Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,53

house. Just go sit in his car—with the doors locked—’til Jake gets there.” By now the tingling was moving through the rest of her body, splitting into separate filaments, branching out. She had been feeling cold all day but now she was even colder. It was a different kind of cold. It was the cold of foreboding.

“Bell, what do you think is going—”

“Just call him, Rhonda. Just tell him to sit tight, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. And you stay there with your grandmother. Don’t leave her.” She’s going to need you, Bell thought. If the news is as bad as I think it might be, she’s definitely going to need you.

* * *

They found the dog first. Marcy’s rambunctious border collie, Nadine, had had her throat cut, and then, based on the blood trail that Luke Dollar missed in the darkness but that the deputies would later discover, had staggered crookedly out of the house in a daze of mortal pain. She collapsed in the snow about a dozen yards from the front porch. Later, the people who had known Marcy Coates would say they were not at all surprised at the dog’s behavior; Nadine was a noble and resolute warrior. Whoever had gone after the women would have had a real fight on his hands, getting past Nadine.

It took Oakes and a second deputy, Charlie Mathers, another twenty minutes to locate the bodies of Connie Dollar and Marcy Coates. The deputies had searched in an ever-widening radius with the house as the center point, moving through the densely packed snow in which they repeatedly sank to the tops of their boots. They fought for visibility through the silvery haze of snowfall. They wove their way between the trees, trees that looked like black stakes jammed randomly into the snow as if searching desperately for its heart.

And then the heavy-duty flashlights illuminated a gruesome tableau. The two old women lay on their backs at the base of a tree about three-quarters of a mile away, on a white mound of snow, limbs twisted like an Egyptian hieroglyphic. They were holding hands. By now, the snow had almost covered them over.

Connie had been shot twice in the chest. Another bullet had caught Marcy full in the face. The sight of the carnage caused Deputy Mathers to stagger backward a few steps, lurch to his left, and vomit up his dinner—pork chops, applesauce, and corn bread—in the snow, after which he dragged his wrist across his mouth and apologized, an apology to which Oakes responded: Forget it. Only reason I didn’t upchuck myself is ’cause I ain’t had my dinner yet.

The women were not wearing coats, only the long-sleeved wool dresses and support hose they’d been wearing when they were surprised—or so the investigators would later theorize—by the intruder. They had not had time to grab their coats or their boots. While the dog held off the assailant as long as possible, until her throat was slashed, the women had bolted out the back door, making a run for it through the fast-falling snow.

They must have blundered and crashed across the freezing woods as best they could—Marcy with her bad hip and her peripheral neuropathy, and Connie with the extra sixty pounds she’d been carrying since the birth of her third child, forty-one years ago, and a painful lack of cartilage in her right knee—and given up only when it became clear that they had to. They were at the end of the line. They must have been able to hear their pursuer as he chased them, getting closer and closer. They might have been able to hear his breathing. Certainly, they would have heard him thrashing through the woods just as they had done a few seconds earlier, only much, much faster, batting away the snow in front of his eyes, tearing at the vines and branches. Relentless.

And then, the evidence appeared to show, they had understood that they were not going to be able to escape. At that point, they had turned and faced their attacker. They joined hands. Connie’s friends would smile at that detail—later, months later, once those friends had gotten over the shock and the grief and could finally contemplate a thing like smiling, which at first had seemed impossible—and say, Yes, that’s our Connie, that’s exactly what Connie would have done. With the end so near, with death a certainty, she would have reached out her hand and taken her friend’s hand, so that neither one of them would