The Scent of Rain and Lightning

26

BEFORE 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.