin’ down.”

“Yep,” Bell said. She had already resumed her bending and grunting.

Larry used his shovel like a ski pole, pushing off against each step as he descended from the porch and prepared to deal with the snow on his own front walk. “Hey,” he said, before getting started. “How come Clay’s not doing this for you? Don’t tell me you’re letting him sleep in today, the lucky so-and-so.”

And that, Bell reminded herself with a silent flourish of unwelcome insight, was the not-so-charming side of living in a place where everybody knew you—and knew your business. And knew that you were dating a man named Clay Meckling. And knew that he almost always stayed over on Saturday nights.

You got asked questions like this one: Where’s Clay?

“He’s out of town,” she said, and then she turned her back on Larry Jenrette, ostensibly to move on to another section of sidewalk, but her ultimate intention was to cut off the conversation.

She was not lying. Yes, Clay was out of town. That was a fact.

But the facts rarely had much to do with the truth. She knew that from her job as prosecutor, and she knew it, too, from her experience of being human—and of feeling, over and over again, how inadequate the facts were to explain something as savagely complicated and chronically illogical as love.

* * *

“You already did it.”

“Did what?”

“Shoveled the walk,” Carla said. “I was sort of hoping to do it myself.”

“You’re in luck. More snow predicted for tonight.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds, Carla poised in the doorway and Bell standing just inside it, as if each needed to be sure that the other was real and not some holographic projection. Not some wishful hallucination. Then the moment passed and practicality returned. It was too damned cold for dramatic pauses on thresholds.

“For heaven’s sake get in here, you,” Bell said. She held open her arms, the universal summons for a hug. “You’ve got to be frozen.”

“Pretty much.” Carla took four steps forward. She shut the door behind her. She dropped her backpack on the floor and leaned awkwardly into her mother’s embrace.

The small talk had been a ruse, a way to keep intense emotion at bay. Both of them were complicit in the scheme, because both of them felt it—felt that surge of tenderness and vulnerability at the