Luke had pointed with a firm, steady hand as he’d said the name:
At the mention of his name, I could remember glancing over to see Lyle as he sat beside his lawyer. He was wearing a gray suit that was too small for him, the cuffs of his shirt extending well beyond the sleeves of his jacket, his white socks stretching up toward the legs of his pants. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I remember noticing how the cuts and scrapes Sheriff Stone had found upon them when he’d first questioned him had healed during the period between his arrest and trial. I studied his slumped shoulders, the way he kept his head slanted, as if dodging an invisible blow. His eyes shifted about, unable to light on anything in particular, until they suddenly swept over toward me and locked there, as if he were studying me now, just as I had been studying him. I looked away, concentrating on Luke, until, after a few minutes, my eyes drifted back toward Lyle. He’d sat back in his chair by then so that I could see only his face in profile, but even so I knew that his eyes were still ceaselessly moving in quick, nervous jerks.
Mr. Bailey was finishing up with Luke.
I believe that despite all the years that have passed since then, Luke still sees Lyle Gates at times when he closes those same pale blue eyes. But does he see him exactly as he saw him that day on the mountainside, a slender young man trudging wearily past Grierson’s Store, the radiant afternoon sunlight glinting in his slick blond hair? Or does he see Lyle the way I so often see Kelli Troy, as a runner racing up a torturous slope, her body plunging through a brutal undergrowth of vine and briar?
CHAPTER 8
LUKE IS NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS KELLI TROY. Sheila Cameron remembers her, and several years ago, after the small stone memorial was erected on Breakheart Hill, she broke the long silence that had enveloped her since Rosie’s death. We’d not come to the ceremony together, and I had not expected her to approach me. During the speeches that had preceded the unveiling of the memorial, Sheila had stood off by herself, listening silently, almost motionless. Over the past few years, I’d often tried to breach the stony isolation in which she lived, but she’d refused each attempt, though always politely, saying only that she was “not very social.” But on that particular day, something eased its grip on her, and at the end of the ceremony, she stepped alongside me as I made my way up the hill. She’d wrapped herself in a long coat despite the warmth of the day, and her eyes, as always, were hidden behind the dark lenses of her glasses.
“Funny how it all comes back,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I thought you’d be the one to speak about Kelli today.”
I shook my head. “I asked Luke to do it. It would have been hard for me.”
“We lost a lot when we lost her,” Sheila said. “So young.”
She was talking about Kelli, but I knew that she was talking about Rosie, too, and I remembered the moment nearly twenty years before, when I’d drawn that tiny little girl from Sheila’s womb and placed her in her mother’s arms.
We stopped at the top of the ridge, the whole town below us, its chaos of streets and twisted lanes, spires pointing into emptiness.
After a moment, Sheila turned toward me. “You know, Ben, sometimes I think there must be some kind of animal out there. It’s invisible. We can’t see it. But it devours us. It devours our lives.” She waited for me to answer, her eyes still fixed on mine, but when I remained silent, she turned back toward the valley. “But it’s the same everywhere, don’t you guess?” she asked wearily.
I remembered something said long ago. “Every place is the whole world,” I told her, quoting Kelli Troy.
IT SEEMS STRANGE THAT OF ALL THE GIRLS WHO CAME TO know Kelli during her year at Choctaw High, Sheila came closest to being her friend. Certainly it was not a friendship I could have predicted. Sheila was very much a Turtle Grove girl, the only daughter of one of the town’s oldest and richest families. She had always moved in a circle of other Turtle Grove girls, a tight-knit little group that dominated Choctaw High almost completely. They inevitably went to each other’s parties, joined each other’s clubs, stole and discarded each other’s boyfriends and finally trotted off to college together, usually to the same sorority house at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, though an occasional rebel spirit might head south to Auburn instead. Most of them were exactly what their lives had made them, gracious and well mannered, taking their considerable privileges for granted, but polite enough not to hold them over the rest of us. Even so, they were not prone to mingle with the mountain girls, or those from the rural villages that surrounded Choctaw, of which Collier, where Kelli lived, was unmistakably one.
So it struck me as rather strange when Sheila mentioned Kelli to me that morning, jauntily striding up to my locker, her books cradled in her arms.
“Hi, Ben,” she said.
Her smile was very bright, as always, and it, along with her hazel, nearly golden eyes, had dazzled most of the boys of Choctaw High at one time or another.
“Hi, Sheila.”
She leaned against the wall of lockers, almost seductively, as if she were cozying up to them. “I was just thinking about you last night,” she said, then caught the odd sound of that, laughed girlishly and added, “Well, actually, I was thinking about you and Kelli.”
This seemed no less odd to me than her opening statement. “Me and Kelli?” I said with a short laugh. “Why were you thinking about us?”
“Well, I’m planning to have a Christmas party in a few weeks, and I was thinking you and Kelli might want to come.”
I could only repeat dumbly, “Me and Kelli?”
“Well, you two are friends, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not going to be a house party-type thing,” Sheila went on. “It’s going to be a dance. Sort of formal, like a Christmas prom, with everybody all dressed up.” She waved at a couple of girls as they walked by, then turned back to me. “I’m having it at the Turtle Grove Country Club. So, the way I want it, it’s no stags, you know. Just couples.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know if you’d call Kelli and me a—”
Sheila laughed and waved her hand. “I don’t mean it has to be like
