“It’s clean, Aunt Belle.”
Her aunt shook her head at her niece’s fashion sense.
This was how Jody played what she thought of as her obsessive little game without anybody knowing what she was up to. She was waiting for the time when somebody in her family might blurt out, “Your mother had a scarf just like that!”
“Did my mom wear scarves?” she asked.
Her grandmother entered the room just then, followed by Bobby carrying a huge bowl of mashed potatoes and Meryl balancing fried chicken on platters in both hands. Hugh Senior was pulling out his chair at one end of the table, and Chase was in the kitchen fetching the gravy, green beans, and biscuits. The butter, jam, and a bowl of Waldorf salad were already on the table. Belle and Jody were setting the table with the “good stuff,” as Hugh Senior liked to call it. Apart from Thanksgiving and Christmas and other events of note, Annabelle only went formal at her dining table when she thought it might increase the likelihood of keeping her family on their best behavior. “There’s nothing like white linen napkins to keep a man in check,” she liked to advise her granddaughter.
Belle asked her mother, “Did Laurie wear scarves, Mom?”
“Not that I recall, no.”
“What about earrings?” Jody asked them. “Her ears were pierced, right? Did she ever wear those clip-on things?”
“Oh, God no,” Belle said, and laughed. “She wouldn’t have been caught dead-”
She bit her lip.
“Nice,” Chase said sarcastically, hearing her as he came in.
“Oh, Aunt Belle, don’t listen to him. You didn’t say anything wrong.”
“Everybody’s hypersensitive right now,” Meryl said, with a glance at his wife.
“We’ll all feel better after we eat,” Annabelle remarked. She looked around her table, checking things. “Which I believe we’re finally ready to do. We’ll begin with a prayer tonight, Hugh.”
THE TABLE SEEMED both fuller and emptier than usual to Jody that night-fuller with the additions of Chase and Bobby from out of town, but emptier because they’d arrived without any of their kids. Neither was married at the moment, so the table seemed short of wives, too. When Jody was young, she’d loved sitting at the “children’s table”-two card tables jammed together with a spill-proof plastic cover thrown over them-with her cousins.
At Annabelle’s command, any further talk about the day’s events was delayed until dessert and coffee. “I won’t have that man ruining my family’s digestion on top of everything else,” she announced, and so most of supper was a quiet affair, since there wasn’t anything else on their minds. There were long spaces where Jody heard nothing except the scrape of forks on plates and requests to pass the biscuits or some other favorite food. When anyone started to bring up Billy Crosby, Hugh Senior tapped his water glass with his knife to remind them of Annabelle’s decree.
Finally, the supper plates were cleared away and taken to the kitchen and Belle’s apple crisp à la mode was passed around on dessert plates. Jody, surprised she could be so hungry, ate it all right down to the melted vanilla ice cream that she scooped up with her spoon.
“There’s something I have to say,” Meryl announced. He looked over at his father-in-law. “Chase and Bobby and I spent some time in town today, sir, testing the temperature, if you know what I mean, and I would say that it’s hot, very hot. People are upset, they’re scared, and there’s some big talk going around about forcing Billy out of town. Some of it is just silly-egging his house, that kind of thing-but some of it is downright ugly. Setting fire to their house-”
“No!” Annabelle exclaimed, one hand flying to her mouth.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s what we heard one old boy say.”
“We can’t control what other people choose to do,” Hugh Senior observed.
“No, we can’t, sir, and I’m not suggesting that we try. We can control what we do, however.”
“What does that mean?” Bobby asked, sounding irritated.
“It means that, speaking as your attorney, I want all of you to keep track of everywhere you go and everything you do and who’s there with you, for at least the next few days, until this maybe begins to die down.”
“Alibis?” Belle asked her husband with disbelief.
“Yes, alibis. Chase and Bobby, it might be better for you to go on back to your places sooner rather than later. If somebody shoots Billy Crosby between the eyes or runs him off the road, I want every member of this family to have a cast-iron alibi for that period of time, and I’d particularly like the two of you to be a couple of hundred miles away. I don’t care if all that happens is that somebody eggs his car, I want every member of this family to be able to prove you weren’t holding the empty carton.”
In the moment of fraught stillness that followed, Jody blurted, “I talked to him today.”
They looked at her with puzzled expressions.
“Talked to who, sweetheart?” her grandmother inquired.
Her heart pounding, she said, “Billy Crosby. I met him.”
Amid the outcries of consternation, it was Chase who exclaimed, “What the hell have you done?”
“I didn’t do anything,” she defended herself. “I’d just been at Bailey’s and when I was leaving you called on my cell phone, Uncle Chase. I was just standing there talking to you-”
“You hung up on me.”
“No, I dropped my phone because I heard him. And then I saw him.”
When she finished telling them about it, she looked across the table at Meryl. “You said I could ask you anything,” she reminded him.
“Shoot,” he told her.
“Why didn’t they test Billy Crosby’s blood alcohol level?”
Tensely, she waited for his answer.
He smiled wryly. “Because we only had one breath alcohol tester in the entire county and it was broken. Remember that, Chase?” His smile widened. “Some drunk kicked it to death, as I recall.”
“I remember,” Chase said, nodding.
Jody’s grandfather caught her eye and interrupted, impatient to say something. “I don’t want you anywhere near him, ever again.” She wanted to protest that she hadn’t meant to be around him at all, but kept quiet rather than be argumentative, because it wasn’t even the point. The point was his concern for her. She felt like crying out of sheer gratitude at being surrounded by strength and love that made her feel so much safer than she had after meeting Billy Crosby. When she felt Belle’s hand come over hers, she had to blink back tears.
Hugh Senior looked around the table at his family.
“As for the rest of us, we’ll do what Meryl wants us to do.” He gave them a small, grim smile. “It’s clear to me from the looks on your faces that you’d all like to kill Billy Crosby, so we’d better all get alibis.” His gaze rested on his wife’s beautiful face. “Even you, my dear.”
“How dare that man speak to her?” Annabelle looked frightened and worried as she stared across the long table at her husband. “How dare he say a single word to our Jody?”
“That’s the kind of man he is, Mom,” Belle reminded them all.
31
AFTER THE DISHES were put away, Chase joined his niece as she sat alone on the front porch swing listening to music on her iPod and looking up at constellations that couldn’t be seen in any city, but only in places as isolated and dark as the ranch was at night. When he sat down beside her, the swing jolted, rattling the chains that held it to the porch ceiling and breaking the rhythm until he got it going again with a push of one boot heel on the wooden floor.
“How long are you and Uncle Bobby going to be here?”
“Until we don’t have to be.”
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t answer, but lit a cigarette instead.
Jody removed the iPod buds from her ears.
“Why didn’t you bring the boys with you?”
He had three teenage sons whom she loved a lot.