Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,9

room window, mesmerized by the transformation. She’d seen it before, of course, having lived through many winters—too many, she thought, feeling a stiffness in her right knee and a tweak in her left shoulder that testified to her four-and-a-half decades on the planet. But a total whiteout like this one was always a spectacular surprise.

She was dressed in a pair of red plaid flannel sweatpants and a gargantuan gray sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was rubbed clean through at both elbows, one sleeve was ripped and the collar was unraveling. It was a look she did not even like to share with her mirror. But the getup was warm, dammit. And comfortable.

It was just after seven a.m. She had a mug of coffee nestled in her cupped palms like a battered chalice in a low-rent religious ceremony. She tried a sip. Too hot—and so she blew on it, and then sipped again. Still too hot.

Well, no matter. Throats could heal, right? Sure they could. She needed the coffee, and she needed it now.

Down the hatch.

She winced, instantly repenting of her decision to face the pain and drink it anyway, and then, as the deliciously bitter black coffee branched through her body like a liquid wake-up call, she repented of her repentance. She was ready now. Ready to face whatever the day might bring.

She took another drink. She did not notice the heat anymore. She had a lot on her mind, and snow was the perfect backdrop for thinking. It was the original blank canvas.

Carla would be arriving today.

Today.

The idea made Bell feel a little dizzy. There was still a slightly dreamlike quality to the idea of her daughter’s return, a gauzy, Can it really be so? sense of unreality. The fact that the actual picture spreading out in front of her was so altered from its usual state—it was a tidy, homogenized wash of white, not a tangled, unruly mess of brown yards and gray street and broken sidewalks—added to the surreal feeling, the feeling of a landscape and a life unplugged from their usual sources of color and action.

Bell had yearned for Carla’s return for so long now that she had forgotten what it felt like to live without that fierce desire, that ache in the very center of her being. She had never told Carla how deeply she missed her, because she did not want her daughter to feel guilty about her choice. Bell never discussed it with her ex-husband, either, or with her best friend, Nick Fogelsong. It was the most profound truth of her life and she had kept it hidden, as if it were a guilty secret.

And so the sadness had tunneled deeper inside her. Life closed back over it.

Carla was coming home to reassess things. Okay, not just “things”—everything. That’s what she had told her mother last night toward the end of their phone conversation, after announcing that she simply had to drive there Sunday. No delay. She needed new skies. Well, new-old, anyway. She’d quit her job. Found someone to sublet her room in the Arlington house. Her car was already packed. She would hit the road first thing tomorrow—now, today—and point her Kia Soul in the direction of Acker’s Gap. She knew all about driving in heavy snow, she said. She’d checked the tread on her tires, had all the fluids topped off. She’d be fine.

Bell was thrilled at the prospect of Carla’s return. Of course. Of course she was.

But part of her wondered—she had to wonder, it was her responsibility to wonder—if a small, fading, isolated and economically bereft town in West Virginia, a place from which a lot of people seemed to run screaming the very first second they had the chance, was really where Carla belonged, long-term. Or for however long her daughter ended up staying.

Clearly there was a lot more to this abrupt homecoming than Carla had let on; something had happened in the young woman’s life, something that Bell would have to question her about, slowly and carefully, once she was settled in. It was not the kind of detective work that Bell relished. But it was necessary.

Carla’s bombshell had shoved everything else out of her mind, including Darlene Strayer’s request. Now it came back to her. She felt a touch of guilt about having forgotten so easily. She would talk to Rhonda Lovejoy. Ask her to spend a few hours poking around the care facility, asking questions.

Done.

Back to Carla.

She envisioned her daughter’s long narrow face and short dark