“But you’re telling me they’re wrong. I’m wrong. We’re all wrong.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’. I suppose you don’t have to believe me.”
She stared at him, knowing he was a man who’d always rather tell the truth than not. Of the two of them, she was the one who felt most comfortable with the lies they told so they could keep playing together. If he’d had his way, and even though he’d scampered like a scared weasel out of her bedroom that very day, Red might have taken his chance with the truth. She knew that was because he thought that much of her and of her family.
“Why’d you run out of my bedroom today, Red?”
“Why’d I what?” He laughed a little at her unexpected question.
“Did you run off just because of your job?”
“I left ’cause if they’re goin’ to find out about us, it’s not goin’ to be like that.”
Out of consideration for her. That’s what he meant.
Maybe she wasn’t the more mature of the two of them after all, she thought.
She dropped her face into her hands again. “Oh, dammit, Red.”
“What’s the matter, babe?”
This time the wry laughter was hers. “What’s wrong? Red, I don’t want to have to be fair. I don’t want to start believing what nobody else that I love believes.” She didn’t see the flinch that passed across his face at those words. “I don’t want you to be right.”
She sighed, every fiber in her resisting his story.
“Listen to me, Jody. One thing you have to believe right now is that you’ve got to get out of here.”
“Why? What’s he going to do to me if he shows up and I’m here?”
“That’s the thing, babe. I don’t know. I just know he was angry when he went into prison and he was angry that time I saw him and he’s had more years since then to build up an even hotter head of steam.”
Old anger burst out of her again. “As if he has any right to it!”
“Jody. That’s what I’m saying. He has a right to it.”
She felt emotionally exhausted, scared of what he’d told her, and confused by it.
“I’ve hated that man for twenty-three years, Red.”
“Babe, it doesn’t matter if you hate him. It only matters if he hates you.”
That sent a shiver down her spine.
“He’s for sure coming back today?”
“They let him go this morning.”
There was increasing urgency in Red’s tone.
“I suppose his son is driving him back.”
“So I hear.”
Red looked back toward the road. Nervously, he shuffled his boots in the white dust. It was about a five-hour drive from Lansing, where the prison was.
“Come on, Jody. I’m not leaving unless you do.”
She thought about staying, on the chance of getting a look at Billy Crosby, but the only defensive weapon she had with her was her backpack. “I find it really hard to believe he’d make a special trip just to look at the scenery,” she said, with an edge of sarcasm.
“Maybe not. I’m just tellin’ you what he told me.”
“Criminals like to return to the scenes of their crimes, though.”
“Babe.” He shook his head at her. “Come on.”
“Go on ahead,” she said, working up to her feet. “I’ll follow you into town.”
Appearing satisfied with that, Red turned to go, but she stopped him.
“I’m not saying I believe you.”
“You believe me they didn’t give him a drunk test, don’t you?”
“Yes. I mean, I guess. I’ll find out for sure from Uncle Meryl.”
“Do that. Do you believe me when I say he couldn’t have done it?”
“I don’t know what I believe right now, Red! But I do believe that you believe that.”
He let out a breath of relief at that admission from her.
She made it better by adding, “I’m sorry I didn’t let you explain.”
Red made a gesture that brushed away hurt feelings. “Not a problem.” And then suddenly he was scrambling up the rocks to where she sat, using his bare hands and the toes of his boots to get to her.
“Wha-” she started to say, when he planted a kiss on her lips.
Then he plunged down the slope again, making her hold her breath for fear he’d break his neck. Once on the ground, he kept moving. When Red was halfway to his truck, he turned back to yell, “You’re coming, right?”
“I promise!” she yelled back at him.
Jody stared at the back of his truck until it was well on the way out.
It was strange to think of Red, when he was only sixteen, being so intimately involved with what happened that night and the next day. He’d been right there in the house with Billy, and he’d been there when the sheriff showed up in the morning. It must have been a lot for a kid like him to take in, Jody thought. Maybe he had devised his theory about Billy’s drinking because it was too frightening to think he’d been in the house with a murderer. Or maybe Red couldn’t bear to wonder if he might have stopped Billy and prevented it all from happening. What if he hadn’t picked Billy up? What if he hadn’t taken him home? Could that have changed anything? And then on top of everything, he’d gone to work full-time for the family of the murdered man and missing woman.
Breath test or no, there were all sorts of reasons he could be wrong.
But what if he was right…
Almost everything in her resisted the idea. And yet…
Come what may, I have to know what happened to my mom.
Jody stood up on the haunches of the Sphinx, shaded her eyes and looked in every direction as far as the huge rock formation would allow. Only the scenery at her back remained blocked from her view.
Why do I keep coming here for searching and solace?
With a catch in her breath, she thought, Because it is huge and solid and it changes so slowly. Unlike her own life, with its devastating, breathtaking alterations, this landscape shifted minutely over centuries, its dust sloughing off of these rocks no more dramatically than cells shed by her own skin. That made it comforting, even while it was also painful because she mysteriously felt so close to her mother here.
She sat down again, feeling a little stunned by her epiphany.
After a bit, she slid on her butt back down to the ground.
Again, she paused to look into the distance, and had another stunning thought: What if this commutation of Crosby ’s sentence is opportunity rather than disaster? What if it shifts all the evidence, bringing a new truth to the surface like wind moving the dirt around here at the Rocks?
After a few moments she trotted back to her truck, feeling as if something within her had both opened and focused, like a long-slumbering dinosaur waking up to turn its eyes toward dinner.
THE NEWLY ALERT FEELING lasted until she reached the edge of town.
There, Jody saw a rough, hand-lettered sign:
go back where you belong in jail!
A frisson of instinctive, unstoppable, vindictive pleasure shot through her, bullying her epiphanies out of the way and letting all the pain and fury of the past twenty-three years pour in again. The bulk of the evidence still pointed in one direction. She’d heard Red, himself, suggest that Billy Crosby was more dangerous now than when he’d gone to prison.
She sped past the sign, nodding her heartfelt agreement with it.
26
BEFORE RUNNING INSIDE to stuff a suitcase she didn’t want to pack, Jody grabbed the green backpack she had thrown onto the seat beside her in her rush from Testament Rocks. It wasn’t any heavier, because Red Bosch had distracted her from searching.
She unzipped it. A mildew smell wafted up to her nose.
Inside, she saw a woman’s scarf-navy blue and yellow with a pattern of keys and locks. There was also half of a rat-tail comb-the business half-and a single clasp earring with a reddish stone in its center.
Once inside her house, she decided to throw away the broken old comb, because who could ever possibly remember if such a thing had belonged to her mother? She chose to keep the scarf and earring, though, and ran into the kitchen, where she washed off the jewelry until the fake stone glowed. She took one of her own earrings out of the hole in her ear and tried on the found earring, crying “Ow!” when her fingers slipped and allowed the clamp to pinch her lobe.