The Scent of Rain and Lightning (21 page)

B
EFORE 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.

I
N 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.

J
ODY 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 any 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.

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?”