The Quiet Streets of Winslow

by Judy Troy

  I hoped that Nate living in an RV park, as opposed to the kind of isolated places where so many residents of Yavapai County lived, would make it easier for me to learn whether anyone else might have seen him at home the night of Jody’s murder.

  MY FIRST INTERVIEW with Nate took place on the telephone the evening of the day the Aspenall boys found the body. I talked to him from home, from my duplex on Abbott Street, across town from Lee and Julie’s residence. Fifteen years earlier, Lee had lived in the left side of the duplex and I in the right; since then, I had bought and renovated both sides into a house for myself, and that was where I had lived since—other than my two years of marriage, when, at her request, I had moved into my wife’s house.

  “Tell me again, Nate,” I said, “when you saw Jody last.” I was at my kitchen table, next to the sliding glass door, with my small notebook in front of me.

  “The last week in February,” he said. “Maybe earlier. I’m not sure. I don’t keep track of time. She asked me to meet her in Flagstaff, and I did and we talked. We met at a diner near the hotel where she worked, and she told me about her life in Winslow and the problems she was having.”

  “With what or with whom?” I said.

  “She was afraid of somebody,” Nate said. “She said a man was showing up late at her house, wanting to make a sexual arrangement with her, calling her all the time, looking in her windows. One night she was at a place called Bojo’s, she said, having supper, and was almost sure she saw him hiding in the back hall, staring at her. She didn’t know who he was, she said, and she didn’t want to go to the police. She felt they would blame it on her, somehow. She didn’t trust them.”

  “Had this man threatened her?”

  “It sounded like it. Or else she felt threatened. She also said that her landlord had come on to her. He would charge her less rent, she said, or no rent, if she . . . well, you can imagine.”

  “She spelled out the sexual act he referred to?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Was she asking you to do something about either of these men?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  “So why do you think she wanted to tell you?” I said. “And why in person?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Nate said. “I have. I think she wanted to see me worried about her—to see that worry in my face.”

  “Why?”

  “She felt that nobody cared about her.” He said that reluctantly, it seemed to me, as if he were revealing a confidence.

  “Before this meeting,” I said, “how often had you and Jody talked on the telephone?”

  “Four or five times a week at first, then not as often. I would call her, and if she felt like it, she would call me back. She didn’t always want to talk to me.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Honestly?” he said. “My feelings for her were stronger than she wanted them to be. We weren’t . . . when she was staying with me, we were roommates. That was how she was with me.”

  “So she wanted you to worry about her but she didn’t want you,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying? That’s a tough position to be in.”

  “Well, I was never popular with girls. You know that. I mean, I wanted to be, but I wasn’t. I was used to that.”

  “Used to it or not, it would make most men angry.”

  “I’m not most men.”

  “What about after you saw Jody in Flagstaff?” I said. “How often did the two of you talk then?”

  “Less so,” he said.

  “Why was that, do you think?”

  “My guess is that she found some other man to worry about her.”

  “You mean, she found the person who ended up killing her?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  I heard the sound of him walking around, pacing.

  “Jody was wearing a bracelet with a cross on it,” I said. “Did she go to Mass? Could she have met somebody at church?”

  “Her dad gave it to her. That was what she told me. And no. She didn’t go. She had this idea that God watched everybody all the time as a kind of hobby and decided who to remember and who to forget.”

  “So she believed in God but didn’t trust him? Or what?”

  “It was hard to tell.”

  “Did it matter to you, you and Jody both being Catholic? Did it make you feel closer to her?”

  “I wouldn’t have cared what religion she was.”

  “Do you go to Mass at all, Nate? I’m just curious.”

  “Sometimes when I stay with Lee and Julie. Julie asks me to, so I go with her and the boys.”

  “I don’t know much about Catholicism,” I said, “but I’ve always been interested in the idea of confession. You know why? Because in my world it doesn’t happen often. Almost everybody says ‘I didn’t do it,’ or ‘I wasn’t there,’ or ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Most of the time people say all three.”

  I laughed a little and Nate didn’t.

  “So you probably never believe anybody about anything,” he said.

  “I believe evidence,” I said. “In that respect, my job is less complicated than most people think it is.”

  Nate was silent. I could picture the watchful, waiting expression on his face, which I had seen so often.

  chapter four

  NATE ASPENALL

  FIVE THIRTY IN the morning I’d hear footsteps on the linoleum, then water running in the bathroom. Bath closet, Jody called it; she liked to name things. In the dim light of the kitchen I would see her in her nightgown, which was white flannel with a line of roses across the top. She would have makeup traces under her eyes and a flush to her skin that went away after she had coffee. Her lips were fuller after sleep, and she was unnaturally quiet in her movements, like she was there but she wasn’t there, awake but still dreaming.

  She made coffee and when it was done she poured herself a cup, stirred in cream and sugar, and took it back to bed with her. This was ritual—the same things in the same order every morning. She would sit up with a pillow behind her back and write in this flowered journal she had.

  I think about you every morning and every night. I think about how small you were when I saw you last, and how much you must miss me. I’m your mother. You and I are part of each other.

  Usually she carried that journal in her purse, but toward the end of her stay with me she got careless and I came across it. On the first page she had written: You will soon have everything in the world that you desire. Who would believe that? She had probably found it in a fortune cookie. She believed what she read and heard, as long as it was positive. If it wasn’t, she told herself it couldn’t be true, and I could never figure out if that was hope on her part, or ignorance. You should get a journal, she told me, but never said why, never explained what it did for her or what it would do for me. Maybe hers helped her believe what she wanted to.

  It was dark, that early, with a moon, if there was a moon, and if the wind was blowing cold enough, she would turn on the electric heater and I would hear the hum of it. I would get coffee for myself and sit with a blanket over my shoulders, and when Jody was done writing she would make us breakfast. I never asked her to. I never asked her to help in any way. She did it on her own—scrambled eggs and toast—and I would clean up afterward while she was out walking, walking fast up and down the narrow roads of the RV park as if her thoughts were after her. With her small build you would think from far away that she wasn’t done growing.

  After her walk she often stopped at Mike Early’s RV, behind mine, and had coffee with him before he went to work, and that was all right with me. He didn’t have much going for him, and he was a good deal older. As I’ve explained, they knew each other from her waiting on him at Denny’s. They were friends, and I liked him well enough myself. Mike was due to retire soon from the Sears in Paradise Valley, where he sold appliances. He and I used to eat together. He would grill hamburgers and tell me about his ex-wife, who wouldn’t have divorced
him if he hadn’t drunk so much, smoked so much, eaten so much fried food, or slipped off to the casinos in Laughlin—if he had been perfect, in other words. He would smile but you could see that he was up nights, regretting it all.

  After his wife divorced him, their son disappeared in the Grand Canyon. The son had been close to my age. He had lived with his mother, worked at a Cellular One, and had trouble keeping friends. He was taking a week off to hike in the Grand Canyon, he had told his father. He was seen hiking down into it and he never came out. Mike Early believed that one day his son would be found alive, although he knew better, and so did everybody he told it to.

  That was a bond between Jody and Mike, the daughter who had been taken from Jody and Mike’s son who had gone off and lost himself. That was what they talked about, Jody said, and sometimes they didn’t talk at all, she said, but just sat together with their coffees and listened to the birds waking up outside. She said that nobody but a parent could understand.

  I know you will come back to me, Hannah. Every person on earth and maybe in the universe has made a mistake, and you will, too, one day, and then you will see that people deserve to be forgiven.

  Jody never wrote about me in her journal, even though I let her stay with me all those months. What that told me was what I should have known from the beginning—you can’t wish or force yourself into somebody’s heart. Up until I found her journal I believed I had a chance, and after I found it I guess I couldn’t give up; it’s hard to when what you want so much is so close. Could you make somebody want to do what they didn’t want to do? It seemed there had to be a way, something you could say that would convince them, or soften them. Some side of yourself you could show them, which they had overlooked and could like you for.

  Anyway, she lived with me from October through January. I think that was where I started. Every morning before dawn I saw her in her nightgown, floating in my kitchen.

  chapter five

  TRAVIS ASPENALL

  “IT’S NOT AS clear as it could be, Lee,” Sam Rush said to my father. “That’s all I’m saying. I’ve spoken to some people in the RV park and there’s now some question about it. I told Nate it would be helpful to the investigation if he could come stay here a while. I need more access to him.”

  I had taken Pete outside before Sam arrived, and when I heard Sam and Dad talking on the patio, I waited in the darkness behind the house before going in. By the time Sam left, my parents were sitting in the kitchen. The room was darkened; only the light over the stove was turned on. When my mother saw me she looked startled. She had forgotten I’d taken the dog out as she had asked me to.

  “We’re just talking,” my father said. “All right? Make sure you get your homework done.”

  I walked past the den where Damien was watching Star Wars with the sound turned down low. He was supposed to be doing his math problems and had his book open in front of him on the rug. But he had forgotten about the book. That was how much he could get into a movie, even one he had seen twenty times before. I was different.

  I went into the room he and I shared and looked over the poems I was supposed to read for English. I had tried to read them on the bus, but in the seat in front of me Nelson Rogers, who was two years ahead of me, was talking quietly to my friend Billy Clay about having had sex with Selena Maynard.

  “Call her a few times, tell her you like her, and she might do it,” Nelson said. “It doesn’t take much.”

  Billy and I and our friend Jason Whitlow—the three of us had been friends since the second grade—had known Selena a long time. Billy had felt her up once at a party. That was what they used to call it, he said, when his dad was in high school. His dad had told him that when he was in high school, feeling a girl up was all most poor sods would get in high school. “Don’t try for much more,” his dad had told him. “It’ll spoil you. You’ll have nothing to look forward to after graduation.”

  Through the open window I heard my mother’s wind chimes, then rain began, which didn’t usually happen in April. It fell slowly at first, but before long it was steady and I gave up reading and listened to it, thinking about what Sam had said to Dad outside, knowing that it must have been about Nate’s alibi. Then I thought about the fact that Nate had been on the wrestling team for a year in high school, as had I, in middle school, and that the first thing they taught you was how not to strangle somebody or break somebody’s neck, how not to accidentally kill your opponent, which had happened at our high school once, fifteen years or so before I was born.

  I countered it with thoughts of Nate taking Damien and me to Frontier Stables to go horseback riding, which he used to do when we were younger, or to Taco Bell, after school, or to the public pool in the summer. I thought about the time our parents were out and Damien had an asthma attack. Nate had gotten us into his truck and driven fast to Urgent Care. There were a lot of examples.

  But Nate could be moody, and he used to have this habit of going around in a raincoat in all but the hottest weather. Sometimes in public you would see people reacting strangely to him, such as moving a few feet away, in stores, and I’d move away so that nobody would know we were related. Around Damien and me, Nate acted like a brother, but I didn’t know what he was like when he wasn’t with us.

  Damien came in and changed into pajamas. He said, “Dad said Nate’s coming tomorrow or the day after or something.” Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep within a few minutes. I didn’t sleep as well as he did. I would lie awake, thinking. Lately I would lie there trying to imagine what Harmony Cecil looked like without clothes on. In addition to seeing her at school I saw her once a week at church. Like me, she was Catholic, but not. She had given up on God last year, when her brother lost an arm and a leg in Afghanistan. She had told me that one Sunday after Mass. Her parents made her attend, and she sat in the pew with them, but she no longer went to confession or received Communion. I had never seen her brother. He didn’t come home now that he was disabled. He hadn’t let them visit him when he was recovering. The last time she had seen him was before he left for Afghanistan.

  Through the window I could smell creosote in the desert and hear the rumble of traffic on I-17, which was always in the background, far enough away that it didn’t bother you, but you would have noticed if it wasn’t there. I fell asleep and dreamed that Jody Farnell was trying to tell me things about myself that only she knew. But I woke before she could say the words. “The dead know our secrets,” Harmony Cecil had said the week before in English class. Did Mr. Drake know what story or poem that might have come from? Harmony’s grandmother said it every time they drove past a cemetery. But Mr. Drake hadn’t known.

  Harmony was one-fourth Navajo. A lot of people claimed to have Indian heritage, but you could see it in her black hair and round face. When she wore a white shirt it shone against her dark eyes and skin. I had had girlfriends before, girls I would be with for three or four weeks, but Harmony was the first girl I felt respect for. It wasn’t automatic with her—liking you back just because you liked her. She had her own feelings she was loyal to. But she wasn’t actually my girlfriend yet. For the last few weeks I had talked to her only at her locker and waited with her after school for her bus, which came before mine did. I had ridden my bike past her house plenty of times, but she didn’t know about that.

  The bedroom was cool, with the windows open, and the wind spun Damien’s planetary mobile, which hung in the corner. Stars were light-years away, Damien had been learning at school. “If you could fly fast enough,” he would tell us, “you wouldn’t get older.” He was always wanting to go backward. When he outgrew his clothes he wouldn’t let my mother give them away, and he had the kind of nightmares younger kids had—monsters in the closet, snakes under the bed. “Hypersensitivity,” my mother said. That was what the doctor had told her. Maybe it was hereditary; maybe Damien would outgrow it. All it meant was that Damien felt too much. “Quit taking him to church,” my father told her. “That alone would make him less
afraid.”

  I heard my parents’ footsteps in the hallway, and after a few minutes I heard them talking. The walls in our house were thin. Sometimes I heard more than I wanted to. I would think, Fine, do it. That’s how Damien and I got here. But don’t make me listen to it.

  “What time will he get here?” my mother said.

  “He’ll get here when he gets here. You know how he is.”

  “Maybe we don’t know him as well as we think we do,” my mother said.

  “I know Nate,” my father said. “I know my children.”

  I fell asleep and woke later to the kitchen door closing. From the window I saw my father standing on the patio, smoking a cigarette. He had trouble sleeping, too, and as far as I knew that was the only time he smoked. But then there were things you would never know about your parents and things they would never know about you. There was always a way in which people in general were sort of strangers to each other.

  chapter six

  SAM RUSH

  NATE ASPENALL ARRIVED in Black Canyon City seven hours later than he said he would. Six thirty the following morning Lee got him up and the two of us walked him out to the wash and showed him where the body had been found. Nate squatted down and touched the rocks with both hands. His straight brown hair was thin, a bit straggly. He had on loose-fitting jeans and a gray-and-black-checked flannel shirt, worn almost threadbare. He had gotten a tattoo since I had seen him last—Jody’s initials, JPF, vertically on the back of his neck. Beside the J was a small blue heart. He asked me when the funeral was going to be and I told him that the mother wanted it to be private and he expressed the view that that was selfish.

  After we walked back I sat alone with Nate on the patio under the corrugated roof, just off the kitchen where the wind wasn’t strong. There was a wicker table between us, and we both had gotten ourselves coffee. Nate seemed formal with me. I was in uniform, and the fact that he had known me all his life seemed to take second place to the uniform. Perhaps he saw me as two people now and was trying to figure out how to talk to both of us at once. He was intelligent; he always had been. Not great in school growing up, but quick and smart. He had done better in college, but had dropped out a few months before graduation.