The Scent of Rain and Lightning

43

January 10, 2010

IN BETWEEN the first and second semesters at Henderson County Consolidated High School, Jody decided to clean out her collection of backpacks. Her idea was that if she destroyed her collection, then maybe that would end her nearly lifelong obsession with it.

It took her two days of going through each pack individually, examining each item and deciding if there was anything worth keeping or giving away. In the end she dumped almost all of it into black plastic trash bags, which she took to the county dump. The packs themselves ate up additional trash bags. She thought about trying to clean them up so they could be donated-to the school where she taught, for instance-but there wasn’t one of them that any self-respecting kid would have wanted to use. They were beaten up, torn up, filthy, out of fashion. But there were a few interesting objects inside of them, a dozen or so, that she wanted to show her aunt Belle, in case Belle might see any value in them for her museum.

HUGH SENIOR had been forced to eat crow about the Rose Historical Museum.

“I thought it was just a little hobby for her,” he admitted freely to people, more freely than his daughter liked, given that he also said, “I thought I was throwing money away, just to let Belle pretend she had a job.”

But he’d been wrong, as he was happy to say now.

Jody thought it was remarkable that during years when Rose was failing in almost every other way, her aunt’s museum-in-a-bank thrived. Belle had turned out to be a great curator with a superb eye for historical artifacts and a talent for displaying them. Plus, she was a public relations fool, as her brother Chase liked to say with admiration in his voice. Belle didn’t like that praise, either, given that he followed it with, “Who would have guessed?”

As for Belle’s writing, what Annabelle used to call “Belle’s little articles” turned out to be good enough to attract assignments from major publications. She became what Meryl called “the go-to girl” for historians and archaeologists, geologists and paleontologists, writers, photographers, and artists, even for the occasional television documentary about ancient seas and rivers, not to mention the busloads of schoolchildren who journeyed to Rose to run around the famous Rocks and giggle their way through her museum. The scientists who arrived in Rose contributed to the local economy: they ate at Bailey’s and the truck stop, and they bought bottled water and suntan lotion at George’s. Some of them got invited out to High Rock Ranch for supper and horseback riding for them and stimulating conversation for the Linders. Jody’s grandfather was especially proud of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist from China who had loved Annabelle’s homemade barbecue sauce.

Jody was proud of her aunt’s “little hobby.”

BELLE’S CHARM still didn’t extend very generously toward the family, and sometimes especially not toward Jody. Sometimes Jody worried that she was the reason Belle and Meryl never had children, because they’d had to spend too much time helping take care of her.

“You got these where, and how?” Belle challenged her niece.

“Out at the Rocks. It’s just stuff I happened to see and pick up.”

“Just happened to,” she said, casting a skeptical eye from the objects to Jody. Her aunt had always been a large woman, patterned on Hugh Senior’s family rather than on Annabelle’s; over the years her good cooking had broadened her as well, so that she cut a formidable figure. “Like you did when you were a little girl?”

“Maybe.”

“I didn’t know you kept doing that.”

“Well, I did. No harm done.”

“Hmm,” Belle said, sounding skeptical.

“Mostly junk,” she declared after a few silent moments of close examination of the first batch that Jody spilled out onto the glass countertop.

“Which ones aren’t junk?”

“This one.” Belle held up a bit of old wood that had a groove in it like old school desks did. “And this one”-a locket without a chain, but with an old-fashioned photo of a girl in it-“and this one”-a metal hinge that might also have come from a desk. “There used to be a one-room schoolhouse near the Rocks. It was ripped apart by a tornado in l882. Killed the teacher and all six children. I suspect these could be remnants of it.”

“I found them together.”

They had worked themselves up to the surface, as things did at the Rocks.

“You did? I’m glad to hear it. That makes it even more likely.”

The locket tugged at Jody’s heartstrings, given that it might have been worn by the schoolteacher or one of the children.

“Will you display them, Aunt Belle?”

But her aunt didn’t answer. She was staring at the second batch of items that Jody was rolling out onto the glass. When Belle finally spoke, her voice sounded choked and she didn’t look at Jody.

“Where did you find this?” she demanded.

Belle held a tarnished little sculpture in the palm of her hand.

“At the Rocks, like everything else. Remember one time I asked you if Mom wore a charm bracelet? I thought maybe that’s what this was, a charm.”

“It’s not a charm,” Belle said, her voice harsh. She turned it over, showing a circular clasp on the back of it. “It’s designed to hold the ropes of a bolo tie.”

The “charm” was a silver rearing horse.

Jody took it from her, noticing with alarm that her aunt’s hand was trembling, and looked more closely at the back of it. “Is this an inscription? M.T. M.T.? Meryl Tapper? Aunt Belle, did this belong to Uncle Meryl?”

“Yes,” Belle whispered, and then she finally looked into her niece’s eyes. Her own were filled with tears and she looked frightened. “Jody, I gave it to him for Valentine’s Day that year.”

“That year?”

“The year your parents…” She couldn’t finish her sentence. “The last time I saw him wear it was the night they died. He told me the next day he’d lost it. I never saw him wear it again. Jody, if he lost it at the Rocks that night…”

Belle suddenly ran from around the counter.

Jody, her heart pounding with dread and her mind trying to refuse what it was hearing, ran after her aunt. She followed her down the basement stairs into the storage area where Belle kept box upon box of things she had been given, had bought, had found, herself. Like a woman gone mad with terror, Belle pulled at the boxes, destroying her neat piles, reaching back farther and farther until the reached a row at the farthest remove from the front line of boxes. She knocked boxes aside, heedless of what emptied out of them until she reached one on the bottom. It looked different from the others-not like ordinary storage containers but like a cardboard box that a law firm might use to store old transcripts. Jody had seen old ones just like it in her uncle Meryl’s law office.

“Get me scissors!” Belle ordered her, pointing to where they hung.

Jody got them and gave them to her aunt, who ripped into the old, threaded wrapping tape that had been wound around the box as if its contents were valuable enough to be stored in Fort Knox.

When the tape was undone, Belle lifted the lid off.

Jody saw only what looked like rotten fabric inside, but Belle saw something that made her burst into tears and rock back and forth on her knees and moan. Scared, anxious, Jody knelt beside her and put a gentle hand on her aunt’s shoulder, only to have it shaken off.

“Aunt Belle, what is that in the box?”

“Sheets,” her aunt sobbed. “The bloody sheets from the bed in the room where your daddy died. Meryl gave me this box to store the next morning. He said it had confidential records of one of his clients and it would be safer stored here than in his office.” And then she said two things that shocked her niece. “Damn her! Damn her, damn her! I saw her flirt with him, but I thought, well, she flirts with every man. I should have known, I should have known.” She lifted the loathsome sheets-and what looked like pillowcases-out of the box and said the second thing that shocked her niece. “Why didn’t he just destroy these? Why, oh why, did he leave them here?”

Jody stood up and backed away in horror.

“Uncle Meryl killed my dad?” She began to shriek, over and over, until Belle had to come and take hold of her to stop her. But she couldn’t stop Jody from screaming, “What did he do to my mother, what did he do to my mother?”

MERYL MIGHT NOT have confessed, even when confronted with the irrefutable DNA evidence of the remaining hair strands that the sheriff turned over to the state crime lab, since any old semen stains on the sheets were long past using. He still might have pleaded not guilty and gone to trial. There wasn’t any other evidence to connect him to the murders, and the fact that he’d had sex with Laurie Linder didn’t prove he’d killed her husband. Based on past and recent events, his defense still could have built another case against Billy Crosby to provide the jury with reasonable doubt.

But Jody and her grandfather visited Meryl.

Hugh Senior sat across from him and stared without speaking.

Jody begged her uncle to tell her where her mother was.

She thought it was her grandfather’s stare that broke him, rather than her pleading, and even then he didn’t say it directly to them. He told the sheriff, claiming that he felt squeamish about telling his niece that he’d put her mother’s body in a feedlot waste lagoon.

Jody doubted that he confessed out of pity, but shame worked fine, too.

After that it was easier for him to admit to killing Valentine as well.

“None of it was murder, it was just one terrible accident after another,” he maintained to the sheriff and to everyone else who’d listen to him, as if he had never intended to kill anybody. This, despite the fact that he confessed to killing Valentine in order to put all the investigative energy into a new murder trial instead of the old one, because he felt threatened by the sheriff’s taunts about using the hair for DNA analysis. “The other deaths,” Meryl protested, in full lawyerly self-righteous dudgeon, “Hugh-Jay and Laurie, they were tragic accidents, too. It was all a terrible tragedy, not a crime. Hugh-Jay was my best friend, he was like a brother to me, and I loved-I love-the Linders, I owe everything to them.”

Two weeks after his arrest, Meryl Tapper had a massive heart attack.

The weight he had gained over the years-perhaps unconsciously to disguise the fact that he had ever been a man whom a beautiful woman might desire-helped kill him. The Linder family was grateful for the easy ending; after Billy’s rampage at the ranch, they had no appetite-not even Bobby or Chase-for more revenge.