The Scent of Rain and Lightning

25

IT WAS A beat-up old truck speeding toward the Rocks.

Soon its driver was parked and walking toward her, daylight visible through his bowed legs.

“Aren’t you even goin’ to ask me what my reason was?”

Red Bosch stood with his hands at his skinny hips, looking up to where Jody sat on the haunches of the Sphinx. She resisted her desire to pick up rocks and hurl them at him.

She could barely make herself look at him.

“You followed me.” She made it an accusation.

“You could give me the benefit of the doubt, you know.”

Jody did pick up a rock then, but only rolled it around in her hands, looking down at it instead of at Red, feeling sick at the thought of what she had done with him without knowing what he’d been doing behind her back, behind the backs of everybody in her family.

“He was too drunk, Jody.”

She looked off into the distance, not at him.

“When I picked Billy up in Bailey’s parking lot, he was almost unconscious drunk. There was no way he could sober up enough to get from his house to your house, not drivin’ and not on foot. No way. Not within the time frame when your dad got killed, that’s for sure.”

“You were sixteen!” Her tone mocked his interpretation of events.

“Well, I knew what drunk was. I wasn’t a sheltered kid, Jody.”

She flushed. Not like you, he meant.

“Jody, they didn’t give him a breath test.”

Finally, she glanced at him, but then quickly away again.

“Did you hear me? I’m tellin’ you they didn’t check his blood alcohol level. Now why do you suppose that was?”

She didn’t say anything but was thinking furiously, back to all the transcripts and records she had read over the years. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the results of a breath test, or any testimony about one. It never occurred to her to realize one was missing.

“I’ll tell you why that was,” Red persisted. “It’s because it would have screwed with their assumption that he did it. A blood alcohol test would have proved he couldn’t have functioned anywhere near well enough to do what they said he did. Hell, Jody, he was still stumbling when they picked him up the next morning. He could barely put two words together. There is no way on God’s green earth that he got off that couch, crossed three blocks in thunderin’ rain, got into your parents’ house, climbed the stairs-”

“Stop.”

“-And then drove his truck somewhere with your-”

“Stop!”

Her right foot jerked reflexively as if she were trying to brake. It dislodged pebbles. They rolled to the ground, coming to rest near Red’s boots, raising a faint clatter and tiny puffs of white dust. Red stepped forward onto one of the pebbles and ground it to powder.

“I’m sorry this makes you feel bad,” he said.

“It doesn’t make me feel bad,” she lied. “It makes me furious.”

He smiled slightly, ruefully. “I get that. But this is why I kept in contact with him. You can understand that, right? I never believed he did it. I thought Billy got a raw deal. I was young and maybe idealistic, I guess. Or maybe I’m just a dummy, but I know what I know. I’m not saying Billy wouldn’t have done it, but just that he couldn’t. Not that night anyway. And nobody listened to me about how drunk he was because, like you said, I was sixteen and what did I know? Especially since they all had their minds made up already. He did it, that was that, and nothing different was ever going to be considered.” The look he gave her was pleading. “But he didn’t do it, Jody. I’m not sayin’ I like the guy. And please understand, when I say I kept contact with him, I mean like three Christmas cards and one five-minute visit over twenty-three years-”

“You went to see him in prison?”

Warily, Red drawled, “Yeah, I did. And I wasn’t impressed and I never went back. It’s not like he changed in prison into a saint, ’cause believe me, he didn’t. I’m just sayin’ it wasn’t right what they did, even if they thought they were doin’ it for the right reasons.”

“‘They’ being my family?”

“They being everybody but me, I guess.”

“You and Collin, apparently.”

He blinked, then nodded. “Yeah.”

“What do you mean he didn’t change into a saint in prison?”

Red glanced behind him, back toward the dirt road leading into the Rocks. “Jody, you need to leave here now.”

“Leave? Why?”

He looked back up at her. “Like I said, I went to visit him that one time. He told me if he ever got out of jail the second thing he wanted was a pork tenderloin from Bailey’s. The next thing he wanted was to get laid. But the first thing Billy wants is to see this place.”

“Why?”

“Because it means, like…” Red struggled to find what he wanted to express, and finally said, “… home.”

Jody didn’t want to understand that, but she did. Because there was nothing like them anywhere else, the Rocks meant home to most people who lived near them. When people from Rose got a glimpse of them after being away, they knew they were back. She didn’t want to share that feeling with a murderer-an alcoholic, wife-beating, animal-abusing, lying, ex-convict murderer.

She dropped her face into her hands.

What if he wasn’t all of those things?

“Jody?” Red stepped forward, concern on his face.

When she looked up, she was leaking tears again. “Oh, Red. Everybody I know-except you, I guess-believes he killed my parents.”

“Yes, they do. I know.”

“But you’re telling me they’re wrong. I’m wrong. We’re all wrong.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’. I suppose you don’t have to believe me.”

She stared at him, knowing he was a man who’d always rather tell the truth than not. Of the two of them, she was the one who felt most comfortable with the lies they told so they could keep playing together. If he’d had his way, and even though he’d scampered like a scared weasel out of her bedroom that very day, Red might have taken his chance with the truth. She knew that was because he thought that much of her and of her family.

“Why’d you run out of my bedroom today, Red?”

“Why’d I what?” He laughed a little at her unexpected question.

“Did you run off just because of your job?”

“I left ’cause if they’re goin’ to find out about us, it’s not goin’ to be like that.”

Out of consideration for her. That’s what he meant.

Maybe she wasn’t the more mature of the two of them after all, she thought.

She dropped her face into her hands again. “Oh, dammit, Red.”

“What’s the matter, babe?”

This time the wry laughter was hers. “What’s wrong? Red, I don’t want to have to be fair. I don’t want to start believing what nobody else that I love believes.” She didn’t see the flinch that passed across his face at those words. “I don’t want you to be right.”

She sighed, every fiber in her resisting his story.

“Listen to me, Jody. One thing you have to believe right now is that you’ve got to get out of here.”

“Why? What’s he going to do to me if he shows up and I’m here?”

“That’s the thing, babe. I don’t know. I just know he was angry when he went into prison and he was angry that time I saw him and he’s had more years since then to build up an even hotter head of steam.”

Old anger burst out of her again. “As if he has any right to it!”

“Jody. That’s what I’m saying. He has a right to it.”

She felt emotionally exhausted, scared of what he’d told her, and confused by it.

“I’ve hated that man for twenty-three years, Red.”

“Babe, it doesn’t matter if you hate him. It only matters if he hates you.”

That sent a shiver down her spine.

“He’s for sure coming back today?”

“They let him go this morning.”

There was increasing urgency in Red’s tone.

“I suppose his son is driving him back.”

“So I hear.”

Red looked back toward the road. Nervously, he shuffled his boots in the white dust. It was about a five-hour drive from Lansing, where the prison was.

“Come on, Jody. I’m not leaving unless you do.”

She thought about staying, on the chance of getting a look at Billy Crosby, but the only defensive weapon she had with her was her backpack. “I find it really hard to believe he’d make a special trip just to look at the scenery,” she said, with an edge of sarcasm.

“Maybe not. I’m just tellin’ you what he told me.”

“Criminals like to return to the scenes of their crimes, though.”

“Babe.” He shook his head at her. “Come on.”

“Go on ahead,” she said, working up to her feet. “I’ll follow you into town.”

Appearing satisfied with that, Red turned to go, but she stopped him.

“I’m not saying I believe you.”

“You believe me they didn’t give him a drunk test, don’t you?”

“Yes. I mean, I guess. I’ll find out for sure from Uncle Meryl.”

“Do that. Do you believe me when I say he couldn’t have done it?”

“I don’t know what I believe right now, Red! But I do believe that you believe that.”

He let out a breath of relief at that admission from her.

She made it better by adding, “I’m sorry I didn’t let you explain.”

Red made a gesture that brushed away hurt feelings. “Not a problem.” And then suddenly he was scrambling up the rocks to where she sat, using his bare hands and the toes of his boots to get to her.

“Wha-” she started to say, when he planted a kiss on her lips.

Then he plunged down the slope again, making her hold her breath for fear he’d break his neck. Once on the ground, he kept moving. When Red was halfway to his truck, he turned back to yell, “You’re coming, right?”

“I promise!” she yelled back at him.

Jody stared at the back of his truck until it was well on the way out.

It was strange to think of Red, when he was only sixteen, being so intimately involved with what happened that night and the next day. He’d been right there in the house with Billy, and he’d been there when the sheriff showed up in the morning. It must have been a lot for a kid like him to take in, Jody thought. Maybe he had devised his theory about Billy’s drinking because it was too frightening to think he’d been in the house with a murderer. Or maybe Red couldn’t bear to wonder if he might have stopped Billy and prevented it all from happening. What if he hadn’t picked Billy up? What if he hadn’t taken him home? Could that have changed anything? And then on top of everything, he’d gone to work full-time for the family of the murdered man and missing woman.

Breath test or no, there were all sorts of reasons he could be wrong.

But what if he was right…

Almost everything in her resisted the idea. And yet…

Come what may, I have to know what happened to my mom.

Jody stood up on the haunches of the Sphinx, shaded her eyes and looked in every direction as far as the huge rock formation would allow. Only the scenery at her back remained blocked from her view.

Why do I keep coming here for searching and solace?

With a catch in her breath, she thought, Because it is huge and solid and it changes so slowly. Unlike her own life, with its devastating, breathtaking alterations, this landscape shifted minutely over centuries, its dust sloughing off of these rocks no more dramatically than cells shed by her own skin. That made it comforting, even while it was also painful because she mysteriously felt so close to her mother here.

She sat down again, feeling a little stunned by her epiphany.

After a bit, she slid on her butt back down to the ground.

Again, she paused to look into the distance, and had another stunning thought: What if this commutation of Crosby ’s sentence is opportunity rather than disaster? What if it shifts all the evidence, bringing a new truth to the surface like wind moving the dirt around here at the Rocks?

After a few moments she trotted back to her truck, feeling as if something within her had both opened and focused, like a long-slumbering dinosaur waking up to turn its eyes toward dinner.

THE NEWLY ALERT FEELING lasted until she reached the edge of town.

There, Jody saw a rough, hand-lettered sign:

go back where you belong in jail!

A frisson of instinctive, unstoppable, vindictive pleasure shot through her, bullying her epiphanies out of the way and letting all the pain and fury of the past twenty-three years pour in again. The bulk of the evidence still pointed in one direction. She’d heard Red, himself, suggest that Billy Crosby was more dangerous now than when he’d gone to prison.

She sped past the sign, nodding her heartfelt agreement with it.