Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,28

“I mean—to talk about whatever’s bothering you. Whenever you feel up to it.”

Carla had paused at the initial “Hey.” She had not turned around; she simply stopped walking.

Now she did turn. She looked as if she was about to say something, but had lost her nerve. “Can I, like, just live my life for a while, Mom? With no questions until I’m ready? Promise I won’t be in your way. I’m going to get a job. Already have an interview set up for tomorrow morning.”

“Fine. But at some point, I’d really like to sit down and have a good long talk about—”

“Got it, Mom.” Carla gave her a thumbs-up sign. “Full disclosure. Soon.”

She did not mean it, and Bell knew she did not mean it, but an important part of parenting was stopping yourself from saying, “You don’t mean it.” Because an even more important part of parenting was perpetual hopefulness, the abiding belief that Carla really would decide eventually to tell her what was going on in her life.

Bell listened to her daughter’s steps as she climbed to the second floor. Those steps sounded slow and ponderous and heavy—heavier, certainly, than should have been the case for someone as light as Carla, someone who used to make short work of that staircase, taking two and three steps at a time, never touching the handrail, a lively, black-haired blur on fire with ideas and passions and crushes and everything, everything that caught her eye or snagged her heart, which could mean a book or a boy or a song or a social cause or all of the above.

Not now. Now she moved with a dull, deliberate plod that sounded like the aural embodiment of dread. She was carrying a lot more these days, Bell thought uneasily, than just a backpack.

Only one thing could account for the invisible weight. Only one thing was substantial enough to be burdening Carla to this extent: a secret. Or several secrets.

* * *

What the—

Bell, blindly thrashing, knocked the alarm clock off her bedside table. Her head was still under the covers. She had heard the landline ring once, twice, three times, and then on the fourth ring, her right arm poked out from under the edge of the blanket and began swiping the air in wild pissed-off arcs. She struck the clock. It made a solid thunk when it hit the hardwood floor. Finally she located the receiver.

“Elkins,” she muttered.

She heard breathing, and then a slight rustle. The breathing was thick and clotted. The caller had been weeping. Bell knew that sound well. Once, just for sport, she’d tallied up the number of times that a crying person had called her; the total was in the double digits. County prosecutors were akin to priests, in some people’s eyes, and the phone was as good as a confessional.

“Elkins,” she repeated. She did not say it impatiently; she wanted to give the person time to recover. She looked around the dark room, seeing nothing. God, it had to be the freaking middle of the freaking night. Another time, she’d added up the number of occasions that she’d been yanked out of a heavy sleep by a phone call.

Again: double digits.

“I need to talk to you,” the caller said. “It’s urgent.”

“Who’s this?”

“You don’t know me.” A slow intake of breath. “My name is Ava Hendricks.” Another pause. “Darlene Strayer was my partner. We’d been together for fourteen years. And she told me that if anything ever happened to her, I should get in touch with you right away. You’d know what to do.” Another deep breath and then a much longer pause, as if more courage had to be retrieved from some distant storeroom in order for her to continue. “I just got the notification about Darlene. I wasn’t home and they had to find me first. Track me down.” She stopped talking. Her breathing was heavy, rusty-sounding.

“I’m very sorry for your loss.” Bell sat up, pushing away the blanket. Her thoughts were starting to clear, like a foggy windshield after the defrost has been activated. “Where were you? Why couldn’t anyone reach you?”

The caller’s voice snapped to attention. Gone was the soft anguish. “I’m a neurosurgeon, Mrs. Elkins. I spent the day removing a glioblastoma multiforme from the brain of an eight-year-old girl. It was an extremely complicated procedure. I wasn’t reachable until an hour ago.”

Bell switched on the lamp by her bed. Instantly a small area of light leapt to life inside the black room, like