West By God

By Tyler Bell

West by God is the story of a young newspaper journalist named Adelaide sent to report on a high-profile murder in the remote (and fictional) town of Targrady, West Virginia. Once she gets there, she discovers the case in question is anything but open-and-shut, and quickly finds herself neck-deep in a mystery that could sink the entire town. Com

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Henlo Press
• Release date: Jan 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962019033

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West By God

By Tyler Bell

Edited by Samantha Ricketts and Chandler Haun

Cover Art by Yui Breedlove

Published by The Henlo Press

Copyright © 2023 by The Henlo Press

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2023

ISBN-979-8-9866027-9-0

The Henlo Press

P.O. Box 1694

Ashland, KY 41105

www.thehenlopress.com

Cover Art by Yui Breedlove

www.fiercelyyui.com

For Sam

As Ever

As Always

Chapters

Before

Best Laid Plans

Hate Crime

The Photograph

Big News

Country Roads

The Circus

Monsters in Cages

Star of Bethlehem

The Family Burr

The Shadows in the Fog

Leads

The Alibi

The Accused

The Fetid Queen

Cornelia

Notice of Termination

Crushing a Cocoon

Exodus

In Time

After

Acknowledgments

I think I started writing the story that would become West By God just a few days after losing the last job I’d ever have as a journalist. It was my sort of break-up letter to journalism written at the rotten end of a short career in print news. And, as such, the original pages were a touch too raw for healthy consumption by the discerning reader. To that end, I’ve got a lot of people to thank for all the miles of red pen that helped wrangle this thing into its current form.

To Sam, as ever, as always, first and foremost, you made it happen. You’re the first person who ever really pushed me to finish something, and you’re the last opinion I ever need to hear when it comes to my creative endeavors. We were dating when I started writing West By God all those years ago, and now we’re married and this fucker’s finally going to hit a few shelves. I love you like crazy, and I can’t wait for you to read the next one. And the next... And the next…

To my editors at Henlo, Courtney and Chandler, thank you so much for taking a chance on this thing; I hope it pays off. Your criticisms and concerns with the early manuscript helped me knock off the mud in a way I never thought possible. It was like finding a lightswitch to the rest of the fixtures in a half-lit room. You helped me illuminate portions of the story I hadn’t yet considered and gave me a chance to clean up some messes I hadn’t even noticed.

To Yui Breedlove, one of my oldest and dearest friends, I can’t believe we’ve come all this way from trading doodles and trashy Inu-Yasha fan-fiction between classes at Oak Hills. You were a wonderful burst of inky darkness in the endless beige hell of high school, and I honestly couldn’t imagine anyone from that era I’d enjoy sharing this with more than you

Your watercolors are the prismatic, wandering ghosts that dance the black and white halls of my stories, and I look forward with anticipation to the works to come.

Thank you, penultimately, to all the friends, family, and fans of the Westside Fairytales who have constantly urged me to write honestly, to write viciously, and to write more, more, more. You are every gust of wind beneath my sails and I owe the lot of you more than I can ever repay, though hopefully this fictional sojourn into the West Virginia hills will in some small way suffice.

And finally, thank You, Little Visitor. You who are taking the time to creep about my pages. Whose nose is even now tipped skyward, tasting the air for the faintest tinge of blood. I implore you to imagine now the softest rustle of leaves and the ringing of the Night Bell. She is in Her woods and awaiting you. Tread lightly, drink deeply, and enjoy.

Before

The sky is dancing, fire and electric, bursting white and gold and green against the bruised purple of midnight. Between her and that sky is the tangerine stain of headlights painting her naked, broken body. Between her and the distant thump of heady music, the rolling crack of the fireworks, is the sound of the car engine and the two men arguing over her. Deeper still, the mental noise of pain in her body. The silent scream of broken bones and ruptured organs. The last gentle pulse of a broken, dying heart.

She knows these shadows standing over her in the wet warmth of this midsummer night. Even though they loom black and grow darker still with every new burst of fireworks, she knows them. She knows their shapes and she knows their intentions. She would even talk to them if her jaw wasn’t broken and her lung wasn’t punctured by a rib. She would tell them that she’s about to die, but they’re only killing themselves.

She feels the thump of their boots in the high, warm West Virginia grass cradling her broken body and then the tightness of the cord they loop around her neck. Then they are dragging her and hoisting her by her throat. The cord tightens into a sunburst of heat and light, and in her last moment, her eyes are for only the flashing sky beyond the scared, shivering men watching her die from beside the old truck.

Then she is free.

They stand and watch until the killing’s done. The pain on the broken child’s face is so extreme that the sudden softening of death gives both men chills. Together they look from the body to the hill, where the fireworks are even now fading, giving way to the steady pulse of electronic music and the shoreline roar of dozens of young voices.

The tall grass of the dead churchyard ticks its way back to standing as the men move through it, picking over the flecks of blood and the muddy sockets of boot prints and body prints to clean up any possible leavings. Lights burst through the trees above them, and they abandon the search, rushing to the vehicles that had brought them to that place.

These killers are long gone by the time this other truck makes it to the bottom of the hill. The driver moves—drunk and overly cautious—through the hidden path beside the old churchyard to the road. His lights dance over the worn, white clapboards of the abandoned church and the tendrils of high grass beside the path, grazing the swaying child’s corpse without fully revealing it. That strange piece of fruit only newly come ripe for picking, fatly bruised and grown thick with flies in the fog of the following dawn.

1

Best Laid Plans

Adelaide forced herself not to collapse onto the floor of the men’s room. She turned up her nose at the acidic stink of the liquid welling between the small gray and white tiles beneath her. Men shuffled around outside her stall in heavy boots. They carried the oil and ink smell of the press in with them, which barely hid the cutting ammonia reek that seemed set into the grout. If any of them noticed her sensible nude pumps beneath the stall door, they didn’t let on.

If there is a kind God in heaven, let him strike this sinner dead and be done with it, Adelaide mumbled. She’d chosen this bathroom because it was isolated on the third floor of the building and usually empty—save for at shift change. Tears blurred her eyes and dripped down her nose. The thought of them mixing with the thin scrim of bile covering the toilet water made her gag, and she heaved violently. This time the meandering pressmen didn’t let her pains go unnoticed.

Hey lady, one of them said. She heard the soft rap of knuckles on the stall door. You alright in there? Adelaide glanced down past her knees—she’d hunched in a sort of half-squat to keep her slacks from dipping into the slurry covering the tile—and saw heavy black boots smeared with crusted yellow, magenta, and cyan stripes. There was probably black in there too; she just couldn’t see it.

I don’t think I’m dying, Adelaide tried to say. Instead, she said something like yurp and burped a mouthful of battery acid into the toilet bowl. She stood and placed a hand on the toilet paper dispenser, a stamped-metal number that’d seen its best days in the ’70s. Everything in that building had seen its best days in the ’70s.

She pulled a strip of two-ply free of the roll and dabbed at her lips. A strand of limp brown hair floated into her eyelashes, and she batted it away and worked up a mouthful of saliva to swish around her mouth. When her teeth felt passably clean, she spit in the toilet and turned to the color-stained boots.

I’m fine, she said, but a girl could use a cigarette. She shook her head as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Who the fuck talked like that? Her tongue had a way of outrunning her teeth at times, a habit she’d formed as a fourth-grade bookworm and failed to break. The boots didn’t seem to notice or care. Instead, she heard the familiar pat-pat-pat of hard-pack cellophane on a palm.

You got a light? the boots asked.

’Fraid not, Adelaide said. She heard a lighter click, and a lit cigarette popped up over the top of the door, followed by a broad puff of gray smoke. She took the cigarette from the thickly gloved fingers and looked at the filter. An indirect kiss. She wondered if Boots was good-looking and then thought of Dan and immediately felt bad. She took a long drag and shivered when the nicotine hit. A ray of sunlight bit through the haze of nausea.

Thanks, she said.

No problem, Boots replied. She saw his toes shift. You might want to stay in there for a bit, though. McIlheny’s got his dick out in here… The third-floor lavatories had showers for the pressmen to clean off after their shifts, which would just be ending now that the afternoon edition was out on the trucks. Of course, Adelaide normally used the women’s restroom on the second floor by the newsroom, but she’d been fighting some vicious stomach flu for days and didn’t want another overly concerned coworker hearing her evacuate her stomach for the third time today.

I’m fine right here… for a little while at least, Adelaide said. And she was. She nipped at the cigarette, taking it down in curt little puffs while the men shuffled about on the other side of the stall door. The showers turned on and then turned off, and the pressmen shared ribald jokes and their plans for Labor Day Weekend. She almost had a feeling they were putting on a sort of show on her behalf, despite none of them outright acknowledging her existence.

The last of them filed out the door just as she was finishing the cigarette. The nausea had passed, and she stood in the stall with her oversized brown leather bag hanging from her elbow, cigarette in that same hand. Her free hand plucked at the broad white belt that rested on her hips over her green cotton dress. She hated dresses, but that was the company policy for women. At least her outfit matched her nails today—she painted them monthly at best—but nobody had noticed because she’d spent two of the four hours she’d been at the office puking in a third-floor toilet.

Adelaide stepped out of the stall when she was sure the men (and McIlheny’s dick) were gone, and then walked to the one sink with a mirror hanging over it. Her face was still there—she hadn’t puked it off, thankfully. She prodded at the slightly puffy, dark rings beneath her eyes, ruefully flicking her attention between each hazel iris and wondering if this flu was related to the sporadic insomnia she’d been suffering from for weeks.

Something snapped in the locker room, and all the main overhead lights clicked off at once. Adelaide flinched, yelped, and then felt her face flush as she realized it was just one of the building’s automatic light switch timers going off in what should have been an empty room. She sighed and touched her fingers to her chest, looking back to the mirror. Her face was still there, but alien now and hollowed out by the diminished lighting. The planes of her forehead, her cheeks, shone with the red light from the door, but her eyes were fully black. Gone, save the slightest crimson pinpricks dancing off the wetness of her cornea.

This other Adelaide seemed to pulse, thudding to an unknown rhythm as her vision tried to adjust to the dark. She felt that sickness in her stomach again, bitter and burning, and she leaned over the sink out of caution. She found her eyes locked to this half-formed apparition as she moved closer to the glass, warping into something less recognizably her, but somehow more clear. Like a half-remembered dream, this mimic Adelaide’s form decayed further, the shadow of her mouth creeping lower, swallowing her chin, reaching down to her chest, and opening further, further…

Adelaide sucked in a breath and left the men’s room in a hurry, slamming the door behind her in a foolish protest against her own imagination. The echo of her childish act of defiance seemed to linger in the white cinderblock corridor as Adelaide made the long, lonely walk to the stairs.

Adelaide dropped her bag in its customary spot beside the yellowed plastic monitor of her old Pavilion 6635. She pressed a button on the keyboard to shake the ancient machine awake and did a cursory maintenance check on the bank of scanners beside her desk, restarting one that had turned off by itself. It squawked back to life, and tinny voices resumed the routine back-and-forth of dispatch chatter. Satisfied the afternoon was back on the rails (and no longer feeling like she might puke at any moment), Adelaide grabbed her coffee cup and left in search of fresh brew and the afternoon paper.

Adelaide said hi to a few of the girls in the tightly packed production section and grabbed the Saturday edition. The paper was so fresh from the press the pages were deeply warm, like a basket of rolls right out of the oven. She ran her fingers over the thatched lines of text and the almost imperceptible dots that made up the massive centerpiece photo, a nameless child placing half a slice of bread directly into the mouth of a duck at the edge of the Kanawha River. Adelaide had always harbored a notion that warm paper felt like skin, and turning that first page was like brushing the hair from an old friend’s eyes.

She walked the length of the nearly empty office to the tiny kitchenette area that made up the corner of the sports department. Bryce Connelly, the high school sports editor, was sitting in the large cubicle he shared with the department editor, Ben Benji Smitts. Connelly heard Adelaide set her coffee mug on the counter and peeked over his own copy of the Saturday edition.

Adelaide, Bryce said. She raised her eyebrows. Are you filling out a college football bracket this year?

Not if Retton is going to whine about losing again, she said, crossing her arms. Retton, the college sports editor, was convinced that Adelaide either had some special line to God when it came to sports brackets or was straight up cheating. Adelaide knew next to nothing about sports—by her own admission—and always filled out her bracket by just writing names in spaces. In seven years at the Indi-Star, she’d never failed to accumulate the best picks despite not even knowing who was on the teams.

Retton always whines about losing, Bryce said. Bryce was one of the paper’s oldest employees and had known Retton going on 25 years. You know his own son beat his high school rushing record down in Beckley? Spent the boy’s entire first year in college talking about how much better ‘shoe technology’ had gotten since the 1970s. I was at one of those Thanksgivings. It was terrible. They both laughed.

Listen, kid, he said, looking around the room. A pet name like that might rankle her from anybody else, but Bryce called everybody kid. If you’re not going to do your own, I’ll throw you fifteen bucks to put mine together.

That’s five more dollars than the prize, Bryce, Adelaide said, raising an eyebrow.

Victory is its own reward, he said, leaning forward. And I really just want Retton to think everybody’s smarter than him. Adelaide laughed, and he went back to his paper.

She turned to the coffee machine and cursed under her breath when she turned the knob above the spigot. A thin line of cold sludge dripped into her cup, barely enough to cover the bottom. She sighed, set the mug aside, and went about refilling the coffee machine. The afternoon crew trickled in as she pulled down the dented can of Folgers and refilled the plastic filter and the water reservoir. Then she flipped the glowing orange switch to on and leaned back against the counter with her paper.

The cover story was about flooding in the Kanawha River. A spate of late-summer storms had pushed the river to just two feet shy of flood height. The kid feeding the duck in the picture was standing on a retaining wall that usually dropped to a rocky breakwater ten feet down. The cutline advised readers that the boy’s mother was standing just out of frame to catch him if he lost balance. Photo credit: Ward Hughes, senior photographer.

Adelaide heard the sports department door open and then a Hey, Addy, from Grip Harrison, the paper’s editor-in-chief. Grip’s real name was Charlie, but nobody had called him that since he earned the nickname playing wide receiver for Marshall. He was a big man, dwarfing Adelaide by a full foot, and a strict diet of fast food and newsroom coffee had done away with his college physique. He had to stand a full two feet away from Adelaide to keep from bumping her with the massive belly jutting through his unbuttoned sports coat.

He pointed to the percolator.

How’s that coming? he asked.

Just refilled it a second ago, Adelaide said. There might be half a cup now.

He wiped a handful of sweat off his face. Grip never really stopped sweating. A collection of rummage sale blazers kept the yellowed sweat rings on his shirts from showing, or at least he seemed to think so. When the air conditioning had gone out in the office last summer, he had started sweating through those too.

No big, Grip said. His eyes widened and he stepped aside as Ward Hughes pushed himself into the room. Ward was sweating harder than Grip. Four cameras hung from his neck on leather and nylon straps, each sporting lenses of a different focal length. Ward had been at the paper longer than Adelaide had been alive. Everybody in the city knew him, and more than half had been photographed by him at some point. He mumbled a quick hello and said something about a boat. Then he vanished into the shadows of the photography studio at the far end of the sports department.

Hey, you’re still going down to Targrady for that white supremacist thing Monday, right? Grip asked. He set a single massive hand on the counter by the coffee machine, and Adelaide couldn’t tell if he was trying to look inquisitive or steady himself. The man’s gut shifted over his belt with an audible rustling of fabric.

No, Adelaide said. It’s Labor Day. Can’t say how they messed that up, but they did. She shrugged. I’m going to drive down there Monday night and stay through Wednesday. It ought to be interesting.

Grip nodded and touched the barrel of the coffee machine with the back of his hand, feeling for how high the hot liquid had climbed. About halfway. He stuck his mug under the spigot, and fresh coffee spilled into the cup. He and Adelaide used the same Indi-Star mug everybody got when they started at the paper. His was slightly older and had red scrollwork instead of blue, but they said the same thing.

WEST VIRGINIA’S ONLY PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING NEWSPAPER.

The quote was a stab at their competitor, the Charleston Tribune, with which they shared offices, a press, and a hallway. Interactions between them and their sworn rival were amicable enough, but the editorial pages descended into pissing matches, especially during elections. The Tribune leaned left and the Indi-Star leaned right—not that it mattered much. All but a handful of staff at both papers were registered Democrats.

Okay, Grip said. He tested the coffee and hissed like an opossum when it burned him. Adelaide filled her own mug and breathed in the steam. Grip kept talking while she stirred in packets of creamer and sugar from the corrugated glass shaker behind the sink. We’re going to send Corrigan down with you for photos, he continued. Jason Corrigan was one of the Indi-Star’s junior photographers. He was a good shot and a former Army Ranger. And, unlike Grip, he’d kept at his exercises and still had a flat stomach and broad shoulders into his early 30s. Is there room for him at the hotel?

Adelaide stirred her coffee and crossed her arms so the cup was just below her face. She took a sip and shook her head.

Not unless he wants to sleep on the floor, she said. There’re only a dozen rooms in town and they’re all booked. Everybody wants to take a shot at the ‘Nathan Forrest of West Virginia.’ She took another sip of coffee. It’s not like he needs to be there the whole time. I’m going down to talk with the locals and get a feel for the town. It’ll be easier for him to drive down the day of the hearing to file that afternoon. Targrady’s only a couple hours away.

Well, uh, if you’re going around to interview locals, it’ll be good to have a… a photographer by your side, Grip said, just in case.

Just in case I… need pictures? Adelaide cocked an eyebrow at him. He cleared his throat and scratched at the hairs in the folds at the back of his neck. He still sported a young athlete’s crew cut, trimmed to the same specifications he’d given since his teens. Now it just made his head look larger and somehow pointier, reminding Adelaide of a scantily forested mountain with a flat summit.

Yes, he said. Well. It’s also good to have a… dammit, Adelaide, we can’t have you running around down there…

Without a chaperone? she asked, setting the coffee down on the counter and re-crossing her arms. She thumbed her wedding band. She’d had this same conversation with her husband, Dan, two days ago and maybe a hundred times since she’d started reporting in her early 20s. They treated her like she hadn’t been under five-and-a-half feet tall and less than 125 pounds her whole life. Like she didn’t know the world was dangerous.

Like she didn’t have the guile to keep herself safe.

"Without a partner, Addy, Grip said, falling back on her nickname. Everybody used it. She didn’t mind. Somebody to watch your back and… he dropped his voice a few notches as Ward walked back past them through the sports department toward the newsroom. To watch your back and… help you… illustrate your story."

Adelaide’s lips flattened out as she cocked her head to the side, trying to think of a nice way to tell her boss to go fuck himself and failing to come up with a winner. She went on dangerous assignments all the time, mostly to poverty-stricken sections of the city to cover shootings and fires and the myriad other crimes that came through the scanner.

She had to admit, she had some apprehensions about heading down south, where the downturn in coal extraction had sunk the entire region into a decades-long depression. Whole towns just shrank up and disappeared. The poverty down there was far worse than in the state’s capital city, and living conditions in some areas were basically third-world.

Still, Adelaide told herself, that didn’t make those people less human, or any less deserving of press coverage or people’s attention, which she believed with a conviction bordering on the religious. She decided to make the situation as difficult as possible for Grip.

Well, if you’re going to send a photographer down, can I get Ward? she asked, knowing full well that was out of the question. Ward was the only photographer at the paper who’d worked extensively in the southern part of the state. He’d done a lengthy photo essay on prescription pill addiction in rural West Virginia a few years back that’d gotten national play and even won him some awards. If Grip wanted good, front-page art from a multi-day assignment, he’d send Ward. But, if he wanted to keep the mostly Black residents of a poor southern West Virginia coal town from bothering his cute little brunette reporter, he’d send Corrigan.

I, uh, don’t think Ward is the best photographer for this assignment, Grip said. Adelaide pursed her lips and gave him a slow, knowing nod. I think he’s got, um, a few assignments Tuesday anyway.

Oh, Adelaide said. Are you sure? We could ask him real quick.

No, Grip said in a sort of choking snort. "No, that’s not necessary. Corrigan’s good for this assignment. And I already had him clear his calendar. He’ll head down there with you Monday and he’ll sleep in his car if he has to. Capiche?"

Sure, boss, Adelaide said, giving him a terse smile. Whatever you say. She picked her coffee back up and took a sip. It had cooled past her preference.

Great, Grip said. He leaned forward and gave her a convivial slap on the shoulder, jostling her so hard coffee sloshed out of the cup and into her face and nose. She leaned forward just in time to keep it from getting on her dress.

Adelaide glared up at Grip, awkwardly bent forward with coffee dripping off her chin. He stared back at her wide-eyed, said nothing, and then quickly turned and walked out of the sports department. Adelaide looked around and saw Bryce’s chubby face peering at her over his newspaper. The paper slowly rose back into place and she saw his shoulders shaking as he tried not to laugh out loud.

Fuck me, Adelaide said, finishing the last swig of coffee in a single gulp, setting down the cup, and trying to blot herself clean with the cheap napkins left by the sink. Unable to keep it in any longer, Bryce dropped his paper and started laughing. When her glaring at him only made him laugh harder, Adelaide broke down and smiled.

2

Hate Crime

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