Summer of the Dead Read Online Free Page B

if it was a man or a woman, and she couldn’t tell by the sound and didn’t care enough to check—laughed a loud two-note laugh, amused by Shirley’s active disinclination to be dragged out of the place. The laugh infuriated Bell, and she clamped her hand around Shirley’s upper arm. The arm felt like a kid’s arm: wiry, hard, all bone. Bell marched her roughly out of Tommy’s and into the soup-warm West Virginia night.
    Neither spoke during the drive from Tommy’s back to Acker’s Gap. The silence continued—in fact, it seemed to spread out and calcify—as Bell reached her destination and made an abrupt right-angle turn into the driveway, punished the gearshift into Park, doused the headlights, shushed the engine, slid out. Squinting in the strong porch light, she worked the key, flinging open the front door. Only then did she turn around to address Shirley, who’d kept her distance during the climb up the porch steps.
    Bell was fuming. Her jaw was set so tight that she’d resigned herself to maybe grinding down a molar or two on account of it. She stepped to one side of the threshold.
    â€œGet in,” she said. “Now.”
    Shirley had hesitated, looking down at the scuffed and discolored wood on the porch floor, working the toe of her boot into an especially large knothole.
    â€œGo on,” Bell said. “I’m in a hurry. Got to get back to the courthouse.”
    Surprised, Shirley lifted her head. “Not even daylight yet.”
    â€œYeah. But you know what?” Bell’s voice was hard and sharp. “I’m a prosecutor. You know what that means? It means that at any given time, I’ve got about a dozen or so open cases. Right now we’re trying to find out who murdered an old man in his driveway. And you know what else? I’m an officer of the court. And because I was present during the commission of a felony tonight, I’ve got to file about ten million forms, give or take.”
    â€œDidn’t have nothin’ to do with you,” Shirley said, but she’d mumbled and Bell couldn’t make it out.
    â€œWhat?” Bell was on high alert for defiance.
    â€œJust sayin’ that what happened at Tommy’s tonight didn’t have nothin’ to do with you. Or me, neither. That fella comes in the bar all the time and starts trouble. Seen him lots. Somebody had to set him straight.”
    â€œSo that’s where you’ve been keeping yourself? Tommy’s? You sleeping there, too?”
    Shirley didn’t look at her. “Staying with friends.”
    â€œFriends.” Bell put a sneer in the word. “Friends who hang out at places like Tommy’s.”
    â€œIt’s not so bad. Things just got outa hand.”
    â€œYeah,” Bell said. “I’d say they got outa hand, all right. A man’s dead.”
    Shirley didn’t answer. Bell shook her head, trying to clear away the last few seconds and get a fresh start on the conversation. She didn’t much care about the dirtball who’d gotten himself killed in a seedy bar in Collier County—as long as the death was unrelated to her murder case here in Acker’s Gap, which seemed likely. She cared about her sister, toward whom she felt an immense and solemn weight of obligation.
    Bell peered at her. Shirley would be forty-seven years old next month. She could pass for sixty, what with the long, spindly gray hair that was rapidly thinning on top, just like an old man’s hair. The bones in her face looked as if they were thrusting forward, pushing the flesh away, and soon would take over the space entirely. Her eyes had no shine; they were flat, and the papery skin around them was dry and crosshatched with brief lines.
    Yet when Bell looked at Shirley as she was doing right now—looked at her intensely, letting the resentment and disappointment slide away—she felt an unruly rush of raw emotions: pity and