Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,60

wobbly as that of a bobblehead doll.

“So she needed money.”

“Yeah. Real bad. That’s how come she was working double shifts out at that place. That place where she worked.”

“Thornapple Terrace.”

“Whatever. Said that as soon as she got the cash, she’d send me out there. To California. Had her heart set on it. Those places—shit, they cost a ton. Ten, twenty thousand. Just to get you started. More and more after that.”

Bell made a note on the pad in front of her. When she raised her head, Lorilee was looking at her expectantly.

“So,” Lorilee said. Big smile, revealing infrequent teeth. “We’re friends now, right? I mean, I helped you. So maybe you can help me out a little bit? To honor my Granny? With maybe, like, reward money or something like that? For telling you whatever it was that you wrote down there just now?”

“I can have a deputy take you where you’d like go. It’s cold outside. Hard day to walk anywhere. Best I can do.”

“Fuck you.” There was no passion in the curse. Passion required energy. Lorilee tried to stand, tumbled back in the chair. Her long bony legs reminded Bell of a colt’s legs, stick-thin and unreliable. Lorilee tried again. This time, she made it up and stayed that way. “Fuck you. Fuck you, okay?”

“Little advice,” Bell said mildly. “You really need to brush up on your people skills.”

She watched the young woman scrabble for and finally hoist up her jacket from the floor and then stumble away. Bell’s mind had already moved past the moment. She was pondering the new information about Marcy Coates: No, the old woman apparently did not have enough money to make her a target. But she had a good reason to want money, and lots of it.

* * *

Carla did something colossally dumb: She listened to her voice mail.

As long as she ignored it, she could pretend (a) she had not received any messages from anybody back in D.C. and (b) nothing had happened that would have caused her to expect to receive any messages from anybody back in D.C. and (c) she had made a clean escape, and the past was past.

None of the three was true. And (c) was the least true of all.

It was late Friday afternoon, and she had just finished her final interview in Raythune County. Next week she would be moving on to Muth County. She sat in her car, head back against the headrest. Seconds ago, she had wedged the clipboard and the recorder into her backpack. She looked over at the apartment complex from which she had just departed.

She had spent the last two and a half hours interviewing the sole resident of Apartment 2-B, an eighty-eight-year-old retired railroad brakeman named Julius Jones. He was an African American. It was her favorite interview so far. Jones told wonderful stories, and when he came to the big finish, he sat back in his oak rocker, tucked his thumbs under his bright red suspenders, pulled the strips forward, and then let them go. They snapped back onto his belly with a deeply satisfying sound, as if he were sending forth the story into the world with a smack on its bottom, like you’d do to a dawdling child.

He told her tales about midnight rides around treacherous curves and across bottomless-seeming gorges, and about a time in the winter in the early 1950s when the tracks were blocked with snow. How much snow? So much snow, Jones explained, that they might as well have been facing the mountain itself—that’s how little chance the locomotive had of pushing through the massive chunk, of tunneling out the other side.

So that was that, Julius Jones said. The train stopped and stayed there. He explained things to the passengers, many of whom had places they needed to be that night, important appointments, people to see, businesses to run. But you could not argue with a wall of snow that was taller than the train itself. Frustration gradually gave way to a sort of madcap frivolity. Men in nice suits, men with a net worth of millions of dollars, got out in the deep snow beside the tracks and played with the children, ruining their expensive shoes but laughing about it. They built snowmen and snowwomen (the upper half of the snowwomen, Julius Jones explained with a courtly dip of his head, were covered with shawls borrowed from the elderly female passengers, so as not to confront the indelicate issue of anatomical