“Too late,” Chase said bitterly.
Jody got up from her chair, ran to Bobby, put her arms around his thick waist and hugged up against his back. It felt good to know they were all as upset as she was. It was a mark of just how bad things really were. She had rarely seen any of them lose control; Bobby’s outburst was a welcome revelation. “It’s not our fault, Uncle Bobby,” she consoled him. This time she didn’t cry. Anger at Collin Crosby had dried her tears.
It felt good to have someone to blame.
23
“PACK A SUITCASE, JOSEPHUS,” Chase told her before the uncles left her house. He had an unlit cigarette in one hand, as if he could barely stand to wait to get outside again so he could smoke it. “You’re coming to the ranch with us.”
“I’m not moving back there, Uncle Chase.”
“Yeah, you are. Mom and Dad want you to.”
They were all standing in the front foyer again, Jody and her uncles.
She had stopped crying. Her anger at what Collin Crosby was doing to her family by getting his father out of prison had rejuvenated her, giving her back some spirit and spite.
“But I don’t want to. I just moved in here!”
It wasn’t only that she’d only recently moved in, it was also that she’d done so much work to the huge house to turn it into her home-sanding and polishing its original wood floors, taking down ancient draperies and putting cheerful new curtains back up in their place. She had painted and wallpapered with the help of her aunt and her grandmother. They had all given hours to dusting, washing, shopping, tossing out and replacing things. It had been, Jody hoped, a restorative time for all of them as they began to transform a mansion of bad memories into a happy and beautiful house again. With every swab of a wet sponge, Jody had felt as if she were exorcising him. She was not going to let Billy Crosby force her out of her own home a second time.
“Do you want them to worry about you?” Chase demanded, the set of his face looking grim around his sunglasses. “Do you want them to lie awake nights thinking about how he’s only a few blocks away from you?”
“God, Uncle Chase, that’s so not fair.”
He shrugged. “Well?”
She gave in to her own concern for her grandparents’ feelings.
“All right. All right! But I’ll drive myself out there.”
“When?”
“When I’ve packed!”
“Six o’clock,” he told her in a tone that brooked no further argument. “Supper. Suitcase.”
Chase grabbed his cowboy hat off its peg and stalked out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind him. Within moments the smell of cigarette smoke wafted back inside.
Jody turned toward her other two uncles.
“Don’t you just want to kill him sometimes?”
“Frequently,” Meryl said with a brief grin as he grabbed his own hat, then gave her a passing hug. “Don’t you worry. He’ll screw up. He’ll end up back in a cell where he belongs.”
“Uncle Chase?” she managed to joke.
Meryl laughed. “I’ll see you tonight at the ranch.”
“I may still have questions.”
“Anything you want to know, honey. Just ask.”
He hurried out to his truck as if he had things to do and not enough time to do them.
When the other two were gone, Bobby surprised Jody by asking, “How are you?”
“Shocked,” she said, after taking a moment to consider it.
“Are you scared?”
That startled her. It was so unlike him to acknowledge that anybody might ever have a reason to be scared of anything. She lifted her chin. “Not in the least.” Then she admitted, “Okay, yes. It makes my heart pound just to think of ever seeing him around town.”
“Good,” he said, surprising her even more. “You should be scared of him.”
“Uncle Bobby! Why?”
“Because we have no idea what he’ll do.”
“He just got out of prison! He won’t want to get into trouble, will he?”
“You heard Meryl. He’s Billy Crosby. Don’t expect him to have gotten any smarter. And remember that he hates us, he hates your grandparents, he hates Chase, and Meryl, and me, and probably even Belle. And I’m guessing he hates you, too.”
“Me? But why?”
Bobby shrugged, looking like his brother Chase when he did it, because they both had the same dismissive lift of their big shoulders. “Billy Crosby has never needed a good reason for what he does.” He stepped closer to her. “But listen to me, Jody. If there’s anybody who should be scared, it’s him. Billy Crosby should be looking over his shoulder every second of the time he’s here in Rose, because we will be watching him.” Bobby put his hat on his head. “That’s why you need to go out to the ranch until he’s gone. We don’t want to have to keep an eye on you, too.”
“What do you mean gone?”
“He won’t stay.”
“How do you know?”
“It won’t be comfortable for him here.”
On his way out the door he said, “I’m sorry about your coffeepot.”
“It’s okay, Uncle Bobby.” She smiled shakily at him. “You can buy me a nicer one.”
“And teach you how to make a decent cup of coffee,” he said gruffly, and was gone.
AFTER THEY LEFT, Jody didn’t know what to do with herself.
At first she wandered from room to room downstairs, looking at all the labor she’d put into them and regretting the need to leave them even for a day, much less for however long it took to put Billy Crosby safely away again. “Shocked” didn’t even begin to describe how she felt. Things that she had assumed were settled suddenly weren’t, and none of the reasons made sense at their deepest level. So what if none of that physical evidence held up? So what, even if the county attorney had withheld evidence from the defense attorney? So what if the local defense attorney hadn’t tried very hard? If Crosby did it, and everybody knew he did-because of his low character and because of all the events leading up to that night-then he was still as guilty as ever and nothing about his sentencing should ever change.
Collin Crosby.
Furious at him all over again, Jody trudged upstairs to pack.
When she reached the second-floor landing, she stood for a moment looking up and down the long hallway with all of its rooms and doors. As if her cowboy boots were moving of their own volition, she turned left and started walking toward the small guest room at the far end. She kept its door open at all times so the sun could shine in during the day and so she could see lights coming from the room at night.
People wondered how she could live there, especially by herself.
This was my home. I want it back.
“But it’s so big,” people objected.
“I like big,” she replied.
She was used to it: big land and sky, big animals and cowboys, big plans for being a really good teacher and meeting a nice man and raising a family right here in this house with plenty of room for them. But first she had to tame it-both this house and her fears of it.
Jody stepped into the doorway of the little guest room.
She looked at the carpet without flinching.
Her father had lain there, shot through the abdomen, blood gushing from him. She’d seen photographs. She’d read the trial transcripts. She had insisted on hearing it all, seeing it all, and learning it all, even when it meant dragging facts out of her family that believed she’d be happier not knowing, even when it meant going behind their backs to ask other people, or going on the Internet, which wasn’t much help for a crime back then. It was the only way she could walk through life without always suspecting that people were keeping dark secrets from her. She didn’t like feeling as if people were staring at her and knew things about her life that she didn’t know, so she had set out to learn all of it, or as much as she could. She knew that her dad couldn’t have survived for long after he was shot, but nobody knew if he’d been conscious or how much pain he’d felt. She prayed that he hadn’t known what happened to him.