A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller (excerpt)

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A Killing in the Hills

J U L I A K E L L E R

MINOTAUR BOOKS NEW YORK

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She didn’t come here often, because there was nothing left.When she did come, it tended to be at dusk, and she would stand

and look at the bare spot, at the place where the trailer had been. It was only a few dozen yards away from Comer Creek.

You could smell the creek, a damp rotting smell that was some-how also sweet, even before you could see it. The woods around it made a tight screen, as if the branches were gripping hands in a game of Red Rover. Daring you to break through. You could hear the creek, too, its ner vous hum, especially in the early spring, when the frequent rains made the water run high and wild.

When she was a little girl, she would play on the banks of the creek in the summertime. Her sister Shirley kept an eye on her. In no time at all, Bell— her real name was Belfa but everybody called her Bell, because “Belfa,” Shirley had told her, sounded dowdy, old- fashioned, like a name you’d hear at a quilting bee or a taffy pull, what ever that was— would get astonishingly muddy. Not that she cared. The mud squirted between her toes and drifted under her fi n-gernails and stuck to her hair. Somehow it got smeared behind her ears, too, and across the back of her neck. Bell could remember how glorious it felt on those summer afternoons, playing in the mud, glaz-ing herself with it. Soft and cool. A second skin. One that made her slippery all over. Hard to catch and hold.

Safe.Or so it seemed.Everything was lost now. The scattered black sticks that had

once been the metal frame of the trailer had gone a long time ago,

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breaking apart, sinking into a bath of old ashes. The brittle gray fl akes were scooped up by the wind and carried away.

The woods should have taken over the spot by this time, covered it, the way the woods gradually came to cover everything else. But the ground under the trailer had been burned so badly that nothing would grow here. It was too scorched. It was a dead thing.

As dead as her childhood.On those rare occasions when she did come back, she would

stand at the spot while the West Virginia wilderness— green, brown, silver, blue, and black— turned, with the forward march of darkness, into a single color. Everything melted into one thing.

Once, standing there, she heard an owl. It wasn’t the lilting and musical Who- WHO Who- WHO of the owl’s cry in fairy tales, the sentinel voice of wisdom and patience. It was a horrible screeching, raw and stark. A red slash of sound.

She fl inched, trembled. This was the scene of a terrible crime, and the owl’s cry was a warning.

She did not return often, because there was nothing here. Only the past. And for that, she knew, she did not have to come back.

Because the past traveled with her.


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Part One


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5

Chapter One

The old men sat around the little plastic table in the crowded restau-

rant, a trio of geezers in shiny black jackets, mumbling, chuckling,

shaking their heads and then blowing across the tops of their brown

cardboard cups of coffee, pushing out their fl abby pink old- man lips

to do so.

Then sipping. Then blowing again.

Jesus, Carla thought. What a bunch of losers.Watching them made her feel, in every restless inch of her

seventeen- year- old body, so infi nitely superior to these withered fools

and their pathetic little rituals that she was pretty sure it showed; she

was fairly certain her contempt was half- visible, rising from her skin

in a skittish little shimmer. The late- morning sunshine fl ooding in

through the fl oor- to- ceiling glass walls made everything look sharper,

rawer, the edges more intense. You couldn’t hide a thing in here.

She would remember this moment for the rest of her life. Because

it was The line.

Because at this point, she would realize later, these three old men

had less than a minute to live.

One of them must’ve told a joke, because now his two buddies

laughed— it sounded, Carla thought, like agitated horses, it was a

kind of high- pitched, snorting, snickery thing— and they all shuffl ed

their feet appreciatively under the table. They were fl aky- bald, too,


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JULIA KELLER

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and probably incontinent and impotent and incoherent and all the rest

of it.

So what’s left? That’s what Carla was wondering. After you hit forty, fi fty, sixty, what’s the freakin’ point anymore, anyway?

Slumped forward, skinny elbows propped on the top of her very

own little plastic table, Carla used the heel of her right hand to push a

crooked slab of straight dark hair up and off her forehead. Her other

hand cradled her chin.

Her nose ring itched. Actually, everything itched. Including her

thoughts.

This place was called the Salty Dawg. It was a regional chain that

sold burgers and fries, shakes and malts, and biscuits topped with

slabs of ham or chicken and a choice of gravy: red- eye or sausage.

But it didn’t sell hot dogs, which at least would’ve justifi ed the stupid

name, a charmless bit of illogic that drove Carla crazy whenever she

came in here and slid into one of the crappy plastic chairs bolted to

the greasy fl oor. If she didn’t have to, she’d never be wasting her time

in this joint, and she always wondered why anybody ever came in here

willingly.

Then she remembered. If you were an old fart, they gave you your

coffee at a discount.

So there you go. There’s your reason to live. You get a dime off

your damned coffee.

Freaks.Carla was vaguely ashamed of the fl icks of menace that roved

randomly across her mind, like a street gang with its switchblades

open. She knew she was being a heartless bitch— but hell, they were

just thoughts, okay? It’s not like she’d ever say anything rude out loud.

She was bored, though, and speculating about the old farts was

recreational.

To get a better look, without being totally obvious about it, she let

her head loll casually to one side, like a fl ower suddenly too heavy for

its stalk, and narrowed and shifted her eyes, while keeping her chin

centered in her palm.

Now the old men were laughing again. They opened their mouths


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A KILLING IN THE HILLS

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too wide, and she could see that some of their teeth were stained a

weird greenish yellow- brown that looked like the color of the lettuce

she’d sometimes fi nd way in the back of the fridge, the kind her mom

bought and then forgot about. It was, Carla thought with a shudder of

oddly pleas ur able repugnance, the Offi cial Color of Old Man Teeth.

She didn’t know any of them. Or maybe she did. All old men

looked alike, right? And old towns like the one she lived in— Acker’s

Gap, West Virginia, or as Carla and her friends preferred to call it,

The Middle of Freakin’ Nowhere— were fi lled with old men. With in-

terchangeable old farts. It was just another crappy fact she had to deal

with in her crappy life, on her way to what was surely an even crappier

future.

Her thoughts had been leaning that way all morning long, leaning

toward disgust and despair, and the constant proximity of gross old

men in the Salty Dawg was one of the reasons why.

Another was that her mother was late to pick her up.

Again.

So Carla was pissed.

They had agreed on 11 a.m. It was now 11:47. And no sign of

good old Mom, who also wasn’t answering her cell. Carla Elkins was

forced to sit here, getting free refi lls on her Diet Coke and playing with

her french fries, pulling them out of the red cardboard ark one by one

and stacking them up like tiny salty Lincoln Logs. Building a wall.

A fort, maybe. A greasy little fort. She’d just had her nails done the

day before over at Le Salon, and the black polish— she was picking up

another french fry now, and another, and another, and another, while

her other hand continued to prop up her chin— looked even blacker by

contrast with the washed- out beige of each skinny french fry.

Her mother hated black nail polish, which was why Carla chose

it. She wasn’t crazy about it herself, but if it pissed off her mom, she’d

make the sacrifi ce.

The Salty Dawg was right down the street from the Acker’s Gap

Community Resource Center— the RC, everybody called it— which

was a long, square, fl at- roofed dump of a place with ginormous plate-

glass windows cut into three sides of the icky yellow brick. Somebody’d


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JULIA KELLER

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once told Carla that, a million years ago, the RC had been a Ford

dealership.

That was Acker’s Gap for you: Everything had once been some-

thing else. There was nothing new. Nothing fresh or different. Ever.

She had to endure her court- mandated Teen Anger Management

Workshop at the RC on Saturday mornings, 8:00 to 10:30, during

which time the counselor would go around the circle and ask each of

them what she or he was feeling. What I’m feeling, Carla wanted to

say, is that this is a lame- ass way to spend a Saturday morning. But

she didn’t. Usually, when her turn came, she just scooted a little bit

forward and a little bit back on the chair’s tiny wheels and stared at

her black fi ngernails and mumbled, I’m, um, feeling kind of mixed up inside. Her friend Lonnie Prince had told her once that adults want to

hear that kind of thing, so that they can nod and look all concerned

and show that they remember how hard it is to be a teenager, even

though it was, like, a thousand years ago.

The counselor always dismissed them right at 10:30. On the dot.

He didn’t want to spend one more minute with them than they wanted

to spend with him. Half an hour after that, her mother was supposed

to pick her up at the Salty Dawg. Her mother’s offi ce was just up the

street, in the county court house, and she was working this Saturday,

so it was a good plan.

Except that her mother was late. Again.

A shriek sliced through the room. It startled Carla, making her

fi ngers twitch, which in turn caused her to demolish one entire wall

of Fort French Fry.

Her head whipped around. A little girl and a man— surely the

kid’s father, Carla thought, because they looked alike, they both had

broad, squashed- looking noses and stick- straight, dirty- blond hair—

were sitting across from each other in a booth in the corner. The little

girl was screaming and pounding the tabletop with a pair of fat pink

fi sts, fl inging her head back and forth. The dad, meanwhile, his white

shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal a pair of aggressively hairy forearms,

was leaning across the table, clutching a chicken biscuit with most of

its yellow wrapper removed. His face was frozen in a hopeful, slightly

crazed- looking smile. The girl, though— she was four, maybe fi ve—


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A KILLING IN THE HILLS

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was ignoring him and instead just kept screaming and jerking her head

around. Threads of dirty- blond hair were stuck in the snot ejected by

her nose in two bright tubes of ooze.

The father was panicky, confused, desperate. Gotta be a divorced dad, Carla surmised. Gotta be some asshole out to bank some kid time on the weekend. He was clearly a rookie. An amateur. He made

cooing sounds, trying to do something, anything, that would stop the

ferocious yowling.

Give it up, dude, Carla thought.

She knew all about part- time dads who wanted to make up for

everything in a few short hours on a Saturday morning at the Salty

Dawg. She could’ve written a handbook. Offered tips. She could’ve

told this jerk that he’d blown it by starting to unwrap the chicken bis-

cuit for his daughter. Never, never, never. The more wounded the little

girl was, the more blindsided by the divorce, the more she’d want to

do everything by herself from now on. It was survival instinct. She

was in training. Getting ready for the day when Daddy Dearest didn’t

come around so much anymore.

Carla’s attention swiveled back to the three old men. They were

still laughing, still making those horrible old- man- laughing sounds

that came out like a whiny scritchy- scratch. One of them was using

the back of his brown- spotted hand to dab at a happy tear that was leak-

ing out of his disgusting- looking runny eye. After the dab he reared

back his head and peered at that hand, like he wondered how he’d got-

ten the wet spot on it.

She saw the three old men in their matching black jackets, laugh-

ing, mouths open, faces pleated.

She saw them savoring their little joke.

Then she saw them die.

Pock Pock PockOne shot per head.

By the time a startled Carla let go of the french fry she was

holding— she’d been rebuilding Fort French Fry from scratch— the

three old men were gone.


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JULIA KELLER

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One slumped onto the little beige tabletop, knocking over his cof-

fee. Blood and coffee, commingled, sloshed across the beveled edge.

The friend sitting to his left had been smacked out of the seat by the

force of the shot and deposited on the fl oor, faceup, his eyes and his

nose replaced by a frilly spray of pink and gray. The third old man had

rocked back in his chair, arms fl ung out to either side. A portion of

his forehead was missing.

Carla turned toward the door.

She saw— she thought she saw— the blur of an arm sweeping up

with a fl ourish, a wild arc, dramatic, like in a movie, and at the end of

the arm, a ridged chip of dark gray, an angled chunk of metal, dull gray, not shiny, and her gaze shifted and she saw— she thought she

saw— a skinny face, two tiny eyes, pig eyes, Carla thought, it looks like a pig’s eyes, pink and tiny and the arm sweeping back down again.

Another frantic blur, and the glass double doors fl apped back and

forth and back and forth in a diminishing swish. Then the doors were

still.

Now the other customers realized what had just happened.

And that’s when the screaming started.


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This is a work of fi ction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel

are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fi ctitiously.

a killing in the hills. Copyright © 2012 by Julia Keller. All rights reserved. Printed in the

United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New

York, N.Y. 10010.

www .minotaurbooks .com

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data (TK)

ISBN 978- 1- 250- 00348- 5

First Edition: November 2012

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A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller (excerpt)

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