Last Ragged Breath (5 page)

“Andy, Brenda—please take a seat,” the sheriff said. They obeyed instantly, glad to have an order they could follow. “It's been a long day for everybody,” Harrison added. “Let's all calm down.” She sounded affable, friendly, but she needed them to understand that she was in charge. There should be no doubt about that, even though Andy Stegner had known her since she was in grade school.
Okay,
Harrison corrected herself.
Longer than that
. Andy and her father were regulars at the VFW Hall.

“How's he holding up?” Brenda said.

Husband and wife wore thick winter coats, the convex, heavily insulated kind that caused even slender people to look like hand grenades, and they were not slender people. Their boots made it impossible for them to take a delicate step. Brenda was twenty years younger than Andy, but in the way these things sometimes went, she now looked almost as old as he did. She had been a great beauty when she was younger, and you could occasionally get hints of that, faint echoes: The elegant bone structure of her face was still evident beneath the yellowed, hangdog skin, and when her drab shoulder-length hair moved back and forth, it showed a ghost of its soft curl and its radiance, even though the velvety honey-blond shade had been stripped down now to a bland whitish gray.

“I'm just asking him some questions,” Harrison said. “That's all. The body was found on his property. I think you can understand why—”

“He's pretty fragile,” Andy said. He didn't seem to realize he'd interrupted her. His big, wind-burnished hands were clasped between his knees. “When I found that body in the creek, I never thought—I mean, it never occurred to me that you'd think Royce would've—It's just not possible that—” The face he showed Sheriff Harrison was bleak, beseeching. “Royce Dillard is a good man. He's got his peculiarities. Nobody knows that better than us. We're his closest neighbors and we don't hardly see him more than twice, three times a year. I go by and I pick up Goldie from the barn and Royce don't even come out to say hello. It's like he can't, somehow. Wants to, but he can't.”

“He'd die in prison,” Brenda said. There was passion in her voice. “You know that.”

“Whoa there,” the sheriff said. “Nobody's talking about prison yet, okay? Nobody. Let's get that straight, first off. But I've got to question him.” She wished Deputy Mathers hadn't stopped at the Stegner house on his way back into town. Seeing Dillard's face in the back of the Blazer, they'd insisted on following the county vehicle to the courthouse in their Tahoe. They'd waited here, standing in her cold office in the lonely annex, while she spoke to Dillard. And then when she returned, they'd fallen upon her like avenging angels in wool and polyester.

“Gentle as a lamb,” Brenda said. She'd perched herself on the edge of her chair, leaning forward, one hand coiled in her lap and the other hand thrust out to rest flat on the sheriff's desktop, as if she wanted to keep a physical tie with Pam Harrison, even one mediated through solid oak. To plead her case. “That's what I'd say about Royce. What anybody would say, who really knows him. You ask. You just ask 'em. The man's not got a mean bone in his body.”

Harrison nodded. “Understood. But let me repeat, Brenda—and this is for you, too, Andy—I'm not arresting him. Okay? I'm just talking to him. We've got a homicide on our hands. Anybody with any connection to the victim—no matter what that connection might've been—will be spoken to. Same as you folks were spoken to. It's how it's done.” She used a knuckle to nudge up the brim of her hat, so that she could make eye contact with Andy. “We appreciate your calling us right away, like you did. And not touching anything.”

Andy shook his head, as if he wanted to shake off the compliment, too. “Who the hell would touch a dead body?”

“You'd be surprised.” Harrison reached for a pen. Then she lifted the yellow legal pad next to it and turned it around, so that it was facing in Andy's direction. The page was covered in a small barbed-wire scribble. “I think we have everything we need from you for the time being. But you have to sign your statement, Andy. About finding the body.”

“Okay,” he said. He bent over the page, grimacing. Reliving the experience as he skimmed what he'd written. Brenda watched her husband's hand as he signed his name. His hand was so large that it made the pen look like a toy. Once he was finished, his hand continued to hold the pen; he didn't want to let it go just yet. Brenda's hand stayed on the sheriff's desktop. It was as if they were trying to stop time for as long as they could, to hold off acknowledgment of the grievous reality of the day's events.

“Dogs,” Brenda suddenly said.

Harrison looked at her.

“Royce's dogs,” Brenda went on. “If you keep him here much longer, who's gonna look after his dogs?” She shook her head. “We can't do it. I'm allergic. Can't be within a hundred feet of those mutts of his. I start swelling up something terrible. That's why Andy has to borrow Goldie. Can't have dogs of our own.”

“How many's he got?”

“Seven,” Andy said. “Counting Goldie.”

The sheriff frowned. “They'll be okay overnight?”

“Yeah, but not much beyond that,” Andy replied. “Somebody'll have to go by in the morning and see to 'em. They're living creatures.”

That irritated the sheriff. Having known her since she was a baby, Andy Stegner apparently forgot that she'd progressed well past that point intellectually. “Understood,” Harrison said stiffly.

“How long you gonna keep him here?” Brenda asked.

Harrison had answered enough of their questions. She didn't have to explain herself to them. Or to anyone. She was calling the shots, dammit. They ought to remember that. She could hold Royce Dillard without charging him for at least forty-eight hours.

“I don't know,” she said. “Depends on what the evidence shows.”
And what the prosecutor says,
Harrison added to herself, but didn't want to say out loud, because she didn't like the sound of it—true as it was.

 

Chapter Five

Bell lied. There was no way she could make it to the courthouse in thirty minutes. The distance between Acker's Gap and the Italian restaurant in Dalton Forge where she'd been picking at a decidedly mediocre plate of spaghetti—the sauce was heavily sugared, the pasta a close cousin to crusty shoestrings—required nearly an hour's drive. But she didn't want Sheriff Harrison to call one of the assistant prosecutors in her stead. Both Rhonda Lovejoy and Hickey Leonard had been putting in loads of overtime lately, extra duty for which—the county budget being what it was—she couldn't compensate them. It was her turn, she thought, to have a Saturday night shot all to hell by a work obligation.

Her date had seemed to understand. David Gage was a professor of environmental sciences at West Virginia University. He was in town for a three-month study based in Raythune and Collier counties, gathering information he intended to use in a book about formerly robust coal-mining communities and what decades of renegade coal dust had done to the air quality. Virginia Prentice, a classmate of Bell's at Georgetown Law School who now taught at WVU College of Law, had set up the date, pushing Bell to agree by sprinkling her e-mails with dares and double-dares.

Reluctantly, Bell had finally said yes. One date wouldn't kill her, would it? Even if Gage turned out to be a fool and a bore, it would be a change of scenery. Take her mind off things. She suggested they take separate cars to Luigi's; that was as much for his protection as hers. Maybe he'd be the one who needed a quick getaway. Bell knew she was an acquired taste. So, as it turned out, was Luigi's.

Dating after forty was a risky business. It was like shopping at the Goodwill store over in Blythesburg: Everything on offer was used, picked over, random. It had been discarded by somebody else.
Just like me,
Bell thought ruefully. Sure, you could find some hidden gems, but you had to be especially careful. And definitely selective.

To her surprise, she enjoyed Gage's company. He was forty-eight years old, recently divorced; the split, he said, had been a long time coming. Lesley, too, taught at WVU. They had two daughters, one in college, the other a senior in high school. Bell liked the way Gage talked about his children, with pride and humor and a deep understanding of their individual personalities and ambitions. He didn't just say “my kids” in that homogenous, glazed-over way that some people discussed their offspring, as if all children were the same, moving at the same pace through the same inevitable stages of development, inevitably causing the same frustrations and heartaches for their parents. Susan, he said, was majoring in biology at Pitt, while Meagan was obsessed with the cello and hoped to go to a university with a top-flight music program.

Gage had close-cropped white hair, a long jawline, watchful brown eyes that lived behind a pair of round gold spectacles, and lean, expressive hands that were in constant motion as he talked, which Bell attributed to his having been a professor for so many years. She liked the way he dressed: olive khakis he hadn't bothered to iron—she didn't trust men who ironed their trousers, probably because her ex-husband had always insisted that everything be ironed, including his pajamas—and a wheat-colored corduroy shirt. Bell's admiration, however, stopped well short of desiring anything more from him than interesting conversation. She didn't like to acknowledge it—especially not to herself—but she was still carrying a torch for a man she'd dated two years ago. In a way, that gave her the freedom to have a good time with David Gage; she knew this couldn't really lead anywhere. Not while she still felt a small but persistent flutter in her stomach at the thought of Clay Meckling, formerly of Acker's Gap, now a grad student at MIT. She and Clay still exchanged the occasional e-mail and letter, still traded phone calls on birthdays and holidays. Bell liked to tell people that her romantic relationship with Clay was over, that the notorious phrase “just friends” was absolutely applicable. But that wasn't really true, and she knew it.

“I wonder how you stand the thought of it,” Gage had asked Bell as they pushed their entrées around on their plates.

“Of what?”

“Of all the coal mines around here. Knowing what coal has done to the environment of West Virginia—and to the health of the miners, too. Not to mention the entire planet. I mean, the science is irrefutable.”

“That may be,” Bell said, “but the coal industry has provided a decent living for these people for a lot of years. Is it easy work? Clean work? Safe work? Hell, no. But it's work. Honest work. I don't see any manufacturing plants sprouting up in these valleys anytime soon—do you? Plants that'll replace all the jobs lost if you and your friends in Washington shut down the last of the coal mines? So you might want to think twice before you demonize coal and coal mining. It's not just coal you're coming out against—it's people's livelihoods.”

“We're developing some promising new fuel sources. Renewable ones. Sustainable ones.”

Bell gave him a level look. “Right. But in the meantime, what happens to the people here? People who depend on coal mining to earn a paycheck? Not many of them left, I'll grant you, but don't they matter?”

“So you're pro-coal.” He said it with incredulity.

“I'm not pro-coal. I'm pro-work. Show me another way for the people of Raythune County to feed their families, and I'll be all over it.”

“Speaking of feeding,” he said, “I'm thinking about dessert. How about you?”

She grinned and shook her head. She liked this man, liked the way they could disagree vehemently about an issue and yet keep the conversation amiable, liked the way he defused the tension with a breezy comeback. Bell had opinions, and she expected other people to have them, too; if their opinions happened to coincide with hers, fine, but if they didn't—well, that ought to be fine, too.

And the truth was, she would have agreed with Gage if they'd had this talk six years ago, before she moved back to Acker's Gap. Yes, she knew the science. She knew that the burning of coal was doing terrible things to the earth's atmosphere, just as the underground mining of it had done terrible things to the respiratory systems of miners. But if the land was your concern, then strip-mining was even worse. And once she'd come back here to live, she saw another truth: Coal meant jobs. As underground mining dwindled, so, too, had the fortunes of the people in this region.

Bell made a private pact with herself: Next time she and Gage got together—if there was a next time—she'd offer to take him to a coal mine she knew about, one that was all but shut down. Only a few men worked there now, and not regularly. She would show him that there was only one thing more depressing than a mine filled with miners: a nearly silent one. And a community filled with men and women who had no jobs.

Before she'd had a chance to choose between the crème brûlée and the cheesecake, her cell had gone off. A glance had informed her that the caller was Sheriff Harrison. The social part of her evening, Bell knew, had just come to an abrupt halt. The nature of her job as a prosecutor in a small rural county meant that she was eternally tethered to her phone, always on call. There was really no such thing as a night off.

She put the cell to her ear, listened, spoke briefly, then hit End and placed the cell next to her plate. The sleek black rectangle looked out of place on the ivory lace-trimmed tablecloth amid the elegant white china and heavy cutlery, like something strange and futuristic that had fallen out of the sky and invaded an old-fashioned garden party.

“Listen, David, I need to run,” Bell said. “Really sorry. I've had fun, though.”

“No worries. Ginnie warned me.”