Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,96

For an oral history thing.” Bonita paused. “Hold on. I just remembered the interviewer’s name she gave me—Carla Elkins. Any relation?”

“As a matter of fact,” Bell said, “she’s my daughter.” There was pride in her voice. There would always be pride in her voice when she talked about Carla.

* * *

Carla Jean Elkins stepped down from a Greyhound bus in the middle of Blythesburg, West Virginia. It was as close as she could get to Acker’s Gap, because the bus station in Acker’s Gap had closed down five years ago. No other business had taken over that location—the town had run out of reckless fools—so now it was a crumbling building with a gouged-up linoleum floor, cracked windows, and the slithery ghosts of long-ago travelers whisking to and fro.

The station in Blythesburg was even less impressive, although it was still open. It was just a kiosk and a couple of benches on a concrete pad. But it was the only place for many miles to board and disembark, so no one was likely to complain about the lack of deluxe accommodations.

The first thing Carla did when her feet hit the frozen ground was to look up. Just for a second, because there were people behind her, shuffling and wrangling their belongings, also eager to get off the bus.

The sky was clear. The sun was the color of a saltine cracker. Snow had been pushed back into a low dirty-white hedge that ran alongside the sidewalk. It was very cold, and very windy. Carla moved on, clearing the way for the other passengers.

She felt … well, how did she feel? She wasn’t sure. That was a new thing. Before, she had always known how she felt. Exactly. She could describe her feelings precisely. She could even select the right words for other people’s feelings. Her friends would come to her with a hot whirling mess of half-formed thoughts and vague impressions and blunt yearnings, and Carla would sort it all out for them, separating the various emotions, reverse-engineering their moods.

Not anymore. Now she was just as blind and bumbling as everybody else when it came to feelings. She had intended to figure it all out on the long bus ride, but instead she mostly slept. It was not a restful sleep; she jerked awake each time the bus rocked sideways or the driver braked hard, wondering where the hell she was. Then she’d doze off again, head jammed sideways against the seat back, backpack secured on her lap with both hands.

Her dad had offered to drive her to Acker’s Gap. No thanks, she had said. He’d offered to buy her a plane ticket to Charleston and then hire a limo to get her the rest of the way. She turned him down again. She wanted time to think. She’d only been on a Greyhound bus one other time in her life—she had visited her friend Sandy Lightfoot in Owensboro, Kentucky, the summer after seventh grade, because the Lightfoot family moved away once school was out for the year—and she remembered that a bus ride created an amazing space for thinking. It took a long time, but unlike flying it featured the same old crap out the window that you had seen a million times before, so you did not get distracted by awe. You could focus on what you needed to think about.

Kayleigh Crocker was going to pick her up. Carla hadn’t told her mother that she was coming. She wanted it to be a surprise.

Back in Arlington, her dad had fixed things for her. She was not sure how she felt about that. Without him—and had she been, say, a homeless veteran with psychiatric issues or a black teenager with anger management problems, and had she done exactly the same thing—she knew the outcome would have been far different.

But Sam Elkins knew everybody in the world who mattered and, in addition to knowing them, he also was owed favors by them, because he had done things in the past on their behalf. So it all happened very quickly, in a blur of insider privilege: the store dropped the charges, the cop withdrew the resisting arrest complaint, and the judge told her to pay the fine and mind her manners henceforth. Those were not his exact words, Carla had explained to Kayleigh when she called her the night before and asked for a ride from Blythesburg to Acker’s Gap. But close enough.

And now Carla understood about courts. She had thought she