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“Governor doesn’t think it’s so honest.”
“Governor’s a liar,” Chase said.
“Somebody is,” Meryl agreed.
She looked from one familiar face to the other, feeling as if protective walls were washing away, leaving her shaking and frightened on the edge of an abyss. “Don’t you have any clout up there? Can’t you stop this?” Billy Crosby was the monster of her life, the boogeyman of her childhood. Ever since he had stolen her parents away from her, she’d had nightmares where he was chasing her and she was ru
Shock turned to tears again. She started to sob.
Meryl stepped forward to put an arm around her while she pulled a tissue out of her pocket and fought for control of her emotions. “Governor knows this county will never vote for him, or for anything he wants,” he reminded her. “And nobody outside of this county gives a damn about”-his voice turned bitter-“our little murders.”
She flinched at his use of the plural “murders.”
“Somebody else has clout, though,” Chase said.
Jody looked up through her tears. “Who? Who would care enough about Billy Crosby-or hate us enough-to do this to us?”
“Just one person.”
She waited, hiccupping, crying.
“His son.”
“Collin?”
“Kitchen,” Chase suddenly ordered, and led them there.
AT THE TABLE her mother had painted yellow, in the room where Laurie had cooked meals for her and her daddy, Jody sat with her shoulders hunched and her hands clasped between her thighs, waiting for somebody, any one of them, to start making sense.
“It’s weird,” she said, sniffling, taking stuttering breaths. “Don’t you think this is a weird coincidence? I move back to town for the first time-and he gets out of jail and moves back, too?” Her shoulders lifted in a shudder and more tears escaped before she trapped them with the tissue. “I don’t understand any of this. When did all this happen? How could it happen? Why did they let him go? You’re going to have to explain this to me.”
To her right, Chase leaned against a kitchen counter only inches from the spot that had tested positive for Laurie’s blood type. It always felt strange to Jody when she cleaned the sink there-just as cleaning other parts of the house took a little courage. She had found a way to do it, though, by thinking of her mother with love and by murmuring a prayer for her, thereby turning the bad moment into something better. Now she watched Chase cross his arms over his white shirt. He still hadn’t removed his sunglasses and his jaw still looked clenched, as if a dentist had told him to bite down. In the past when she had seen her uncle Chase look like this she’d gone out of her way to avoid him-even walking clear around the house and coming in another door if necessary. He looked in the kind of mood that started with him blaming somebody for something, then turned into a loud argument, and finally ended with doors slamming.
Sounding angry, barely opening his mouth to speak, he said, “Bobby, make us some coffee.”
Jody started to get up to do it.
He waved her back into her chair. “He makes better coffee than you do.”
It was true. It had been her mom who was the good cook. Jody had always heard that great coffee and piecrust were two of Laurie Linder’s specialties. Chase, particularly, had loved her coffee, people said, and everybody had loved the pies she baked, with their flaky, sugary crusts. At that moment, Jody would have given anything for a bite of her mother’s piecrust and a cup of that coffee to relax Chase.
Sitting across the table from Jody, Meryl said, “Give me a minute, sweetheart.” He glanced at Chase, then at Bobby, and then gazed out a kitchen window toward the backyard. For a moment, Jody thought anxiously of Red and hoped he wasn’t hiding there in plain sight.
“I need to get my thoughts together,” Meryl said. “I wasn’t ever expecting to have this conversation.”
Jody bit her tongue on the questions that sprang to it, and gave him his chance to get organized. She was almost relieved to wait, to delay the words she didn’t want to hear. She stared down at the top of the table and thought about how it must have looked bright and cheerful when her mom painted it. Now it was dingy. The old paint was bare in some places, bubbled in others-she brought her hands above the table and rubbed some of the rough places with her fingers-but she wasn’t ready to redo it. She had the superstitious feeling that if she did, her mother would never come back in any way, not as a living woman or a corpse. Everybody assumed her mother was dead, but there was a part of Jody’s brain-or her heart-that still held out hope. A bloody yellow sundress had been found in a truck, that was all. It didn’t have to mean she was dead, did it? The fact that not a single sign of her, anywhere at any time, had shown up in the last twenty-three years was taken as proof that Laurie Linder was truly gone, but her daughter lived in a fugue state, haunted by the slimmest of possibilities that her mother was alive.
Jody suddenly wanted her grandmother A
It made her heart hurt to think of what this was going to be like for her grandparents, having their son’s murderer so near, where they might run into him at any time. She knew they would worry for her sake, and that made it essential for her to get a good grip on herself.
She would not cause them more pain. Clasping her hands atop the table, Jody sat up straight in her chair. She looked at her uncles and felt such sympathy for them that it nearly undid her and started her tears again. This was going to be hard for everybody.
Meryl looked straight at her. “Tell me what you know about why Billy was convicted, Jody.”
She wasn’t expecting the question, but she focused and obeyed.
“Physical and circumstantial evidence,” she recited, having been taught it all when she demanded to hear it years ago.
“What physical evidence?”
“Hair in the guest room and a bathroom drain. Fiber from his socks, on the carpets.” She swallowed. “His hat in this kitchen.”
She kept her eyes on Meryl, forbidding herself from looking over to where Billy Crosby’s cowboy hat once had lain, stopping herself from wondering if the chair that had been turned over was the very one in which she sat now.
“What was the circumstantial evidence?”
“The cow. The arguments. The fences. The fight he got into with you guys at Bailey’s. The way he looked at Mom. How he tried to hit her.” Fury surged in to suffocate her sadness. She took a ragged breath and beat on the table with her fists. “I hate him! How can they let him go? How can they!”
“Calm down,” Chase ordered.
She threw him an infuriated look.
Meryl snapped his fingers to get her attention back. “What did all of that circumstantial evidence establish that was so damning to him at the trial?”
“A pattern,” Jody recited, answering by rote. “It formed a convincing pattern of events leading up to the crime.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Well, here’s the bad news about the physical evidence. Hair and fiber comparisons are considered faulty science in some quarters now, and our governor’s office is one of them.”
A sickening, sinking feeling rushed through her.
“I didn’t know that,” she said in a near whisper, and then angrily, “Why didn’t I know that?”
“Most people don’t.”
“But you did, right? A lawyer would know. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I think the science is fine. And because even without the physical evidence, there is still enough circumstantial evidence to support his conviction.”
“So what happened?”