Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,38

blue bandana. She wore a red-checked apron over her sweater and jeans. She also wore Birkenstocks, her footgear of choice no matter what the weather was. The Birkenstocks had provoked intense whispered conversations when Jackie first opened the diner five years ago. Now, nobody cared.

She frowned at Bell’s empty coffee cup.

“I’ll send Martha over with the pot,” Jackie said. “Some things are sacred.” At JP’s, there was a facedown coffee cup on every place mat in every booth and table. If you did not want coffee, you moved the cup to one side. If you did, you flipped it over and tried to catch the waitress’s eye to give her a hopeful grin.

“You all know what you want?” Jackie added. “I’ll tell Martha that, too. So we can get your order going. I know you’re in a hurry, Bell. You always are.” It was a dig, but only a mild one. Jackie had mellowed over the years since she’d first opened the diner, but there was still a coldness at the core of her, Bell thought, a permanent aura of aloofness, and a hint of distance and reserve in her manner. She had known sorrows—some that Bell knew about, and some, Bell was sure, that she did not. It was the same with everyone. But with Jackie, you had the sense that the sorrows were still calling the shots, no matter how automatic her smile.

“Good to see you, Carla,” Jackie said.

“Yeah. Same here.” Carla dipped her head. She didn’t know what else to say. Well, maybe she did. “Cheeseburger for me. Mom?”

“Sounds good. Make it two.”

“Two cheeseburgers,” Jackie said. “Okeydoke. Well, I better get these lunches to their rightful owners.” She used her chin to indicate the plate and bowl, and then she was off.

“So I’ll be starting with Raythune County,” Carla said, picking right back up again with the news about her job. “I have a list of people who’ve agreed to be interviewed. I can finish up here by the end of the week. And then get over to Muth County by early next. After that, I move on to Collier. Oh—and one of my stops in Muth County is that new place with the Alzheimer’s patients. Apple-something.”

“Thornapple Terrace. Darlene’s father was a resident there.” Bell frowned. “Hold on. How do you interview people with Alzheimer’s?”

“Not the patients, Mom. The staff. Turns out they hire a lot of older folks. Aides, housekeepers, maintenance staff. That’s our target demo—people over sixty-five.”

“What do you ask them?”

“Everything. These are people who have lived their whole lives here. The idea is to get a sort of general sense of how and when they made the decision to stay in West Virginia.”

As if they had a choice, most of them, is what Bell wanted to say. But she didn’t. She had read a few articles about the project in the Acker’s Gap Gazette. Public libraries throughout the state had received grants to record brief autobiographies of longtime residents, after which the videos would be posted to a Web site that anyone could access.

Who leaves, who stays—that was always the central question around here, Bell thought. It was the question that haunted them all, as if the same ghost lived in every attic.

Darlene Strayer’s face instantly came into her mind. Darlene Strayer, whose desire to go had been fierce enough to enable her to achieve escape velocity. And then she had died in the very place she’d fought so hard to leave behind.

“Earth to Mom,” Carla said. “Your coffee’s getting cold. And you don’t like it unless it leaves third-degree burns on the roof of your mouth.”

Bell looked down. The waitress had apparently come by, filled her cup, and probably traded a few banalities with Carla, all without her noticing.

Jesus, Bell thought. I’m more affected by Darlene’s death than I realized. Although perhaps it was not only her death, but also Ava Hendricks’s insistence that it was the result of a deliberate act, not of a dark night and a slick road.

“Oh. Okay.” Bell took a drink. She barely tasted it. Was it hot? She could not have told you, seconds after.

“You were thinking about Darlene, right?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I didn’t. Just a guess.” Carla took a sip of her own drink, a Diet Dr Pepper in a tall green-tinted glass shaped like an hourglass. “I wonder what your friend would have said. About leaving West Virginia, I mean. Do you think she ever regretted it?”

Bell was ready to utter an emphatic and definitive