Free Evening Street by Julia Keller Page A

with every step. The bar’s only virtue was its location, halfway between Acker’s Gap and wherever it was that Darlene was heading.
    So what was the actual purpose of this rendezvous, which had come about as the result of Darlene’s phone call two days ago?
    Bell had no idea. She was letting Darlene run things. It was her show. Her choice of venue. Bell had indulged her opening question—“What’s the number one problem that prosecutors face in this area?”—even though they both knew what Bell’s answer would be.
    It was always the same. Prescription drug abuse and its following swarm of illegal activities had upended life in the hills of Appalachia, turning ordinary people into addicts, and addicts into criminals. Unlike meth, unlike heroin or cocaine or molly or all the other sexy-sounding, forbidden substances that people pictured when they heard the word “drugs,” pain pills had ushered in their very own, very special version of hell.
    â€œAsked you the same thing the last time we talked,” Darlene said. “Four years ago, remember? You gave me the same answer.”
    â€œThings stay pretty consistent around here.” Bell raised her own glass. “Consistently hopeless.” She smiled as if she were making a joke, which they both knew was not the case. Then she set the glass back down again, also without drinking from it. The liquid in her glass was clear: Tanqueray and tonic. The dark stuff in Darlene’s was Wild Turkey. But the differences between these two women went far beyond their choice of drinks-they-weren’t-drinking.
    Bell and Darlene had been classmates at Georgetown Law. During the subsequent two decades, Darlene became a federal prosecutor based in Northern Virginia, and had handled, over the years, the kinds of major criminal cases that landed her unsmiling, this-is-business face in photographs on the front page of The New York Times alongside the equally grim mugs of the attorney general and the FBI director. Bell was the prosecuting attorney for Raythune County, West Virginia. The closest she’d ever gotten to the front page of the Times was when she managed to dig up a copy in rural West Virginia and read it over her biscuit-and-gravy breakfast.
    Oddly, as Bell had found herself musing now and again over the years, anyone who’d known them back in law school would have expected each woman to fulfill the other one’s fate. Both had grown up poor in rural areas—Bell right here in Raythune County, Strayer in Barr County—and yet it was Belfa Elkins who had seemed destined for a glittering career in a big city, surrounded by tall buildings and knotted traffic and a magisterial sense of importance, while Darlene Strayer was the misfit, the shy, slightly awkward and even somewhat gauche girl who was never able to shed the small-town veneer of earnestness and yearning. Her clothes were never quite right; her hairstyle was always a few years out of date. She’d talked endlessly about returning to her hometown and using her law degree to help the people there escape the poverty and hopelessness that engulfed them.
    Dang. Just look at us now, Bell thought, glancing across the battered wooden booth at the woman who, once again, had lifted her glass in order to not drink out of it.
    Darlene was the one in the cool black suit. The one who owned the elegant Massachusetts Avenue town house along Embassy Row and the Sanibel Island condo. The one whose life was as smooth as a fitted sheet.
    Bell was the one in the jeans and turtleneck sweater. The one who lived in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, in a crumbling stone house built more than a century and a half ago. The one whose life was as rumpled as that same sheet, after a passel of rowdy kids has used the bed as a trampoline.
    It was as if, late at night just after graduation from Georgetown, they’d met in some secret location and agreed to swap ambitions. And