Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,62

the remembering now. For the others. Somebody’s got to do the remembering.”

Now Carla sat in her car. To her surprise, she was feeling pretty good. She had not had a serious headache in two days. Her appetite was back. At least her appetite for Cap’n Crunch. And that was a start, right? Her mother was going through a rough time—everybody was talking about the two old ladies who had gotten killed, and there was a ton of other stuff going on, too—but the truth was, there was always a ton of stuff going on with her mother’s job. Her mother could handle it.

In the library the other day, when Carla was giving her daily report to Sally McArdle, she had seen a guy she’d gone to high school with. Charlie Crawford. And it was fine. It wasn’t embarrassing at all. Or awkward. Charlie said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey” back, and that was that. He was not any more inclined to stick around and answer questions from her about his present life than she was inclined to answer questions from him about hers. She had been dreading an encounter like that one, with somebody who’d known her before, but it was okay. It was really okay.

And then, because she was feeling good, because she was feeling stronger and more centered and focused, and much calmer, even, than she’d been feeling in a long, long time, she decided to listen to her messages.

It was a mistake.

The first one was time-stamped on Monday, the day after she’d left Virginia. It was from Skylar: “Okay, like, I’ve been calling and calling. You don’t answer. You don’t want to talk to me? Fine. But I thought we were friends, Carla. What the hell is going on? Some kind of investigator showed up here today. From the prosecutor’s office. Kurt got rid of them. He told them we don’t know where you are. But they’ll be back. They said so. And they have your cell number, okay? I don’t know how—I sure as hell didn’t give it to them, and I didn’t confirm it was right when they rattled it off—but they’ve got it. And so they’ll be calling you, too.”

There was also a nervous-sounding message from later in the week from the highly excitable Kurt: “You’ve been getting a shitload of calls here. I need to know what to tell them, okay? I mean—I’m totally in the dark. Which is okay. It’s your choice. But these people are serious. What the hell did you do, girl?”

A flurry of additional messages had come in just a few hours ago. The first one was from a sergeant with the Arlington, Virginia, police department.

So was the second. And the third, fourth, and fifth.

* * *

Bell sat at her kitchen table. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—she liked to sit in the dark. The thickness of it, the way it surrounded her on all sides, helped to direct and clarify her thinking. No distractions.

It was just after eight on Friday night. She did not know what time Carla would be coming home. House rules were still in the discussion phase. Bell had suggested a midnight curfew—“curfew” was not the right word, because Carla was an adult, but Bell had pointed out that she would prefer not to be awakened out of a sound sleep by the noise of the front door opening and closing, and be forced to wonder if it was her daughter or an ax-wielding maniac. So if Carla intended to stay out later than midnight, fine—but Bell expected a courtesy text with an ETA. Fair?

Sorta, Carla had answered. Could they maybe talk about it again later? Renegotiate?

Bell agreed, but in the meantime: midnight. Or a text that indicated approximately when.

She had only been home herself for about ten minutes, just long enough to pry off her boots and dump her coat and briefcase and then head in here. She had started to switch on the overhead lights, but didn’t. She’d considered making dinner, but realized she wasn’t hungry.

She had an image in her mind. She needed to go over it again, every detail. Interrogating it, in effect, by giving it close attention.

It was a silver-framed photo of Marcy Coates and her granddaughter, Lorilee. A latex-gloved Deputy Oakes, assisting the crime-scene unit sent over from Charleston, had taken it from a table in Marcy’s house. The actual photo resided in a locked room at the courthouse where evidence was stored for trials, but Bell did not need the