The Scent of Rain and Lightning

  “When? When was this hearing?”

  “Last night in Topeka.”

  “What? Last night? Who went? Did you all go?”

  Meryl nodded, looking wary.

  “Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t you tell me? You did all this behind my back?” She was furious. All of her life they’d protected her from hearing the worst; all of her life she’d had to fight for any bit of truth and information, until finally she thought they’d loosened up and started treating her as an adult. Obviously, that still wasn’t the case. “The governor needs to see me. I want to talk to him. I want to tell him what that man did to my life. Maybe I’d make him feel some sympathy. Why didn’t you give me a chance?”

  “Mom and Dad didn’t want you to be there,” Chase said, his voice harsh. “They wanted to protect you. Dad was sure it was all for show, and he was right. The governor already had his mind made up, and there was nothing we could do to change it. They wanted to spare you.”

  “They shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have!”

  He shrugged. “Maybe not, but it’s done now.”

  She glared at him with all the force of how infuriated, helpless, and frightened she felt.

  “Don’t blame us.” He looked disgusted at the idea of it. “Put the blame where it belongs, on that kid of Billy’s. Like father, like son.” Finally, his own bottled-up rage burst out of him. “Liars, both of them!” He let his anger flow toward his brother. “Isn’t that damned coffee ready yet?”

  Bobby answered by swinging his right arm into the coffeepot.

  The force of the blow sent the pot full of water and coffee grounds flying into the metal sink, where it shattered. Chase and Meryl both jumped and Jody gasped with shock.

  Bent over the sink like a man who might throw up into it, Bobby propped himself up with his one arm. “He’s moving back,” he said, as if the words hurt and sickened him to say. “That murdering bastard who killed my brother and took Laurie is coming back here to live as if he never did anything to anybody. We can’t let this happen.”

  “Too late,” Chase said bitterly.

  Jody got up from her chair, ran to Bobby, put her arms around his thick waist and hugged up against his back. It felt good to know they were all as upset as she was. It was a mark of just how bad things really were. She had rarely seen any of them lose control; Bobby’s outburst was a welcome revelation. “It’s not our fault, Uncle Bobby,” she consoled him. This time she didn’t cry. Anger at Collin Crosby had dried her tears.

  It felt good to have someone to blame.

  “PACK A SUITCASE, JOSEPHUS,” Chase told her before the uncles left her house. He had an unlit cigarette in one hand, as if he could barely stand to wait to get outside again so he could smoke it. “You’re coming to the ranch with us.”

  “I’m not moving back there, Uncle Chase.”

  “Yeah, you are. Mom and Dad want you to.”

  They were all standing in the front foyer again, Jody and her uncles.

  She had stopped crying. Her anger at what Collin Crosby was doing to her family by getting his father out of prison had rejuvenated her, giving her back some spirit and spite.

  “But I don’t want to. I just moved in here!”

  It wasn’t only that she’d only recently moved in, it was also that she’d done so much work to the huge house to turn it into her home—sanding and polishing its original wood floors, taking down ancient draperies and putting cheerful new curtains back up in their place. She had painted and wallpapered with the help of her aunt and her grandmother. They had all given hours to dusting, washing, shopping, tossing out and replacing things. It had been, Jody hoped, a restorative time for all of them as they began to transform a mansion of bad memories into a happy and beautiful house again. With every swab of a wet sponge, Jody had felt as if she were exorcising him. She was not going to let Billy Crosby force her out of her own home a second time.

  “Do you want them to worry about you?” Chase demanded, the set of his face looking grim around his sunglasses. “Do you want them to lie awake nights thinking about how he’s only a few blocks away from you?”

  “God, Uncle Chase, that’s so not fair.”

  He shrugged. “Well?”

  She gave in to her own concern for her grandparents’ feelings.

  “All right. All right! But I’ll drive myself out there.”

  “When?”

  “When I’ve packed!”

  “Six o’clock,” he told her in a tone that brooked no further argument. “Supper. Suitcase.”

  Chase grabbed his cowboy hat off its peg and stalked out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind him. Within moments the smell of cigarette smoke wafted back inside.

  Jody turned toward her other two uncles.

  “Don’t you just want to kill him sometimes?”

  “Frequently,” Meryl said with a brief grin as he grabbed his own hat, then gave her a passing hug. “Don’t you worry. He’ll screw up. He’ll end up back in a cell where he belongs.”

  “Uncle Chase?” she managed to joke.

  Meryl laughed. “I’ll see you tonight at the ranch.”

  “I may still have questions.”

  “Anything you want to know, honey. Just ask.”

  He hurried out to his truck as if he had things to do and not enough time to do them.

  When the other two were gone, Bobby surprised Jody by asking, “How are you?”

  “Shocked,” she said, after taking a moment to consider it.

  “Are you scared?”

  That startled her. It was so unlike him to acknowledge that anybody might ever have a reason to be scared of anything. She lifted her chin. “Not in the least.” Then she admitted, “Okay, yes. It makes my heart pound just to think of ever seeing him around town.”

  “Good,” he said, surprising her even more. “You should be scared of him.”

  “Uncle Bobby! Why?”

  “Because we have no idea what he’ll do.”

  “He just got out of prison! He won’t want to get into trouble, will he?”

  “You heard Meryl. He’s Billy Crosby. Don’t expect him to have gotten any smarter. And remember that he hates us, he hates your grandparents, he hates Chase, and Meryl, and me, and probably even Belle. And I’m guessing he hates you, too.”

  “Me? But why?”

  Bobby shrugged, looking like his brother Chase when he did it, because they both had the same dismissive lift of their big shoulders. “Billy Crosby has never needed a good reason for what he does.” He stepped closer to her. “But listen to me, Jody. If there’s anybody who should be scared, it’s him. Billy Crosby should be looking over his shoulder every second of the time he’s here in Rose, because we will be watching him.” Bobby put his hat on his head. “That’s why you need to go out to the ranch until he’s gone. We don’t want to have to keep an eye on you, too.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “He won’t stay.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It won’t be comfortable for him here.”

  On his way out the door he said, “I’m sorry about your coffeepot.”

  “It’s okay, Uncle Bobby.” She smiled shakily at him. “You can buy me a nicer one.”

  “And teach you how to make a decent cup of coffee,” he said gruffly, and was gone.

  * * *

  AFTER THEY LEFT, Jody didn’t know what to do with herself.

  At first she wandered from room to room downstairs, looking at all the labor she’d put into them and regretting the need to leave them even for a day, much less for however long it took to put Billy Crosby safely away again. “Shocked” didn’t even begin to describe how she felt. Things that she had assumed were settled suddenly weren’t, and none of the reasons made sense at their deepest level. So what if none of that physical evidence held up? So what, even if the county attorney had withheld evidence from the defense attorney? So what if the local defense attorney hadn’t tried very hard? If Crosby
did it, and everybody knew he did—because of his low character and because of all the events leading up to that night—then he was still as guilty as ever and nothing about his sentencing should ever change.

  Collin Crosby.

  Furious at him all over again, Jody trudged upstairs to pack.

  When she reached the second-floor landing, she stood for a moment looking up and down the long hallway with all of its rooms and doors. As if her cowboy boots were moving of their own volition, she turned left and started walking toward the small guest room at the far end. She kept its door open at all times so the sun could shine in during the day and so she could see lights coming from the room at night.

  People wondered how she could live there, especially by herself.

  This was my home. I want it back.

  “But it’s so big,” people objected.

  “I like big,” she replied.

  She was used to it: big land and sky, big animals and cowboys, big plans for being a really good teacher and meeting a nice man and raising a family right here in this house with plenty of room for them. But first she had to tame it—both this house and her fears of it.

  Jody stepped into the doorway of the little guest room.

  She looked at the carpet without flinching.

  Her father had lain there, shot through the abdomen, blood gushing from him. She’d seen photographs. She’d read the trial transcripts. She had insisted on hearing it all, seeing it all, and learning it all, even when it meant dragging facts out of her family that believed she’d be happier not knowing, even when it meant going behind their backs to ask other people, or going on the Internet, which wasn’t much help for a crime back then. It was the only way she could walk through life without always suspecting that people were keeping dark secrets from her. She didn’t like feeling as if people were staring at her and knew things about her life that she didn’t know, so she had set out to learn all of it, or as much as she could. She knew that her dad couldn’t have survived for long after he was shot, but nobody knew if he’d been conscious or how much pain he’d felt. She prayed that he hadn’t known what happened to him.

  There was still so much that nobody knew, but at least she wasn’t the only one in ignorance. Why was her dad in the house that night? He was supposed to be in Colorado. There were unanswered questions about him, not to mention the huge gap of knowledge about her mom. Jody suspected that she had scrambled to get all the details she could about her father’s death to compensate for all she didn’t know about her mother’s fate.

  It hadn’t helped much.

  What she didn’t know about her mother ate at her, always.

  She realized there were other important things she hadn’t known, like for instance that Billy Crosby might someday return to Rose, or that it could happen this soon.

  A noise outside made Judy startle and whirl around to look down the hallway.

  There was nothing there, but she was good and spooked.

  She felt as if she had to get out of the house where his vile, contaminating presence seemed more real to her now than it ever had before. She forced herself to walk down the hall, down the stairs, to the front door, and then she ran for her truck.

  SHE WAS ABOUT TO turn the key in the ignition when a man’s voice made her jump as if somebody had stuck a gun in her ribs.

  “Hey.” Red Bosch grinned at how startled she was.

  Jody leaned back against the seat and inhaled deep sucking breaths, trying to get her heart going in a normal rhythm again. “My God, Red, don’t sneak up on me like that. You nearly gave me a coronary.”

  “Sorry.” He laughed again. “Where are you going?”

  She tapped her fingertips on her steering wheel, resisting the question.

  In the glare of midday, her lover’s face showed all thirteen of the years he had on her, but she didn’t mind that. It was merely evidence of hard work in the great outdoors, which she loved, too. Red just missed being good-looking, but he was appealing in a sexy, cowboy way. He wasn’t educated past twelfth grade and he talked with a country drawl that would have been laughed out of the movies for being excessive. But there was a sweetness about him—always had been, people said—that seemed to stem from his own easy acceptance of himself and of everybody else. He could gab with anybody and he laughed easily. Red had never had any trouble attracting women, except for the fact that there weren’t many available ones in his own county.

  Jody looked at him standing beside her truck and felt glad to see him.

  He was a relief from the angry intensity of her uncles.

  She’d known Red all of her life. He looked like comfort to her.

  They probably would never have bridged the divide of employer/employee, however—the age thing wasn’t a big deal to either of them—except for one night when she’d stopped by his house to give him a message from her grandfather. Red had handed her a cold beer and then another one, and before either of them quite knew what happened, they were staring at each other, naked in his bed, and Red was drawling, “Oh, shit, Jody, what have I done?”

  “We both did it,” she said. “Let’s do it again.”

  He had laughed, and that was the start of something good for a while.

  It just hadn’t developed beyond that easy fun for Jody, and she was pretty sure it never would. Now she knew she had to do something about it because it looked as if it had passed that point for Red. It wouldn’t be right for her to encourage him.

  “Don’t know where I’m going,” she lied.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  Red had been asking her things like that lately, demanding to know where she was and what she’d be doing. It was beginning to sound like possessiveness or jealousy, and she hated it.

  When she shrugged, he said, “You want company?”

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  “Not if they can’t find me.”

  “Are you forgetting they’re related to me?”

  “I never forget that, babe, but they don’t seem to want to get anything done today.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I tried calling a few times.”

  “Red? Did you hear what just went on in my kitchen?”

  “What?”

  “They came to tell me that Billy Crosby has been let out of prison and he’s coming back here to live.”

  “Yeah.”

  Red looked down at his boots, leaving Jody to stare at the fabric button on top of his cap. “What do you mean … ‘yeah’?”

  He met her eyes again, but with a squint, as if he found it difficult to face her all of a sudden. “I mean yeah, I know.”

  “You know? How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows by now. And …” He got a look in his eyes that she had never seen there before, as if he was wary of her, or had a guilty conscience. Jody tensed, waiting for something she had a feeling she wasn’t going to like. “I guess I may as well tell you. You’re bound to hear it eventually.” Red cleared his throat and looked away from her again. “The thing is, Jody, I kind of kept in touch with Billy.”

  She recoiled as if he had thrown a live snake into her lap.

  “You what?” Her words were quiet, but the syllables were drawn out slowly, imparting the impression that she had a warning rattle. “In prison?”

  “Yeah, in prison. There’s a reason—”

  He hadn’t heeded the warning, and she struck.

  “A reason? You slept with me, Red. In my parents’ house. In their bed. We screwed. You work for my family. You take their money. You eat at their table. And all this time you kept in touch with the man who murdered my father and did God knows what to my mother?”

  He got a confused look on his face as if he didn’t know what to say, and then Red picked the wrong thing. “You shouldn’t talk that way about what we do together, Jody. It means more to me than—”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  She threw her truck into reverse, laid her righ
t arm up on top of the bench seat, glared behind her down the long driveway, and gunned it, spraying gravel at him so he had to raise his arms to protect his face.

  Jody was so angry at Red Bosch that she drove down the Main Street of Rose faster than she should have, but not so fast that she missed spotting all three of her uncles’ trucks at Bailey’s Bar & Grill. “That’s what you were all in such a hurry to do?” she said out loud inside her truck, feeling willing to be angry at anybody right at that moment.

  At the edge of town her tires screamed around a corner and sped west toward the one place where she always felt closer to her mom than anywhere else in the world.

  IN A CERTAIN LIGHT, the Testament Rocks turned white as bleached seashells. At those times, when Jody walked into that landscape, she felt like a black dot on a white slate, as visible as a prairie dog to a hawk, as uncomfortable as if she were naked in public. It was her least favorite light at the Rocks, because it washed out all other color, all subtlety of tone, and it was blinding. Sunglasses were not enough to make it possible to look at the rocks under such light, and so she donned a cap for its additional shade.

  But being there, even like that, beat not being there on some days.

  She stuck her hands down in her back jeans pockets and squinted up to the tops of the Rocks where golden eagles nested and red-tailed hawks flew by. She wouldn’t have gone so far as to claim she experienced instant peace of mind just from looking at them, but it was true that her heart rate slowed down and so did her breathing.

  There was wind on this day, blowing bits of white dust around her.

  Dust of chalk, she thought, dust of limestone, dust of bones.

  She saw no other humans. No fossil hunters. No rock climbers. No tourists with cameras, no strangers taking potshots at beer cans or teenagers making out in their cars.

  She had the place to herself, the way she liked it best.

  After squinting at the Rocks for a few moments, she walked back to her truck, took a swig from a water bottle, and then pulled on her work gloves. They were soft and tough and they grasped her fingers like old friends that knew her well. If my uncles knew I was coming out here, they’d have made me bring along a snake hook and a pistol, she thought. But fortunately they didn’t know, and she had never seen a single snake out here anyway.