The Scent of Rain and Lightning

27

IN 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.

JODY 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?”

Phyllis sniffed. “Nobody ever accused Bailey of being a genius.”

She finally moved away, leaving Jody alone. Blindly, Jody picked up an apple as if she was considering buying it. Then, feeling hideously self-conscious, she made her way to the dairy section and got the two half gallons of milk for her grandmother. Their handles felt cool and damp in her hands as she walked back to the front again with every intention of purchasing them. But when she saw Byron George at one of the checkout counters, she felt swept by outrage at his defense of Crosby. It was different for Red Bosch to feel as he did-he’d been there that night, he’d actually seen Billy, and even if Red’s perceptions were wrong, at least they were drawn from firsthand experience. Not so Byron. All he was doing was taking the word of people who could be expected to defend their husband and father. In all the years that her family had bought groceries here, they’d never suspected the worm in all the apples they’d bought from Byron.

Jody took the milk to the checkout counter.

“Hi, Byron,” she said to the red-faced man who stood behind one of them. She put the sloshy containers down on the conveyer belt. It was hard to keep antagonism out of her voice, so she grabbed the first superficial topic she could think of, even if it must have sounded like a non sequitur to Byron. “My grandma’s making gravy tonight.”

He looked apologetic as he said, “I hear your grandmother makes the best gravy in five counties.”

“And my mom made the best piecrust.”

She looked him in the eyes.

Byron’s face flushed even redder. “I can’t claim I ever had any of it. But that’s certainly what I always heard.”

Jody didn’t say out loud her contemptuous thought as she took her change from him. You believe things you don’t know anything about, don’t you, Byron? You believe what anybody tells you?

“Where’s Valentine today?” she asked him.

He looked both sad and embarrassed as he said, “She stayed home.” He busied himself with packing the milk into plastic bags. “To get ready.”

Jody swallowed. “Is he in town yet?”

“I don’t know, Jody. I’m keeping my distance.”

“Probably a good idea for all of us,” she replied, and realized she sounded like a self-righteous version of her grandmother.

“I hope you weren’t offended by-”

“Not at all,” she lied, with a bright smile.

But then she heard her grandmother’s voice in her head.

If you don’t get down off that high horse, you’re going to have a very long way to fall, young lady.

Jody’s false smile wavered. A smaller, truer one took its place. Byron couldn’t help it, she realized. He was in love, and sometimes love wasn’t only blind, it was also stupid. Maybe that wasn’t a kind thought, but it was the best she could do at the moment.

“’Bye, Byron,” she said quietly.

“’Bye, Jody. Thanks for coming in.”

When she got back into her truck, she pointed it in the opposite direction of the ranch.