The Scent of Rain and Lightning

32

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.”

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

IT 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.”

Jody couldn’t keep her hands from flying to her mouth.

“Here’s an irony for you,” Collin said, sounding bitter. Jody wanted to go to him and take his hands and squeeze them to comfort him, but she brought her hands down from her mouth and kept them at her sides instead, and stood there listening. “He’s sleeping in the hammock again, just like he used to do. Only this time he doesn’t even have the excuse of being drunk. We couldn’t stop him from having a few beers at Bailey’s, but I wouldn’t buy him any more to take home. Now he’s just a stone-cold sober son of a bitch. You saw how he is. I’m getting him away from her as soon as she’ll let me, which I have a feeling may be first thing in the morning.”

Jody swallowed. “So you felt you had to get him out of prison because…”

“Because otherwise I’d have to go through my life knowing my own father had been wrongly convicted and I hadn’t done anything about it. And because my mother knew it, too.”

“You remind me of my grandfather.”

He looked askance at that. “Why?”

“Men of principle, both of you. It can cause a lot of grief.”

Collin looked taken aback at that, but then he said, “Yeah. I’m afraid I’ve caused you some of that today.”

“Oh, hell, what’s a little more?” she said with false lightness, and then felt ashamed for the self-pitying sound of it. She lowered her head so she didn’t have to look him in the eye. Although she heard his feet moving over the distance separating them, she was still surprised when she felt the heat of his body right in front of her. They stood on an incline with her slightly above him, which still didn’t bring her face level with his. Somehow gravity pulled her close to him and she found herself pressed against him. Collin’s arms came around her, and hers went around him, and he rested his chin on top of her head as she breathed in the scent of his skin. They stood like that for several minutes, neither of them saying anything, but their arms getting tighter around each other, holding on as if this were the only chance they’d ever have to embrace. There was a moment when Jody thought she felt him kiss her hair. She shivered and pressed even closer into his body, feeling more deeply comforted by his touch than she had ever felt before and wanting with all of her heart to give back to him the same profound feeling.

It felt so wonderful and so impossible that she wanted to weep.

Finally, she pulled away and Collin released her.

Jody looked into his eyes once more and then turned and walked away from him. One hesitant step. Two steps. She didn’t hear him do the same so she guessed he was watching her go. Unable to bear leaving him, she turned around to see if he was there, which was why she could see the shocked and frightened look on his face-which mirrored hers-when they both heard a sound that could only have been a gunshot coming from the direction of his parents’ house. There was no other sound, no scream that followed it, no other boom of gunfire, just the one shot that cracked the night silence as if it had broken a sound barrier.

Jody started to run with him toward his home until he turned to say, “No, please! Stay here. Get out of sight. Don’t make me worry about you.” And then he said, “I’ve always loved you, Jody.” Shocked as much by those words as by the gunshot, she stopped where she was, then ducked back into the shadows beside the car in the driveway and watched Collin Crosby run home, his long legs covering the sidewalks, the street, and his yard faster than either of the screeching cars of the deputies could get there. Her heart screamed No! when Collin pulled open the front door and disappeared inside. She prayed frantically for his safety. She watched Ray and the other deputy park at strange angles in the street, saw neighboring lights come on, watched the two sheriff’s men advance cautiously toward the house with guns drawn.

And then she saw Collin come back outside.

Jody stood up where she was.

He walked past the deputies as if they weren’t there while they called to him, “Is anybody hurt? What’s going on inside?” Instead, he came straight to Jody and faced her.

Her voice shaking, she asked, “Is your father-”

“It’s not Billy,” Collin said, his face distorted with all of the emotions running through him. “It’s Mom.”

Too shocked to speak, Jody stared at him.

“He shot her. Point-blank in the face. Killed her. He took her car and he’s gone.”

She stammered. “But I didn’t see a car-”

“Hers was parked in back.”

There were potholed alleys that ran the length of some blocks, emptying into other streets.

He put his face in his hands and began to weep. “This is my fault, this is all my fault, Jody. I should have left him there. I never should have tried to get him out.”

Jody reached out to grasp his shaking shoulders, with hands that were also shaking, but he broke away without another glance and returned to where the deputies still waited with their guns out, ignorant of the fact that it wasn’t Billy Crosby who’d been killed by some local vigilante, it was Valentine Crosby-who had waited for her husband all those years only to have him kill her soon after their reunion. Staggered by the shock of it, Jody watched a few more moments and then, sensing that her presence was useless, she turned and went slowly toward her own home. She wanted to run, to escape, to get as far away from Rose as she could go, though only if she could grab Collin and take him with her. Instead, frightened, sad, confused again, and bone weary, she climbed back into her truck to drive out to the ranch to tell them before they heard it from anybody else.