June 9, 2009
IT WAS A beautiful June day in a season bursting dangerously with hope when she saw Collin Crosby again. By that time she was twenty-six years old and he was thirty. They were twenty-three years away from her father’s death, her mother’s disappearance, and his father’s incarceration. On this particular day, Jody wasn’t worried about anything worse than how to ease away from her lover and whether or not she’d prove to be a good high school teacher. And then her uncles walked into her parents’ house and reinforced her belief in bad following good as inevitably as the moon chased the sun.
Billy. Crosby. Released from prison. Coming home.
Following that announcement, the sun still shone through Jody’s new curtains, but now it cast malevolent shadows. A breeze still blew through the screens, but now it carried no sweet, imaginary scents of lilac and honeysuckle. In the front hallway of Hugh-Jay and Laurie’s house, in the space of a few words, their daughter’s world turned brittle as a winter field. She shivered like a slender weed taken by surprise and caught defenseless by an early, killing blizzard.
“How could this happen?” she screamed at them. “His sentence got commuted? What does that mean?”
“It means he gets out with time served,” Meryl told her.
“He got pardoned?”
“No, not pardoned, Jody. Commuted.”
“What’s the difference?” She felt lost in a terrifying thicket of jargon.
“He would have to prove actual innocence to get a pardon.”
She stared at him, aghast. “They let him out, but they still think he’s guilty?”
“They’re not saying that. They’re saying it was a smelly trial.”
“The smell is all over them,” Chase said. “He is guilty.”
“Smelly?” She was deeply sarcastic now. “Is that the official legal term, Uncle Meryl? What was smelly about it?”
“The county attorney has cooperated with Billy’s lawyers to say he messed up the case. He says his conscience got to bothering him as the years went by.” At the doorway, Bobby made a sound of incredulous disbelief, but Meryl kept talking. “He says he withheld evidence from the defense attorneys. Billy’s new attorneys got the original defense attorney to say he messed up, that he didn’t provide an adequate defense or file timely motions. They even got a juror to claim she wouldn’t have voted for conviction if she’d known all this at the time.”
“Withheld what evidence? What about the honest evidence that he’s guilty?”
“Governor doesn’t think it’s so honest.”
“Governor’s a liar,” Chase said.
“Somebody is,” Meryl agreed.
She looked from one familiar face to the other, feeling as if protective walls were washing away, leaving her shaking and frightened on the edge of an abyss. “Don’t you have any clout up there? Can’t you stop this?” Billy Crosby was the monster of her life, the boogeyman of her childhood. Ever since he had stolen her parents away from her, she’d had nightmares where he was chasing her and she was running, out of breath, tripping and stumbling and feeling as if she would die of fright even before he caught her. The nightmares tapered off as she grew up, but lately they’d reappeared, and now she knew why: they were warnings, predictions of this shocking day.
Shock turned to tears again. She started to sob.
Meryl stepped forward to put an arm around her while she pulled a tissue out of her pocket and fought for control of her emotions. “Governor knows this county will never vote for him, or for anything he wants,” he reminded her. “And nobody outside of this county gives a damn about”-his voice turned bitter-“our little murders.”
She flinched at his use of the plural “murders.”
“Somebody else has clout, though,” Chase said.
Jody looked up through her tears. “Who? Who would care enough about Billy Crosby-or hate us enough-to do this to us?”
“Just one person.”
She waited, hiccupping, crying.
“His son.”
“Collin?”
“Kitchen,” Chase suddenly ordered, and led them there.
AT THE TABLE her mother had painted yellow, in the room where Laurie had cooked meals for her and her daddy, Jody sat with her shoulders hunched and her hands clasped between her thighs, waiting for somebody, any one of them, to start making sense.
“It’s weird,” she said, sniffling, taking stuttering breaths. “Don’t you think this is a weird coincidence? I move back to town for the first time-and he gets out of jail and moves back, too?” Her shoulders lifted in a shudder and more tears escaped before she trapped them with the tissue. “I don’t understand any of this. When did all this happen? How could it happen? Why did they let him go? You’re going to have to explain this to me.”
To her right, Chase leaned against a kitchen counter only inches from the spot that had tested positive for Laurie’s blood type. It always felt strange to Jody when she cleaned the sink there-just as cleaning other parts of the house took a little courage. She had found a way to do it, though, by thinking of her mother with love and by murmuring a prayer for her, thereby turning the bad moment into something better. Now she watched Chase cross his arms over his white shirt. He still hadn’t removed his sunglasses and his jaw still looked clenched, as if a dentist had told him to bite down. In the past when she had seen her uncle Chase look like this she’d gone out of her way to avoid him-even walking clear around the house and coming in another door if necessary. He looked in the kind of mood that started with him blaming somebody for something, then turned into a loud argument, and finally ended with doors slamming.
Sounding angry, barely opening his mouth to speak, he said, “Bobby, make us some coffee.”
Jody started to get up to do it.
He waved her back into her chair. “He makes better coffee than you do.”
It was true. It had been her mom who was the good cook. Jody had always heard that great coffee and piecrust were two of Laurie Linder’s specialties. Chase, particularly, had loved her coffee, people said, and everybody had loved the pies she baked, with their flaky, sugary crusts. At that moment, Jody would have given anything for a bite of her mother’s piecrust and a cup of that coffee to relax Chase.
Sitting across the table from Jody, Meryl said, “Give me a minute, sweetheart.” He glanced at Chase, then at Bobby, and then gazed out a kitchen window toward the backyard. For a moment, Jody thought anxiously of Red and hoped he wasn’t hiding there in plain sight.
“I need to get my thoughts together,” Meryl said. “I wasn’t ever expecting to have this conversation.”
Jody bit her tongue on the questions that sprang to it, and gave him his chance to get organized. She was almost relieved to wait, to delay the words she didn’t want to hear. She stared down at the top of the table and thought about how it must have looked bright and cheerful when her mom painted it. Now it was dingy. The old paint was bare in some places, bubbled in others-she brought her hands above the table and rubbed some of the rough places with her fingers-but she wasn’t ready to redo it. She had the superstitious feeling that if she did, her mother would never come back in any way, not as a living woman or a corpse. Everybody assumed her mother was dead, but there was a part of Jody’s brain-or her heart-that still held out hope. A bloody yellow sundress had been found in a truck, that was all. It didn’t have to mean she was dead, did it? The fact that not a single sign of her, anywhere at any time, had shown up in the last twenty-three years was taken as proof that Laurie Linder was truly gone, but her daughter lived in a fugue state, haunted by the slimmest of possibilities that her mother was alive.
Jody suddenly wanted her grandmother Annabelle in the worst way.
It made her heart hurt to think of what this was going to be like for her grandparents, having their son’s murderer so near, where they might run into him at any time. She knew they would worry for her sake, and that made it essential for her to get a good grip on herself.
She would not cause them more pain. Clasping her hands atop the table, Jody sat up straight in her chair. She looked at her uncles and felt such sympathy for them that it nearly undid her and started her tears again. This was going to be hard for everybody.
Meryl looked straight at her. “Tell me what you know about why Billy was convicted, Jody.”
She wasn’t expecting the question, but she focused and obeyed.
“Physical and circumstantial evidence,” she recited, having been taught it all when she demanded to hear it years ago.
“What physical evidence?”
“Hair in the guest room and a bathroom drain. Fiber from his socks, on the carpets.” She swallowed. “His hat in this kitchen.”
She kept her eyes on Meryl, forbidding herself from looking over to where Billy Crosby’s cowboy hat once had lain, stopping herself from wondering if the chair that had been turned over was the very one in which she sat now.
“What was the circumstantial evidence?”
“The cow. The arguments. The fences. The fight he got into with you guys at Bailey’s. The way he looked at Mom. How he tried to hit her.” Fury surged in to suffocate her sadness. She took a ragged breath and beat on the table with her fists. “I hate him! How can they let him go? How can they!”
“Calm down,” Chase ordered.
She threw him an infuriated look.
Meryl snapped his fingers to get her attention back. “What did all of that circumstantial evidence establish that was so damning to him at the trial?”
“A pattern,” Jody recited, answering by rote. “It formed a convincing pattern of events leading up to the crime.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Well, here’s the bad news about the physical evidence. Hair and fiber comparisons are considered faulty science in some quarters now, and our governor’s office is one of them.”
A sickening, sinking feeling rushed through her.
“I didn’t know that,” she said in a near whisper, and then angrily, “Why didn’t I know that?”
“Most people don’t.”
“But you did, right? A lawyer would know. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I think the science is fine. And because even without the physical evidence, there is still enough circumstantial evidence to support his conviction.”
“So what happened?”
Meryl glanced over at Chase, who still leaned silently against the counter, while Bobby banged around looking for Jody’s coffee and filters. Driven nearly mad by the clatter and tension, Jody yelled at him, “They’re in the left-hand drawer, Uncle Bobby!”
“I don’t have a left hand,” he growled.
It was a bitter reminder of one more thing Billy Crosby had done to them.
“This is where withholding evidence comes into play,” Meryl said, calling her attention back. “The county attorney withheld evidence from Crosby ’s defense attorney-”
“What evidence?”
“He had witnesses who said Billy lost his hat at Bailey’s and that it was your mom who picked it up.”
“What?”
“Hold on. There’s more. The county attorney also did not reveal that Doc Cramer-remember him, used to be our vet?-told a deputy that your dad had told him about some men he’d confronted in a car passing by the ranch the day before his murder.”
“What men?”
“Strangers. One of them threw a lit cigarette out of their car, and your dad got so mad he forced them to the side of the highway and then gave them holy hell for doing it. Your dad told Doc Cramer they looked like tough customers.”
“So what?”
“So they could have been suspects, Jody.”
“Oh, bull, Uncle Meryl!”
“Bullshit,” Bobby muttered at the sink.
“No doubt,” Meryl agreed, “but prosecutors are required by law to share exculpatory evidence with the defense, and they didn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
Meryl sighed. “So it couldn’t be used to try to establish reasonable doubt.”
Jody stared at him, and after a moment, she said, “Okay, I get it. I get all that. But none of that proves Billy didn’t do it.”
Meryl smiled slightly in approval of her quick analysis.
“Goddamn right he did it,” Bobby muttered, his back still turned.
“Why now?”
“What?” Chase interrupted.
She turned to look at him. “Why is all this coming out now? Why is this happening now?”
“Because that boy of his got out of law school, that’s why.”
“Collin.” She felt her face flush at the memory of him.
Over the years since that day at the Rocks, she had thought of him more often than she wanted to. Each time, she’d had to fight the impulse to keep thinking about him. Now she felt a molten flash of resentment and fury and humiliation as she recollected those moments and the “sorry” he had claimed to feel for her. She tasted gall as she thought, So this is his idea of sorry.
“This is really Collin Crosby’s doing?” she asked them.
“He went through law school with the governor’s son,” Meryl told her. “And apparently the young son of a bitch has been active in political campaigns since he was old enough to figure out how to get what he wants.”
“Paving his way,” Chase said.
“Working up to this,” Meryl agreed.
Jody thought about the boy she remembered-how quiet and self-contained he seemed, how carefully he moved through the streets of Rose and the halls of its schools, how hard he studied and what good grades he got, the scholarships he earned, the fact that he could have gone to college and law school in other places, but stayed in Kansas to do it. She thought about the day she’d seen him at Testament Rocks, about his climbing gear, his athleticism, his obvious ambition to surmount obstacles in literal and figurative ways. If any boy was going to grow up to be the man who accomplished what Collin had achieved on this day, it was that boy. Now, too late to stop him, it was clear what he was after all the time.
“Didn’t we-us, our family-get any say in this at all?”
The uncles exchanged glances again. “We got a hearing with the governor,” Meryl told her. “There’s not much statutory guidance on these things, so I’m not sure he had to do it, but it didn’t make any difference anyway.”
“Don’t give him credit,” Chase growled. “He did it so he could say he heard us.”
“When? When was this hearing?”
“Last night in Topeka.”
“What? Last night? Who went? Did you all go?”
Meryl nodded, looking wary.
“Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t you tell me? You did all this behind my back?” She was furious. All of her life they’d protected her from hearing the worst; all of her life she’d had to fight for any bit of truth and information, until finally she thought they’d loosened up and started treating her as an adult. Obviously, that still wasn’t the case. “The governor needs to see me. I want to talk to him. I want to tell him what that man did to my life. Maybe I’d make him feel some sympathy. Why didn’t you give me a chance?”
“Mom and Dad didn’t want you to be there,” Chase said, his voice harsh. “They wanted to protect you. Dad was sure it was all for show, and he was right. The governor already had his mind made up, and there was nothing we could do to change it. They wanted to spare you.”
“They shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have!”
He shrugged. “Maybe not, but it’s done now.”
She glared at him with all the force of how infuriated, helpless, and frightened she felt.
“Don’t blame us.” He looked disgusted at the idea of it. “Put the blame where it belongs, on that kid of Billy’s. Like father, like son.” Finally, his own bottled-up rage burst out of him. “Liars, both of them!” He let his anger flow toward his brother. “Isn’t that damned coffee ready yet?”
Bobby answered by swinging his right arm into the coffeepot.
The force of the blow sent the pot full of water and coffee grounds flying into the metal sink, where it shattered. Chase and Meryl both jumped and Jody gasped with shock.
Bent over the sink like a man who might throw up into it, Bobby propped himself up with his one arm. “He’s moving back,” he said, as if the words hurt and sickened him to say. “That murdering bastard who killed my brother and took Laurie is coming back here to live as if he never did anything to anybody. We can’t let this happen.”
“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.