Ghost Roll by Julia Keller Page A

plunges toward the door, breaking it down with a loud splintering crack of wood. The hinges give way with a snowflake-flutter of rust.
    There are no separate rooms inside. Just one small, square, empty space. She stands in the threshold, holding her throbbing shoulder, her eyes sweeping across the emptiness. No boy. No people, period. No furniture. Nothing. The only sound is her own husky, erratic breathing, in and out, in and out. She looks toward the window, the one through which she saw the boy’s lonely, solemn face.
    The window is boarded up from the inside. A sheet of plywood has been nailed over the space. The plywood is covered with a thick layer of dust. No one’s looked out of that window for a long, long time.
    And that was when she’d wake up, frantic and sweaty and confused—and aware, inexplicably, of a soreness in her right shoulder.
    *   *   *
    â€œSomebody’s lookin’ for you.”
    By way of response to this remark, Bell Elkins aimed a thin smile at Jesse Jarvis, the postmistress of Raythune County. She didn’t ask Jesse to elaborate. She knew that Jesse would, whether encouraged to do so or not. There was no one else in line, and without the press of impatient customers, Jesse might go on for a long time, mistaking Bell’s silence for curiosity.
    â€œOlder fella,” the postmistress added, a gleam in her eye. Bell had dubbed this particular look the gossip-gleam. Jesse was not the only one who exhibited it regularly around here.
    Bell still didn’t reply. Once again, Jesse decided to interpret that not as indifference, but of an interest so profound as to have leapt beyond the provinces of speech to express it.
    â€œOld or not, though, he was in real good shape,” Jesse said. “I mean, his hair was gray and all, but he moved like somebody lots younger. Thought maybe he was a retired astronaut, you know? Had that air about him. Like he’d been to places that the rest of us ain’t.”
    Bell decided not to offer the observation that the chances of a retired astronaut fetching up in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, were small. She continued to thumb through her mail while Jesse talked. Catalog, catalog, catalog, offer for credit card, catalog, bill, credit card, catalog. At what point, Bell wondered, did mail go from being something you looked forward to, something you savored, to something that left you either bored or irritated?
    Her mail came to her house, of course, but if she had a minute, if things settled down at the courthouse long enough for her to leave the premises for a mind-clearing stroll, Bell sometimes walked over to the post office in the next block to collect it herself.
    Jesse relished her visits. The postmistress was sixty-four years old, edging closer each day to the mandatory retirement age that frankly frightened her, meaning as it did that she’d be trapped in her house with nowhere to go, no post office to run, no responsibility for getting the mail in and out of a small Appalachian town that was wedged so tightly down in this mountain valley that not even a crowbar could likely pry it loose. White-haired, with a weary, crumpled-looking face that seemed at odds with her bright and lively eyes, Jesse loved to talk to people. If you bought a book of stamps, you’d get, along with your purchase, an update on somebody’s hip replacement surgery or pending divorce; if you mailed a package, you’d get a well-considered opinion about global warming as well as the receipt for the transaction.
    â€œAnd so I finally just asked him,” Jesse was saying. “Bold as brass. I said, ‘Hey, mister. Bell’s our prosecuting attorney and we all think the world of her, so if you’re here to make some kind of trouble, you better turn around and go back the way you came—because you’ll be fighting the whole town. Not just her.’ “
    â€œSo he didn’t know I was