Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,75

of bed. She turned on the lamp. She switched her cell to speaker so that she could get dressed while finishing her conversation. “I’ll find her.”

“Okay. And Bell…”

“Yes?” She was all business now, too. Coldly focused. “What?”

“I wish…” He waited. “I wish I’d known how much pain she was in. I didn’t know. I mean, she said things were fine. Said she didn’t need her counselor anymore. Once she moved out, I didn’t see her every day. I just trusted what she told me. We’ve always been able to trust her, right? I never knew she was suffering, I never knew that…” He could not finish. He coughed. Something was in his throat. Yes—that had to be it.

“She’s all grown up now, Sam. We don’t tuck her into bed at night with Mister Gompers anymore.” That was the name of Carla’s favorite childhood toy, a purple plush giraffe. “It was up to her to tell us. To keep us informed.”

“It’s the memories, you know?” Sam said. “Seeing Lonnie Prince get shot. Watching him die. And then the kidnapper. Him, too. God, Belfa, she’s been through hell, hasn’t she? Our little girl has been through hell. The memories filling her head. Do you think—do you think she’ll ever get rid of them?”

“No.” Bell was blunter than she’d meant to be. But she had work to do. She could not let herself slide back into the soft enveloping warmth of her bed—or the similar comfort of lies. “Absolutely no chance of that.” If forgetting were possible, she wanted to say to Sam, don’t you think I would have cut loose the memories of my own royally fucked-up past? Wouldn’t I have done that, instead of having to deal with them every goddamned day of my life?

“So how can she go on?” he said.

“The way everybody does. You find a place to put them. Lock them up. So they can’t hurt you anymore.”

“Does it work?” Sam said. His tone was soft and probing. Plaintive, even.

So he did remember. He remembered that she, too, had a past that cut her each time she brushed against it, and memories that lurked in her mind like dirty bombs with ticking timers.

She needed to go. She had to find her daughter.

“Does it work?” he repeated, assuming she had not heard his question.

“Sometimes,” she said. “And sometimes not.”

Three Boys

1938

It was Alvie’s idea. Vic was driving, but it was because of Alvie that they went in the first place. And to say that Vic was driving was a bit misleading, because you could argue that, at the crucial moment, Vic and Harm were actually at the wheel.

So: All three boys—Vic, Alvie, and Harm—were responsible.

“Let’s take ’er out,” Alvie said.

The screen door had just clicked shut. Vic’s mother had gone back into the kitchen, to do all those mysterious things that mothers did in kitchens, the things that made families run as smoothly and efficiently as that flathead V8. The comparison came to Harm because they had been discussing analogies in English class the week before and he had discovered that he really, really liked analogies. He found them everywhere now.

“Naw,” Vic said. “Supposed to ask my dad first. And he’s at work.”

“So?”

The air was instantly thick with tension. Alvie’s “So?” was a direct challenge to Vic and all the things that made Vic Vic: the authority, the swagger, the assumption of privilege and autonomy. Moreover, the fact that this challenge came from Alvie—little rat-face Alvie, whose father was made fun of by everybody, because he’d been fired from his job as pastor of the Crooked Creek Baptist Church, and how often, really, did a preacher ever get fired?—added several more layers of apprehension to the moment.

Harm felt slightly sick to his stomach. He wished Alvie had kept his mouth shut. He did not like it when his friends argued. It was supposed to be the three of them against the world. Not one of them against another. In the beginning their friendship had been based on proximity and convenience—on the fact that they all lived in the same neighborhood—but as time passed the very habit and longevity of the friendship had acquired its own significance. Now they were cemented in place, like three stones in a wall.

Vic, for all of his bravado, was afraid of his father. That was a well-known fact, without it ever having to be stated out loud. Frank Plumley was a bully. He had been known to slap his wife when she got out of