by Judy Troy
THAT NIGHT IN Chino Valley I was so cold I was numb when I got back. Behind the partition Jody was asleep, oblivious. There was relief in that. When I was a small kid I thought people could read your mind. I thought you had to monitor the inside of your head, keep right thoughts on display and wrong thoughts hidden. I felt that pressure all the time.
When I woke the following morning it was late. Jody had gone to work and left me a note: You have a fever. I felt your forehead. She had put her hand on me; that was what struck me. I looked at the note for a long time—the large loops of her letters, the smiley face with which she dotted the I. The night before seemed a long time ago. I had a hard time remembering how the whole thing had started.
chapter twenty
TRAVIS ASPENALL
“IN ORDER TO anticipate what might happen, Travis,” Dad said, “in any situation, you have to train yourself to see things the way other people might. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
It was Saturday, and my father had gotten me up early. Before Nate had started working at the veterinary clinic, it had been my job, Saturday mornings, to clean the animals’ cages and mop the floors in the examining rooms. “We don’t want Travis to lose his work ethic,” Dad had said to Mom at breakfast. “Before long Nate will go home, and Travis will have to get used to working again.”
Once Dad and I were on our way he wasn’t in a hurry to get there. He pulled into the Roadrunner in New River and ordered coffee. We sat at a table outside in the chilly morning, with the sun spilling across the desert. The air was so clear that you could see as far as the foothills of Carefree, and Dad looked at the landscape, and that was when he started talking.
“It seems as if Nate might have gone up to see Jody before she died,” he said. “There’s no crime in that, and it’s easy to understand why he might not have told Sam Rush. Nobody wants to be suspected of doing what he didn’t do, Travis, and nobody wants to admit to chasing after a girl. Nate does have an alibi, of a sort. He was home in Chino Valley that night. But his neighbors can’t verify having seen him or his pickup.”
Dad paused when the coffee arrived. I had ordered a Coke.
“So the possibility of Nate having gone to see Jody when he did,” he said, “is just between us. You’re old enough to understand the importance of that.”
“You mean don’t tell Nate we know,” I said.
“It’s simplest to say nothing to anybody. That’s the best thing. It’s what is required of you as a man, and here’s what I mean by that. In a family it’s the husband and father who’s responsible for more than the family realizes. The family has to be able to depend on him, no matter what. In my opinion that’s how it should be. It doesn’t mean that Mom isn’t responsible, or that she’s less important than I am. It just means that I know what I need to do in order for my family to be able to count on me, whether she or anybody else realizes it.”
“So Mom doesn’t know what you’re telling me,” I said.
Dad glanced at the door opening and two men in work clothes coming outside.
He said, “No. Not yet. Mom and I are in this together, Travis, but until Nate was in college she didn’t know him. She didn’t see firsthand what Nate had to deal with, between Sandra and me. Nate didn’t get to have the kind of childhood you and Damien have had.”
“I know that.”
“And Mom knows it, too. But she didn’t see it. Nate might be something of a mystery to her. There’s no way she can understand him the way I can. What you can’t understand, you can misunderstand. Do you see what I’m saying?”
He stopped to drink his coffee.
“I realize that I’m putting a lot on you,” he said. “Normally I would have Sam to talk to, but, well, you see the situation.”
“Sam doesn’t trust Nate, you mean.”
Dad took off his windbreaker. The day was heating up.
“You could say that it’s Sam’s job not to trust Nate,” he said. “And here’s what he’s faced with. Nate is the only person connecting Jody Farnell to where her body was found. That’s how things stand, Travis, even though that in itself makes it unlikely Nate had anything to do with this—the obviousness, I mean. Why would Nate do that to himself?”
The waitress came outside and poured Dad more coffee. I waited until she had gone.
“What if Nate went to see Jody and he killed her without meaning to?”
Dad’s eyes were on the desert.
“If that’s what happened,” he said, “then that’s what happened, and we’ll support Nate however we can.” Dad knocked the table with his knuckles, as he did whenever he was making a point about something.
He took out his wallet and left money on the table. But after we got in the Jeep he didn’t move for a minute.
“Nate used to do this thing on the phone,” he said. “He must have been seven or eight or so. He would say, ‘Is this the party with whom I’m speaking?’ I suppose he heard it on television. He was always smarter than people gave him credit for.”
Then Dad started the Jeep and we drove to his clinic. Cave Creek was made up of a collection of small businesses straggled along Cave Creek Road, and the clinic was at the northwestern end. Inside I got the dogs from the cages in the back—a collie mix and two who-knew-whats—and took them out to the fenced-in area behind the clinic, from where you could see the small houses along the side street. For a brief while Dad came out and stood with me. It was still early enough that the birds were noisy. The collie mix started digging a hole under the fence, and Dad said, “She wants out, and who can blame her?” He whistled and reached into his pocket for the treats he carried.
WE LEFT THE clinic early in the afternoon, stopped for hamburgers, and discovered at home that my mother, Damien, and Nate were taking down the curtains in the house.
“Spring cleaning,” Dad said. “She goes crazy every year.” But he joined in, and so did I; we didn’t have a choice. We worked until five, when Dad and Nate went to pick up Chinese food, which we ate outside as the sun went down.
“Where’s Pete?” Nate said.
None of us knew. We looked in the house and around the house, then went out to Canyon Road and up to the ridge. He wasn’t anywhere, and it was getting dark. We sat on the patio, hoping to see him emerge from somewhere in the dusk.
“He’ll come back when he’s ready,” Dad said, but we knew it had been years since he had gone off like that. Meanwhile five mule deer were filing down from the ridge to drink from the small, shallow pool Dad and I had dug under the palo verde tree. They walked as silently as Indians, or at least as silently as Indians walked in movies. Harmony, I thought, probably hated those movies. She probably saw all kinds of things differently from the way I did.
One by one the deer filed up to the ridge.
“The javelina will be next,” Dad said.
Ten minutes passed. Then six of them emerged in a clumsy group from the desert beyond the Airstream. Mom went inside for the carrots she tossed them, which they ate noisily.
“They’re such pigs,” Dad said.
Nate walked a few feet away from us and looked at Venus, which was low and bright over the ridge. But I knew it was Pete he was looking and listening for. We all were.
Eight months ago, at daybreak, Nate had been with us when we had taken the ashes of Pete’s sister, Bodie, up to the ridge, opened the tin box, and watched the wind distribute them. “She’s not in the pain of the world anymore,” Mom had said.
Three hours later, after we had all gone to bed, I heard the sound of Pete’s bark and found him standing outside the kitchen door. Good things could happen, but not always, I thought, and not forever.
chapter twenty-one
SAM RUSH
THE WOMAN AT La Posada told me on the phone that she recognized the couple in the photocopies. She had sold them a ring. The girl had tried on six or seven, the woman said. She was drawn to them.
“They didn’t have much,” the woman said. “You could see that, and
the boyfriend—well, I assumed he was her boyfriend—offered to buy her one. You could see she didn’t expect that. He told her, ‘It’s worth it to me,’ and in the end they bought a ring with a slender, curved coral stone, an inch and a half in length, outlined in tooled silver. I can fax you a picture of it. We keep photographs of all our jewelry.
“The boyfriend paid cash for it, and the girl didn’t want a box. She wore the ring on her index finger, I believe it was. She had small hands, small fingers. And if I’m not mistaken it was her left hand she put it on. I recall thinking, well, that relationship will never work. The girl looked unhappy, and you got the impression the man wanted to fix that. So of course it was unworkable.”
“Anything else you recall either of them saying?”
“I believe the girl said something like, ‘I’ll wear it all the time. I won’t take it off.’ Then they talked about where they might go for a drink. I figured, with how little they had, they’d go somewhere like PT’s, which is not far from here. Well, nothing’s far in Winslow. Or perhaps the girl mentioned PT’s. I can’t be certain. In any case they went into the bar here at La Posada, and as I was leaving work later I saw them come out to the parking lot and get into a small, orange car. I recall thinking how glad I was, never having to be their age again.”
Two hours later Nate called my cell and said he had something to tell me. He asked me to meet him at the Satisfied Frog, on Cave Creek Road. He was already in Cave Creek, he said. He was at his father’s veterinary clinic. He could walk to the restaurant from there.
When I arrived he was sitting at a quiet booth in the back. He wore a gray sweatshirt, and his hair hung straight and limp in his eyes. He had ordered a beer for himself, and there was a Coke on the table for me. He started talking as soon as I sat down.
“I went to Winslow to see Jody the day before she was killed,” he said. “I spent the afternoon with her, then at six or so I left, and stopped in Flagstaff for the night.”
“At the Old Route 66 Western Motel.”
“So you know that,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“The motel receipt was found under the driver’s seat of Jody’s car.”
“Her car was found?” he said. “Where?”
If he knew the answer, he was doing a good job seeming not to.
“How do you suppose your receipt got into her car?” I said.
“We went to La Posada in her car,” he said. “I must have dropped it somehow.”
“You hadn’t stayed there yet,” I said.
His eyes darted away from mine to the basket of unshelled peanuts that were on the table.
“I don’t know how then,” he said. “I can’t imagine. I got confused.”
“It’s an important point,” I said.
He was silent. He took a nervous drink of his beer.
“We’ll come back to that,” I told him. “So you went to Winslow and got there in the afternoon.”
Nate touched the basket of peanuts.
“She was calling me late at night,” he said, “saying she had made a bad mistake. Saying that one thing again and again.”
“The mistake was what?”
“Moving back to Winslow. Everything had gone wrong, she said. Her mother didn’t need her except to use her. Wes Giddens wasn’t living anywhere near there, not that she could find out, which meant that Hannah was further away than she had thought, further away than she could get to. Everybody wanted things, Jody said. She should have known that about people, she said, and now she did. I was the only one who didn’t want anything from her. That was why she was calling me. Just to hear my voice, she said.”
“Then what?” I said.
“On this particular night she said she was sorry for calling, that it was selfish of her, and she hung up. She had called from a bar called PT’s, and it was late, and I tried to go back to sleep. But it wasn’t like Jody to apologize straight out like that, and her voice was strange. She sounded hopeless. In the morning I set out for Winslow, and when I got there she had just come home.”
“What time was this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Three in the afternoon or so. She said let’s go somewhere, and she told me about La Posada, and we got into her car and that was where we went.”
“You didn’t go into her house?”
“She didn’t want me to.”
“Why not? Did she say?”
“No.” Nate was chewing on a fingernail. “You’re probably thinking somebody might have been watching. Some man she knew.”
“Is that how it seemed to you?”
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “I don’t know how it seemed. Maybe she didn’t want me to see how she was living. She had dreams for herself, you know, like getting Hannah back, and maybe she didn’t want to see her life as I might have, as it really was. You know what I mean? It’s possible.”
“So the two of you went to La Posada. I know that you bought her a ring there. Tell me about that.”
He looked up at me, his eyes so dark they seemed opaque.
“I was going to tell you about the ring,” he said, “even though I don’t see that it’s important except to me.”
“So tell me now,” I said.
He looked at the waitress coming toward us and asked her for another beer. He was polite and quiet-spoken, as he always was, and didn’t make eye contact with her, nor did he watch her as she walked away.
“They sell Indian jewelry in the lobby. They had three or four boxes of rings, most of them old, and Jody was pulled in their direction. They weren’t as expensive as I was afraid they would be, and I told her I would buy her one. It wasn’t like she expected me to. She tried a lot of them on. She had a hard time making up her mind. Then she chose one and said it made her feel hopeful, like there was good luck in it. She said she would never take it off. I figured she had it on when Travis and Damien found her.”
“You and Jody went into the bar at La Posada,” I said. “I know that. What did the two of you talk about?”
“Chino Valley,” he said quietly. “We talked about the small deck she wanted me to build onto the RV. She used to suggest that a lot. We talked about a Chinese restaurant we used to keep hearing about. I guess we talked about things we almost but never did. Then I . . .”
“What?”
When he spoke I could scarcely hear him.
“I asked her to marry me. She said, ‘You want to marry me, even though we never . . .’ And I said yes. She asked if she could think about it for a while, and I said sure.”
“And after that?” I said.
“She wanted to go for a drive as the sun went down. We went on the Reservation and drove to a town called Leupp and back. That was her idea.”
“Why there? There was something or somebody there she wanted to see?”
“I don’t think so. There aren’t many roads around there, at least not paved ones. Maybe it was one of the few she knew.”
“What about after the drive?”
“She said she had to cook supper for her mother. ‘You go back to Chino Valley,’ she said. Meanwhile she would think about what I had asked her.”
The waitress brought Nate his beer without his noticing.
“But you only went as far as Flagstaff,” I said.
“I wanted to spend the night at a motel in Winslow. Any motel. But she said no, that she needed more time. She needed to make sure that if she said yes, she was saying it for the right reason. That was what she told me, that she didn’t want to use me. So I left.”
“For Flagstaff.”
“I didn’t tell her that. I let her think I was going home—doing what she wanted me to.”
“So why didn’t you?”
Nate put his hands flat on the table. He had thin hands and long fingers, like his father.
“I just didn’t. It didn’t feel right.”
“You went straight to Flagstaff?”
“I stopped for pizza, the
n I went to the motel.”
“And in the morning?”
“I filled up my truck, got a biscuit from McDonald’s, and drove home.”
“I don’t know, Nate,” I said. “It doesn’t make much sense to me, your staying in Flagstaff, but not returning to Winslow in the morning. They’re not but forty-five minutes apart. In fact if it were me,” I said, “I would have wondered what difference it would have made to Jody, your staying overnight in Winslow, as you had wanted to. It’s a long drive from there to Chino Valley, and it was already dusk. Had you driven home, you would have had to make that long round trip in one day.”
“Maybe she figured I would stay the night somewhere.”
“Then why say no to your staying in Winslow?” I said. “Did you wonder?”
“She wanted time to think. Time and space.”
“But you had some idea of other men in her life,” I said. “You must have had some suspicion as to why she wanted you out of town so fast. It would have been natural to drive back there late that night, perhaps, or the next day, to see what you could see. That would be understandable. I imagine the two of you had a talk in her car, which was how the receipt ended up there. That’s what makes sense to me. So let’s make this easy, Nate. Just tell me the sequence of events.”
“I didn’t go back.”
“Make that believable to me.”
“I was afraid she’d turn down my proposal if I did that.”
“Maybe she did say no. Is that what happened, Nate? She called you the next day and told you no? Or you showed up in Winslow the following day and she told you no? It’s a hard thing to be turned down, when you have already put up with so much. I can see how that would feel.”
“Don’t talk to me like a detective,” Nate said. “I asked you to meet me so that I could tell you what I know, and I’m telling you.”
“All right. I appreciate that. I’m asking you to do more of it, Nate. It’s in your best interest.”