by Judy Troy
NATE ASPENALL’S PICKUP, a 2003 blue Ford F150, had two bumper stickers: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, I’VE LOST MY TRAILER and ARE YOU AS CLOSE TO JESUS AS YOU ARE TO MY BUMPER? The lettering on both was small. So unless Sonny Calhoun had been wrong about the date, Nate had returned to Winslow after the night he spent in Flagstaff, and he was still in Winslow that evening, a matter of a few hours before Jody was killed. I fought a losing battle with myself not to take some satisfaction in that. I was irritated with Nate’s lies, which had come one after the other since the case began. I was spending too much of my time proving what I had known or at least suspected to start with. He had been there. He knew far more than he was telling me.
As for who would have stolen the keys to the Bowmans’ rentals, why Paul Bowman wouldn’t have wanted to file a police report, and whether this K in question was Kevin Rainey, whom Bowman had denied knowing, those were questions I wrote down for later, when I wasn’t as tired as I was then. I had been using my days off working the case, as well as my evenings, and I was more than tired; I wanted my life back, such as it had been.
I OPENED THE kitchen door and stepped out to smoke a cigarette before bed. Unlike drinking, I had not been able to quit smoking, although I kept it under half a pack a day.
I could see the back of the house Audrey Birdsong still owned—a one-story bungalow with a detached carport. One summer night, years ago now, I had seen her in her kitchen, in a white top and panties, taking something out of the refrigerator. My wife and I had just divorced, and I had stood there watching her, imagining her life with her husband. If they had been as happy together as I had pictured, which I thought likely, based on my recent conversation with her, that was a good thing. That was something to be glad about, and the fact that it made me jealous was—what? Natural? I could see that. There was the pressure of trying to live up to a memory. Moreover, my track record wasn’t a good one. I had yet to make a woman happy for longer than a year.
I went back to thinking about the investigation. It was easier.
chapter thirty-one
NATE ASPENALL
I WAS SITTING OUTSIDE the Airstream when Sam appeared. I didn’t expect him any more than I ever expected him. He suggested we go inside to talk, and I said fine and cleared off the mess I had made on the table. I had been trying to fix a model plane Damien and I had put together last year. Somehow it had gotten broken.
The family had gone to Byler’s for supper. When I had said no thanks, I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t feel like it, I could see the relief that Lee and Julie felt. They could go without me; they could get a reprieve from Nate. As for the boys, who knew what they thought. I couldn’t tell anymore. Circumstances had gotten between us. That was what I was thinking when Sam drove up.
“Your pickup was seen parked down the street from Jody’s house,” he said once we were seated. “This was late afternoon of the night she died, Nate. This was the afternoon you told me you were back in Chino Valley.”
I was nervous and he could see that I was.
“You’re good at your job, Sam,” I said. “Better than I knew.”
He shook his head. Dismissing it, I guess.
“So you went back to Winslow,” he said. “Why was that?”
My mouth was dry, and I got myself a Coke from the refrigerator. I didn’t ask if he wanted one. Then I tried to speak slowly, wanting to tell my part of the story my own way, that is, what happened and in what order, to the degree that I felt mattered.
“In Flagstaff I checked out of the motel in the morning,” I said. “I had breakfast at a Shoney’s across the street, and as I ate I looked at the Arizona map. Maybe I wouldn’t go home right away, I thought. Maybe I would drive north, on the Reservation, maybe to the old Hopi villages. I had never been there. Then maybe I would go to Winslow in the afternoon, I thought, or maybe I wouldn’t. Anyway after breakfast I started driving east on I-40 instead of west.”
“So you went up on the Reservation first. For how long?”
“From ten or so, I guess it was, until two or maybe three,” I said. “I had lunch up there, did my sightseeing, drove around.”
“Then what?”
I looked away from Sam. I didn’t know how much he knew. Better for me to tell it my way, I thought, than to get sideswiped by a question that I was going to have to answer anyway.
“Then I took State Highway 87 South, in the direction of I-40 and Winslow,” I said. “And before I got to I-40 I stopped at the overlook for a view of the Painted Desert.”
“The Scenic Overlook Park?” he said. “You saw Jody’s car and Mike Early’s truck—that’s what you’re telling me?”
It was clear that he hadn’t known, at least not for certain. I went to the door, looking out at the setting sun, feeling tricked, and I had been tricked. I had tricked myself by making the wrong assumption. It was easy to do, and I tried not lose focus by blaming myself.
“You saw what they were doing then,” Sam said.
“I didn’t see much of anything. I saw Mike sitting in the truck but not Jody. I didn’t know what they were doing.”
“No conclusions you came to? Nothing you wondered about it, her car next to his, only Mike Early you could see?”
“I wondered, but I didn’t know.”
I looked down at the model airplane I had put on the side table next to the couch. With one part of my mind I was realizing it was too damaged. I should have seen that. There was no fixing it.
“So you saw their vehicles, and you saw Mike Early,” Sam said. “What did you do?”
“I drove to the other end of the parking lot, backed into a space, and waited for them to leave.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said.
“Then you followed them to Winslow?”
I could see on Sam’s face what he was thinking and imagining. I can’t tell you how disconcerting it is to have people who know you look at you and see a different person. But there was no point in telling him that. He would hear it not from me, but from the person I had become to him. The person I was and always had been was no longer present—not to him.
“I waited before driving to Winslow,” I said. “Jody and Mike left at the same time. I figured Mike would leave town, since he had already . . . since they were where they were, rather than at her house, and since they had driven to the overlook separately.”
“Then you went looking for her?”
“I went to her house and saw that her car wasn’t there,” I said. “I waited a while. Then I went in search of her, driving past her mother’s trailer, driving through the parking lot of Bojo’s and PT’s, then going back to her house. I parked down the street and waited, and darkness came and she didn’t come home.”
“You waited how long?”
“I don’t know. An hour and a half, maybe two hours. Then I made the same circuit again, adding the hospital, just in case . . . When I went back to her street the house was dark, and her car wasn’t there.”
“You must have been angry all this time,” Sam said.
“I was a lot of things,” I said.
We heard the dogs barking, then Lee’s Jeep on the gravel, the slamming of doors, the boys’ voices. It was as if I were listening to strangers.
“A lot of things like what?” Sam said. “What else were you feeling?”
“I was worried,” I said. “That’s the relevant thing. Anything could have been happening to her. I drove back to the overlook, to where I had seen her car last, but it was closed. There was a chain across the road. I went in on foot, and the parking lot was empty. Deserted. I drove back to Winslow and sat in front of her house until eleven.”
“Just sat there, all that time? Never saw her? Never saw anybody?”
“I began to think that she was probably with somebody else now, somebody I didn’t know, and here I was worrying about her.”
Sam was watching me. He was overweight but muscular beneath. He had the kind of build I would have l
iked to have had.
“So you did what?” he said.
“I drove home in the middle of the night. Didn’t stop for gas. Didn’t stop anywhere. I would have, Sam, if I had known she was going to be murdered and I would be blamed. But I can’t see into the future. I never have been able to.”
“Let me tell you something interesting,” he said. “Mike Early got a phone call when he was in Snowflake. Seven thirty in the morning on April 25. From a pay phone in Holbrook.”
“What did he say about it?”
“Said it was from somebody he worked with in Paradise Valley, who happened to be up in Holbrook.”
“Maybe it was,” I said.
“I had somebody check with his co-workers, and it wasn’t. This is a pretty big coincidence, isn’t it? Jody’s dead, her car’s left in Holbrook, and here he gets this phone call from Holbrook, and the three of you all know each other so well that you saw the two of them together the afternoon before, which was not too many hours before Jody was killed.”
“I’m not responsible for coincidences.”
Sam looked at me for half a minute or so before he spoke, and I looked directly back at him. I felt like he was daring me to look away, like we were kids in a staring contest. I didn’t like eye contact much, unless it was with somebody I trusted, the way I used to trust Sam. That I had trusted him once no longer seemed possible. In fact, I wondered if I were remembering wrong.
“The lying, the keeping information from me, Nate,” he said, “makes it impossible for me to think that you’re telling me the truth now, or at least the whole truth.”
“You think I can’t see the doubt on your face?”
“You can’t understand that?” he said. “It doesn’t seem logical to you?”
“I suppose it seems logical.”
“Is there any justification you can give me for the lies?” Sam said. “Anything that would make sense to me?”
I looked out the window at the light in Lee and Julie’s kitchen spilling onto the gravel. Whenever I came for a visit, that light was the first thing I would see, and for half a second I was as heartbroken as anybody could be.
“What I think and feel,” I said, “my relationship with Jody—none of that is your business or Lee’s or anybody else’s. I’ve told you that. It’s my right to tell you what I want and no more than that. It’s my duty to myself, even. But I didn’t kill Jody, and I’ve told you both that, too, from the beginning. Even if you can’t believe that, Sam, Lee should.”
“You think it’s that simple.”
“It is that simple.”
“Let’s say you’re not you,” Sam said. “Let’s say you’re a man who was caught in the act and yet claims to be innocent. You think your father should believe you?”
“That’s not the case.”
“But what if it were?”
“Nothing follows from a statement not true to fact.”
“Where did you hear that?” he said.
“A class in logic.”
“So much for what does or doesn’t seem logical?” Sam said. “Is that the point you’re making?”
“I’m not making any point,” I said. “But yes, I suppose so.”
“I’m investigating a murder, Nate. That’s all. It’s my job. The stakes are not high for me, but they are for you. I’d like to see you care about that.”
After he left I saw him walk toward the house, hesitate, then get into his SUV. I put my Coke can in the trash, then I picked up the model plane and threw it in there, too.
chapter thirty-two
TRAVIS ASPENALL
“I’M KIND OF interested in Jason,” Harmony said. “I’m sorry, Travis. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She told me that at my locker, at the end of the day, then walked down the hall to hers. I looked at my books, the jacket I kept on the hook, my gym clothes, a pair of old gym shoes I had had in there forever, which didn’t fit. I stared at everything, trying to figure out what you were supposed to do when the girl you liked didn’t care for you anymore.
I told Billy about it on the bus the following morning, on what was his first day back. There had been the funeral, which my parents and I had gone to, then there had been the day his mother had insisted that he and his sister stay home. His sister was still home, and Billy could have stayed out longer, but there was nothing to do at home, he said, except think about it, and he didn’t want to think about it.
“Jason’s not into Harmony,” Billy said, after I told him what Harmony had said to me. “That’s what he said to me, anyway.”
I was surprised.
“I bet for her it was the army thing,” Billy said. “That connection they had.”
“I forgot about that.”
“When people die, everything changes.”
“Harmony’s brother’s alive.”
“Yeah. Well, sort of,” Billy said.
He had his hands in his backpack, feeling around for something. He was disorganized, as his father had been. Billy could misplace anything anywhere, and like his father he could get frustrated and lose his temper easily, but also like his father he could find his own anger funny. It was the most likeable thing about him, and different from how I was. It took a lot to make me angry, but once I was I stayed angry for a long time. I had always been that way.
“You need to find another girl right away,” Billy said. “Harmony needs to see that you don’t give a shit.”
“You think that’ll bring her back?”
“You don’t want her back.”
“Then why do it?” I said.
“So you don’t care if she sees you looking pitiful, like you do now.”
“I don’t look that way.”
“You do,” Billy said.
He had found what he was looking for and held the backpack open to show me—a ziplock bag with a small amount of marijuana in it, maybe enough for three doobies, not that I was an expert.
“You’re crazy to bring that to school,” I said.
“I found it at my father’s and didn’t know what else to do with it. Cy looks through my room. He says he doesn’t, but that’s bullshit. Anyway I’m thinking I’ll cut school, leave after first or second period, and go get stoned somewhere, if you want to come. I don’t care where we go. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be anywhere. You probably don’t either.”
“Not much.”
“Harmony might just be screwing with you,” Billy said. “Making it seem like she’s not interested so you’ll be more interested. You know how that goes.”
“She’s not like that.”
“Maybe she wants you to think she’s not.”
“No,” I said. “She’s not.”
Outside the sky was already bright, with the sun coming up earlier. Soon it would be summer. I looked out the window and felt there was nothing to look forward to anymore except life the way it was before Harmony, only worse. I was mad at her, and I had a lot of things in my head that I wanted to say to her. But it felt useless, like trying to break a wall with your hand. It wouldn’t get me anywhere. Worse, she would see that it mattered to me.
As we pulled up to the school I wanted to believe that if I went in and spoke to her she would look at me the way she had before. It was possible, I thought, just as it was possible that aliens would land on the school roof, or that when I got home that afternoon Jody Farnell would be sitting at the kitchen table with Sam Rush and Nate. There were a lot of things you couldn’t alter. I knew that; everybody knew that. So much for knowing something, I thought.
“Let’s not go in,” I said to Billy. “There’s time enough for us to go out to the parking lot, hang out at the back until everybody’s in. Then we can go wherever.”
He was nodding his head before I finished saying it.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER we were in the principal’s office. We both knew that Billy’s father was what kept us from being asked to open our backpacks, what kept us from being spoken to as if it were a crime, our getti
ng caught as we were heading out into the desert. Somebody had seen us, a teacher, probably. Billy was upset about his dad and wanted to talk to me. That was what they assumed, and I guessed that was partly true, although not the way they were picturing it.
“The counselor would like to talk to you, Billy,” Ms. Deakin said. “We understand how difficult this is for you, especially your first day back.”
“Do I have to?”
“No. Of course not. But it might be—”
“I’ll see if I need to,” Billy said, “I mean, as the day goes on.”
“You just let us know,” she said.
WE WERE SENT to class, which was English, for both of us, and when people looked at Billy—everybody knew about his father now—he didn’t look at any one person, just sat down and gave me a glance like, Shit, I should have known this was how weird it was going to be.
Harmony was in her seat in the window aisle with the sun on her hair. It was hard to look at her and hard not to. She wore jeans and a red, long-sleeved T-shirt. She had on gym shoes with the laces undone. Mr. Drake was reading to us, and I tried to keep my eyes on our textbook, as Harmony was. “When you are old and gray and full of sleep / And nodding by the fire, take down this book . . .” Mr. Drake read slowly, as if he had written it. “. . . But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face . . .”
“What does Yeats mean by pilgrim soul?” he stopped to ask. “Does anybody have a guess?”
A girl in the first row said, “Does it have something to do with the pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving?”
“Yeats was Irish or something, not American,” said the boy behind her, “so yeah, well, no.”
“Pilgrims are just people who make pilgrimages,” another girl said, “like to holy sites, so maybe this girl in the poem used to do that.”
“But why pilgrim soul?” Mr. Drake said. “Why put those words together?”
“Because she has a wandering soul,” Harmony said, “a soul that’s looking for something.”
“Such as what?” Mr. Drake said.