Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,55

had been as a marksman. He was fifty-six years old. Even without the injury that had almost taken his life—he had been shot last year by a drug dealer—he would be fighting time. The fine motor skills that had made him a crack shot were the first to go. He hated that. But hating a fact did not make it any less true.

They sat down in the kitchen. It was a bright, well-kept one, with clean countertops and a white tile floor. Bell piled up her outerwear on a third chair. Nick gestured toward the coffeepot. She shook her head.

“Already had a full pot before I left home this morning. ’Bout to float away as it is,” she said. “Where’s Mary Sue?”

“She’s been volunteering at the school.” He did not need to specify which school; Bell knew he meant Acker’s Gap Elementary. His wife had taught third grade there for many years until mental illness forced her to take disability leave. She was doing better now, with the right balance of medication. And with a diligent daily attention to routines, such as keeping a kitchen spotless. But she wasn’t able to teach third grade anymore.

“She likes being back there,” Nick went on. “Helps out with the math classes. Goes in on Fridays, when I’m home in the morning. I give myself a half-day off. She claims that otherwise we’d be tripping all over each other, both of us home on a weekday morning. Probably true.” He was head of security for the Highway Haven chain—a good job, a job coveted by a lot of people, but not the one he’d done for most of his adult life. And not the one he wanted.

It struck Bell—not for the first time, certainly, but with a poignant force today that she had not felt before—that Nick and Mary Sue were in the same boat now, trying to work their way back into their former lives, trying to recover some essential part of themselves that they had lost along the way. There was a kind of quiet heroism about that. But at what point, she had begun to wonder, did it start to be counterproductive, robbing the present because your hopes were fixed so passionately on the future?

Unclear. And frankly, she knew she was in no position to be giving life advice to anyone.

“I need your help, Nick,” she said. “I’m just frustrated as all get-out.”

“This about the old ladies?”

“Sort of. Pam Harrison is pretty well convinced it was the same perpetrator who’s been holding up gas stations in Muth County.” Harrison had been deputy sheriff under Nick Fogelsong, and then, with his endorsement, was elected to the top spot.

“And you’re not.”

“That’s a hell of an upgrade—going from robbing gas stations to committing murder,” Bell declared. “And why take the chance? Marcy Coates’s house was a run-down piece of crap. Her TV set was about a thousand years old. And there were no other electronics. No jewelry. Who’d target her in the first place?”

“What does Harrison say?”

“She says beggars can’t be choosers. She says the assailant probably just found himself out there on Hanging Rock Road. Maybe he was cold and hungry. Maybe he saw the light in Marcy’s window. Stopped by to take what he could get. Maybe they resisted. And that’s what got them killed.”

“Two old ladies. Resisted.”

“Exactly,” Bell said, smacking the tabletop. “You see my point. Those women were—and forgive my bluntness here—old and fat and helpless. The chances of either one of them putting up a fight? Nonexistent. And anyway, these were good people we’re talking about here. If a stranger came along and asked for a sandwich, they’d fire up the stove and ask him if he wanted his grilled cheese on white or wheat.”

“So you figure it was on purpose. Somebody wanted one or both of them dead.”

“Maybe. Makes more sense, anyway, than the idea of two old ladies sneering at a knife-wielding, gun-toting maniac and saying, ‘Make my day.’ I mean, come on.” She shook her head. “The good news is that Jake Oakes isn’t giving up. He pointed out that the killer would have had to check and make sure Coates and Dollar were really dead. Couldn’t take a chance on surviving witnesses. So our man might have gotten some of their blood on his shoes when he did that. Just a drop or two, maybe—and he could very well have burned his shoes afterward—but it might give us an angle if we take someone into