The Scent of Rain and Lightning Page 24

  “Oh, Grandma …”

  “I didn’t keep your father safe.” Her voice caught, but she kept going. “So far, you have been safe with us. I want to keep it that way forever.”

  Annabelle slipped out of the bedroom before Jody could get to her feet and catch her for a hug. She watched her walk down the hallway toward the master bedroom and close the door, then she shut her own door and leaned her back against it. Tears started to roll down her cheeks until she had to run to get her pillow and put it over her face to cover the sound of her sobs. She wasn’t even sure who she was crying for this time—her grandmother, her lost parents, herself, or for everybody whose lives had changed so much on that violent night twenty-three years ago.

  JODY COULDN’T SLEEP because she couldn’t stop feeling miserable and because she was afraid of what she might dream. Finally, around eleven-thirty, she threw off her covers and got up and dressed again, feeling as if she had to get out of there. She didn’t want to worry her grandparents—or piss off her uncles—but she longed for her own home, her own bedroom, and her own bed. Knowing there were sheriff’s deputies stationed at either end of Billy Crosby’s street made her feel she might safely get what she wanted. The desire to leave was so strong it surprised her. She hadn’t realized how completely she had already transferred her allegiance to her parents’ house in Rose and how powerfully it could pull her toward it. She was a little worried about whether she’d get spooked inside of it again, but also determined not to let that get to her.

  She wrote a note and taped it to her bedroom door.

  Please don’t worry about me. I couldn’t sleep. I’ve gone for a drive.

  It wasn’t as irresponsible as it might have seemed to an outsider. In the Linder family, “going for a drive” at any time of day or night—in a car, a truck, on a horse, or even on a tractor—was a time-honored tradition that signaled, I’m losing my mind. See you later. It wasn’t remarkable for any of them to wander in the middle of the night, rendered sleepless by ghosts and painful memories. Her grandmother had been known to ride her horse around the yard at three in the morning with the horse practically walking in his sleep. Her grandfather took his truck out to scare the coyotes with his headlights now and then. When her uncles visited, they often drove to Bailey’s tavern late and got home later.

  She had her cell phone, which still worked.

  They could reach her at any time.

  As she hurried through the kitchen, Jody grabbed a couple of leftover biscuits and a bottle of cold water from the refrigerator. She sneaked out of the ranch house, where the only interior sounds were a ticking grandfather clock and a snoring uncle. Outside, it was so quiet she could hear the whir of the occasional truck tires on the closest highway.

  Three of the ranch dogs trotted up silently to sniff her.

  She cracked open a biscuit and divvied it up for them, letting them grab the pieces from her open palm and then lick her clean. And then, with a sigh, she divvied up the other biscuit for them, too.

  Worried about the noise she’d make by starting her truck, she got it rolling downhill without the engine on and didn’t start it up until she was many yards away from the house.

  She switched on the CD player as she drove toward stars on the horizon.

  Johnny Cash—her father’s favorite singer—crooned into the cab of her truck. She rolled down the front windows so he could serenade the cows as well. It was a Johnny that might have shocked her dad, Jody thought—not a country-western song, but a cover of the Nine Inch Nails’ song, “Pain.” With all the emotion, honesty, and life experience that Johnny poured into it, it was enough to break your heart. When it finished, Cash’s voice rocked out of the truck speaker again, this time singing a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Your Own Personal Jesus.”

  Jody figured her dad would like the singer if not the songs.

  “Hey, Dad,” she murmured, feeling love for him, “times change.”

  She let the cool night air roll in while the music rolled out.

  She passed Red Bosch’s house, with its garage door left half open for his dog. For a moment she wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed with him, but as Red’s home passed in her side mirror, so did the moment of desire.

  She wasn’t afraid of being out on the road by herself at night.

  Wide-open spaces didn’t scare her. She felt as if she needed them in order to keep breathing; the way other people needed oceans or mountains, she needed the plains. And anyway, she was fairly sure there was nothing to fear on this night. Billy Crosby was inside his house with law enforcement outside to make sure he stayed there. As for herself, she had a big powerful vehicle with plenty of gas, and a cell phone with its battery fully charged, and there were people she knew living down almost every road and around every corner, even if the corner was a mile and a half away. This was her territory, which she knew like the soft comfortable feel of her saddle.

  The night smelled to Jody like fresh-plowed dirt and new things growing.

  WHEN SHE DROVE into Rose, it was close to midnight.

  Most of the streetlights were out, because the town couldn’t afford to turn them on all night anymore. “We’re safe,” was the sad local joke, “if anybody ever wants to bomb us from an airplane.” No bomber pilot could spot them in the vast Kansas darkness below. In truth, Rose had already been bombed by the economy. “You want a growth industry?” one wag had said about struggling rural towns like Rose. “Sell the lumber people use to board up their store windows.” Surprisingly, at least to Jody’s family, her aunt Belle’s museum was a rare bright spot and success story in the county’s economy, a fact that Chase claimed “only goes to show how hard up this place really is.”

  But Rose still had a high school, and Jody had a job teaching in it come fall.

  She was thinking about that as she drove slowly down the street that crossed at the north end of the Crosbys’ block. As she neared it, she saw a deputy’s sedan blocking the entrance, and when she drove up parallel to his car, she spotted a second one blocking the other end of the street, just as the sheriff had told her grandfather they would be.

  Through her rolled-down window, she called to the deputy next to her.

  “Hi, Ray.” He was an old friend of her uncle Meryl’s.

  “Jody? What are you doing out so late?”

  “I just wanted to see you maintain the peace.”

  She smiled to make sure he knew she was being nice about it. She didn’t know what, if anything, his boss had told his deputies about the tense standoff at the ranch that evening.

  “We cleared everybody out hours ago.”

  “I’m glad.”

  He gave her a curious look. “I wouldn’t think you’d care.”

  “I care about what happens three blocks away from my house. And I don’t want anybody to get hurt or arrested because of Crosby.”

  “We’re not going to arrest anybody, don’t you worry.”

  Jody nodded her head in the direction of the Crosby place.

  “What about the rear of their house?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “The alley in back? Might be kind of vulnerable?”

  Ray glanced in that direction. “If he’s nervous, he can stay up and watch.” Sounding resentful, he added, “Like I am.”

  “This citizen appreciates it.”

  He softened a little and smiled up at her. “Does the citizen happen to have fresh coffee with her?”

  “No, but I’ll bet she could bring some back with her.”

  “Nah, I’m just kidding. You go on home, Jody. It’s going to be a peaceful night in Rose, just right for sleeping.”

  She gave him a grateful wave and drove on home, but didn’t go inside.

  Instead, she left her truck parked behind her house and started walking to Bailey’s Bar & Grill. Since supper, she’d felt a growing need to talk to somebody who wasn’t in her family about her family.

  FOR THE SECOND TIME that day Jody walked into
the dark tavern.

  As before, country-western music was playing loud enough to require earplugs, and the pool table was the most popular spot in the joint. Bailey had closed the kitchen, so there were only the pool players and a few drinkers left in the place.

  Jody hopped onto a bar stool again.

  When Bailey came over, she said, “I ate a big supper, Bailey. I left my truck at my house. I walked over here. I’m going to walk home. Now may I have that beer, please?”

  “Corona with a lime and a glass? Your mom always drank from a glass.”

  Bailey had told her that before, so she only nodded. “Yeah.”

  “But she was satisfied with domestic beer.”

  “Well, I’m un-American.”

  The big man smiled slightly, and Jody saw how weary and bored he looked as he leaned over to pull her beer out of a refrigerator under the bar. Maybe what she had to ask him would wake him up.

  “Bailey, I would never confuse you with a priest.”

  He plucked a glass off a shelf and located a slice of lime in the refrigerator, too. “Good to know.”

  “And as far as I know you’re not a lawyer or a shrink.”

  “Where’s this going?” he asked, setting what she wanted in front of her.

  “Where it’s going is …”

  He watched her pick up the glass, tilt it and pour beer down its side. When it was upright again she ran the lime slice around the rim and then dropped it into the beer and took one swallow. Finally she said, “I got to thinking about you tonight.” She took another swallow, because it tasted so good and because she hoped it could relax her. The glass was cool in her palm, the beer was sweet and bitter in her mouth. “And what I thought is that I’ve been coming here all of my life and I’ve never heard you pass on gossip about anybody.”

  Bailey looked at her with an impassive expression, but she thought she saw a hint of pride in his eyes.

  “Which leads me to believe,” she said, after wiping her upper lip with a bar napkin, “that I can ask you something and it won’t go beyond us.”

  He frowned a little.

  “Don Phelps was out to the ranch this evening,” she told him. “My family pretty much accused him of making all this happen by running a dishonest investigation.” When Bailey didn’t say anything, she pushed a little. “So I wonder what you think about that?”

  Bailey shrugged. “I think he ran a dishonest investigation.”

  “Shit,” she said, involuntarily, and took another drink. “You do?”

  “Well, yeah, didn’t the governor say so?”

  “I guess, but—”

  “You guess? No, he did say so. And as much as I respect your grandfather and the rest of your family, I think they have some nerve blaming Don Phelps for all of that.”

  It was a lot of words for Bailey, and he looked like he had more to say.

  Jody worked up her courage and asked, “Why, Bailey?”

  He sighed and propped himself on his bar with his hands spaced wide on it. “Listen, your granddad is the biggest property owner in this county, right? Everybody thinks he shits gold. Nobody’s respected any more than him and Annabelle. They have the most money, so they wield the most power and influence, right? You know that’s true. And one night their oldest boy—who just happens to be a kid that folks think is the nicest young fellow around—gets murdered and those nice, rich, powerful people point to Billy Crosby. They believe he did it. They are sure he did it. They’re not lying. They really do believe it, and they expect him to get arrested and tried and convicted and be sent away for a long, long time.”

  Bailey took a breath and backed off from the bar a little, then leaned in again toward Jody, close enough that she could see the gray hairs amid his whiskers and the broken capillaries in his nose. He leaned one meaty forearm on the counter and turned his back to the couple of customers farther down the bar who looked as if they needed refills. “And let’s say you’re the sheriff of this county where the Linders are royalty. And you’re an average guy, no Colombo, just a young guy who got elected sheriff because you always wanted to turn on a siren and drive a car real fast and, anyway, it’s a job. And you don’t know eff-all about investigating a homicide. If you’re that man—I’m not saying if you’re you, but if you’re that man—what are you going to do?”

  “Find and arrest Billy Crosby,” she answered with reluctance.

  “Are you going to waste time lookin’ for anybody else?”

  “Probably not.”

  “No probably about it. Are you going to give the time of day to anybody that suggests that somebody else might have done it?”

  She hesitated too long, and Bailey said, “Trust me, you’re not.”

  Jody asked, “Are you saying my grandfather—or somebody in my family—told the sheriff to ignore that other evidence?”

  “No, I’m not saying that, Jody. I don’t know if they did or not, although knowing your grandpa, I’d guess not. But they wouldn’t have to, I do know that much. Don Phelps may not be a genius, but he’s no dummy, either. There was an atmosphere, there was a rush to judgment—if you want to call it that—and he knew enough to lead the rush. But let me tell you something. In my opinion, it’s a damned good thing Don did that, because if he hadn’t taken Billy to jail first thing that morning and kept him there, we would have had other violence in this town. There were people who would have dragged Billy out and either beat him to death or hung him. So I’m not blaming Don for what he did, and I don’t think your family ought to be blaming him, either, because they’re the ones who set him up for it.”

  “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.”