Sorrow Road by Julia Keller Page A

forget it. He had lived every second of his sixty-seven years in Acker’s Gap, as had his father and mother before him. He knew which skeletons rattled in which closets belonging to which commissioners, and if there was ever any talk about cutting the budget for the prosecutor’s office and maybe getting rid of him or Rhonda, all Hick had to do was show up at a commission meeting and, while the minutes of the last meeting were being read, tug a small spiral-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit coat and thumb through the first few pages he came to, brow furrowed, mouth bunched in a thoughtful frown as if he had forgotten the particulars of some especially heinous incident but—oh, my!—here those particulars were, written down in all of their lurid shamefulness. And then he would look up and catch the eye of one of the commissioners—Bucky Barnes, say, or Sammy Burdette or Carl Gilmore or Pearl Sykes—and, still holding the eyes of that suddenly nervous person, he would lick his finger and use it to turn to yet another page of the notebook, slowly, slowly, while shaking his head ever so slightly as if to say, You think you know a person, but no. No, you don’t. Not when you see what they’re truly capable of, when no one’s looking. Or at least when they think no one’s looking.
    It was a form of soft blackmail that once upon a time would have disgusted Bell, but she was a different person now from the one she had been when she first came back to Acker’s Gap, stuffed uncomfortably full of idealism and judgment, in addition to being headstrong, snippy, and quickly notorious as a know-it-all. She had changed. She had been forced to change, if she wanted to accomplish anything. Now she appreciated Hick’s regularly scheduled performance. It meant that Bell was able to keep him and Rhonda Lovejoy on the payroll, and she needed them. More to the point, the county needed them.
    And besides: She’d had a peek at that notebook of his. The pages were blank.
    â€œI appreciate you pulling all this together so fast this morning,” Bell said. “I’m sure Dr. Hendricks will be paying us a visit. Apparently she and Darlene were together a long time. And a grieving spouse is going to want some answers.”
    â€œYeah. Well. About that. Jake Oakes said that when he finally reached her—apparently you have to go through about twenty-eleven layers of hospital bureaucracy to even get her on the phone—she was, like, ‘Okay, thanks.’ Pretty weird, he said. For somebody whose whole life just changed.”
    â€œPeople grieve in their own way.”
    Rhonda put a funny squint on her face. “I do sort of wonder about them.”
    â€œWonder what?”
    â€œAbout—well, you know.”
    â€œNot a clue. Wonder what?”
    â€œI mean…” Rhonda discovered a phantom speck of lint on the sleeve of her sweater that she needed to remove. The gesture took a very long time. Too long. She was stalling.
    â€œWhat are you getting at?” Bell said. Her voice was brusque. She had a full schedule today. And she had asked Carla to meet her for lunch at JP’s, the diner down the block from the courthouse, after her job interview. The list of things Bell had to accomplish between now and the moment she slid into a booth at JP’s, clamping her hands around a mug of hot coffee, was dauntingly long.
    â€œWell,” Rhonda said, “I just mean that—well, usually you think that women who are—well, together, you know, in that way, you just assume it’s because…” She was struggling.
    At this point Bell understood perfectly well what Rhonda was trying to say, and was determined not to help her out. She was surprised at her assistant’s attitude, but then again, except for Rhonda’s time at West Virginia University and then its College of Law, she had lived all thirty-three years of her life within a