Sorrow Road by Julia Keller

morning, Bell could have sworn she saw a couple of Druids chanting and gesturing oddly at the base of an obelisk, but it turned out to be adolescents in gray hoodies with floppy sleeves who were posing for selfies next to snow piles.
    â€œAnd by the way,” Rhonda added. “Real sorry about your friend. That road’s bad news in the ice and snow. Curves’ll sneak up on you.”
    â€œThanks.” Bell moved the mug so that it wouldn’t be in the way if the stack shifted again. “What’d you find out?”
    â€œHendricks is a big deal. Head of neurosurgery at George Washington University Hospital. Pretty amazing credentials. I found a ton of stuff on the Internet—interviews, profiles, award citations.”
    â€œSo she’s solid.”
    â€œSolid? Yeah, I’d say so.” Rhonda lifted her eyebrows and lowered her chin, her standard Wait’ll you get a load of this pose. “Born in Boston. Everybody in the family’s a doctor. Even the cat, I bet. Oh, and then there’s—um, let me see here—oh, yeah. Columbia med school, residency at Mass General, surgical fellowship at Johns Hopkins. A ton of commendations for community service. There aren’t a lot of neurosurgeons, period. And female neurosurgeons? We’re talking really rare. Endangered-species rare.”
    Two chairs faced Bell’s desk. Rhonda picked the one on the left. She was a large woman who moved with nimbleness and grace. If Bell had been asked to come up with a phrase that defined her assistant, she would have said that Rhonda was comfortable in her own skin. She possessed a distinctive sense of style that Bell admired without ever feeling the slightest desire to emulate. Today her assistant wore a white wool cable-knit sweater with flecks of red and gold thread, an orange scarf, and purple wool slacks. Her bright blond hair was stacked on top of her head and secured there by a combination of hope and hair spray.
    After a brief pause to enable Rhonda to situate herself, Bell spoke.
    â€œDid you enjoy your weekend?” The topic-switch was abrupt. And the words sounded rehearsed, because they were. Bell was trying to be friendlier to her staff these days. Lee Ann Frickie had recently used the words “prickly” and “moody” to describe Bell’s behavior as a boss, and it bothered her, so much so that she had lashed out at Lee Ann—thereby proving her secretary’s point.
    â€œI mean,” Bell added, “with the snow and all.”
    Rhonda was flummoxed, and looked it. Bell did not make small talk, especially small talk about the weather, for God’s sake, and this felt an awful lot like small talk. About the weather, no less.
    What was going on?
    â€œIt was fine,” Rhonda said. Cautiously.
    â€œGood.” Social niceties over, they could get back to business. Bell placed a hand on top of the stack. “Looks like you were thorough.”
    â€œI brought you anything even remotely relevant. Hick finally fixed the printer in our office, so I didn’t have to run all over the courthouse looking for one I could cabbage onto. Last week they almost threw me out of the assessor’s office. I tied up their printer for an hour and a half, trying to print out all those motions in the Vickers case.”
    Hickey Leonard was Raythune County’s other assistant prosecutor. Bell was fortunate to have two. Most West Virginia counties as small as this one had only a prosecutor and no assistants at all. It wasn’t a question of workload; there were always plenty of cases. It was a question of money. Pressured by a steady drop in revenue as coal mines shut down and businesses closed up and families moved away in multiples, the majority of counties could not afford the luxury of assistant prosecutors.
    But Bell was lucky: Two-thirds of the Raythune County commissioners owed their political success to Hickey Leonard, and he never let them