Ghost Roll by Julia Keller Page B

prosecutor?”
    â€œWell, see—that’s the funny part. He did and he didn’t. He said, ‘Oh, so she’s still in office?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t she be?’ And then he said, ‘Just thought maybe she’d moved away by now.’ And then I said, ‘Why would she do that?’ And then he said, ‘After all that happened, figured maybe she’d had enough.’ And then I said—.”
    â€œGot the picture, Jess.” Bell scooped up the rest of her mail from the tall wooden counter. Jesse, she knew, had to stand on a stool on the other side in order to serve the customers. The post office was a very small brick building with dark wooden floors. Jesse ran the counter, and the single delivery man, Artie Minton, used his own car, a swaybacked, rust-scored white station wagon, to make his rounds.
    There’d been talk, a few years ago, of shutting down this post office for good, forcing the residents to drive over to the one in Blythesburg. Fortunately, the place had been granted a reprieve. Everyone knew, though, that the clock was ticking. If the population kept dropping, the postal service would have no choice. Thus Jesse Jarvis had a two-pronged anxiety: the years creeping up on her from one side, and from the other, the deteriorating economic situation of Acker’s Gap, which also threatened her position.
    She didn’t let the worry show. She was a merry woman, one who luxuriated in the information that came her way, hour by hour, as people stopped in at the post office and chatted.
    â€œWell,” she said, “you be careful, Belfa. Never know about some folks.” Because Jesse perused her mail, including official correspondence, she sometimes slipped and called Bell by her formal name. Bell didn’t like it, but let it go. “You heading back to the courthouse?”
    â€œGot to stop at the bank first,” Bell answered.
    When she’d first moved back to Acker’s Gap seven years ago, she would’ve answered Jesse’s inquiry with a decided snippiness: “And what the hell business is it of yours?” But she understood a few things now, like the fact that Jesse wasn’t being nosy. Jesse was being Jesse. And the postmistress never hid the fact that, if another customer came in thirty seconds after Bell went out the door, the new person would be fully informed about Bell’s morning plans. That’s how it was around here.
    The bank was two doors down. Bell had gone to Acker’s Gap High School with the manager, Dot Burdette, and if the office door was open when Bell finished her business with a teller, as it was today, Dot always waved at her, beckoning her to come inside and sit down.
    â€œThank the Lord it’s finally spring,” Dot said. She was a thin woman, sinewy, given to long tunics with matching skirts and heels, plus necklaces that ended in dangling gold pendants, all of which tended to emphasize her height. In high school she’d been serenely, untouchably popular, vastly more popular than Bell. Bell, raised in foster care, was a dark cipher, a girl whose face was absent of expression and who seemed to find her only true friendships in books. Her clothes were wrong, her hair was wrong. Dot had never acknowledged her existence. But now Bell was prosecuting attorney, and Dot acted as if she and Bell had been BFFs back then, as if they’d hung out on weekends and braided each other’s hair and giggled their way through prank calls. It was a lie—but some lies, Bell knew, you simply had to find a way to live with.
    â€œYeah,” Bell replied. “Sure seems that way.”
    Dot clearly had something on her mind, and it wasn’t the weather. She sat hunched over the desktop, hands linked on the lid of her laptop. A sudden frown aged her face by about a decade, igniting the wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her downturned mouth.
    â€œSo,”