The Scent of Rain and Lightning

  “Come on, Jody. I’m not leaving unless you do.”

  She thought about staying, on the chance of getting a look at Billy Crosby, but the only defensive weapon she had with her was her backpack. “I find it really hard to believe he’d make a special trip just to look at the scenery,” she said, with an edge of sarcasm.

  “Maybe not. I’m just tellin’ you what he told me.”

  “Criminals like to return to the scenes of their crimes, though.”

  “Babe.” He shook his head at her. “Come on.”

  “Go on ahead,” she said, working up to her feet. “I’ll follow you into town.”

  Appearing satisfied with that, Red turned to go, but she stopped him.

  “I’m not saying I believe you.”

  “You believe me they didn’t give him a drunk test, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I mean, I guess. I’ll find out for sure from Uncle Meryl.”

  “Do that. Do you believe me when I say he couldn’t have done it?”

  “I don’t know what I believe right now, Red! But I do believe that you believe that.”

  He let out a breath of relief at that admission from her.

  She made it better by adding, “I’m sorry I didn’t let you explain.”

  Red made a gesture that brushed away hurt feelings. “Not a problem.” And then suddenly he was scrambling up the rocks to where she sat, using his bare hands and the toes of his boots to get to her.

  “Wha—” she started to say, when he planted a kiss on her lips.

  Then he plunged down the slope again, making her hold her breath for fear he’d break his neck. Once on the ground, he kept moving. When Red was halfway to his truck, he turned back to yell, “You’re coming, right?”

  “I promise!” she yelled back at him.

  Jody stared at the back of his truck until it was well on the way out.

  It was strange to think of Red, when he was only sixteen, being so intimately involved with what happened that night and the next day. He’d been right there in the house with Billy, and he’d been there when the sheriff showed up in the morning. It must have been a lot for a kid like him to take in, Jody thought. Maybe he had devised his theory about Billy’s drinking because it was too frightening to think he’d been in the house with a murderer. Or maybe Red couldn’t bear to wonder if he might have stopped Billy and prevented it all from happening. What if he hadn’t picked Billy up? What if he hadn’t taken him home? Could that have changed anything? And then on top of everything, he’d gone to work full-time for the family of the murdered man and missing woman.

  Breath test or no, there were all sorts of reasons he could be wrong.

  But what if he was right …

  Almost everything in her resisted the idea. And yet …

  Come what may, I have to know what happened to my mom.

  Jody stood up on the haunches of the Sphinx, shaded her eyes and looked in every direction as far as the huge rock formation would allow. Only the scenery at her back remained blocked from her view.

  Why do I keep coming here for searching and solace?

  With a catch in her breath, she thought, Because it is huge and solid and it changes so slowly. Unlike her own life, with its devastating, breathtaking alterations, this landscape shifted minutely over centuries, its dust sloughing off of these rocks no more dramatically than cells shed by her own skin. That made it comforting, even while it was also painful because she mysteriously felt so close to her mother here.

  She sat down again, feeling a little stunned by her epiphany.

  After a bit, she slid on her butt back down to the ground.

  Again, she paused to look into the distance, and had another stunning thought: What if this commutation of Crosby’s sentence is opportunity rather than disaster? What if it shifts all the evidence, bringing a new truth to the surface like wind moving the dirt around here at the Rocks?

  After a few moments she trotted back to her truck, feeling as if something within her had both opened and focused, like a long-slumbering dinosaur waking up to turn its eyes toward dinner.

  THE NEWLY ALERT FEELING lasted until she reached the edge of town.

  There, Jody saw a rough, hand-lettered sign:

  go back where you belong in jail!

  A frisson of instinctive, unstoppable, vindictive pleasure shot through her, bullying her epiphanies out of the way and letting all the pain and fury of the past twenty-three years pour in again. The bulk of the evidence still pointed in one direction. She’d heard Red, himself, suggest that Billy Crosby was more dangerous now than when he’d gone to prison.

  She sped past the sign, nodding her heartfelt agreement with it.

  BEFORE RUNNING INSIDE to stuff a suitcase she didn’t want to pack, Jody grabbed the green backpack she had thrown onto the seat beside her in her rush from Testament Rocks. It wasn’t any heavier, because Red Bosch had distracted her from searching.

  She unzipped it. A mildew smell wafted up to her nose.

  Inside, she saw a woman’s scarf—navy blue and yellow with a pattern of keys and locks. There was also half of a rat-tail comb—the business half—and a single clasp earring with a reddish stone in its center.

  Once inside her house, she decided to throw away the broken old comb, because who could ever possibly remember if such a thing had belonged to her mother? She chose to keep the scarf and earring, though, and ran into the kitchen, where she washed off the jewelry until the fake stone glowed. She took one of her own earrings out of the hole in her ear and tried on the found earring, crying “Ow!” when her fingers slipped and allowed the clamp to pinch her lobe.

  “How do women ever wear these things?”

  After carefully taking it off again, she dropped it into her shirt pocket, put her own back on again, and proceeded to wash the scarf with dishwashing liquid. She rinsed it out, wrung it as dry as possible, shook it and slapped at it to get some wrinkles out, and then walked it out onto the back porch, where she laid it on top of a railing, weighted down a corner with a flowerpot, and left it to dry in the sun and the breeze. Then she raced upstairs and headed back down to the smallest guest room at the far end of the second floor. She moved fast this time, to keep the shivers at bay.

  Inside the room, she opened the closet door.

  There, piled in a heap, was the rest of her collection of backpacks.

  It was a collection of a couple dozen packs in which she’d gathered objects from the rocks over many years. Some were crammed full, others held only a few things.

  She knew it was strange, maybe even crazy.

  She could only guess how it would look to anybody who happened upon it, which was why she had never shown her stash to anybody. It was why she stored them in this room—because nobody in her family ever wanted to enter here. They could barely tolerate the idea that she did. Prior to moving in, Jody had stored her treasures in various places like hollow tree trunks or old wells, often having to shift them elsewhere. But now she had what she figured was a permanent hidey-hole for backpacks and Christmas presents.

  As she closed the door on them, she remembered what a poet had written about “the quivery earth,” a phrase she had never forgotten. The ground in Rose had gone all quivery on her this day—dirt and rock turning without warning to gelatin that wobbled under her boots. If she lived in San Francisco on top of a fault line, she couldn’t have felt any more shaky. Foundations were cracking and giving way—her trust in Billy Crosby’s prison sentence, and now her belief in how much he deserved it …

  Red had to be mistaken, that’s all there was to it.

  Jody shook off her doubts. There was too much evidence.

  Billy had to have done it. No one else was ever suspected, and the idea of those strangers driving back to take that kind of revenge was nonsense. How would they even have known where her father lived, and why would they have done such a thing in such a storm?

  “They wouldn’t,” she told herself decisively, and went to pack.

>   As she tossed underwear into a suitcase, the resentment she felt about having to go back to the ranch eased a little, and she found herself feeling glad to be going. If there was anywhere in the world that put firm ground beneath her boots, it was High Rock Ranch, where her grandparents ruled. She wanted to be with them, where her life felt solid, familiar, and reassuring.

  Before she left the second floor, Jody went to the guest room a third time.

  Standing in the doorway, she stared at the room where her father had died.

  “We’ll get him back in prison, Dad. Don’t you worry.”

  How that could happen she did not know, although finding out what he did to her mother could do it.

  At the last minute she remembered to grab the scarf from the porch.

  As she lifted the flowerpot off it, she felt chilled again and looked up to see if clouds had been blocked by the sun. But no, they hadn’t. The chill was another inner one. She stared all around the backyard. There. Her father’s truck was parked there the morning Annabelle found him. There. Crosby’s truck was supposed to be parked behind the garage, but it wasn’t. Instead, it was lodged in a streambed with a bloody yellow dress inside. There. That path around the house led to the basement door where Annabelle and a neighbor—Samuel Carpenter, who still lived next door—had to enter because Laurie had the other doors locked, and nobody knew why she did that, either. Was it the storm that scared her? Had Billy tried to get in the house earlier?

  Feeling spooked again, Jody went back inside.

  She had to rummage around several kitchen drawers before she located them, but she finally found the old house keys. She put them in the same pocket that held the earring and then went around the perimeter, pressing old button locks that had not been used except when the big house stood empty. This is silly, she told herself, but she locked up anyway.

  IN HER TRUCK, Jody used her cell phone to call the ranch.

  Sometimes she wondered how her life might be different if her mother or father had owned cell phones. What if they could have called for help even though their land lines were dead? Now and then, when her phone rang and there was nobody there and she didn’t recognize the number, she wondered if it was her mom calling. It was crazy to think that, she knew, but the flash of hope came to her anyway.

  When the soft, steady voice of her grandmother answered, “High Rock Ranch. This is Annabelle Linder speaking,” it had a greater calming effect on Jody than mere landscape ever could. They always answered phone calls like that at the ranch, because all of their business was conducted there alongside their personal lives. In her mind’s eye Jody saw the familiar figure of her father’s mother. If today was like most days in the spring and summer, Annabelle would be wearing a pair of her favored Capri pants, with a soft cotton shirt worn loose over them—to hide the tummy that only she could see—and sandals. She only put on cowboy boots these days when she donned blue jeans for riding her horse. Her hair, a beautiful silver—which it had turned after her son’s murder—was always cut very short so she didn’t have to think about it.

  “Hi, Grandma.” She dropped her voice to a gentle tone. “Are you and Grandpa okay?”

  “We will be as soon as we see you coming up the road.”

  Her grandmother wasn’t given to laying guilt trips on people—that was the job of her sons—so Jody took her statement at face value as a simple statement of truth. She also took it as an example and held back her urge to lay a guilt trip on her grandparents for not taking her with them to see the governor. It was done. This was awful for them; she would not make it worse.

  “I’m just leaving. Do you need me to pick up anything for you?”

  “Child, I do. I have enough milk to mash the potatoes, but not enough for gravy.”

  “Oh, no, not that!” Jody teased. “Uncle Bobby can’t live without gravy.”

  “I think his veins run with it.” Even under these circumstances, there was humor in her grandmother’s reply. “That can’t be good, can it?”

  Jody thought that if a person didn’t know her grandmother well, they’d never suspect from her voice on the telephone that anything was troubling her. It was only in person, where you could see her expressive face, that a stranger might get a glimpse of pain or trouble.

  Jody said, “One day science will discover that your gravy cures cancer.”

  “In that case, I’d better take out a patent on it.” There was a smile in the warm voice. “Pick up two half gallons, please?”

  Her granddaughter knew without asking to get two-percent milk. “I’ll do it.”

  “How are you, dearest?”

  Jody’s throat closed on tears for a moment and she waited until she could talk. “Let’s see.” She cleared her throat. “I’m stunned. Confused. Sad. Pissed off. That about covers it, I think.”

  “Yes,” Annabelle said gently. “That would about cover it.”

  “I’ll be out as soon as I can get there, Grandma.”

  “If you run into your uncles, tell them to be on time for supper unless they want cold fried chicken.”

  The words “fried chicken” made Jody’s stomach rumble with hunger.

  “I’m pretty sure I can smell it from here.”

  “Well, then, I’d better check to make sure it’s not burning.”

  “Chase and Bobby aren’t there yet?” They’d been in such a hurry to get her out to the ranch. “Where are they?”

  But her grandmother had already murmured a soft goodbye and hung up.

  JODY FELT ON high alert during her short trip to Main Street where George’s Grocery was still located. As she spotted people she knew and waved to the ones who noticed her, she wondered if she was only imagining that they, too, looked wary. Was everybody as nervous about seeing Billy Crosby as she was? Many of them had known him a long time ago, and they probably wondered what in the world they would say to him or he would say to them.

  A couple of them had served on his jury.

  She wouldn’t have wanted to be in their shoes today, either.

  Jody walked into a grocery store that was far different from the bustling enterprise it had seemed in her childhood, when it was called George’s Fresh Food & Deli. With a falling population in the county, Byron George had been forced to cut back in every way, including closing a quarter of his floor space. There wasn’t any deli now; if you wanted a ham sandwich, you bought the bread and made your own at home. Everything about his store seemed smaller to Jody, and she knew that wasn’t just because she was bigger. The ironic exceptions were the products that kept arriving in ever larger containers containing ever less inside.

  At least a half gallon of milk was still a half gallon of milk.

  She walked into a store kept dim to save on the lighting bill.

  Just inside, Jody halted, because she heard raised, heated voices.

  She looked to her right and saw Byron surrounded by three of his customers who had him backed against a soft drink refrigerator. Taller than all of them, he looked red-faced and frustrated above his butcher’s apron.

  Even from the rear, Jody recognized her grandmother’s friend Phyllis Boren and also one of the men, her own next-door neighbor, Samuel Carpenter. It might have seemed a coincidence, since she had just been thinking about him only minutes earlier, but it was hardly ever a coincidence to run into somebody she knew in Rose. There just weren’t that many people, and they basically all had the same errands to run. The other man wasn’t anybody she knew, which likely made him somebody from one of the neighboring towns that had lost its own grocery store and whose citizens were forced to use a lot of gas to pick up bread and milk. All three of them were in their seventies, at least, but that wasn’t weakening their voices or tamping down their anger.

  “You can’t possibly believe what you’re saying, Byron!”

  As Phyllis Boren yelled at Byron George, Jody decided the wisest thing to do was slip down the bread aisle to avoid them. Everybody knew Phyllis was argumentative, and Byron wasn’t a
ny shrinking violet himself. Sam Carpenter was a tenderhearted sweetie who’d brought Jody housewarming flowers and tomato plants, and she had a soft spot for him because of how much he always cared about what happened to the Linders. He was as thoughtful a neighbor as anyone could wish for, but even Sam Carpenter looked as if he’d like to kill somebody.

  Then she heard Byron say, “I do believe he didn’t do it, Mrs. Boren.”

  “That’s just sex talking,” Phyllis shot back, shocking Jody into standing still as her grandmother’s very proper friend said with a nasty tone, “You and that wife of his.”

  “That’s insulting,” Byron retorted, looking ready to strangle one of his oldest and best customers. “Don’t you talk to me like that and don’t you be talking about Valentine like that!”

  Jody flinched at the name. She looked around for its owner.

  A lot had changed for Valentine Crosby, too, in the years since she’d been left at home with a child and a part-time job. She had hung onto one of the few steady jobs in Rose and done it the old-fashioned way. Byron had once told her Aunt Belle, “It’s real hard to fire somebody who works as hard as three people and never misses a day of work.” His wife, Livia, had passed away of a brain aneurysm five years ago, and he’d moved Valentine up to manager. The talk around town the last year or so was that he’d have married her if she didn’t insist on staying married to Billy.

  Jody didn’t see Valentine in the store.

  At her grandmother’s insistence, she had never been anything but polite to Mrs. Crosby, who had without exception returned the courtesy. But now her feelings toward the woman who was welcoming Billy Crosby home were not so friendly.

  The other man—the one Jody didn’t know—stuck his own opinion into the fray: “If you’d of married her by now, he’d never have come back here.”

  “Oh, now you want us to get married?” Byron’s words were sarcastic. It made Jody remember how offended a lot of people were when it became obvious that he and his manager were keeping company outside the store.