A Haunting of the Bones by Julia Keller Read Free Book Online

captured her long thick hair, shaping it into a plump black raindrop. She was flushed from the heat of the grill.
    â€œWhat?” Bell said.
    â€œLarry. Last night.” She shook her head. To Bell, Jackie seemed more irritated than frightened. “Mad as hell. Just like always. Said he was calling from a pay phone at a gas station halfway between Richmond and Acker’s Gap. Said he’s coming here, no matter what. He used a pay phone so I’d answer—because if I’d seen it was his number on the caller ID, I never would’ve picked up. He was right about that.”
    Bell had two thoughts simultaneously:
I didn’t know there were any pay phones left anywhere on earth
was one. The other:
I’m a lousy friend
. With everything else going on, she’d not given Jackie or her problems a second’s worth of thought. From the moment she’d gotten the sheriff’s call about the bones, those bones had preoccupied her. It was a wonder she’d been able to focus on her work at the courthouse that morning.
    â€œDid you talk to Sheriff Fogelsong?” Bell asked.
    Jackie nodded. “He’s alerted his deputies. But like you said, until Larry does something, we just have to sit tight. So far, all the bastard’s done is shoot off his mouth. Keeps telling me how much I’m gonna regret treating him this way. Telling me to watch out. Telling me I better see the light—or else.”
    Before Bell could comment, Jackie had returned to the grill. She finished up two hamburgers, sliding them onto the bottom halves of a pair of buns on a big white plate and handing the plate to Mindy Lewis, the other waitress. “Fries’ll be up in a sec,” Jackie told her. “Go ahead and take him the burgers while they’re hot.”
    Jackie, Bell recalled, had envisioned another sort of place when she’d first opened JP’s. It would be a place where nobody ordered fries or onion rings as side dishes because the grilled asparagus and oven-roasted Brussels sprouts were so enticing. Gradually, though, she’d been forced to abandon that dream. The people of Acker’s Gap had started avoiding JP’s, driving the extra distance out to the interstate to the fast-food chains to get what they wanted. Frustrated but realistic, Jackie plugged in the deep-fat fryer and now kept it going all day long.
    â€œGuess nothing much changes around here,” she’d muttered over her shoulder to Bell one day last year as she’d turned the dripping wire basket to one side, dumping a pile of shiny fries onto a plate. “You try and help people out, show ’em another way, and they go right back to what they know best.”
    Bell had given Jackie a sympathetic smile, but felt like a damned hypocrite when she did so. Because she was the one who’d ordered the fries.
    * * *
    The next day, Bell was sitting at her desk in her courthouse office when Rhonda Lovejoycharged in. Rhonda was a large woman with a piled-up parfait of brown hair with blond highlights, a yen for brightly colored skirts and flamboyant tops, and a unique skill set: She had a bloodhound’s relentlessness when it came to tracking people down and a light, highly effective touch when it came to interrogating them.
    â€œFound her,” Rhonda said.
    â€œGreat.” Bell flipped down the lid of her laptop, glad for the excuse to abandon the memo she was writing to the county commissioners. She and Nick Fogelsong had been trying for a year now to get them to requisition the funds for a third deputy. Bell crafted a new argument for each commission meeting. Trouble was, she saw it from the commissioners’ side as well: With limited public resources, would the advantages of an additional deputy outweigh the benefits of repairs to torn-up roads and dangerously overstressed bridges?
    â€œYeah.” Rhonda didn’t wait for an invitation to sit down on the couch across from Bell’s