The Scent of Rain and Lightning

  She was forty feet up when her shoes slipped and she fell, landing not only on chalky ground but on rock as hard as centuries could build it.

  BLEEDING AND BROKEN, Laurie lay on the chalky, rocky earth in a daze of shock and pain. Her consciousness faded in and out as her five senses surged in to startle her awake and then disappear again: smell of her own urine soaking her sundress; tastes of dirt, of beer and catsup; sounds of the wind that whipped her dark hair stingingly into her open eyes and moaned and sang around the rocks; sight of enormous clouds rushing east; painful stab of rocks beneath her shattered back.

  It all blinked on and off as she woke up, faded out, woke up.

  At first she felt terrified of lying helpless on her back, because she feared drowning with her face to the sky. Thunder rumbled the ground beneath her, making her shudder involuntarily, making her broken bones rattle agonizingly inside of her like seeds in a gourd. Flashes of lightning illuminated the landscape in nightmarish relief, turning rocks to gargoyles looming over her.

  But then the first storm passed, and she found herself staring up into a sky so clear and deep blue-black that it hurt her heart to see it. In a moment that changed her, Laurie felt grateful to have been flung onto her back, her poor ruined back, so that she might see this astonishing beauty.

  She had not known the world could be so lovely.

  She’d always thought of the landscape of Rose, Kansas, as boring, had never understood when other people raved about its supposed glories, its famous soaring rock monuments and its sunsets, its flat horizons and dramatic cloud banks. Now she understood: it was wonderful! It looked transformed and magical in the shifting, changing light of the moon, stars, and clouds. Light rolled over the Rocks like waves, changing their colors from soft orange to gold to white to silver to black and back to gold again.

  It appeared strange, enchanted, like the landscape of a fairy tale with a tragic ending. She had thought herself a princess, too special, too beautiful for her own hometown. Hugh-Jay had played her wealthy prince, and the big house in Rose had been their castle where they were going to live happily ever after inside its thick stone walls that were supposed to keep the three of them safe.

  The Rocks above her looked now as if they had been washed in delicate pastels she would have stolen for a dress.

  She had literally never noticed such beauty in the world before.

  If her arms could have moved, she would have reached up to touch the amber moon and the winking stars that appeared from under the clouds as they scudded west to east. A memory from high school surprised her, because she couldn’t remember ever having paid much attention: From Missouri to the Colorado border, Kansas climbs nearly half a mile in altitude. Which teacher had said that? She couldn’t recall, and wouldn’t previously have cared, except that now the memory felt like someone kind had come to keep her company in her loneliness.

  Thank you, she sent to the unremembered teacher.

  Thank you, she repeated, to taste its novelty in her mouth.

  But then that memory of the slant of Kansas gave her a sudden dizzying feeling of lying on a bed with her head lower than her feet.

  Oh, God!

  The world tilted back into flatness again, and she stopped worrying about dying by choking on her own seasick vomit.

  She stared up, and felt entranced by the sky again, and soothed by the cool wind between storms. She felt embraced by the vast landscape that had previously felt so barren and dead to her. It wasn’t lifeless at all! The eighty-foot rock formations that rose beside, and above, and all around her looked like living creatures now, protectively watching over her with their sharp, cold faces.

  Why did you let me fall? she asked them, sadly, but without blame.

  Everybody in her county was proud of them, these Testament Rocks.

  Geologists and archaeologists traveled from all over the world to study the soil or dig for fossils here, and yet she had declared these formations—these amazing, huge, natural sculptures—stupid and boring. There was a sphinx! There was a castle! Over there were towers and pyramids and eagles made of rock! At other moments those same rock formations stood out starkly on the plain like giants who had paused in a long walk; she now thought they looked wise and fascinating, like living beings who knew the secrets of the ages.

  And yet the Rocks had let her feet skid, let her hands grasp air, let her plunge screaming through darkness and rain, falling through sickening yards of space, falling like a bird with oiled wings that wouldn’t fly, like an angel in a spinning dive to earth.

  I’m no angel, Laurie admitted to the Rocks above her.

  She had a feeling they already knew that about her.

  Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

  Once they would have been tears of self-pity; now they were for Jody.

  She felt a pang of love so painful it made her cry out with pity and sorrow for her child. For a few moments, for her three-year-old daughter’s sake, she fought what was coming. She tried to move, to rise, to run, but it was torture, and impossible.

  Her heart and thoughts continued the fight for a little while longer.

  When that made no difference, she tried pleading.

  Please, she feverishly begged whatever might be listening, take care of her and protect her.

  She wished her daughter could know that her mom had fought hard to live.

  Headlights like two distant tiny moons would soon be coming if Meryl had told her the truth, but Laurie didn’t believe their puny light would reach her in time to save her.

  MERYL DROVE BACK into Rose and ran back into Hugh-Jay’s and Laurie’s home, going in again through the back door. Hugh-Jay’s boots were in their accustomed spot by the back door, and Meryl left them there. The first things he saw inside were Hugh-Jay’s yellow slicker, a straw hat, and the overturned chair on the floor.

  He left them where they were.

  It dawned on him the hat was Billy Crosby’s.

  He walked over to the sink where he had first had sex with Laurie that night and examined it for anything linking the scene to him. He saw the bit of her blood on the metal lip of the sink, and decided it was smart to leave that alone, too. Whatever he had done, let the sheriff decide that Billy had done.

  It wasn’t as if Billy wouldn’t have done it, if he could have.

  Meryl knew his own fingerprints were all over the house.

  Did that matter? It would seem odd if they weren’t, he decided, although the guest room and bathroom upstairs might be a problem, albeit not one he couldn’t solve with a dust rag and a can of dusting aerosol for the bedroom and cleanser and a sponge for the bathroom.

  He looked at his watch and then outside at the storm.

  It looked as if it would keep pouring and thundering for hours.

  There was plenty of time to do all that needed doing.

  His only real worry was exactly what Laurie feared, which was flooding that might keep him from getting back to her. He had to get back to her. She was an emotional unguided missile aimed directly at both of them if he didn’t stick with her and control her.

  There was time, but he couldn’t afford to waste it.

  He washed the bathroom first, watching out for hairs in the shower, getting rid of as much blood as he could, although he wasn’t particularly worried about that as it was only Hugh-Jay’s blood and not theirs. If someone else—Billy, for instance—had committed these acts, that person could have been expected to use the shower to wash off, too.

  They had left bloody footprints on the upstairs carpets.

  Meryl ran to the basement for bleach, made a solution of it with water, grabbed a scrub brush and went back upstairs. He flooded the bloody floors and carpet with the solution and rubbed at the footprints until they ran together and their outlines were indistinguishable by size or footfall.

  Now the upstairs smelled hideously of acrid bleach.

  He preferred that to the worse smells that it covered up.

  He ha
d told Laurie he would bring her what she needed.

  But he wouldn’t do it now, and it wouldn’t include anything she owned.

  It would have to be all new. She would have to have a new identity.

  He felt overwhelmed by how much would be required to save both of them from here on out. She didn’t think she could do it, and Meryl wasn’t at all sure she could, either.

  He would deal with that later; right now he had to prepare the bedroom.

  He stripped the sheets, for fear of hair fibers. Hair from his head anywhere in the house was one thing, but pubic hair in a bed with semen stains on it was something else entirely. He wiped down all the surfaces, rather than try to remember which of them he had touched.

  Meryl left the gun where it lay loose in Hugh-Jay’s right hand. He had, essentially, shot himself, which took care of the problem of fingerprints. If people didn’t jump to the conclusion that Billy Crosby had murdered him, then maybe they’d think Hugh-Jay had killed himself. But when Meryl stepped back and viewed the obvious signs of violence and struggle in the room, and those downstairs in the kitchen, he doubted that scenario would convince anyone.

  All the while he stepped around his best friend’s body.

  Best friend, he thought several times.

  Had they been best friends? Brothers was more like it. Brothers raised at first by two different families and then merged into a single one, the better one. Everybody knew Meryl loved Hugh-Jay, and they would expect him to be incredibly upset by his friend’s death. There’d be no faking there: he was incredibly upset by this. Whoever had killed Hugh-Jay was going to be hated. Meryl had to make sure that wouldn’t be him. He worried a little over the fact that he didn’t feel very sad, that he only felt worried about what this night might mean to his own life. And then he put that behind him, because if all went well, he would have the rest of his life to make it up to the Linders—and to Hugh-Jay’s daughter—the best way he could, with attention and hard work and taking care of them and their business.

  “I’m sorry, buddy,” he said when he was finished. “We didn’t mean to.”

  After throwing the thin quilt aside, he gathered up the sheets and pillowcases and walked them downstairs, knowing that his footprints in wet socks would dry and disappear before morning. He stuffed the linens into a black plastic trash bag and put them in Billy’s truck, still unsure of what he was going to do with them. He’d worry about that later, because he had to get back out to Laurie before the roads were too flooded to allow him through.

  Meryl stood in the darkness and the rain taking a long last look at the house that looked like a huge gravestone to him now. Had he taken care of everything? Had he thought of everything? Feeling unsure, he went back inside and rechecked every room to look for things he’d missed, nearly fainting when he spotted his own bolo tie down on the carpet between the far side of the bed and the wall. He had removed it when he got undressed to get into bed with Laurie and put it on the end table, where it had fallen off.

  Feeling shaken, Meryl stuffed it down inside his suit coat pocket.

  Then he hurried down the stairs and went around the first floor using a knuckle to push the button locks closed on the outside doors, hoping to make it just that much harder, and delay that much longer, anybody’s entrance into the house.

  SHE WAS DEAD when he found her, and it wasn’t hard to discern why.

  A large shred of her dress had caught on a rock sticking out of the formation she had apparently tried to climb. Meryl realized she must have gotten a long way up for a fall to have killed her, or else she just happened to hit at a fatal angle. He also realized this was going to make his life much, much easier. All he needed to do now was get rid of her body, Billy’s truck, and the damned bed linens in time to walk back to Rose and climb into his own bed to await the moment when someone called to tell him the terrible news.

  Her body, shed of its clothing, went into an abandoned feedlot waste pit in the next county. Billy’s truck—with her yellow sundress tied into a plastic bag Meryl found in the truck—got sent into the floodwaters over the highway. In desperation, out of ideas and running out of time before sunrise, Meryl picked up the plastic bag with the bed linens and carried them back to Rose with him. He felt ridiculous doing it. He could get rid of a body and a two-ton vehicle, but he couldn’t figure out how to do the same with some sheets? He’d been afraid to throw them into the feedlot waste pit, for fear they wouldn’t sink fast enough, and he didn’t want to leave them in the truck to be found there. As he walked home, daring the lightning to get him, Meryl nearly started laughing hysterically at this last dilemma. It seemed so stupid compared to everything else he’d had to take care of this night.

  When he woke up to the phone ringing in the morning, he knew what to do about the bedclothes that were his remaining problem. He was afraid to wash them for fear Belle or someone else would see him doing it; he was also afraid to take them to the dump, or put them out with the trash. He knew he was being paranoid about something that probably should be easy, but it felt as if all of his fears had centered now on the damned sheets and pillowcases. So after emptying out a cardboard file box, Meryl folded the sheets, put them inside it, and closed the lid on top of them. He found threaded mailing tape in his desk and wrapped the box in it so tightly and completely all around that even scissors would have a hard time finding a place to cut. Then he put it aside to give to Belle to store unknowingly in her basement for him, “because it’s full of a client’s personal records and your bank is more fireproof than my office.” Later, much later when nobody would be paying any attention related to Hugh-Jay or Laurie, he could go back and get the box and finally destroy it. And if he didn’t, maybe the wet fabric would mildew so completely in the box that it would eventually disintegrate and be no threat to him. It wasn’t as if they were much of a threat anyway—hair fiber analysis was an inexact science; a good defense lawyer would cast doubt on it.

  Having thought his way out of his last problem, Meryl hurried off to help his future wife and her family in their sad time of great need. He absolved himself with the sentence that became the source of his confidence and his reassurance: It wasn’t a crime, it was a tragedy.

  January 10, 2010

  IN BETWEEN the first and second semesters at Henderson County Consolidated High School, Jody decided to clean out her collection of backpacks. Her idea was that if she destroyed her collection, then maybe that would end her nearly lifelong obsession with it.

  It took her two days of going through each pack individually, examining each item and deciding if there was anything worth keeping or giving away. In the end she dumped almost all of it into black plastic trash bags, which she took to the county dump. The packs themselves ate up additional trash bags. She thought about trying to clean them up so they could be donated—to the school where she taught, for instance—but there wasn’t one of them that any self-respecting kid would have wanted to use. They were beaten up, torn up, filthy, out of fashion. But there were a few interesting objects inside of them, a dozen or so, that she wanted to show her aunt Belle, in case Belle might see any value in them for her museum.

  HUGH SENIOR had been forced to eat crow about the Rose Historical Museum.

  “I thought it was just a little hobby for her,” he admitted freely to people, more freely than his daughter liked, given that he also said, “I thought I was throwing money away, just to let Belle pretend she had a job.”

  But he’d been wrong, as he was happy to say now.

  Jody thought it was remarkable that during years when Rose was failing in almost every other way, her aunt’s museum-in-a-bank thrived. Belle had turned out to be a great curator with a superb eye for historical artifacts and a talent for displaying them. Plus, she was a public relations fool, as her brother Chase liked to say with admiration in his voice. Belle didn’t like that praise, either, given that he followed it with, “Who would have guessed?”

  As for Belle’s writing, what Annabelle use
d to call “Belle’s little articles” turned out to be good enough to attract assignments from major publications. She became what Meryl called “the go-to girl” for historians and archaeologists, geologists and paleontologists, writers, photographers, and artists, even for the occasional television documentary about ancient seas and rivers, not to mention the busloads of schoolchildren who journeyed to Rose to run around the famous Rocks and giggle their way through her museum. The scientists who arrived in Rose contributed to the local economy: they ate at Bailey’s and the truck stop, and they bought bottled water and suntan lotion at George’s. Some of them got invited out to High Rock Ranch for supper and horseback riding for them and stimulating conversation for the Linders. Jody’s grandfather was especially proud of the Nobel Prize–winning scientist from China who had loved Annabelle’s homemade barbecue sauce.

  Jody was proud of her aunt’s “little hobby.”

  BELLE’S CHARM still didn’t extend very generously toward the family, and sometimes especially not toward Jody. Sometimes Jody worried that she was the reason Belle and Meryl never had children, because they’d had to spend too much time helping take care of her.

  “You got these where, and how?” Belle challenged her niece.

  “Out at the Rocks. It’s just stuff I happened to see and pick up.”

  “Just happened to,” she said, casting a skeptical eye from the objects to Jody. Her aunt had always been a large woman, patterned on Hugh Senior’s family rather than on Annabelle’s; over the years her good cooking had broadened her as well, so that she cut a formidable figure. “Like you did when you were a little girl?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I didn’t know you kept doing that.”

  “Well, I did. No harm done.”

  “Hmm,” Belle said, sounding skeptical.

  “Mostly junk,” she declared after a few silent moments of close examination of the first batch that Jody spilled out onto the glass countertop.