The tall stack of printouts hit with a wallop. The top several pages slid to one side like a drifting snowbank, bumping up against Bell’s coffee mug. “Everything you ever wanted to know about Ava Hendricks,” Rhonda declared. It was just after eight on Monday morning. The overnight snow hadn’t mat...
Often she had trouble falling asleep, and her dreams, when they finally came, had to do their work in a hurry. Thus they were as cold and abrupt as a drive-by shooting. Drive-by dreams—that was how she thought of them. They were black-hearted marauders who hardly paused long enough to do anything...
Judge Barbour’s gavel descended with a level bang that left no echo and the atmosphere in the courtroom instantly shifted. It grew slack and disordered, unraveling into separate enclaves of coat-gathering and scarf-knotting and glove-tugging and murmured conversations. Bell rose and reached for t...
‘Eddie lives here,’ he said. ‘Last one on the right.’ A bunch of scrubby one-story houses in various stages of disrepair were scattered up and down the street. The houses looked to Carla as if they’d landed here by crazy accident, after being picked up and flung around by a storm in some other pa...
Same one, three nights running. Bell Elkins didn’t believe in dreams. Not the nighttime kind, anyway. Not the kind that came because you were restless and preoccupied, your mind unable to shed the burden of a problem and so the problem invaded your sleep, too, just as it invaded your conscious ho...
Darlene Strayer nodded. “Copy that,” she said. “So what’s second?” “Drugs.” “And third? Fourth? Fifth?” “Drugs. Drugs. And drugs.” “I’m sensing a pattern here.” Darlene smiled a quick, tight smile. She picked up her shot glass and moved it around in a small level circle, making the river-brown li...
—William Styron, “A Tidewater Morning” Jackie LeFevre was in a business that thrived on banter and raillery, on mundane observations about the fickleness of the weather or the routine injustices of the world, but she was not a talker. Her habit was to deliver a customer’s ...
Follow the latest news from Julia Keller at juliakeller.net Copyright © 2012 by Julia Keller 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 onl...