The Scent of Rain and Lightning (26 page)

“Set him up?” She was shocked by his words. “Bailey, are you saying you think they did it on purpose?”

“No, they most likely did it out of honest grief and sorrow and a belief that they were right, but the result was just the same.”

“You mean the wrong man went to prison?”

But Bailey only shrugged again. “Oh, I think Billy Crosby was an absolutely right man to put in prison.”

Jody took a sip of her tart beer, looking down to hide her emotions. When she finally looked up again, she said, “There’s a flaw in your logic, Bailey.”

“Which is?”

“If Billy didn’t kill my dad, then somebody else did who’s more dangerous than he is.”

Bailey said, “It was those strangers your dad stopped that day.”

“And so we’ll never catch them and we’ll never know?”

For the first time, he let some sympathy into his eyes. “Probably not, Jody. It might be best for you to accept that fact.” He grabbed his lone waitress as she tried to squeeze past behind him to get to some bottles. “Sylvia can tell you what I mean.”

The waitress, older than Bailey, said, “Tell her what, baby?”

“Tell her about that day over at the truck stop when you were there.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, looking at Jody, “are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yeah, she does,” Bailey insisted, before Jody could say anything.

Sylvia—white-haired and still shapely at over seventy in her T-shirt and blue jeans—leaned against Bailey but looked at Jody. “I used to waitress at the truck stop, did you know that, honey?”

Jody shook her head. Sylvia was fixed only to Bailey’s in her mind.

“Well, I did work there, so I was there that Saturday when that poor Sam Carpenter came running in, just so out of breath you’d have thought he would die right there. He came in yelling, ‘Where’s Hugh Linder, where’s Hugh Linder!’ and then he said that Billy Crosby had killed your daddy.”

“And how did everybody react to that?” Bailey prodded her.

“Well, shock!” Sylvia said, her hands flying up into the air as if she’d just been shot. “Pure shock and grief was what it was, people weepin’ and yellin’. We just wanted to go get that little bastard and string him up right then.”

“See, that’s what I was saying,” Bailey interrupted, releasing Sylvia back to her job. “It was a good thing Don Phelps did what he did that day. If he’s responsible for sending the wrong man to prison, then we’re all responsible for it, because there wasn’t anybody—including me—who really stood up and suggested we might be convicting the wrong guy. Oh, I told them how drunk Billy was, but that’s all I did. We all just went along, most people because they believed he did it and a few because maybe they knew better but they didn’t want to cross your folks, and a few of us because we didn’t mind so much if Billy got sent away. That probably saved some-other-body’s life, like his own wife or his kid, or who the hell knows who Billy might have ended up killing someday.”

Bailey went off to sell a few drinks, and Jody took the time to gulp down half of her beer, only to realize she didn’t want any more of it. She was already disoriented enough from everything that had happened and everything she’d heard since noon. When Bailey came back, she said, “But why would my family be so hard on the sheriff?”

This time there was no mistaking the depth of sympathy in his eyes.

“Ah, Jody. Think about it. Think about your grandfather and what kind of man he is. How’s he ever going to live with himself if he admits he sent the wrong man to prison?” Bailey took up a wet rag and began wiping down the counter around her glass. “When you don’t want to face what you did wrong, it’s easier to find you a scapegoat.”

Jody sat quietly for a moment, working hard to keep her emotions under control, and then she said, “Thank you for being honest with me, Bailey.”

He shrugged. “There’s nothin’ much else to be most of the time.”

His last remarks to her before she left the tavern were a warning: “Watch out for Billy. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t, but if he didn’t, that don’t make him any less dangerous. He went into prison a bad kid and he came out a worse man. I had him in here today, and you don’t want to meet him in a dark alley, Jody. I don’t want to, either, leastwise not without a gun or a baseball bat. He is one pent-up angry dude with a grudge as big as your granddaddy’s ranch, for which I can’t really say that I blame him. If I was him I might want to kill somebody, too. If I didn’t know he was locked up on his block with deputies at either end of it, I’d walk you home myself.”

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

I
T 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 for 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.”