There was still so much that nobody knew, but at least she wasn’t the only one in ignorance. Why was her dad in the house that night? He was supposed to be in Colorado. There were unanswered questions about him, not to mention the huge gap of knowledge about her mom. Jody suspected that she had scrambled to get all the details she could about her father’s death to compensate for all she didn’t know about her mother’s fate.
It hadn’t helped much.
What she didn’t know about her mother ate at her, always.
She realized there were other important things she hadn’t known, like for instance that Billy Crosby might someday return to Rose, or that it could happen this soon.
A noise outside made Judy startle and whirl around to look down the hallway.
There was nothing there, but she was good and spooked.
She felt as if she had to get out of the house where his vile, contaminating presence seemed more real to her now than it ever had before. She forced herself to walk down the hall, down the stairs, to the front door, and then she ran for her truck.
SHE WAS ABOUT TO turn the key in the ignition when a man’s voice made her jump as if somebody had stuck a gun in her ribs.
“Hey.” Red Bosch grinned at how startled she was.
Jody leaned back against the seat and inhaled deep sucking breaths, trying to get her heart going in a normal rhythm again. “My God, Red, don’t sneak up on me like that. You nearly gave me a coronary.”
“Sorry.” He laughed again. “Where are you going?”
She tapped her fingertips on her steering wheel, resisting the question.
In the glare of midday, her lover’s face showed all thirteen of the years he had on her, but she didn’t mind that. It was merely evidence of hard work in the great outdoors, which she loved, too. Red just missed being good-looking, but he was appealing in a sexy, cowboy way. He wasn’t educated past twelfth grade and he talked with a country drawl that would have been laughed out of the movies for being excessive. But there was a sweetness about him-always had been, people said-that seemed to stem from his own easy acceptance of himself and of everybody else. He could gab with anybody and he laughed easily. Red had never had any trouble attracting women, except for the fact that there weren’t many available ones in his own county.
Jody looked at him standing beside her truck and felt glad to see him.
He was a relief from the angry intensity of her uncles.
She’d known Red all of her life. He looked like comfort to her.
They probably would never have bridged the divide of employer/employee, however-the age thing wasn’t a big deal to either of them-except for one night when she’d stopped by his house to give him a message from her grandfather. Red had handed her a cold beer and then another one, and before either of them quite knew what happened, they were staring at each other, naked in his bed, and Red was drawling, “Oh, shit, Jody, what have I done?”
“We both did it,” she said. “Let’s do it again.”
He had laughed, and that was the start of something good for a while.
It just hadn’t developed beyond that easy fun for Jody, and she was pretty sure it never would. Now she knew she had to do something about it because it looked as if it had passed that point for Red. It wouldn’t be right for her to encourage him.
“Don’t know where I’m going,” she lied.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
Red had been asking her things like that lately, demanding to know where she was and what she’d be doing. It was beginning to sound like possessiveness or jealousy, and she hated it.
When she shrugged, he said, “You want company?”
“Don’t you have to work?”
“Not if they can’t find me.”
“Are you forgetting they’re related to me?”
“I never forget that, babe, but they don’t seem to want to get anything done today.”
“How do you know that?”
“I tried calling a few times.”
“Red? Did you hear what just went on in my kitchen?”
“What?”
“They came to tell me that Billy Crosby has been let out of prison and he’s coming back here to live.”
“Yeah.”
Red looked down at his boots, leaving Jody to stare at the fabric button on top of his cap. “What do you mean… ‘yeah’?”
He met her eyes again, but with a squint, as if he found it difficult to face her all of a sudden. “I mean yeah, I know.”
“You know? How do you know?”
“Everybody knows by now. And…” He got a look in his eyes that she had never seen there before, as if he was wary of her, or had a guilty conscience. Jody tensed, waiting for something she had a feeling she wasn’t going to like. “I guess I may as well tell you. You’re bound to hear it eventually.” Red cleared his throat and looked away from her again. “The thing is, Jody, I kind of kept in touch with Billy.”
She recoiled as if he had thrown a live snake into her lap.
“You what?” Her words were quiet, but the syllables were drawn out slowly, imparting the impression that she had a warning rattle. “In prison?”
“Yeah, in prison. There’s a reason-”
He hadn’t heeded the warning, and she struck.
“A reason? You slept with me, Red. In my parents’ house. In their bed. We screwed. You work for my family. You take their money. You eat at their table. And all this time you kept in touch with the man who murdered my father and did God knows what to my mother?”
He got a confused look on his face as if he didn’t know what to say, and then Red picked the wrong thing. “You shouldn’t talk that way about what we do together, Jody. It means more to me than-”
“You son of a bitch!”
She threw her truck into reverse, laid her right arm up on top of the bench seat, glared behind her down the long driveway, and gunned it, spraying gravel at him so he had to raise his arms to protect his face.
Jody was so angry at Red Bosch that she drove down the Main Street of Rose faster than she should have, but not so fast that she missed spotting all three of her uncles’ trucks at Bailey’s Bar & Grill. “That’s what you were all in such a hurry to do?” she said out loud inside her truck, feeling willing to be angry at anybody right at that moment.
At the edge of town her tires screamed around a corner and sped west toward the one place where she always felt closer to her mom than anywhere else in the world.
24
IN A CERTAIN LIGHT, the Testament Rocks turned white as bleached seashells. At those times, when Jody walked into that landscape, she felt like a black dot on a white slate, as visible as a prairie dog to a hawk, as uncomfortable as if she were naked in public. It was her least favorite light at the Rocks, because it washed out all other color, all subtlety of tone, and it was blinding. Sunglasses were not enough to make it possible to look at the rocks under such light, and so she donned a cap for its additional shade.
But being there, even like that, beat not being there on some days.
She stuck her hands down in her back jeans pockets and squinted up to the tops of the Rocks where golden eagles nested and red-tailed hawks flew by. She wouldn’t have gone so far as to claim she experienced instant peace of mind just from looking at them, but it was true that her heart rate slowed down and so did her breathing.
There was wind on this day, blowing bits of white dust around her.
Dust of chalk, she thought, dust of limestone, dust of bones.
She saw no other humans. No fossil hunters. No rock climbers. No tourists with cameras, no strangers taking potshots at beer cans or teenagers making out in their cars.