from the document in her hand. She was a terrible mother, right? The worst ever. For nearly a week now she had not pressed Carla, had not demanded an explanation for her sudden arrival here. Because Bell didn’t want to be the heavy. The bad guy. The nosy, overbearing mom who waggled a finger in her child’s face. Because if she pushed, if she hectored and prodded, Carla might go away. She was an adult now. She could do that. She could leave.
That’s what I would have done, Bell told herself. If someone had confronted her with something she had done, something inexplicable, she would have booked. Instantly. That was her modus operandi—just take off. When things became too real, too hard, too emotional, she withdrew. She fled.
It was how she’d handled her relationship with Clay, after all. Until tonight. Wasn’t it?
So Bell had let things slide. She had not questioned Carla closely about the reason she’d left D.C. The thought that kept rolling around Bell’s head was this: She will tell me when she’s ready. She’s a good kid. A levelheaded kid. A responsible kid.
Except that she’s not a kid, Bell corrected herself. Not anymore. Carla was an adult, with adult problems and adult consequences to her behavior.
And there was more. Bell could not let herself off the hook. It was too easy that way. She knew that her non-interference in Carla’s life was more than just a desire not to alienate her daughter. There was another reason that she had not gotten in Carla’s face and declared, “I want some answers—now.” Bell was busy with her own affairs—with Darlene’s accident, with the deaths at Thornapple Terrace, with the murder of two defenseless women. Her job was always in the picture. Always trying to own her complete focus.
It was her job that had put Carla in danger in the first place.
When Carla was seventeen, she was among the witnesses to the murder of three old men in a restaurant in Acker’s Gap. Carla thought she had recognized the shooter. She could not reveal that to Bell, however, because of where she knew him from: a party at which drugs had been present. He was a dealer, intent on drumming up new business. Carla should not have been there in the first place. Her mother was a prosecuting attorney, sworn to eradicate the drug trade in Raythune County. Carla was ashamed of having been at that party.
And so she had tried to track down the killer herself. She had enlisted the help of her best friend, Lonnie Prince. And in their confrontation with the drug dealer, Lonnie was shot dead and Carla was kidnapped. Carla narrowly escaped with her life, after a gun battle in an abandoned building.
It was the kind of searing emotional trauma from which Bell had tried so desperately to protect her child. Because she knew those wounds never washed out. She knew about shock and terror. She knew how it felt to stare into the face of an evil that seemed to drench the world in endless darkness. Bell’s own childhood—thanks to her father, Donnie Dolan—had been lived in daily proximity to that kind of evil, that degree of darkness. She had promised herself that Carla would never, never know it.
I failed, Bell thought. I failed my child.
Her sweet girl already knew the truth about the world: that while it had joy in it, and good people, and hope, it also was a place of sadness and suffering.
Bell thought she might understand why Carla had done what she had done in that store. They had not talked about it, but Bell got it: Sometimes the only way to make the roaring chaos inside your head go away was to create a rhyming chaos on the outside. Match frenzy with frenzy, anarchy with anarchy.
I used to do that, too, Bell thought.
In her case, she did it with running. Endless, insane amounts of running. In high school, in college, she would go for long runs along fearsomely steep mountain roads until she was slammed with exhaustion, half-delirious with dehydration, her legs too weak and wobbly to stand. Until finally she could feel the faint stirrings of an inner peace, an eye-of-the-hurricane calm carved right out of the middle of the emotional maelstrom.
Her little girl, her beautiful daughter, had wrecked a store in a mall for the same reason that Bell had run up and down mountains: to try to heal herself.
She lowered the cell. She did not need