Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,51
suspicious?”
“Darlene was afraid. She’d had some threatening calls.”
“Did she contact the police about them?”
Ava placed the mug carefully on Bell’s desk. “No. She didn’t. I advised her not to. She had no proof, no recordings—it was only her word about the calls—and I told her they wouldn’t believe her.”
Bell felt a faint itch of impatience. “Okay, I’m still in the dark here. Who was supposedly threatening her—and why? And you just acknowledged that the evidence proves she was drunk when she started down that mountain Saturday night. So how could foul play have been involved?”
Ava answered the second question first. “Both could be true. She was drunk—and someone ran her off that road. Or tampered with her car.”
“Look, Dr. Hendricks, I—”
“Call me Ava. If we’re going to be working together, we need to lose the formality. I’ll call you Bell.”
“Whatever.” Bell’s impatience was growing. She would deal later with the “working together” fallacy. There was nothing to work on. “So I’ll ask you again. Who might have been threatening her? Someone she prosecuted in federal court? Someone in organized crime, maybe?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Then who?”
“Darlene believed that someone at Thornapple Terrace was complicit in her father’s death. Maybe it was just negligence or maybe it was outright murder—she didn’t know. She was collecting evidence. Interviewing the staff. They knew she was getting close. So they killed her, too.” Ava’s composure slipped for a moment. Her lip quivered. She swallowed hard. By the time she spoke again, she was back in control of herself. “I don’t have a lot of details. And no description of the calls—just that the caller was male, or sounded that way to Darlene, anyway—and that he warned her to stop asking questions about her father’s death. She wasn’t sure why Harmon had been targeted. Maybe it wasn’t personal. Maybe he’d been picked at random. She didn’t know. Her investigation had just started. Darlene didn’t tell me much more than she told you on Saturday night.”
“Why not?” For God’s sake, Bell wanted to exclaim, you were her partner, right? Why the hell did she hold back? Why didn’t she give you every speck of information she had uncovered thus far?
Ava’s eyes softened.
“Because she loved me,” she replied. “And she didn’t want to put me in danger. The more I knew, she said, the greater the risk. Given what happened to her up on that mountain, I’d say her apprehension was justified.”
“Or it could be,” came Bell’s sharp response, “that she was paranoid, and her judgment was clouded by grief, and her suspicions were baseless, and she was beginning to realize that and was embarrassed by it, and so she was wallowing in self-pity on Saturday night, and after talking to me she just decided to get drunk in a bar and—in effect—kill herself. It could be that, too.”
Bell hated her own harshness, but she was tired, and the world outside her window was getting colder and darker every minute, and there was no way to do anything more for Darlene Strayer than to mourn her and to wish that she had been able to accept her father’s death from natural causes. Yes, Bell had promised Ava to look into the accident, but her visit to the Terrace that morning had yielded nothing of note. The additional deaths were explicable. Everything made sense.
It was time to be honest with Darlene’s partner.
It was time to stop indulging the highly unlikely notion that a conspiracy was brewing at an Alzheimer’s facility in Muth County, West Virginia, a conspiracy to do—what? To rid the world of octogenarians with bushel-baskets of serious health problems and the inability to recall which end of the toothbrush they ought to use?
No. The truth here was not dramatic or sinister. It was ordinary: A very old man with a very bad disease had died. End of story.
Ava seemed taken aback by Bell’s brusqueness. Her umbrage was almost immediately superseded by a kind of snippy stoicism. “All right,” Ava said. “Then I don’t suppose there’s anything more for us to discuss. Thank you for your time.” She stood up, tapping the rim of the mug with two fingers as she did so. “And for the coffee.”
Bell watched her gather up her coat and her purse. “You’ll let me know the date and time for Darlene’s service?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be back in D.C., I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“And that eight-year-old.” Bell had to know. “She died, right?”
“What?”
“The child you operated on. You said there were complications.”