The Scent of Rain and Lightning

  “I’ll be all right, Bailey,” she said, and paid for her beer.

  IT WAS GOING on 1:00 A.M. when Jody stepped outside onto the front walk where earlier that day she’d confronted the man she had always been convinced was the killer of her father and probably of her mother. She took a deep, shaky breath, feeling suffocated by the air inside and by what she’d heard there. Had her family sent an innocent man to prison? It was almost impossible to connect the word innocent with the name Billy Crosby, so she settled for what Red Bosch had said: not guilty. Had the Linders taken Valentine’s husband away, and Collin’s father, and locked up a human being for twenty-three years inside a maximum security prison—because they had connected the dots of various pieces of circumstantial evidence and used them to draw the wrong picture?

  The possibility was so disturbing she felt sick to her stomach.

  Above her, the sky was a clear dark blue with a sliver of moon.

  There was the Big Dipper and Orion. There was the Milky Way, which was impossible to see anywhere near a city. The June air was cool, but not so chilly she wanted a sweater. Her head felt tight and she realized she had never removed the tattered old scarf. Had she showered in it? She almost laughed. Was she that preoccupied? Hadn’t she even washed her hair? She untied it and looked at it briefly. Whose scarf were you? Not her mother’s, at any rate. Jody dropped it into Bailey’s trash can outside the tavern and then combed and lifted her hair with her fingers, liberating it to the breeze.

  I’m never going to know what happened to her.

  It stabbed her heart. I must learn to live with it.

  Her boots on the cracked sidewalk were the only sounds she heard except for trucks passing infrequently on the nearby highway, and music coming out of somebody’s windows, and an owl hooting every few minutes. Jody stuck her hands down in her jeans pockets and hunched her shoulders as if against a cold wind from the north.

  At the end of the last block downtown she looked to her right and saw the other deputy’s car at the southern end of the Crosbys’ block. Unable to bear the thought of going home yet, and still desperate for fresh air, she struck out diagonally in that direction. She aimed for the center of the block she was on and then slipped between houses to get closer to the guarded block. When she was across the street from the Crosby home, she sat down beside a parked car in a driveway where neither of the deputies could see her. When her butt landed on crumbled concrete, she raised up enough to sweep it out from under her and make a less bumpy spot to sit cross-legged. She wasn’t sure why she’d come, except she was following a need to look without flinching at the home of the family to whom it was possible that her own family had done great harm.

  The Crosby house was completely dark, without even a porch light.

  The whole block, the whole town, was equally dark, dimmed by its budget and the night. Rose wasn’t a town that stayed up late. Very few houses, and none on either side of this block, showed any interior lights, though a few had porch lights on. It was so dark that Jody thought she could probably have sat out in the middle of the street and the deputies still wouldn’t have been able to see her.

  She surmised that the Crosbys’ lights were all off because they didn’t want to call attention to themselves, not after the trouble they’d already had that night. What was it like in there? she wondered. Were they sleeping? What was it like for Valentine having her husband home after more than two decades? Did Billy sleep soundly in the silence or did he toss and turn? And what about Collin—

  With a jolt she realized she wasn’t the only person sitting on pavement in the middle of the block. Her heart stuttered with anxiety and her breath caught as she recognized that what she had thought was a shadow was actually a man seated on the curb with his knees apart and his hands dangling between them.

  She had a feeling he had heard her and been watching her.

  Collin Crosby stood, using his hands to push himself to a standing position, and immediately moved toward her. She saw that he was wearing an unlikely wardrobe—long basketball shorts and an oversized sleeveless T-shirt, along with sneakers—huge ones—and socks pushed down around his ankles. He looked as if he’d just finished a pickup basketball game in the city park, but she doubted that, considering he didn’t have any friends in Rose right now.

  Jody stayed where she was, hoping he’d turn around and go back.

  He kept coming, and then he started talking in a low voice before he reached her, a voice so calm she could hardly believe it. “There’s nothing to see here,” Collin Crosby said, sounding like the most reasonable man in the universe and not at all like one whose house had been stoned that night.

  She saw the moment when he recognized who sat there in the dark.

  “Oh.” He stopped about five feet from her. “I didn’t realize it was you.” Collin cleared his throat. “Why are you here, Jody?”

  She thought for a moment about how to answer. “I’m trying to figure things out.”

  “What things?”

  “Did your father kill my father.” She made it a statement, not a question. “Or not.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “I wasn’t aware you had any doubt. You didn’t seem to this afternoon.”

  “I didn’t. But the governor says I should. Red Bosch says I should. He says your dad was too drunk to do it. Bailey says the same thing. But it’s hard for me to take in information like that, because I’ve grown up hating your dad and being really scared of him.”

  “Me, too.”

  “What?” Jody stood up in surprise, brushing off her jeans. “What did you say, Collin?”

  He turned his head and looked toward where Ray’s car was parked at the other end of the block. Looking back at Jody, he said, “Billy scares me, too, and he always has. When he used to come home drunk, I’d make myself stay up all night to keep an eye on him.”

  “Why?”

  “In case he started beating on my mom.”

  “Oh, God, Collin. And beating on you, too?”

  He shrugged, sloughing off whatever was the truth of that.

  “Then why’d you do this for him, Collin? Why?”

  “You mean beyond the fact that we’re not supposed to convict people unless they’re guilty of the crime for which they’re charged?”

  “Is there more to it than that?”

  “Yeah, there is.” His face—his handsome face, she thought—looked grim, and he gave her a probing look as if to try to figure out how she might take what he said next. “I’ve known from the beginning that he didn’t do it, Jody. The night your dad died? It was one of those times I just told you about, when I stayed awake all night to watch Billy.”

  Her heart was pounding so hard she almost couldn’t hear him.

  She noted how Collin called his father by his first name, as if he didn’t want to call him “Dad.”

  “That night, he passed out on the couch and I watched him from the hallway. When he got up to use the bathroom, I followed him. It was exactly the sort of thing I’d done a lot of times before. He went out to the backyard and climbed into our hammock. I thought he was going to dump himself onto the ground, and if he had I wouldn’t have helped him up. I would have let him lie there. But he didn’t. He fell into it and started snoring. I sat on our back stoop and watched him until the sun came up. He never left, Jody. He didn’t go anywhere. He didn’t go to your house and hurt your parents. I’ve always known that, because I watched him all night.”

  Chills were running through her nonstop.

  “You were, what, seven? Maybe you fell asleep and you didn’t know it?”

  “But I didn’t. I never did. I felt responsible for my mother’s life. I couldn’t fall asleep.”

  She felt so confused and overwhelmed that she couldn’t speak.

  Her voice came out sounding choked. “Why didn’t you say anything—”

  “I did. Nobody believed me except Mom and Red. Mom and I went to the sheriff to tell him and he lectured her for using her son to lie fo
r her husband. That was awful.” He shook his shoulders in a voluntary shudder and looked away, down toward the other end of the street and the other deputy’s car. “After that, she didn’t want me telling anybody.” Collin looked back at Jody again. “People wonder why she stuck with my dad, don’t they?”

  She nodded. “Are you aware that they think she hooked up with Byron at the grocery store?”

  He snorted. “That’s all in Byron’s mind. To her, he’s just her boss.”

  “Why does your mom stay with your dad, Collin?”

  “Because she knows he didn’t kill anybody and she used to love him and she feels guilty about him and she always hoped he might change.” Collin shook his head. “He’ll never change. She’s seeing that now. They’ve already been fighting. My mom refused to let him in her bedroom tonight and he was so angry about it that I know he would have hit her if I hadn’t been there.”

  Jody couldn’t keep her hands from flying to her mouth.

  “Here’s an irony for you,” Collin said, sounding bitter. Jody wanted to go to him and take his hands and squeeze them to comfort him, but she brought her hands down from her mouth and kept them at her sides instead, and stood there listening. “He’s sleeping in the hammock again, just like he used to do. Only this time he doesn’t even have the excuse of being drunk. We couldn’t stop him from having a few beers at Bailey’s, but I wouldn’t buy him any more to take home. Now he’s just a stone-cold sober son of a bitch. You saw how he is. I’m getting him away from her as soon as she’ll let me, which I have a feeling may be first thing in the morning.”

  Jody swallowed. “So you felt you had to get him out of prison because …”

  “Because otherwise I’d have to go through my life knowing my own father had been wrongly convicted and I hadn’t done anything about it. And because my mother knew it, too.”

  “You remind me of my grandfather.”

  He looked askance at that. “Why?”

  “Men of principle, both of you. It can cause a lot of grief.”

  Collin looked taken aback at that, but then he said, “Yeah. I’m afraid I’ve caused you some of that today.”

  “Oh, hell, what’s a little more?” she said with false lightness, and then felt ashamed for the self-pitying sound of it. She lowered her head so she didn’t have to look him in the eye. Although she heard his feet moving over the distance separating them, she was still surprised when she felt the heat of his body right in front of her. They stood on an incline with her slightly above him, which still didn’t bring her face level with his. Somehow gravity pulled her close to him and she found herself pressed against him. Collin’s arms came around her, and hers went around him, and he rested his chin on top of her head as she breathed in the scent of his skin. They stood like that for several minutes, neither of them saying anything, but their arms getting tighter around each other, holding on as if this were the only chance they’d ever have to embrace. There was a moment when Jody thought she felt him kiss her hair. She shivered and pressed even closer into his body, feeling more deeply comforted by his touch than she had ever felt before and wanting with all of her heart to give back to him the same profound feeling.

  It felt so wonderful and so impossible that she wanted to weep.

  Finally, she pulled away and Collin released her.

  Jody looked into his eyes once more and then turned and walked away from him. One hesitant step. Two steps. She didn’t hear him do the same so she guessed he was watching her go. Unable to bear leaving him, she turned around to see if he was there, which was why she could see the shocked and frightened look on his face—which mirrored hers—when they both heard a sound that could only have been a gunshot coming from the direction of his parents’ house. There was no other sound, no scream that followed it, no other boom of gunfire, just the one shot that cracked the night silence as if it had broken a sound barrier.

  Jody started to run with him toward his home until he turned to say, “No, please! Stay here. Get out of sight. Don’t make me worry about you.” And then he said, “I’ve always loved you, Jody.” Shocked as much by those words as by the gunshot, she stopped where she was, then ducked back into the shadows beside the car in the driveway and watched Collin Crosby run home, his long legs covering the sidewalks, the street, and his yard faster than either of the screeching cars of the deputies could get there. Her heart screamed No! when Collin pulled open the front door and disappeared inside. She prayed frantically for his safety. She watched Ray and the other deputy park at strange angles in the street, saw neighboring lights come on, watched the two sheriff’s men advance cautiously toward the house with guns drawn.

  And then she saw Collin come back outside.

  Jody stood up where she was.

  He walked past the deputies as if they weren’t there while they called to him, “Is anybody hurt? What’s going on inside?” Instead, he came straight to Jody and faced her.

  Her voice shaking, she asked, “Is your father—”

  “It’s not Billy,” Collin said, his face distorted with all of the emotions running through him. “It’s Mom.”

  Too shocked to speak, Jody stared at him.

  “He shot her. Point-blank in the face. Killed her. He took her car and he’s gone.”

  She stammered. “But I didn’t see a car—”

  “Hers was parked in back.”

  There were potholed alleys that ran the length of some blocks, emptying into other streets.

  He put his face in his hands and began to weep. “This is my fault, this is all my fault, Jody. I should have left him there. I never should have tried to get him out.”

  Jody reached out to grasp his shaking shoulders, with hands that were also shaking, but he broke away without another glance and returned to where the deputies still waited with their guns out, ignorant of the fact that it wasn’t Billy Crosby who’d been killed by some local vigilante, it was Valentine Crosby—who had waited for her husband all those years only to have him kill her soon after their reunion. Staggered by the shock of it, Jody watched a few more moments and then, sensing that her presence was useless, she turned and went slowly toward her own home. She wanted to run, to escape, to get as far away from Rose as she could go, though only if she could grab Collin and take him with her. Instead, frightened, sad, confused again, and bone weary, she climbed back into her truck to drive out to the ranch to tell them before they heard it from anybody else.

  IT WASN’T EVEN two o’clock in the morning yet.

  Jody drove fast, taking advantage of the fact that every law enforcement officer in the county had more important things to do now than to chase speeders like her. Her high beams showed her fence lines, sleeping cattle, sweet young growths of soybeans and sunflowers that she flew past as she navigated the curves in the road with a skill that came from familiarity—which was a good thing, since as she approached the gate, she couldn’t even remember how she got there. The whole drive was a blank in her mind.

  All she could think of was Collin’s face as he told her about his mother, Collin’s arms as he held her, Collin’s grief, and Collin’s confession of love for her. She tried to recall how his mother had looked yesterday in front of Bailey’s, but she couldn’t remember anything about Valentine. She’d been aware only of Billy and his son. She felt grieved and guilty about that, realizing she had totally ignored a woman who—at that moment—had only a few hours to live. If she could have gone back in time, she would have run at Valentine and pulled her away, yelling, “Get away from him, get away from him now!”

  As Jody neared the ranch gate, she drove past Red Bosch’s place again. This time she saw that his garage door was all the way down and she felt a tweak of surprise. Since it wasn’t her truck hiding in his garage, it must mean that some other woman’s was.

  That didn’t take long, she thought as she drove on by.

  It appeared that Red had read the signs correctly and already moved on. Jody felt no jealousy; she felt relieved that thei
r ending was so easy and relatively painless. He’d be sad about Valentine, though. She hoped that he and his new friend got to sleep in a little on this morning, to delay the moment when he found out.

  JODY HALF EXPECTED to find her grandparents and her uncles awake and already talking about the shooting, but instead she found her grandfather in the kitchen alone, with only a light on the stove to illuminate him. He was noisily puttering around in the near-dark, trying to fix coffee and only managing to make a mess of grounds on the counter and water in the sink.

  Her first instinct was to blurt the news, but she didn’t.

  “Here,” she said, flipping on an overhead light and hurrying toward him. “I’ll do that.”

  He blinked in the sudden light and then smiled down at her. “Your coffee isn’t any better than mine is.”

  “Why does everybody say that?”

  “Because it’s true?”

  “Yes, well at least I’m tidier.”

  He laughed and turned and walked over to the kitchen table.

  He doesn’t know yet, she thought, observing him from behind.

  “What are you doing up so early, Grandpa?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. What are you doing dressed and sneaking in the back door?”

  “Didn’t you see my note? I wasn’t sneaking.”

  She turned and tried to smile at him.

  It hurt Jody’s heart—a lot more than seeing Red’s closed garage door—to note how slowly Hugh Senior moved this morning. He was a big man, but his skeleton was never designed for years of the hard physical abuse he’d given it on horseback and in cattle pens.

  If he didn’t know about the shooting yet, it wouldn’t do any harm to let a few more minutes slide by before she told him and ruined his morning. Besides, that would give her own heart a little more time to stop pounding and her eyes to stop prickling with tears, so she could tell it all to him calmly, as he would want her to do.