Read Online Ghost Roll by Julia Keller - Free Book Online

things would ever get better? That if they worked hard and got an education and avoided traps like alcohol and drugs, they’d be able to find a good job and know a different kind of life? It wasn’t true. The mines were dead. The pay at the shiny fast-food places up on the interstate was laughably low, not even close to being enough to live on, much less raise a family on. The real enemy was an invisible one, a force that trapped people even more definitively than the mountains did. It was an attitude, a default setting of defeat. You could always leave; but if you stayed, you faced long odds and, more than likely, a short life.
    â€œSo that’s all we know so far,” Bell said. She twisted the paper clip back and forth until it was no longer a paper clip, but a short straight piece of steel. She didn’t have to tell him what he already knew: Truck stops were notoriously common distribution points for the pills—and for the heroin that was, perversely, cheaper than pills and thus had begun an entirely new spiral of addiction in these hills, an auxiliary misery. “The state police are being extra attentive,” she added. “Notifying local law enforcement, prosecutors, school authorities—everyone who understands the drug trade and has a stake in stopping it.”
    He fingered his tie gingerly, as if he’d just discovered it was there. “Not a good time for the bad publicity,” he said. “What with the new resort coming, I mean.”
    A Virginia-based firm that called itself Mountain Magic had recently purchased a twelve-hundred-acre parcel stretching across portions of Raythune, Collier, and Steppe counties. The plan was to build a resort to rival The Greenbrier, the historic and palatial facility in White Sulphur Springs that had hosted kings, queens, senators, presidents, and CEOs. Because no matter what else was going on with the people of West Virginia—poverty, addiction, despair—the landscape was a thing apart, a separate and unassailable fact. In the spring to come, like all the springs before it, the mountains would rise into a seamless blue sky, the massed interlocking trees on the sides of those mountains would make a solid block of spectacularly vivid green that drifted its way into your dreams, and the brown rivers would move so fast that their supple surfaces resembled the sleek back of a muscular animal in a stretch run.
    â€œOh, come on.” Bell’s response to his point was sharp and dismissive. “Won’t matter a damn. The billionaires who’re putting up money for that thing don’t care about local crime stats. They hire their own armies. Once the resort’s up and running, the place’ll be crawling with private security.” Too late, she remembered that Nick was now private security himself; her remark could be construed as a dig.
    Well, hell. He was a big boy. He could take it.
    â€œMight cut down on their bookings, though,” he said. There was no indication he’d felt insulted. “The negative press, I mean.”
    Bell shook her head. “No way. That resort won’t be connected at all with what’s going on locally. The guests’ll come and go and never set foot beyond the tennis court or the golf course or the sauna or whatever the hell else they build.”
    â€œYou don’t sound too happy about it.”
    She shrugged. “If it means new jobs—good-paying ones—I’ll be over the moon. But there’s been no word yet about how many local people they intend to hire. If they’re going to use our land, the least they can do is put our people to work.” She was getting wound up, despite herself. “This state’s been exploited long enough, don’t you think? We’ve suffered for years from absentee landlords and all of their promises. Maybe it’s time we just told them to go away and leave us alone. Go use up somebody else’s natural