by Judy Troy
Nate touched the wrapping of his sausage biscuit, ran his fingers over the edges of it.
“She told me she had problems, back then,” he said. “I knew she took drugs. But she didn’t get specific.”
“Jody’s mother has a picture of Hannah at three months old. Tiny infant, as you can imagine, born that early. That’s the only picture she has. Have you seen pictures of Hannah? Did Jody ever show you one?”
“She had a picture of Hannah at about that age,” Nate said. “That’s the only one I remember. She said that the Navajo family didn’t believe in them, and that until Wes and Hannah moved away the Navajo family had the baby most of the time, and that they didn’t trust Jody or Jody’s mother.”
“Since when do present-day Navajos not believe in photographs? I’m just asking,” I said.
“Jody could exaggerate,” Nate said. “I know that. She could change the truth sometimes in her mind.”
“It seems odd, more than odd,” I said, “that nobody has a picture of Hannah that’s more recent. What I wonder is whether something has since happened to the child.”
“If it did, Jody didn’t know about it. She wouldn’t have lied about something so important to her. And she wasn’t living in some other universe, Sam. She wasn’t mentally ill, is what I mean. And she had good qualities. She had deep places in herself.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“What is it you’re saying?”
“That I think differently than you do,” I said. “More factually. For instance, I know that three significant facts about somebody—anybody—can reveal more than you realize.”
“What three, where Jody’s concerned?”
“She had a baby at a young age, when she was doing drugs, with somebody she hardly knew. I learned that from Alice Weneka. The child never lived with Jody. And these stories about the child being with the father, and Jody being afraid of either him or somebody else, and Jody wanting to get the child back, Jody told to a number of men.”
“Which doesn’t mean they’re not true.”
“Or that they are,” I said.
“So that’s how you see her.”
“It’s a list, Nate, not an attitude.”
I finished my sausage biscuit and took a drink of coffee. Then I said, “I’ve spoken to the landlord, Paul Bowman, and his wife. They told me a similar story, a story in which Jody talked about the child she was due to get back. In addition, Jody asked Paul Bowman for protection. Asked if she could call him for help.”
“You don’t believe there was somebody Jody was afraid of? You think she completely made that up?”
“I don’t know about completely,” I said. “But why were you so quick to believe her, when you knew she could exaggerate?”
Nate was looking out the window at his father walking to his Jeep. Lee and I had played basketball in high school, and he had been quick, wary, and athletic. He was wary now, taking in my SUV. I had brought that on myself by taking on the case, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.
“Jody was more alone in the world than you think she was,” Nate said, “despite the men she told stories to, despite me, even. She felt alone. She had this tendency to trust the wrong men. There was somebody from Holbrook she mentioned being nervous about. She probably trusted him some, too, whoever he was. She didn’t give me details. But she said she was afraid, and I believed her. The small bird makes the loudest sound.”
“Paul Bowman said that Jody mentioned you to him,” I said. “Said she had a picture of you standing outside your RV, and that she referred to you as her boyfriend.”
That touched Nate. His face softened. It had been some time since I had seen him wear that expression.
“When was that?” he said.
“Three weeks before she was killed. She said you were coming up to see her in a few weeks, which would have put you there close to the week she was killed.”
Nate unwrapped his biscuit but didn’t eat it.
“Did she ask you to come see her,” I said, “the way she had before, when you met her in Flagstaff?”
“No. I offered to come see her, or asked, I guess, and sometimes she would say she wanted me to, and sometimes she would say she didn’t. More often it was didn’t. Things with Jody changed a lot, depending on her mood or how her mother was.” Nate picked up his coffee and took too big a drink. It spilled on his shirt. “She wanted whatever wasn’t in front of her. That was what I came to believe. That what she didn’t have was what she believed could make her happy. So she was always in a state of . . . I don’t know. Longing.”
“That’s a hard thing to resist in a woman,” I said.
“Meaning what?”
“We like to fix things for them, make things better, be the salvation for a woman who will appreciate us and be grateful.”
“I gave that a try,” Nate said, “October through February. It didn’t work very well. But Jody’s unhappiness wasn’t a game with her, and neither was the wanting what wasn’t in front of her. She didn’t see it in herself. She couldn’t stop and look. She just couldn’t. She didn’t know how to. Her suffering wasn’t an act.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s when it’s irresistible.”
Nate looked away from me, his face stubborn, but not as if he hadn’t understood.
“If you did to go Winslow,” I said, “whether on your own or in response to Jody asking you to come, it would be understandable, given that you were worried about her. Anybody could understand that, so long as you tell the truth about it. It’s not just me you have to worry about, Nate. I don’t work for myself. I report to the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. On every case I have a county attorney working with me. So it would be best to tell me now.”
“Would it?” Nate said, but kept quiet.
chapter sixteen
NATE ASPENALL
THERE WAS A girl waitressing at Denny’s named Carla Kirby with whom Jody had become friendly. Jody worked the morning shift, six to two, and Carla the two to ten, and often Jody would stay late, helping Carla set tables, fill salt and pepper shakers, fold napkins. Jody and Carla would sneak drinks from the vodka miniatures Carla kept in her purse, and they would confide in each other, as girls did, I learned, in their quick and what seemed to me overly-quick-to-trust friendships.
Jody spoke of Carla, but I had not met her. I had supper at Denny’s alone one night in order to see what kind of person she was, how she was with people. I felt I should know. She smiled a lot, that was the first thing—a toothy smile that revealed big, buck teeth. When she said, “What can I get you?” she spoke loudly enough to be heard tables away. When she turned you could see her breasts move under her pink uniform. The upper part of her body was large, but her legs were thin, and she darkened her small, pale eyes with makeup.
Halfway into December Jody and Carla Kirby happened to work the same shift and had an argument over who was going to wait on a certain man, a truck driver, who tipped well. He was put in Jody’s section, Jody said, but Carla had come running over to say a big, loud hello, one arm going around his shoulder. Jody told me all this in detail. He said, “I’ll have the BLT, honey, with fries,” and Carla said to Jody, “Well, I might as well go ahead and get this,” and Jody said, “Why should you? He’s in my section,” and Carla did anyway, and that was the end of their friendship. Jody said that Carla had cut the cord between them, and when Jody walked into the RV that afternoon she said, “I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I just wanted to come home to you.”
That meant a lot to me, and I wasn’t sorry about the way it happened. I had not liked the bond they had formed; I don’t think most men would have. But I didn’t expect Jody to have so much difficulty losing her. Jody cried over it, said it reminded her of when a friend in middle school had moved to Nevada and never called or emailed. Just disappeared, Jody said. I didn’t point out that it wasn’t like that at all, that Carla hadn’t disappeared, and that Jody could have let Carla wait on that t
rucker, and she and Carla could have remained friends. Why was it so important for Jody to wait on him, anyway? Just how much did that trucker mean to her? But I didn’t want to be critical, especially when Jody seemed lost over the end of the friendship—not just lost but distraught, as in overly so. I tried to think of what might distract her.
“Let’s go to the Humane Society and get a dog,” I said. This was close to Christmas.
Jody had had one as a child, and I had had one as well, and naturally I liked the idea of Jody and me adopting one together.
“Really?” Jody said. “That would be all right with you?”
It was a chilly, gray afternoon, and as we drove there we discussed whether to choose a small dog or a large one, a male or female, and so on, and we came up with a list of names. But once we were at the shelter Jody got a glimpse of the dogs in cages, looking at us as their one hope, she said, their only way out, and she couldn’t bring herself to choose one and leave the rest behind. It seemed unfair, she said. It seemed unfeeling.
In the parking lot she said, “Let’s get as far from here as we can,” and we drove into the mountains, all the way down to Kirkland and west to Bagdad, where snow started falling—big flakes as if the sky were weeping big tears, Jody said. I drove carefully, with Jody sitting close to me. She wouldn’t wear a seat belt. It didn’t matter how many times you asked her to. She gave a reason: in such-and-such a place somebody was killed in an accident because they were trapped in a seat belt. I told her it probably happened one time out of a hundred thousand, but she said no, it had to have happened a lot more than that, or else she wouldn’t have heard of it. Anyway, she didn’t want to wear one, and I couldn’t make her, but I liked her sitting close; in that respect I didn’t mind.
In Bagdad we pulled into the parking lot of the Mountain Tavern and stood in the snow, feeling it on our faces, opening our mouths and tasting it. Then we went inside and drank until we were warm and drunk, and we danced to Willie Nelson on the jukebox, even though I didn’t know how to dance. But when you wanted something badly enough, you didn’t have to know how. That was how love came into existence. Maybe that was how every important thing did.
I JUST WANTED to come home to you. I couldn’t forget her saying that—the words, her voice, her expression. To me it proved that she knew she had a home with me. She could have driven home to me every night of her life, and I mean even if she never slept with me. Looking back, I believe I would have accepted that, if I had had to. I like to think I would have. Nobody understands that about men, about some men, and I don’t mean men who don’t care about sex because all men care about it and want it and fantasize about it. I mean men like me, who wouldn’t settle for a girl other people might think was a more realistic choice—a girl not so pretty, a girl who saw the world as you did, a girl who wanted you. Granted, there weren’t a lot of those around for me. Nonetheless I was aware of what I was choosing.
There was a day in my childhood when Lee and Sandra took me to the playground and I climbed up the big slide and saw them below me, Lee to the left and Sandra to the right, and I thought about jumping. Maybe I was trying to bring them together, not that I could have known that at the time; maybe I wanted to get away from them. Maybe I was having that impulse to jump that a lot of people have. Or maybe it was a thought that meant nothing at all except, wow, jumping was one of the possibilities that existed for you at the top of a slide.
But everything changed when I had that thought, when I saw that you could do something weird, something crazy, something nobody else would understand. That had to be true for everybody, I thought. It was a mistake to think that you weren’t like other people. Nobody was special. Nobody was any more or less entitled to love the wrong person than I was.
chapter seventeen
TRAVIS ASPENALL
“JODY WAS UNDER the bed, Travis. She was dead but she was moving her hands.”
I turned on the light so that he could see me checking. Damien wouldn’t take your word for anything.
“A pair of socks are under there,” I said, “but that’s it, and they’re not moving.”
He had his head over the side of the bed, making sure.
“We didn’t know her,” I said. “Don’t think we did, Damien. We saw her once, when she was alive, but that was all.”
“But we saw her dead.”
“Doesn’t count,” I said.
From the hallway we heard Pete coming down the hall, back into the room with us. Now that he was older he slept on the braided rug between our beds. He couldn’t jump onto Damien’s bed anymore.
“There’s Pete,” Damien whispered, and I went back to bed and heard Damien’s breathing slow down and mine slow down with it. I knew from science class that we were all physiologically affected by each other. Yawning was contagious; nobody knew why. And when girls hung out with each other, they got their periods at the same time. Placebos were another example. If you believed something was working, your body could respond as if it were working.
Then there was genetics—not just blue eyes or brown eyes but tendencies to be a certain kind of person: good, bad, kind, evil, whatever, if there were such a thing as evil. There was research done on twins who had not grown up together. There was a lot to discover, still. Similarities in brain chemistry lead to similar personalities, similar likes and dislikes. Then there were studies done on the differences between the genders—what was inborn and what was learned. In what ways did our brain chemistries differ? How much choice was involved in what we felt and thought? Why were we so different from each other?
I heard my parents getting ready for bed and the wind rise outside. In the spring the wind blew down hard at night from the Bradshaws. I looked at the shadows on the wall and thought about the five-sided house Harmony lived in on Wanda Drive. I had ridden my bike past often enough to know which room was hers. I had seen her through the window, in front of the mirror, brushing her hair, and I had hung around on my bike longer than I should have, given how bad it would have looked to her parents if they had seen me. I rode my bike around and around the block almost until dark, so that watching her was like watching a movie. She was sitting on her bed by then, with her iPod in her lap. I was hoping she would change her clothes, while I was watching, take off her top and change into a sweater. It was getting cold out by then. Instead her mother came to the doorway, and Harmony followed her out of the room and the movie was over.
I had done things with girls, not as much as Billy had, but probably more than Harmony knew. In the fifth and sixth grade girls used to call me. I hardly knew why, at first. That aspect of my life was easier than I had thought it would be. The girls I ended up doing things with were more into me than I was into them. I wouldn’t think about it much, after. Then they’d be mad; I wasn’t paying enough attention to them, and I would feel like a jerk for a while until the next girl came along. I didn’t feel good about that, but I didn’t feel as bad as somebody else might have. Now there was Harmony, and I wasn’t on such safe ground.
“Travis,” Damien said in his sleep. “I lost my shoe in the circus tent. Tell Dad to come build a bridge.”
I heard a sound from outside that wasn’t the wind, and I went into the kitchen and looked out the window and saw that Nate was on the patio with a screwdriver in his hand, tightening the bolts on my mother’s glider. She had mentioned it once. Nate was in jeans and boots, without his shirt on. I hadn’t realized how skinny he was, how much weight he had lost in the little bit of time he had been here, or maybe before that. We hadn’t seen him in some time. He hadn’t wanted us to visit, and now we knew that it was because Jody Farnell had moved in with him. He had told my father that. She had been living in a motel, when we met her. He didn’t say why he hadn’t wanted us to know. Just that she had been sharing his RV, and then she had moved to Winslow, where she was from.
Nate sat in the glider, pushing himself back and forth on it with his foot. Then he was on his hands and knees with WD-40, oiling the
springs. Next he stood on a chair and straightened out my mother’s wind chime, which had tangled in the wind, and after that I watched him put the WD-40 on the patio table, next to the pliers, and then slowly and carefully climb to the top of the ridge behind our house. He stood with his arms out to either side as if they were the wings of a hawk. The sky was starry and the moon was above him. Then he put his arms down and looked in the direction of the wash where we had found Jody. You could see a long way, from where he was, all the way to where we had found her. He looked for a long time, as if he could see her.
Then he climbed down from the ridge and stood in the clearing between our house and the Airstream. His arms were hanging loose at his sides. His head was bent down. I thought about going out there to let him know somebody was watching. It seemed so private, what he was doing, even though he wasn’t doing anything. But he was heading to the Airstream with slow steps. He went inside and closed the door.
chapter eighteen
SAM RUSH
JODY FARNELL’S 2001 Corolla was discovered on Bucket of Blood Drive in Holbrook, which was thirty miles east of Winslow. The Navajo County deputy sheriff who called me with the information said, “Odd, isn’t it? The car left on that particular road? Makes you think it had to be intentional.”
He had found the car himself, he told me, pretty much by accident. The Toyota was undamaged, with the license plate removed. In the back seat was a red sweater, a small pillow, a brown microfiber blanket, and a brochure from La Posada hotel in Winslow. What appeared to be a small, hand-drawn map, in pencil, without street names, was in the compartment between the front seats. A destination on the map was marked with a small, hard-to-make-out symbol. In the glove compartment was the Toyota manual, and under the driver’s seat, crumpled, was a cash receipt for a night’s stay, the night of April 23, at the Old Route 66 Western Motel, in Flagstaff. And that was it. No blood, no signs of a struggle, no fingerprints, no cell phone, no purse, no journal.