Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,78

had not really happened. The vehicle ended up at a crazy angle, half-in and half-out of the road, but no one else had come along. Until the deputy did. Deputy Diehl.

Vic still held onto the wheel. Harm also had a hand on it. Alvie was leaning against Harm. Vic’s mouth hung open and there was drool shining on his chin, but Harm and Alvie never let on that they had seen it.

It was clear that the two people—one in the ditch, one in the road—were dead.

Where had they come from, anyway? An old lady and a kid? There were no houses around here. No stores. Not even so much as a shed. Where the hell were they on their way to?

Deputy Diehl asked them again: Come on, fellas. Come on out.

He had checked the bodies first, although the gesture was pointless, a formality. Then he opened the driver’s side door of the Ford and spoke to them. His voice was amiable, almost singsong: Let’s go, boys.

An ambulance came and took away the bodies. The deputy found the old lady’s purse. Her name was Gertrude Eloise Driscoll. The kid was her granddaughter, Betty Driscoll. Betty was five years old.

Somehow, Frank Plumley got there in his Packard. Deputy Diehl must have called the sheriff’s office on his radio, and someone in the sheriff’s office called Frank’s office. Harm never knew quite how it happened. All he knew was that by the time Frank arrived, they were lined up against the side of Deputy Diehl’s squad car, all in a row, like birds on a wire: Vic, then himself, and then Alvie.

Three boys.

“Deputy,” Frank said, touching the brim of his hat.

“Mr. Plumley,” the deputy said. He nodded smartly.

It was all arranged, then and there. Frank Plumley had been driving. That was what the report would say. Frank Plumley had been driving, and he had tried to avoid Gertrude Driscoll and her granddaughter, but damned if the two of them had not jumped right out in front of the Ford. Nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could have done.

Maybe, Frank Plumley added, and these words went down in Deputy Diehl’s report, maybe Mrs. Driscoll was deaf and had not heard the Ford approaching, and the child did not have the wherewithal—Frank deliberately avoided words like “good sense” or “intelligence”—to look in both directions, being so young and all. It was a tragedy, no question. Two precious lives.

Frank Plumley was a well-known and much-respected man in Norbitt, indeed in the whole of Barr County. The judge would require only a few minutes to decide that he was not at fault. Accidental death: That was the ruling.

Harm never knew how the small details were explained away. The niggling facts. If Frank Plumley had been driving the Ford, then how did the Packard get to the scene of the accident? And what were the three boys doing there?

It turned out that the three boys had not been there, after all. Harm eventually read the report. Their names were not in it. Which meant they were not there. Vic Plumley’s future, plump as it was with promise—dazzling, even—would not be imperiled by something as trivial and irrelevant as an old lady and a kid crossing a dirt road on the outskirts of Caneytown, West Virginia.

* * *

It would be nice to say that in the aftermath of an event as momentous as causing a death—because of course they carried the truth in their hearts, even if it was never officially acknowledged—the three boys changed. Straightened up. Settled down. Recognized the fragility of life. Displayed the grace of gratitude. Worked harder in school. Were more respectful to their elders.

It would be nice, but it would not be true. Over the next four years, they became even wilder than they had been before the accident. Vic, Harm, and Alvie were trouble, period. They shoplifted, they vandalized buildings, they got into nasty fights. Vic attacked a man in a bar with a pool cue; he ruptured the man’s spleen when he shoved it into his side like a Roman gladiator thrusting a spear. The man was strongly encouraged not to press charges, and he did not. Alvie was twice caught stealing cars, and both times, Frank Plumley squared things with the sheriff. The spring Vic turned fifteen, one of his girlfriends, Wendy Devlin, ended up pregnant—it might or might not have been his, but he was glad to claim it, because of the way it burnished his reputation—and he and Harm