At the ranch, nobody had felt that way, or if they did, hadn’t said so. “They’re probably the two loneliest people in Rose,” Annabelle had remarked at the time, “and this may be a good thing for both of them.”
But now the gossip worm had turned, Jody observed, as Byron said, “Well, Val believes she needs to stay with him to show she believes he didn’t do it, which she does and which he didn’t!”
Jody’s neighbor, Samuel, said with a deep sarcasm that shocked her, because it was so bitterly different from his usual manner, “Oh, well, yes, let’s make sure he looks good, the murdering bastard.”
“I swear to you he didn’t do it,” Byron insisted to them.
“No!” Samuel got up in his face, his own kind features twisted with anger. “He’s telling Val he didn’t do it, and she’s telling you that, and you’re an old fool to believe it. Don’t you tell me he didn’t do it, Byron George. You didn’t see what I saw that day. You didn’t hear Annabelle Linder scream over the body of her dead son. You didn’t have to go fetch her poor family. Don’t you stand there and try to tell me Billy Crosby’s innocent!”
Jody brought her hands to her face and stood frozen.
Oh, God, she thought, silently pleading with them to stop.
“I never said he’s innocent!” Byron shouted. “I’m saying he’s not guilty!”
“Oh good grief,” Phyllis Boren said in disgust. “Are we talking about the same Billy Crosby? The one who used to get drunk and hit his wife? That’s the Billy I knew, and I’m betting he’s exactly the same person he always was, and now you’re glad he’s coming back here. If you loved Valentine like you supposedly do, you ought to be horrified that he’s coming back to live with her!”
“I didn’t say I’ll be happy to see him! I said he’s not guilty!”
“And who told you that?” Phyllis challenged him. “His wife and his son? Of course they think he didn’t do it. But where’s your evidence, Byron?”
“It’ll all come out someday, Phyllis.”
She made a disgusted noise.
“Not guilty?” Samuel launched in again. “On which planet? That man murdered that wonderful young man and his wife and it couldn’t be any plainer unless he confessed—”
“Which he’s never going to do,” Phyllis interjected.
“Because,” the third man said, “that would mean taking mercy on their family and especially on their daughter, who’s never going to know for sure—”
He stopped when Phyllis, who had just spotted Jody, tugged on his shirtsleeve. “What?” he asked her, sounding annoyed at being cut off in mid-tirade. “Who’s that?”
Phyllis’s whisper could have been heard in the back of the store.
“That’s Jody Linder!”
Far from stopping out of consideration for Jody, he now pointed at her: “That young woman. What do you think all this is going to do to her, Byron George? You want to look her in the eye and tell her how you believe Billy Crosby didn’t do it? Go on, I dare you. Walk up to her and tell her how—”
Jody didn’t wait for more. She hurried toward the back.
She was used to being recognized or pointed out by people she didn’t know, because of her family’s infamous history, but she’d never gotten over finding it an appalling experience. She might not have minded being recognized for some worthy accomplishment of her own, but she minded very much being “famous” because her father had been murdered and her mother might have been. When she was thirteen, a couple of tourists asked for her autograph, which shocked her so badly she had thrown their pen back at them before running away. Behind her, she’d heard one of them call her a rude little brat.
When she was out of sight, she clutched the side of a table holding apples and bananas and waited to see if the four people would keep yelling at each other. Her heart was pounding even harder than when her uncles broke the news to her and she felt like crying again.
All she wanted at that moment was to be invisible.
The yelling stopped, but then she felt an arm come around her shoulders. She looked up into the lined face of Phyllis Boren, who laid the side of her head against Jody’s and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Jody nodded, and didn’t know what to say to her.
Phyllis took hold of her left hand and squeezed it. “Please give your grandparents my best wishes.”
“I will.” Then she made herself ask what she didn’t want to ask. “Phyllis? Are there many people who think Billy didn’t kill my dad?”
Her grandmother’s friend—who could be counted on to tell the truth as reliably as she could be counted on to be tactless—said, “There are a few. Always have been. They’re the ones who think he was railroaded and that he wouldn’t be in prison if your family hadn’t forced it.”
“People blame my family?”
“Not many, just a stubborn few. Probably jealous of you. And then there are people like Bailey who don’t think Billy did it, but they don’t mind if he got sent to jail anyway.”
Jody frowned at the idea of the tavern owner’s betrayal. “Bailey thinks he didn’t do it?”
Phyllis sniffed. “Nobody ever accused Bailey of being a genius.”
She finally moved away, leaving Jody alone. Blindly, Jody picked up an apple as if she was considering buying it. Then, feeling hideously self-conscious, she made her way to the dairy section and got the two half gallons of milk for her grandmother. Their handles felt cool and damp in her hands as she walked back to the front again with every intention of purchasing them. But when she saw Byron George at one of the checkout counters, she felt swept by outrage at his defense of Crosby. It was different for Red Bosch to feel as he did—he’d been there that night, he’d actually seen Billy, and even if Red’s perceptions were wrong, at least they were drawn from firsthand experience. Not so Byron. All he was doing was taking the word of people who could be expected to defend their husband and father. In all the years that her family had bought groceries here, they’d never suspected the worm in all the apples they’d bought from Byron.
Jody took the milk to the checkout counter.
“Hi, Byron,” she said to the red-faced man who stood behind one of them. She put the sloshy containers down on the conveyer belt. It was hard to keep antagonism out of her voice, so she grabbed the first superficial topic she could think of, even if it must have sounded like a non sequitur to Byron. “My grandma’s making gravy tonight.”
He looked apologetic as he said, “I hear your grandmother makes the best gravy in five counties.”
“And my mom made the best piecrust.”
She looked him in the eyes.
Byron’s face flushed even redder. “I can’t claim I ever had any of it. But that’s certainly what I always heard.”
Jody didn’t say out loud her contemptuous thought as she took her change from him. You believe things you don’t know anything about, don’t you, Byron? You believe what anybody tells you?
“Where’s Valentine today?” she asked him.
He looked both sad and embarrassed as he said, “She stayed home.” He busied himself with packing the milk into plastic bags. “To get ready.”
Jody swallowed. “Is he in town yet?”
“I don’t know, Jody. I’m keeping my distance.”
“Probably a good idea for all of us,” she replied, and realized she sounded like a self-righteous version of her grandmother.
“I hope you weren’t offended by—”
“Not at all,” she lied, with a bright smile.
But then she heard her grandmother’s voice in her head.
If you don’t get down off that high horse, you’re going to have a very long way to fall, young lady.
Jody’s false smile wavered. A smaller, truer one took its place. Byron couldn’t help it, she realized. He was in love, and sometimes love wasn’t only blind, it was also stupid. Maybe that wasn’t a kind thought, but it was the best she could do at the moment.
“’Bye, Byron,”
she said quietly.
“’Bye, Jody. Thanks for coming in.”
When she got back into her truck, she pointed it in the opposite direction of the ranch.
WHEN SHE WALKED into Bailey’s Bar & Grill, the scent of beer and fried food was overwhelming, as it always was. Sometimes she thought she’d go to her grave with the scent of Bailey’s cheeseburgers still clinging to her hair and clothes. After every meal she’d ever eaten there, she went home and scrubbed, even if she had loved every fatty bite. Before Bailey outlawed smoking—because he wanted to quit—it had been even harder to wash out the stink.
The place was even dimmer than the grocery had been.
A few early diners had their suppers in front of them, and a couple of them raised their hands to her in greeting. Bailey had installed a pool table years ago, and now it was bracketed by men with pool cues in one hand and bottles of beer in the other.
Bailey himself, standing in front of a neon sign behind his bar, looked up and gave her a nod. He was wearing one of his Denver Broncos T-shirts, she saw. On game days between the Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs, Bailey’s tavern could get rowdy. As usual, he had his beloved country-western music playing too loud, because as Bailey got older and deafer, he kept turning the music up, until enough of his customers complained about it. People wondered what the magic number was to get him to turn it down—three customers? ten?—and joked about running an organized test on that someday.
Jody went over and hoisted herself up onto one of the chrome and red vinyl bar stools.
“Rascal Flatts?” she asked, not recognizing the song.
“Yeah. My boys. Want a beer while you wait?”
“I’m waiting for something?”
“Aren’t you? Friends? Your family?”
“No, I came to see you, Bailey.”
He quirked a bushy eyebrow.
Over the years, Bailey had become a man of fewer and fewer words. He poured your drinks, cooked your steaks, took your credit card, and tossed you out on your ear if you broke his house rules, which consisted of: don’t upset me, my waitresses, or my other customers. Most people knew he was sick of running his tavern; he wanted to move to Florida, but for years now his business had dropped off so drastically that he was lucky to pay his bills on time, with nothing left to save for retirement.
Jody reached for a handful of peanuts, shelled one of them and ate it.
She raised her voice to be sure he heard her.
“I hear you don’t think Billy Crosby killed my dad.”
She could be very direct herself, as encouraged by her family. As Chase liked to say, “Life is short. If you have something to say, either spit it out or forget about it.” It had been hard for her to ask Phyllis Boren in the grocery store about opinions that conflicted with her family’s, and hard to face a man who held such opinions, and her heart was still pounding too fast, but the questions she had to ask were coming easier now.
Bailey didn’t look fazed by her blunt question. He gave her a long look and then confirmed it. “No. I don’t think Billy did it.”
“Why not?”
He put down the shot glass he’d been wiping dry. “Too drunk.”
“That’s what Red Bosch says, too.”
“Red’s right.”
“Then how come he got convicted and sent to prison, Bailey?”
He shrugged.
“No, really.” She dumped the rest of the peanuts back into their bowl and brushed her hands together to get the shell dust off. “If he didn’t do it, how could he end up in prison for it?”
This time Bailey gave her a look that made her feel as if she was the stupid one in Rose. It was a look that said, What? You think that never happens in this country?
“I’ve read the trial transcripts, Bailey. You didn’t testify.”
“I told the cops what I saw. They never called me back.”
Jody started to say something, but Bailey wasn’t finished.
“Didn’t matter to me,” he said, “Billy needed to go to jail and stay there. He was bound to do something similar someday.”
“Bailey,” Jody said to him, “the system’s not supposed to work like that.”
He shrugged again. “It wasn’t supposed to let him out this soon, either.”
“He might say twenty-three years isn’t soon.”
“And I say it’s not long enough.”
Jody, feeling a little shell-shocked by all the opinions she was hearing for the first time from people she thought she knew, said, “May I have that beer now, please?”
“Are you going to eat something with it?”
“No, I’m due out at the ranch for supper.”
“Soon?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You can’t have a beer.”
She gave him a look that said, Why not?
“Because you’re too little to absorb the alcohol that quick, and your grandpa would kill me if I let you drive out of here tipsy.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Bailey.”
She whirled around on the bar stool, hopped down and stalked out, even though she knew he was right.
JUST OUTSIDE the tavern’s front door her cell phone rang.
When she saw who was calling, she punched Talk and said, “I’m on my way, Uncle Chase.”
“What’s taking so long?”
“I had to pick up some milk for Grandma.”
“Did you go clear to Topeka to get it?”
People were coming up the walk toward her, so she stepped to one side and turned her back. “No, I didn’t go to Topeka,” she said with exaggerated patience. “It just took a little longer than usual, that’s all.”
She felt her left arm being squeezed and turned in that direction to see who had done it. It was the mother of a girl she’d gone to school with. The woman smiled sympathetically at her and then went on inside with her husband. Jody turned back toward the shrubbery.
“What? I didn’t hear what you just said, Uncle Chase.”
“I said, why did it take longer than usual?”
Jody heard a man say loudly, “If I want a goddamn pork tenderloin for supper, that’s what I’m going to have.” She was turning to look to see who was saying that so unpleasantly when the same raspy voice said, “I’ve waited twenty-three goddamn years for one of Bailey’s pork tenderloin sandwiches. You can goddamn wait one more night to cook your damned spaghetti.”
In one chaotic moment Jody heard her uncle call her name over the phone, dropped the cell phone onto the cement walkway, and realized she was looking straight at Billy Crosby, who was coming up toward Bailey’s with Valentine and a tall good-looking man who could only be their son Collin.
“Dad,” the younger man said, “we’re here, aren’t we?”
Jody bent to pick up her phone and saw that she had cracked its case. She opened it with fumbling fingers and said, “Uncle Chase, I’ve got to go. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” She clicked the phone shut before finding out if it was even still working.
She didn’t know what to do next.
They were coming closer.
He looked about five foot ten and muscular, as if there’d been a weight room at the prison and he had used it often. His hairline was receding at his temples but his hair was still dark with no visible gray. It was a shock to see he looked no older than her uncles. She realized that in the last few years she’d started picturing Billy Crosby as an old man, worn-down and neutered by prison. This man coming toward her was nothing like that; he looked full of hunger, anger, and testosterone. She’d heard he was considered good-looking by some women, and she supposed the same kind of woman would think that now, too, but all she saw was a top-heavy man with big shoulders and biceps and a pinched, aggressive expression on his face. He had on sneakers, blue jeans, and a black T-shirt, and it all looked new.
Collin looked up and saw her standing there.
He put a restraining hand on his father’s arm, but Billy shook i
t off.
Collin was taller than his dad, Jody saw, a bigger man altogether, and he didn’t look overjoyed to have his father home from prison. Jody barely noticed Valentine.
She had eyes only for the father and the son.
“What the hell is she looking at?” Billy said, nodding toward Jody as they came closer still. “People think I’m some kind of fucking tourist attraction? Like them rocks you wouldn’t take me out to see!” He put on a falsetto, like a crazily enthusiastic girl, and waved his hands in the air: “Fly your freak flag, Billy!” Then he raised an eyebrow and smirked in Jody’s direction. “I see the girls have gotten better lookin’ since I was here. You know that girl, Collin? She’s lookin’ at you.”
“Shut up, Dad. For God’s sake, shut up.”
Such a powerful surge of reaction went through Jody that she thought if she’d had a gun she would have used it. Every bit of information she’d heard that day that purported to exonerate this man fled from her brain and her heart. All she could remember at this moment was how he had haunted her nightmares, how she had grown up hating him, how one violent night had devastated her family, and how terribly much she missed and longed for her parents. Her next impulse was to turn and run. No, she thought, and stood her ground until the trio were only a few feet away from her. She stepped to her right then so that she was in the center of the sidewalk, blocking their path into the tavern. Any warnings she’d heard that day, any fear she’d previously felt, vanished as if they had never happened. He wasn’t getting by her without acknowledging her. He wasn’t.
“You the bouncer?” he joked, right in front of her.
“Jody,” Collin said, and then, “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m not the bouncer,” she said, looking straight into eyes that hurt her to see. “I’m Hugh-Jay and Laurie’s daughter. I’m Jody Linder.” She raised her eyes to look at Collin. “Why did you do this? Why?” she asked him.
“You’re a Linder?” his father said, stepping even closer.
“Dad, you touch her and I’ll kill you myself.”
“I’m not gonna touch her.”
“I’m not ‘a’ Linder,” she said to him. “I’m ‘the’ Linder. I’m the kid you left without any parents.”