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

places were located at the end of one-way roads paved with sorrow. But that was better, she supposed, than what used to happen years ago, when a deteriorating older relative was left to rot in a back bedroom with a portable commode and the blinds pulled shut.

“Thornapple Terrace,” Darlene said, “is supposed to be one of the best.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“For the past several months, my father had gotten more and more agitated. We used to sit in the visitors lounge, but he didn’t want to go there anymore. He wanted to stay in his room. Something—or someone—was bothering him. He couldn’t tell me—he didn’t talk very often—but I knew. I just felt it. And when I tried to have a chat with the director about it, she—”

An argument suddenly erupted in the booth next to theirs, a tangled snarl of voices jump-started by beer and bad manners. Bell had seen the trio of twentysomethings on her way in. She could not see them now—the back of the bench seat rose too high—but she got the gist of the fight based on the spillover noise.

Two women were quarreling—shrieking, really—over whether or not the man across from them was, as one of the women had just eloquently dubbed him, a shithead, because he had been dating them simultaneously, without either one knowing about it. Until tonight. “He is too a shithead,” the woman said, and the other countered wittily, “Is not.”

This went on for a few more dreary minutes, while the man said nothing. Bell couldn’t see his face, but she imagined he was lapping up the attention, even though his evening would probably end with a Bud Light bottle smashed over his head and a lot of blood loss.

Violence was always lurking just below the surface in a place like this. It made up its mind, moment by moment, whether to rise up with a bellow and a roar, or to lie in wait, biding its time, eager for an opportunity to do the most possible harm.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the loud part of the argument stopped. The voices dropped to inoffensive mumbles.

Darlene waited until she was sure it was over, and then spoke. “Anyway, it really bothered me—seeing my father upset like that. Not much I could do, though, unless I wanted to move him, which would have been a major ordeal. I didn’t think he was up to that.” She paused. “It was a lot of responsibility. All the decisions were mine. I’m an only child. My mother died when I was in grade school. So it was all on my shoulders.”

“I’m sure you did your best.” Bell had no idea if Darlene had done her best or not, but it seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to say.

“You’re sure of that, are you?” Darlene shot back. Her tone was cold, belligerent.

Bell had a flash of recollection about this woman, from back in their Georgetown days. Darlene Strayer hated bullshit. She brutally dismissed well-meant clichés and platitudes like a soldier waving around a saber at a batch of flies. Trying to console her was a dangerous business. You might very well come away with flesh wounds.

“From the little I know of you, Darlene,” Bell said carefully, “you’re a woman who would do right by her father. That’s all I meant.”

“Yeah. Sure.” The sarcasm in her voice was heavy and dark. She rearranged her elbows on the wooden tabletop. There was a restlessness in her movements, an ill-concealed frustration.

“What’s really going on?” Bell said.

Darlene did not look at her. Instead she dropped her eyes and studied the tabletop. It was the color of mud, and it was shiny from repeated coats of shellac, which only served to preserve the undesirable, like a fly trapped in an ice cube. The surface had been roughed up over the years by the assorted shitheads and their assorted girlfriends who had occupied this booth, and used it as a scratch pad for their switchblades. It had absorbed their spilled beer and sopped up their unused dreams.

The tabletop, Bell thought as she watched her, did not belong anywhere near Darlene’s present life—a life defined by the sleek haircut, the elegant wool suit, the pressed white silk blouse, the necklace of tiny pearls. Yet it was still a part of her, too, still a part of her deep and abiding past. Darlene, like Bell, had tumbled out of a scuffed-up, stripped-down childhood. She had risen above all that—far, far