The Quiet Streets of Winslow

by Judy Troy

  “Next year’s birthday will be better, Nate,” Dad said. They were sitting at either end of the table. Our kitchen and dining room were combined into one rectangle, with yellow walls and a wood floor.

  “Better in what way?” Nate said.

  “Let’s hope in every way.”

  “You might have a new girlfriend next year,” Damien said.

  “I might,” Nate said. “I might have one who likes me better.”

  “How come Jody didn’t?” Damien said.

  “Don’t ask personal questions,” Mom said.

  “Sometimes girls don’t like you back,” Nate said.

  “What didn’t she like about you?”

  “I don’t think it was any one thing.”

  “Who did she like?”

  “It was hard to tell.”

  “Maybe nobody,” Damien said.

  “Yes,” Nate said. “That’s possible.”

  NATE AND DAMIEN and I cleaned up, despite my mother saying “Don’t help, Nate. Really. It’s your birthday. You shouldn’t have to.”

  He nodded his head slightly to signal that he had heard her. But he didn’t pay attention. He filled the sink with water and got to work. He washed the dishes slowly and with concentration while I stood next to him, drying. He didn’t talk at all. It was like he was a worker in a restaurant.

  When he finished he got the broom from the closet and swept the floor. “Dog hair,” he said, as if that were our fault.

  Instead of going back to the Airstream he got a beer and went outside with us. My father watched him drink it. Dad worried that we were going to become alcoholics someday, since he had been one, or, as he put it, still was one; he went to AA meetings twice a week. He was often warning us about it.

  “I appreciate your spending time with us tonight,” Dad said to Nate. Dad was in a patio chair, and Nate was cross-legged on the concrete, a few feet away.

  “Are you being sarcastic?” Nate said.

  “I’m being serious.”

  “I can’t always tell,” Nate said.

  “Am I usually sarcastic with you? Is that what you think? Maybe you misinterpret my tone.”

  “Everybody hears things differently,” Nate said.

  “I don’t intend to be sarcastic, Nate. Intention has to count for something.”

  “Maybe so,” Nate said.

  “We’re together for your birthday,” Mom said. “I’m glad for that.”

  Nate drank his beer without looking at us. It was almost dark by then. He hadn’t been this quiet a person before now. He used to talk in rushes. He would get on what my father would call a rant about one thing or another—usually some philosophical subject, such as how you should live your life away from the crowd, or why you should be suspicious of anything that managed to find its way into print. His quietness used to come only at intervals. But now it had taken over. We were all sitting right there near him, but it was as if he were sitting there alone.

  LATER, I WENT with the dog in the direction of Billy’s mother’s house. She and Billy’s father were divorced, and Billy and his sister lived with their mother during the week and with their father on the weekends. His father lived a mile away, near Black Canyon Creek, in a house that had an open feel to it. He was more or less a hippie. Billy and his sister could do what they wanted within reason, and so could I, including drinking. “One apiece,” his father had told us last Saturday. “Any more and the two of you will be drunk on your asses.”

  We were sitting outside, watching his father teach Dennie how to run hurdles. There was something hilarious about it. I came close to telling Billy about what was going on with Nate. Billy had seen Nate’s pickup more than once. He had asked about it. I pictured myself telling him to see the look on his face and so that we could make jokes about how weird the situation was.

  But in the end I didn’t tell him. I knew I couldn’t. If I hadn’t been used to keeping things to myself, it would have been harder. But I had always been the kind of person to listen and not say a lot.

  Pete started lagging behind, and I walked him back. The moon was rising, and it created a milky path across our property. When we passed the Airstream I could hear Nate’s television going, as I always could at night and early in the morning. Nate kept it on all the time. He had always been that way. He couldn’t sleep without company. He was lonely in some way I didn’t understand.

  chapter twelve

  SAM RUSH

  PAUL BOWMAN WAS a broad man in suspenders, with deep-set eyes and a fleshy face, who had had a heart bypass in January, his wife told me, and was trying to quit smoking. But he smoked as I sat with them in their kitchen in Winslow. Mary Bowman, who was short and big-breasted, with bright blue eyes, made coffee.

  “We hardly knew the girl,” Bowman said, “but here’s what I can tell you. She responded to an ad we put in the paper, and I met her there, at the house. It’s about five blocks north of here. She asked if I could reduce the rent by $50, and I said no, and she said she’d think about whether or not she could afford it and let me know. Meanwhile I came home and told my wife and she said . . . well, she can tell you herself what she said.”

  “I knew her mother a long time ago,” Mary Bowman said. “We used to run into each other at the Laundry Mat.” She smiled. “That’s what it’s called. You can see the name for yourself on the side of the building. Anyway, we each had a small child, and we talked about them, how tiring it was, how you feared they’d hurt themselves. Lisa Farnell was younger than I was, and there was something sad about her and I could never figure out what. Then years and years later, when I heard she was into the drugs, I thought, well, that sadness must have taken her there.”

  “You’re getting off the subject,” her husband said.

  “Yes. I do that,” she said to me.

  “The point is,” Bowman said, “that Mary told me to lower the rent, so I did.”

  “You argued with me first,” Mary said.

  “True. But I told Jody she could have the house for $350 instead of $400, utilities included, and she thanked me for that. She said it would help.”

  “She didn’t want to move in with her mother,” Mary said. “There were the drugs, and the fact that her mother’s trailer was too small for two people, let alone three, if you include the child Jody was due to get back.”

  “You spoke to Jody yourself?” I said. “And she told you this detail about the child?”

  “Yes. Once, when she came by to pay the rent. Generally I don’t get to know the tenants. We have three other rentals, and Paul is the one who keeps them up and rents them out. I just do the bookkeeping. Anyway, I spoke to her only that one time, and that was what she told me.”

  “We weren’t here the night she was killed,” Bowman said. “You know that already. We had left on our trip a few days before that, and we didn’t hear about the murder until our neighbor called and said a Navajo County deputy sheriff was looking for us. Where was it we were the night she was killed, honey?” he asked his wife.

  “Albuquerque.” Mary rummaged through a drawer and handed me a receipt from a Comfort Inn. “Our daughter lives in Amarillo, and we visit as often as we can. She has three little girls. I keep saying to Katie, ‘Move back here so we can see more of you and the children.’ But there’s Roy, who doesn’t want to come back, even though he could get a job in Flagstaff. He’s got something against us.”

  “You’re going on again,” Bowman told her.

  “I’m telling you things you don’t care to know,” Mary said to me. “I see that. How about if I just pour you more coffee? Would you like a second cup?” I nodded and she poured me one and I waited for her to sit again.

  “What else did Jody say about being due to get her child back?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Mary said. “Just that one sentence. I remembered it, because while I knew there was a child, I had heard that she—wasn’t it a girl?—was with the father, and that they had moved away from Winslow years ago. I don’t th
ink anybody knew where they were.”

  “How is it you know about him and the child?”

  “This is Winslow,” Mary said. “It’s small. You hear things. On top of that, I used to be in a quilting group with Alice Weneka. She’s the woman who took in the boy who fathered Jody’s baby. She took him in after his mother died. I believe her daughters were friends with him. Alice said that he—Wes Giddens, his name was—moved away with the baby. He needed a new start, she said.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Well, his mother had died here in Winslow, and his father was in prison. Wes hardly knew his dad, was what Alice said, but a lot of people were aware of it.”

  “What kind of person was Wes?”

  “Smart, according to Alice. Hoped to be a nurse someday, like she was. Alice was a nurse at the Indian Clinic. Maybe she still is, it’s been so long since I’ve seen her.”

  Mary looked up at the clock, took a pill from a container on the counter, and drew a glass of water for her husband.

  “As far as you know,” I said, “he hasn’t moved back here?”

  “Not that I’ve heard,” Mary said.

  “What about other people in Jody’s life? Did either of you ever see Jody out and about?”

  “No,” Bowman said. “As we told you, we hardly knew her. She moved in, with the little she had. She paid the rent on time, or close to on time.”

  “The Navajo County deputy sheriff took me through the house,” I said, “but I’d like to see it again. You mind driving over there with me?”

  Bowman seemed not to have expected that. But he got up from his chair and followed me out to my SUV. It was a cool, bright day, and he squinted at the sunlight.

  “So you visited the house after she was living in it?” I said on the drive over. “That’s how you knew she didn’t have many possessions?”

  “I went over to replace the shower nozzle,” he said. “That was three weeks or so before my wife and I left for our trip. Jody called and asked me to, and I did.”

  “What did the two of you talk about?” I said.

  “The shower nozzle.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What are you asking?”

  “I’m asking, was Jody flirtatious with you, or you with her?”

  I pulled up in front of the rental, which was a small, plain, white house without shutters. The grass in front was sparse—sandy dirt, more than anything. Bowman looked at the house for a minute or two before speaking.

  “She was a pretty girl,” he said. “When I first showed her the house and she asked if I could lower the rent she had looked at me in a certain way. I didn’t want to say that in front of my wife. But I knew that look and what it meant, and I didn’t say or do anything by way of response. I just told her no, like I mentioned earlier. I’m telling you the truth now. I know it’s important.”

  We got out of the SUV and went into the rental. Bowman walked slowly, either from reluctance or the state of his health. Jody’s belongings were just as she had left them. Only after the investigation was concluded would they be given to Jody’s mother, should she want them.

  “There was a photograph here,” he said, pointing to the table beneath the living room window. “I saw it the day I replaced the shower nozzle. It was a picture of a young man standing in front of one of those recreational vehicles. He was on the small side, thirty or so, with longish, dark hair.”

  “How is it you remember that so well?”

  “Jody saw me looking at it. She said, ‘That’s who I used to live with in Chino Valley. He’s my boyfriend, sort of. He’s coming up to see me in a few weeks.’”

  “Word for word?”

  “Yes. I remember wondering if she’d be moving back to Chino Valley with him, and I’d have to rent the place out again. That’s why I recall it.”

  “What else did Jody say about this boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Nothing else.”

  “Not his name, for example? Or his family?”

  “No. Although she was talkative,” Bowman said. “I can tell you that. She didn’t use good judgment in terms of keeping what should be private, private. But I wasn’t much interested in the boyfriend, and I didn’t act as if I was.”

  “Well, sometimes people mention things in passing, you know, the name of a town, for example. You recollect Jody saying anything like that?”

  “Just that the boyfriend lived in Chino Valley.”

  When we were back in my SUV I showed him a copy of Nate Aspenall’s driver’s license, and he said, “Yes. That’s him, I believe, the fellow in the picture.”

  “How about this man?” I said. “Have you seen him before?” I showed him a photocopy of Mike Early’s driver’s license.

  “No. He’s not familiar to me.”

  “What other information can you give me about Jody that would be easier to say here, away from your wife?”

  He hesitated, his face shiny with sweat, despite the coolness of the afternoon. “The day I replaced that nozzle,” he said, “after she told me about the boyfriend, or whoever he was to her, she asked if she could call me if she ever needed help. ‘Help with what?’ I said, and she said, ‘With anything, because you never know what could happen.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m the landlord, so if it’s related to the house, sure, call me,’ and she said, ‘Can I call you if it’s not related to the house?’

  “I didn’t know what to say. I thought about Mary and what she might think. I thought about the fact that Jody could have been in some kind of trouble, that maybe she was trying to tell me that. Then, as I was standing there, before I said a word, she unbuttoned her sweater and took it off and removed her bra. Just stood in front of me like that, half naked, and I said, ‘You’d best call the police, if that’s the kind of thing you’re talking about,’ and I got out of there as fast as I could. To tell you the truth, it was creepy to me.”

  “And you didn’t tell your wife.”

  He looked at the wide, windswept street, at the end of which a train was passing on the Santa Fe Rail Line. “I cheated on my wife once,” he said. “She said she would leave me next time, and there hasn’t been one. She wouldn’t have believed the story about Jody, that I hadn’t asked for it somehow, or hadn’t acted on what Jody was offering me. You probably don’t believe me yourself.”

  “Let’s go back a bit. What do you mean, creepy? Why did you have that response?”

  “Jody was young. And small as she was, she looked younger still. I have a daughter and granddaughters, Deputy Sheriff. I may have cheated on my wife, but it wasn’t with a kid or somebody who resembled one.”

  “Did Jody ever call you after the conversation?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Did she ever mention being afraid of anybody?”

  He shook his head.

  “Has anybody ever owned this rental besides you? Or rented it out on your behalf?”

  “I bought it from an elderly man who had lived there most of his life,” Bowman said. “That was fifteen years ago. And nobody has ever rented it out but me.”

  When I pulled up to his house I saw his wife watching from the living room window, looking relieved to see her husband coming up the walkway.

  IT WAS AFTER eight when I returned to Black Canyon City, and I had supper at the Rock Springs Café. Audrey Birdsong waited on me. A year and a half ago, before her husband, Carl, had died, they had lived behind me, on Spencer Street. I used to run into the two of them walking at dusk in the neighborhood, before Carl got sick, and we’d stop and talk a minute. I had liked them both. Audrey had a freckled face that was wide at the cheekbones and narrow at the chin, and she resembled Julie Aspenall in terms of her height and long hair.

  “Since when are you waitressing?” I said. As far as I knew, she did people’s taxes.

  “For a while now,” she said, “except during tax season. It’s not as bad as it looks, Sam, and it keeps me busy, which is good for me. It keeps me from being lonely.”

  So you’re
not dating anybody, I wanted to say. But I didn’t know what the etiquette was, where a death was concerned, and I didn’t want to seem forward or insensitive. What I did say was, “It can be lonely living alone.”

  “Especially when you’re not used to it,” she said. “Though you’d think I would be by now.”

  She smiled with some sadness and I tried to think of something to say and couldn’t, and she went to get my supper. As I ate she cleared and set tables for breakfast, and I pretended not to watch her. Then she brought my check, and I paid it, and we spoke a minute more about the warm temperatures starting and how soon we would be complaining. Then we said good night.

  My two years of marriage had not been good ones. My wife had had an affair with a man she later married, something she still didn’t know I knew. Other than my attraction to Audrey Birdsong, the only woman I found myself drawn to was Julie Aspenall, and that had been going on a long time. I had been with Lee when he first saw her at the Crown King Bar, up in Crown King, and if he hadn’t approached her, I would have. It was possible that she knew that. There had been an afternoon, once, close to Christmas, a year after my divorce, when she and I ran into each other at the Cave Creek Trading Post and went next door together to the Mexican restaurant. She showed me her purchases: an old Indian drum for Travis, and so on.

  It was dusk when we walked out to the parking area, and she gave me a hug good night and kissed me. The hug wasn’t unusual for her but the kiss was. If you were lost in the desert, you would remember your last glass of water for a long time. But it wasn’t just that, and I wanted to think that it wasn’t any kind of just for her, either. Not that anything had or would come of it. I wasn’t the kind of person to wreck a friend’s marriage, were that possible, and it wasn’t. The Aspenalls were happy, at least happier than most married couples I knew. It was just that having a warm, reciprocal connection with a woman didn’t happen to me often and it stayed in my mind.

  I sat in the Rock Springs Café parking lot, thinking that the restaurant was about to close; soon Audrey would be coming out to her car, and I could ask if she’d be interested in getting together. But the idea of waylaying her made me uncomfortable. If I wanted to ask her out, I should call her, I thought. That was normal behavior. When I got home I would do that, I told myself, yet ten minutes later, at home, I looked up her number, wrote it on a slip of paper, and left it on my kitchen counter. I would wait until the Jody Farnell investigation was over, I decided. I didn’t have time for a date now, anyway, which was true, and not just an excuse. Or at least not only an excuse.