The Quiet Streets of Winslow

by Judy Troy

  QUIET STREETS OF WINSLOW

  Copyright © 2014 Judy Troy

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Troy, Judy, 1951-

  The Quiet Streets of Winslow : a novel / Judy Troy.

  1.Murder--Investigation--Fiction. 2.Arizona--Fiction. 3.Mystery fiction. I. Title.

  PS3570.R68Q54 2014

  813' .54--dc23

  2013026168

  ISBN 978-1-61902-356-7

  Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout Studios

  Interior design by meganjonesdesign.com

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  To Georges and Anne Borchardt And Miller

  “There is a crack in everything. It’s how the light gets in.”

  —LEONARD COHEN

  chapter one

  TRAVIS ASPENALL

  MY BROTHER AND I were walking Pete in the wash of the Agua Fria when he caught a scent and we found her. This was before school, in the windy dawn. Her eyes were wide open, brown eyes staring straight up at the pale sky.

  “We better close them, Travis,” Damien said, and I nodded, but we knew better than to touch her. Her arms and legs were flung out as if somebody had tossed her down into the wash, as if she wasn’t wanted anymore.

  She was maybe four or five inches shorter than I was, thin and small, like even her bones were small. She was wearing a gray sweater and jeans and cowboy boots, and the boots reminded me of our mother’s, with stenciling up the sides. But she was much younger than our mother was. She had short, dark hair and pale skin, pale enough to make her look like a tourist, only she didn’t look like a tourist. She had a bracelet on her left wrist with a cross dangling from it, which made me wonder if she had been Catholic, like we were, and was somebody we had seen at church. I thought she looked a little familiar.

  There were bruises on her neck, and her head didn’t lay right, which was how I guessed that her neck was broken, that maybe somebody had broken it with their hands. The April wind was blowing down from the mountains and for half a second I thought she might be cold and almost took off my jacket to cover her.

  Pete was nosing at her clothes. He was part Rottweiler and part some kind of hound, our father said. Our dad was a veterinarian—not here in Black Canyon City, but in Cave Creek, twenty miles down the interstate and a few miles to the east. Somebody had brought Pete into Dad’s clinic and said, “I can’t keep him anymore. You may as well put him to sleep,” and Dad brought him home instead. The dog’s name had been Butch, but Damien had called him Pete from the start, so we kept it.

  “Get away from the body,” I told him, and he stepped away and sniffed at a tumbleweed. We had had Pete’s sister and brother, also, until they had died last year, but Pete had always been the most intelligent.

  My brother Damien couldn’t stop looking. Even when we had started home, he kept looking back as if he couldn’t believe in that dead body being there. He was ten and I was fourteen. We didn’t look alike. He had blondish-brown hair and green eyes, like our mother, and would probably be tall, someday, like her side of the family, whereas I was dark and on the small side, like Dad. Damien was a better athlete than I was. I liked fooling with a basketball in the parking lot of the Mission Church, where Father Sofie had put up a hoop, but the only thing I could do well was dribble. I felt that nobody could steal the ball away from me, but people could and did. For some reason that always surprised me.

  I was walking fast and Damien walked fast to keep up with me. We lived on Canyon Road, north of the Agua Fria. You turned onto the gravel drive just past the cattle guard, and our stucco house was fifty yards or so farther in. It had been my mother’s idea to paint it blue. My father had built the house small, believing that people needed just so much, that anything more would cause you grief somehow. Nobody lived close to us. It was just desert all around, with saguaros and cholla and mesquite and creosote and the wind blowing all the time. If you climbed the desert ridge behind our house, you would be looking in the direction of the Perry Mesa National Monument, which tourists got lost every year looking for.

  Parked next to our house was the Airstream we had lived in while our house was being built. Our half brother, Nate, stayed in it when he came to visit, and we all thought of it as his now. When he visited he almost never got up as early as we did, unless he happened to have been awake all night. Then you’d see him sitting on the steps of the Airstream in the morning, just sitting by himself as if he thought something might happen.

  From a distance I could see my mother on the patio, looking for us; we’d been gone so long. When we told her she got Dad out of the shower and he called Deputy Sheriff Sam Rush, and when Sam arrived he told Damien and me to keep this to ourselves. Not to say a word to anybody. Then Sam and Dad headed to the wash. They had known each other since high school. Sam was six three and weighed some seventy pounds more than Dad. They were mismatched friends, my mother liked to say.

  “You two sit down and eat,” Mom said to Damien and me. “Focus on school today. You have that history test, Travis. Whatever happened to that dead woman has nothing to do with you.”

  Mom was wearing jeans and a blue shirt and her long hair was wet from the shower. She spoke sometimes about cutting it, and Dad would protest. I liked long hair as well, although the girl I liked happened to have short hair, like the woman in the wash.

  Pete’s water bowl was empty, and when I started to get up to fill it Mom said, “You don’t have time for t
hat,” and did it herself. Then she opened the kitchen door and stood in the doorway, shading her eyes from the blaze of sun appearing.

  “Finish eating and get your backpacks,” she said to us. “Your buses will be here soon.”

  Damien and I would be on Trail Road by the time Dad and Sam Rush returned, and we wouldn’t learn until later that the dead woman was Jody Farnell, whom we had seen once when we were visiting our half brother, Nate, in Chino Valley. Nate had taken us to a Denny’s for breakfast and she had waited on us and Nate had said to Dad, “Leave her a good tip. She has a kid.”

  Later, in science class, I would wonder whether you would be able to hook a brain up to a computer, one day, so that you could download what a murdered person had seen and heard and thought before she died. I imagined that it would be there, in the brain cells, the way that DNA survived in a strand of hair. Then I would think about Harmony Cecil—the girl I liked—and wish there was a way to get inside her head, to make her think about me more often than she did, or to change the thoughts she might already be having.

  Anyway that was how it started—with that April morning Damien and I took Pete for a walk before school.

  chapter two

  NATE ASPENALL

  I USED TO FOLLOW Ernest Sterling around, back when he and my mother, Sandra, were together and I was in middle school. Ernest was a handyman, basically, a hippie handyman who smoked pot on his way to this or that job, and I’d go with him, Saturdays, to watch him unclog a drain or replace a washer, insulate a ceiling or install a swamp cooler.

  “Watch how I do this, Nate,” he would say, and I’d be there at his elbow, handing him a wrench or a Phillips. He was muscular and tattooed, with hair to his shoulders and a moustache dripping down either side of his mouth. Being stoned never seemed to get in his way. In his truck, those mornings, I would say, “Let me have a toke. It’s not like I haven’t gotten high before,” and finally he would let me, and it was like I was watching myself in a movie, all morning, watching myself act the role of a thirteen-year-old kid following this father figure around. At home, for lunch, Sandra put a frozen, family-size Mexican dinner in the microwave, and I ate almost all of it myself, and Sandra said to Ernest, “I can’t fucking believe you would do this,” and she got his clothes out of her bedroom closet and threw them on the front porch.

  I tell this story to show that nobody knows what’s best for another person.

  YEARS LATER, I used the skills I had learned from Ernest to get my job at the Chino Valley RV Park, earning a small salary and bartering a place to live in exchange for keeping the narrow gravel roads smooth and the RVs in running order, and some years after that was when I met Jody Farnell. She was waitressing at the Denny’s on Mirage Highway, where I ate breakfast, and from the moment I saw her, before I had heard her voice, even, I felt a physical shock, as if I had just taken off in a rocket or woken up from a coma. I’m not sure I ever stopped feeling that. In that flesh-pink uniform with her pale skin and brown eyes she looked so young you wouldn’t have guessed that she had a child or that she had lived the complicated life I was to find out about.

  I was thirty-two to her twenty-three, and five mornings a week with her bringing me coffee and pancakes I learned that she had come to Chino Valley with a boyfriend she wasn’t with anymore, and that she was renting a motel room by the month. I also learned that her daughter, Hannah, lived with Hannah’s father, only nobody knew where, and that Jody wanted to get Hannah back from him. With some people you could see where the darkness was, and you knew better than to shine a light there, but she volunteered details: she and the father had hardly known each other; she had been struggling with drugs, back then, which was why Hannah’s father had taken Hannah from her. He had been raised by a Navajo family near Winslow, Jody said, which was where Jody was from, too. The Navajo family hadn’t wanted Jody to have Hannah either, even after Jody got clean. It seemed as if everybody had been against her.

  I told Jody she could count on me if she ever needed anything—seriously count on me, I said—and on a rainy October morning after her motel room had been broken into she asked if she could stay with me a few nights. She knew from Mike Early, who had the RV behind mine, that the RV park was safe. She knew Mike Early from Denny’s, which he frequented quite a lot.

  “You can stay with me as long as you need to,” I told her, and she brought over her belongings and slept in the built-in bed in my RV, while I slept on the futon couch in what was essentially the living room. She talked about looking for a place of her own, but I said, “You don’t have to,” and after a week she dropped the subject and I was relieved.

  Jody was tiny. Five feet one with bones so thin it made you ache to look at her wrists. She fit into the RV alongside me, because I’m not a big person either. I’m small, for a man, five seven and 138 pounds no matter how much I eat or how many weights I lift. I take after Lee, my father, more than I take after Sandra. I have dark hair and eyes, like Lee and my half brother, Travis, whereas Sandra is blonde and blue-eyed. The Honda dealership she worked for used her face on billboards, but up close she was tenser and older looking than you would have expected. She and Lee had been seventeen when they had me, and I used to try and guess how many times they had thought no way before they gave in and let me come.

  I never introduced Sandra and Jody to each other. I didn’t like the thought of them forming ideas about each other, or ideas about me based on what they thought of each other. I didn’t want all that imagining going on. Moreover, I didn’t want to jinx my situation with Jody. I felt lucky to have found her, and luck was something you had to protect, I had learned. It wasn’t as if it came often or easily, at least not to me.

  chapter three

  SAM RUSH

  I SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN working the case, given how long I had known Nate Aspenall and how close I was to the family, but there was just Kurt Hargrove and myself deputy-sheriffing the more than eight thousand square miles that made up Yavapai County, and Kurt would have had to take the time to get to know the family and the situation. Moreover, I thought it likely that Kurt, or anyone in Kurt’s position, might not have looked as carefully elsewhere once he had Nate as a suspect. Nate did not have a criminal history, but he was a solitary, underemployed, thirty-two-year-old male who had known the victim, and the victim’s body had been found near his father’s house, 150 miles from where the victim was living. I knew what I would have thought; I knew how it looked even to me. For my part, I had to be conscious of my bias. I wasn’t convinced I had one, which made me fairly certain I did, and I knew it was crucial that I keep aware of it.

  The details of the case were as follows: Jody Farnell had left Chino Valley at the beginning of February, close to three months before she was killed, and moved back to Winslow, where she had grown up. She moved into a small rental on the corner of Hicks and Maple, across town from where her mother was located, and when she wasn’t able to find a job locally she looked for work in Flagstaff and was hired as a maid at a Hilton Inn.

  The elderly woman living next door to Jody didn’t often see her, but she had seen a man at Jody’s front door two or three times, quite late. A medium-size male in his thirties, was her impression, with light hair; had she seen the same man mowing a yard down the street? It was possible. She never saw a vehicle. She would see him at Jody’s door, then she would see him leaving on foot. She assumed Jody wasn’t home or didn’t feel like letting him in.

  Jody’s landlord, Paul Bowman, had been out of state with his wife at the time of the murder; I wasn’t able to interview him at first.

  Jody’s mother I spoke to at the trailer she rented on the eastern edge of town. She was anorexically thin, from drug use, I surmised, and described herself as disabled. She chain-smoked while we talked. She said that Jody was supposed to have taken her to the pain clinic in Winslow the following day, which was how she knew that something was wrong. But she couldn’t tell me anything about Jody’s recent life. “Jody didn’t confide in m
e,” the mother said. “I don’t know why we weren’t close in that way.” If Jody had had a boyfriend in Winslow, the mother didn’t know about it, and while the mother had heard Jody mention the name Nate, she couldn’t recall the context. About her granddaughter, Hannah, she knew little to nothing. She had not seen her since she was an infant. “That Indian family,” she said, “who knows what they did to her? The baby’s father stole her away.” Jody’s mother didn’t know where they were.

  AS FOR THE death, itself, Jody’s neck had been broken, probably by hand, by somebody who was left-handed, as Nate Aspenall was. There were no discernible fingerprints. There was some bruising on her upper arms, as if she had been either shoved or grabbed first. She hadn’t been thrown down into the wash but positioned to look as if she had; there were no signs of her body having hit the rocks. Whether she had been killed there or brought there dead was hard to know. Footprints were hard to make out in the desert. I suspected she had been killed first, then carried there. She had not been raped, nor had she had intercourse within the previous twenty-four hours, but there were traces of semen in her mouth and on her chin. She had been dead for about ten hours by the time Travis and Damien Aspenall found her. Nine PM, then, she was killed, or close to it.

  As I said, the fact that Nate Aspenall had known Jody, and that Jody had been found not in or near Winslow, where she was living, but near the Aspenalls, in Black Canyon City, made Nate a person of interest, despite the illogicalness of his having done something that pointed the finger at himself. He claimed to have been in Chino Valley the night of her murder, working on the RV behind his, trying to locate a water leak. He had worked until midnight, he said. The occupant of that RV was a sixty-two-year-old man named Mike Early, who worked at a Sears in Paradise Valley. I left messages and waited to hear back. Meanwhile, I spoke to the manager of the RV park, who said that he had no knowledge of Early’s water leak but that Mike Early and Nate Aspenall were neighbors, and they were friendly with each other. Early had probably asked Nate for help directly. That often happened, the manager said. Often he—the manager—wouldn’t learn until later what work Nate had done, when, and for whom.