The Scent of Rain and Lightning

by Nancy Pickard

  Grandmother and grandchild ran to the bed and hopped onto the covers.

  “Wake up, Grandpa!”

  Hugh Senior jerked awake as if somebody had stuck a gun in his spine.

  “Wha? Wha?”

  Annabelle sprawled on her back and Jody jumped up and down on the bed, both of them laughing so hard that Jody got the hiccups and Annabelle had tears running down her cheeks. When he finally saw who had invaded his room, he started laughing, too, grabbed Jody with both strong hands and lifted her above him. “I should keep you up there all day!” he said with pretend ferociousness. “You woke up the grumpy old goat.”

  Jody was breathless, so he put her gently down again.

  Annabelle got off the bed and said, “I told the boys to meet us at the truck stop in half an hour. And Jody and I are going over to Laurie’s now to get her, too.”

  “What about Belle?”

  “Oh, my lord, I forgot about Belle.” Pangs of mother-guilt shot through Annabelle. “Where is she?”

  “With Laurie. Or else she’s at the bank.”

  “Museum,” Annabelle reminded him absently. “You can stop by and pick her up.”

  “I’m starving!” Jody told them.

  “Well, then let’s go get your mother!”

  WHEN JODY SAW Chase and Bobby emerge yawning from their room, she got excited and begged to go with them and her grandfather. And so Annabelle arrived alone at her son and daughter-in-law’s home that morning. As she pulled halfway up their drive, she noted that her son would have some yard pickup work to do when he returned from Colorado: the big old pin oak tree in the front yard, the only oak in Rose, had lost some branches. Annabelle smiled, guessing what her optimistic oldest child might say about that: Well, good. Now I don’t have to risk life and limb climbing that tree to prune it with my chain saw. And then he’d laugh, acknowledging the humor of his absurdly rose-colored glasses.

  She saw no lights in the big stone house; their power was still out.

  So glad I never had to live here, she thought.

  Big old spooky monstrosity full of ghosts and dust. Mostly dust.

  At the massive front door, Annabelle turned the old brass doorknob, expecting the house to be unlocked, but it wasn’t.

  “Locked?” she asked the door, in surprise.

  Had Laurie been afraid to stay alone while Hugh-Jay was gone?

  She rang the bell and then knocked on the door.

  When that raised no reply, she did it again.

  “Are you still asleep?” she asked her daughter-in-law, looking up to their bedroom. Why did the idea of Laurie sleeping in annoy her, she chided herself, when just a few moments before she’d been happy for her sons and husband to do the same? It wasn’t because they worked hard and deserved it and Laurie didn’t; any woman with a three-year-old and a house this size worked hard unless she had a nanny and a house cleaner, and Laurie didn’t have either.

  Annabelle walked back down the front steps and around to the back.

  The kitchen door was also locked, and the windows were all pulled down, probably to keep the rain from spraying in during the storm last night.

  She knocked, and then pounded on the back door.

  “Laurie Jo!” She felt frustrated. “Answer the door!”

  Maybe she had gone out in search of breakfast, too.

  Annabelle turned to go, and it was only then that she realized her son’s truck was parked in the backyard.

  Was Hugh-Jay home already? Or had he driven Laurie’s car to Colorado?

  This was all very strange, she thought, feeling cranky about it.

  And then she realized how she might get into the house.

  Hoping that Laurie had forgotten to lock the basement door, Annabelle went around to the side of the house and descended the old cement steps to the basement, where they’d only recently cemented in the dirt walls. She had to stand in dirty water from the backed-up drain at the bottom to test the door, but when she did, it budged. She put a shoulder to it, and it gave with a cracking sound that she hoped didn’t mean some kind of expensive repair.

  The basement smelled as if it had flooded, as indeed it had by a couple of inches. The water was gone, but mud coated the concrete floor. Annabelle grimaced as she stepped across it, moving carefully so she wouldn’t slip and end up lying in the muck. That was some rain they’d had last night!

  She saw residue around the clothes washer and dryer.

  “Hope they’re not shorted-out,” she said aloud.

  When she climbed the wood steps, treading cautiously on her now slippery soles, she hung onto the banister and prayed the basement door upstairs wasn’t locked from the other side.

  It wasn’t.

  Inside the kitchen, Annabelle removed her muddy shoes.

  “Laurie? Are you here?”

  The appearance of the kitchen startled her.

  A chair lay on its back. There was a battered straw cowboy hat on the floor as well. A yellow rain slicker lay crumpled on the floor, too. At the kitchen sink, water was dripping from the spigot. When she went over to turn it off, she saw what looked like blood on the sharp metal rim of the sink.

  Suddenly, she felt anxious. Things were not as they should be.

  This time she yelled it: “Laurie Jo! Laurie!”

  She rushed out of the kitchen and into the front hallway, calling, “Laurie! Hugh-Jay! Is anybody here?” Quickly, Annabelle looked into the dining room and the living room, and then she ran upstairs, her heart hammering and her body trembling when she saw and smelled strange stains on the stairway carpet. It smelled like bleach, and the carpeting had pale blotches in it.

  Too frightened to speak now, she raced from room to room on the second floor.

  They weren’t in the master bedroom. Or its bathroom. Or Jody’s room. Or the other bathroom on this floor. Or the guest room across from Jody’s room. That left only the small guest room at the far end of the hall. Annabelle raced toward it, pushing its door wide open as she rushed inside.

  “Hugh-Jay! Oh, God! Oh, no! My child!”

  His body lay on the bloody carpet.

  Annabelle screamed his name again and again as her heart broke.

  OUTSIDE, a neighbor who came over to check on the Linders after the storm heard muffled screams through the closed, thick-paned windows and was alarmed. The neighbor, Sam Carpenter, finally located the same unlocked door that Annabelle had and hurried up the basement stairs, slipping on her slimy footprints several times in his rush, while overhead the screams—clearer to his ears now, and more terrible because of it—punctured the air. They terrified him. They were the worst thing Sam had ever heard in his life. They sounded as if a woman was being stabbed repeatedly. He only escaped falling back down the steps by hanging onto the painted railing for dear life. During one slip, he barked his shins through his trousers, but barely felt the pain. At the top, he flung open the door and immediately spotted ominous signs of struggle in the kitchen: the chair, the rain slicker, the ruined straw hat. Without stopping to think about any of it, he followed the harrowing wails to their source in the small guest bedroom at the end of the hall on the second floor of the old stone house.

  When Sam saw there was nothing he could do to help there, he hurried in search of his beautiful young neighbor, but Laurie Linder wasn’t there.

  He returned to the terrible room.

  Gasping for breath, he told Annabelle, “I can’t find her!”

  “Get my family, Sam,” Annabelle begged him through her tears.

  She told him where they were, and he tried the telephone, but it wasn’t working. “I’ll get them!” Sam Carpenter yelled back at her. He was so upset he forgot to drive, forgot to tell his wife Louanne that he was going, forgot everything except his mission for Annabelle Linder. His heart pounding, sobs forcing their way up his chest and out his mouth, he ran the half mile to the truck stop, stopping for nobody, hearing no voices that called to him.

  He burst in the door of the restaurant sho
uting, “Hugh Linder! Where’s Hugh Linder?”

  Waitresses and customers turned to stare.

  The smiles that came automatically to some faces faded upon seeing the state he was in.

  People pointed: In there. The Linders are in there.

  “What’s the matter, baby?” asked a waitress who was known for calling all of her regulars by endearments rather than their names.

  “Oh, God!” he exclaimed as he ran past her. In a flash it came to him who owned that beat-up hat he had seen in the kitchen of the young Linders. Like everybody else in town, Sam knew about the incidents at the ranch the day before, and he’d even already heard about the fight at Bailey’s the night before. His mind jumped to a logical conclusion: “Billy Crosby has gone and murdered Hugh-Jay Linder!”

  She screamed. Dishes full of eggs and toast slid off her tray.

  All around the restaurant people who heard those words stood up, some of them knocking their chairs back. Others demanded frantically to know what Sam Carpenter had said, and then they, too, gasped, cried out “Oh, no!” and stood up, or rocked back in their chairs, or grabbed each other.

  After the initial uproar, silence fell over the entire room as they waited.

  It was broken only by the beginning of sobs from some of the women.

  “That son of a bitch!” someone cried in an anguished voice.

  And then they all heard it—a roar of “No!” from the other room, where the Linders sat together. When the family came running out into the main room, they were greeted by a restaurant full of people standing, waiting to hear that it wasn’t true, that they’d misunderstood, that nobody had actually killed that nice boy. Instead, they saw Chase Linder carrying his scared-looking little niece, and Belle hanging onto her father, who suddenly looked a hundred years old. All eyes followed them as they rushed out the front door.

  Bobby Linder still had a napkin tucked in his shirt collar.

  Sam, following them, was too exhausted to walk back. He limped slowly into the main room as people gathered around to hear him tell his terrible story.

  “Hugh-Jay’s dead, shot to death, and his mother’s there with his body—”

  “Oh, my God!” A woman put her hands to her face in horror. “Annabelle! Poor Annabelle!”

  “And I couldn’t find Laurie—”

  “Did he kill her, too?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Sam sank down onto a restaurant chair beside half-eaten breakfasts now going cold. His shoulders slumped and he wept while one or two people patted his back as they fought to hold back their own emotions.

  “How could he do that? How could anybody do such a thing?”

  Nobody had an answer at first, because nothing like this had ever happened in Rose before. Then somebody said decisively, “It’s Billy. He’s just that way. I hope they catch him and kill the son of a bitch.”

  COUNTY SHERIFF DON PHELPS made it to Rose in half an hour from where he was, fifty miles east. He drove with his siren blaring, all the while thinking about the things he didn’t know.

  He was forty-three years old and had been first a deputy and then sheriff for a total of nine years. Not once in that time, or in any of the years that he knew of preceding it, had there been a murder in Henderson County. Maybe back in the homesteading days some sheepherder had killed a cattleman, or vice versa, but he wasn’t much on history and didn’t actually know if there’d been any murders back then, either. These days, he handled traffic violations and a bit of larceny and petty thievery, domestic disputes and drunken fights at bars, farm foreclosures and rental evictions. He had never faced a single attempted homicide, much less an actual one. His deputies didn’t know squat about handling such cases, and the only things he knew came from one weekend seminar the county had managed to afford to send him to, and the law enforcement journals he read at home. When he got together with cop friends from more populated places, he had to take a lot of ribbing about having nothing to do but put his feet up on his desk. He always shot back with his standard retort: “I don’t think that coming from a county where there aren’t any murders is anything to be ashamed of.”

  When he entered the big stone house and climbed the stairs and saw the scene of the crime, he knew the wisest thing he could do was to close the door until the KBI got there.

  Since he didn’t dare risk gathering evidence, he did the next best thing.

  He went after the man he knew to his bones had done it.

  It also allowed him to escape from that house where an entire family—a good and decent family, in his judgment—was falling to pieces like a plate thrown against a wall. The sheriff wasn’t a homicide detective, and he knew he was no psychologist, so he got the hell out of there carrying feelings inside of him that mixed sorrow, fury, sympathy, and anxiety in nearly equal measure. He thought that if he’d had to look into Hugh Senior’s eyes one more time, he’d have started crying himself. And that little girl …

  He couldn’t even stand to think about what this meant to her.

  The sheriff figured he had more experience with the worst of Billy Crosby than anybody else in the county, with the possible exception of Billy’s wife. In addition to seeing Billy in his jail a few times, Sheriff Phelps had been out to High Rock Ranch the day before. He’d seen the fences Billy cut, viewed the carcass of the cow, heard the story of the animal abuse two days ago. And then, at the house just now, Chase Linder had filled him in on the incident at Bailey’s during the storm. The sheriff felt awful about the fact that he hadn’t managed to find enough evidence to hold Billy in jail last night. Maybe he’d have cooled off. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe it was going to happen no matter what, because once you got a man like Billy rolling down a path toward violence, there was no stopping him.

  By the time the sheriff parked at Billy’s house, his two full-time and two part-time deputies had caught up to him. One of them had a search warrant in hand, issued by a judge who cried while he signed it.

  Sheriff Phelps called them together in the front yard and said, “Do not do what you feel like doing to him. Arrest him like anybody else. Read him his rights. Get him into jail and let the law take care of Billy.”

  After taking a good look at their faces, he said, “I mean it.”

  One of them, who had played football with Hugh-Jay Linder, found Billy Crosby asleep in a hammock in his backyard. He dumped the hammock over, spilling its vile contents onto the ground. Billy woke up and yelled, then rolled over and stared up bleary-eyed into the face of the deputy who stood over him.

  “Stand up, you fucking scumbag excuse for a human being.”

  The deputy dragged him onto his feet, snapped handcuffs on him, and shoved him into the barricaded backseat of the sheriff’s vehicle.

  Billy threw up on the floor of it.

  INSIDE THE HOUSE, Valentine was fixing breakfast for her son and for young Red Bosch when the sheriff pounded on the front door. Before she could stop her son, Collin ran and opened it, letting out the scent of bacon and pancakes, letting in the big men in tan uniforms. The boy backed up until his legs hit the couch and knocked his feet out from under him, so that he sat down with his arms flailing. Just as quickly, he shot back up.

  Valentine came out of the kitchen, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, wiping her hands on a paper towel while the smell of bacon turned to burning.

  “What are you doing here, Red?” Sheriff Phelps asked, first thing, looking nearly as surprised to see the teenager as Red was to see him. Momentarily, it distracted the sheriff from the order he had originally planned to say things.

  “I p-picked up Billy last night,” Red stammered. “I brought him on home here.”

  His hair flattened by sleep, his jeans and T-shirt rumpled, and one side of his face still creased from sleeping on the teeth edge of the zipper of the sleeping bag—Red looked confused by the hullabaloo and scared by the sheriff’s tone of voice. One of the deputies told people later, with a laugh, that Red had that look teenagers ge
t when they don’t know if they’re in trouble, the look that says, Oh, shit, whatever it is, please don’t tell my dad.

  “You weren’t drinking at Bailey’s, were you, Red?”

  Red was only sixteen and shouldn’t have been drinking at all.

  “No, sir,” he said with fervor, looking willing to swear to it on a Bible if the sheriff produced one. “I was just drivin’ around ’cause I like storms, and I saw somebody lying in the parking lot at Bailey’s, and it was Billy. He was drunk as a skunk! I couldn’t just leave him there to get run over, so I hauled him into my truck and brought him home to Mrs. Crosby.”

  “Why are you still here, Red?”

  The kid blushed as red as his hair. “Mrs. Crosby, she told me to call my mother and tell her it was too dangerous to drive in the storm and that Mrs. Crosby said I should sleep over.”

  “Where’d you sleep?”

  Red gestured to a sleeping bag. “There, on the floor.”

  The sheriff turned to Valentine. “What did Billy do when Red brought him home?”

  In a high, nervous voice, she said, “He passed out on that couch.”

  Collin had moved over to stand beside her, and now she tried to get him to leave the room, but he wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t unpleasant about it, but he didn’t move. His mom shook her head and gave up trying.

  “Son,” the sheriff said to him, in a kind but firm tone, “do you have your own room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you need to go there now and shut the door.”

  Collin obeyed, and they all heard a door click shut.

  They didn’t hear it quietly open seconds later.

  The sheriff turned back to Red. “Did you see Billy get up and leave?”

  The teenager nodded. “I thought he got up to go to the bathroom and then probably went on in to sleep with”—he blushed again—“Mrs. Crosby. He never came back in here.”