The Quiet Streets of Winslow (31 page)

“I will,” somebody else said. “It's a mystery.”

“Why become a scientist then?” Billy said. “Why bother?”

“Because you could figure out just one more thing,” Harmony said.

“How are you supposed to live with all that unknowing?” somebody behind me asked.

“You're already living with it,” Billy said. “You can't count on anything. You don't know how long you're going to live or how you're going to die. You don't know a fucking lot of things.”

“Billy Clay,” Ms. Hanson said.

“Well, you don't, do you?”

“No,” Ms. Hanson said. “But do you have to use that particular word to say it?”

“Well, in terms of what I was saying, shit, yes,” Billy said.

Everybody laughed, including her. She didn't like profanity, but she knew smart when she heard it.

On the bus that afternoon Billy said, “I might be done with honors classes. My grades suck, and I'm tired of working so hard. Who cares, anyway? My mother's new son can be the brains of the family.”

“You mean one of Cy's kids?” I said.

“Yes. But not one he has already.”

“You're kidding me,” I said.

“She's forty-six. I mean, who would think?”

“Was it on purpose?”

“Fuck. I hope not.”

He looked out the window at the dusty sky.

“Cy says he's going to build us a bigger house, maybe with a pool,” Billy said. “This would be somewhere on the other side of the interstate. Some new street I've never heard of. So there goes taking the bus with my friends.”

“Maybe it will never happen.”

“No,” Billy said. “Not with Cy. That's what would have happened with my dad.”

We got off at the same stop and walked the mile or so to what was left of his father's house. Most of the rubbish had been cleared away, and there was only the foundation left and the brick fireplace, which they had never used. Sand had blown across the concrete, and Billy marked off with a stick where the living room used to be, the kitchen, and the bedrooms.

“Here is where my dad was found,” he said, and drew a picture of the recliner in the living room. “He died where he wanted to be, doing what he liked to do.”

“Drinking, you mean?”

“And drugs,” Billy said. “He was into pills before he got sick. I found his stash once, a long time ago. I was so young and stupid I didn't take any.”

He drew a picture of the concrete Buddha statue his dad used to have sitting on the hearth.

“That's a smart hiding place,” I said.

“I was trying to move it over, I can't remember why. I expected it to be heavy, but it was hollow inside, and there they were, stuffed inside a pea can. Peas,” he said, “like you would eat.”

“Painkillers, peas, peace,” I said.

“Right.”

“Did the Buddha burn?” I asked.

“It got blackened. Dennie has it in her closet.”

We headed back. The sun was low behind us, but in front of us the day was bright, as if we were walking backward, toward lunch instead
of supper, toward last year instead of next year, as if with each step we were undoing the past, even though it meant we would have to do all those same things again. We wouldn't be able to change anything. That was how science worked. You could make discoveries, which could make things better in the future, but you couldn't undo anything that had happened or had been set in motion. It was the one sad fact about the universe.

W
HEN
I
GOT
home my mother was in the Airstream, ripping up a corner of the brown carpeting.

“I want to redo in here,” she said. “It's dated and worn. Depressing looking. When Billy comes to spend the night, you and he could stay out here. A bit like camping.”

She looked down at the carpeting. “I suppose we could have just gotten it cleaned,” she said, “but I think we'd be better off starting over. What do you think?”

It wasn't a real question.

“Okay then. You can get started before supper. I'll leave it to you,” she said, as I had known she would. That was how she got us to do what she wanted done.

I put the radio on and listened to country-and-western while I worked—music that Harmony didn't like. All those cowboys who hate Indians, she used to say. All those pretend heartachy people. As for the heartachy part, well, nobody had damaged hers yet. She might say something different when and if that happened. Maybe Jason would break up with her at some point, I thought. He was going out with her now. He had not come out and said that, but it was obvious.

When my father got home from work he came into the Airstream to see what I had done and to tell me how I should have done it instead.
“It's fine, though,” he said. “It'll work.” One sleeve of his shirt was ripped. “Doberman mix,” he said. “Don't become a vet, Travis. Animals hate us.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“What field might you go into then? Do you think about it?”

“Not really.”

“You might want to start. Time moves fast.”

“I thought I'd be a teenager a while longer.”

“I was afraid of that,” Dad said.

Just before I went in for supper I moved the bed out of the back corner, and just under the edge of the carpeting was where I found the coral ring. It was a smallish, woman's ring, and I was pretty sure that Nate had bought it for Jody Farnell. Sam Rush had told my father about it, and he had told me. “That's how much Nate cared for her,” my father had said.

I put the ring in my pocket and tried to figure out what to do with it.

chapter forty-five

SAM RUSH

W
ITH MY SLIDING
glass door open to the night wind, I sat at my kitchen table in front of my computer, preparing for my meeting in Prescott with Bob McLaney. I had typed up my notes from the beginning of the investigation and emailed them to him, including my recent conversation with Paulette Hebson. Now I wanted to familiarize myself with the information and make sure of the correct sequence of events. I drank coffee in order to keep myself alert, and when I made changes on the computer, typing with two fingers, I wished not for the first time that I had taken a typing class in high school.

By one in the morning I had done what I could, and I went outside. My neighborhood was asleep. It was mostly older folks, aside from a young couple down the street who partied late and had too much company. But tonight even their lights were out. There was a white moon, and I focused on it and tried to let my mind empty, especially of Lee and Julie Aspenall. I was sorry I had taken on the case, yet I understood what my reasoning had been, and it still made sense to me. A sense of certainty belongs to your twenties and thirties. After that, you make
do with the complexities of being human. I went inside and lay on the couch and fell asleep in front of the television.

On the drive to Prescott in the morning I had my paperwork on the passenger seat, and I went over the investigation one more time in my mind, trying to see what if anything I had overlooked, not given enough significance to, or not followed up on. In the back of my mind was Jody Farnell in her Toyota, a girl on her own who knew too many men, in too many different ways, stopping at PT's in the early evening. Despite how much we knew, we still knew too little. But unless you had a confession or indisputable physical evidence, there was always the chance that anything could have happened.

T
HE MORNING WAS
warm and cloudless when I left Black Canyon City. Prescott was considerably cooler, with low clouds hanging raggedly over the hills. Bob's office was upstairs from the Sheriff's Department. I could remember when the county attorneys had their offices in the pretty courthouse across the street, as could Bob.

He was waiting for me, wearing jeans and a black Western shirt—not one of his days to be in court. He was a few inches shorter than I was, darker complected and thinner, with brown hair mixed with gray, a focused, sharp expression, and a sense of humor you didn't expect. I had gotten us two coffees, and I handed one to him and sat in the chair opposite his desk.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I bet.”

“Myself,” he said, “we had a crying grandchild staying with us. Seven months old, with strong lungs. Guess whose bed he slept in.”

Then we looked at our notes and started talking about the case.

“We have a fair amount of evidence against Nate Aspenall,” he said, “even though it's circumstantial. Nate has history with Jody, is fixated on her big-time, sees her at the overlook performing a sexual act with Mike Early one day after he proposes to her, she ends up dead five hours or so later, his pickup is parked near her house—all night, possibly—and somebody makes a phone call the next morning to Mike Early from the town in which Jody's car is found.”

Bob took a drink of coffee. “The fact that Jody's body was found near Nate's father's house could go either way, I suppose, although I tend to see it as strong. How about you?”

“Leaving her body close to somebody he has ties to,” I said, “that was my thinking. So that he doesn't feel as if he's just abandoning it. Plus he doesn't just throw it in the wash—he can't bring himself to. But he likes the idea of tossing her away, now that he's been tossed aside by her. So he positions her that way. It's the closest he can come.

“Since we're assuming unpremeditated,” I said, “it's possible he had a need to be caught. He's horrified by what he's done. Can't admit it to us, or to his parents, maybe not even to himself. So he leaves the body near his father's house. Maybe throwing a little blame in his father's direction at the same time. Nate's childhood wasn't easy.”

“None of that sounds far-fetched to me,” Bob said.

We drank our coffee.

“Then there's Jody's Toyota being found in Holbrook,” Bob said. “Assuming it wasn't stolen by somebody else entirely, and left there—which seems unlikely—Nate may have left it there in order to misdirect us to this person Jody knows in Holbrook. Even if Nate didn't know him by name, he knew of him, am I right?”

“Yes. And he mentioned knowing about him early in the investigation,” I said.

“Or maybe Nate just wants to throw us off, complicate our investigation. That covers all the bases—the need to be caught, combined with the desire not to be. He's a contradiction, like everybody else in the world. Did you ever find anybody to verify whether Nate's pickup was in Winslow all night?”

I shook my head. “It was parked in front of an empty house, it turned out. At the houses nearby, and there aren't many, nobody recalled noticing. One person said they remembered a red pickup parked there at midnight; somebody else got the color right but the make wrong, said they saw the vehicle in the morning but weren't sure it had been there the night before.”

“The usual witness accuracy, in other words.”

“Correct.”

“That phone call to Mike Early from the pay phone in Holbrook,” Bob said. “You never got any reasonable explanation for that, am I right?'

“Right.”

“So Nate calls Mike Early at seven thirty in the morning, in Snowflake,” Bob said, “which he knows is reasonably close by, asking for a ride to Winslow. Maybe Nate tells Mike the truth about what he's done, or some version of the truth, and says, ‘It's your fault, Mike. I saw you two at the overlook.' Then Nate and Early come up with that alibi about the water leak.”

“Or Nate could have made up a story as to why he was in Holbrook,” I said. “Then, after Jody's body is found, Mike is implicated. He gave Nate that ride. And he has his own history with Jody. So he keeps quiet. He doesn't know for sure anyway.”

“And there's no indication that Kevin Rainey and Mike Early knew each other?”

“None that I could find,” I said.

Bob picked up his glasses and turned them around in his hand as he thought.