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Everyone was standing, like the sheriff, leading her to think he had only just arrived. She slid in beside her aunt Belle, who stood in front of the wall just inside the room. Jody crossed her hands behind her, swallowed the bit of mint left in her mouth, and leaned back until her palms touched the wall. She felt shaky and upset from her encounter with Billy Crosby, and it was hard to concentrate on what was going on in front of her. Her mind kept jumping back to him-what he’d said, what she’d said to him, how vicious he had sounded, how crude and intimidating and aggressive he was. Clearly, he was not a convict whom prison had softened into remorse, or rehabilitated. She was proud of herself for standing up to him, though she doubted she had disturbed him in the least. He’d laughed at her, made fun of her, threatened her family and showed no feeling at all for what he’d done to her. And his son! Collin Crosby was almost worse-purposely throwing his psycho father back into the path of i
An involuntary shudder went through her.
“Where have you been?” her aunt whispered.
Jody turned her shudder into a shrug. “Where’s Meryl?”
“Coming. Shh.”
“-talked to Billy,” the sheriff was saying.
Hearing that name, Jody stood up straight and paid more attention.
Phelps was in his sixties now, paunchy, and gray-haired under the brown felt cowboy hat he had taken off and was revolving in his beefy hands. His name and fame had been made locally by his quick arrest and conviction of Billy Crosby. Since then, only rarely had another man-and never a woman-campaigned against him for the office of sheriff of Henderson County. Jody knew him only because he liked to stop teenage drivers and check for drugs or alcohol, and she had been in a few cars that he pulled over when she was younger.
“Your parents will thank me,” he was famous for saying.
Now she listened as he informed his small audience, “I stopped by their house just before I came out here. I warned him that if anything bad happens to any member of this family, anything at all, I’m coming after him. I told him if Hugh-Jay’s girl gets so much as a flat tire, I’m going to check the nail to see if it’s his. If Mrs. Linder stubs her toe, I’m going to assume Billy tripped her. And the same holds true for the judge who tried him, the members of that jury, the county attorney, his own lawyer, and every one of my deputies who worked the case at that time. I told him he is under suspicion for every bad thing that happens in my county from now until he leaves again, and he’d just better live and conduct himself in a ma
He sounded forceful and looked proud of himself.
Jody expected to see the men in her family nodding their appreciation.
Instead, they were staring at him with less than friendly expressions on their faces.
“You should have run an honest investigation, Don,” Chase said, launching an attack with no preamble.
Jody gasped imperceptibly and touched her aunt’s arm.
Belle glanced at her, but Jody noticed that neither Belle, nor her grandfather, nor her uncle Bobby appeared surprised or offended by Chase’s bald accusation. Instead, they just kept steadily staring at Phelps, whose face had taken on a reddish hue.
They’ve discussed this, she thought, whatever it is.
Jody also had the thought that the sheriff didn’t know what he was walking into when he’d shown up at their front door. She’d seen it before in her lifetime, when her family came to a unified decision and joined forces. Most of the time it was for ordinary reasons-whether to tear down an old barn and build a new one, or alter the composition of their cattle feed with the goal of boosting calf weights. Often it was directed toward civic beneficence-funding a senior trip, electing a judge. But sometimes it was directed at a common enemy-a breeder who lied to them, a buyer who shorted them. In those cases, Jody didn’t envy anyone who stood in the path of her family’s will and decision. She just didn’t know, this time, what that decision was, or why they’d come to it. Maybe that’s why they’d been after her to arrive sooner, she realized-so she could be part of it. Out in the kitchen, her grandmother obviously was involved, to judge by what she’d said to her.
“Well, now, that’s one hell of a thing to say, Chase.” The sheriff had gone rigid, and now spoke in a tone as cold as the looks he was getting from the people around him. “You’re going to have to explain to me just what the hell you mean by that.”
“It’s not hard to figure out, is it?” Chase said with a wry hard tone. “You chose not to investigate things you should have investigated and question people you should have questioned. You withheld evidence that should have gone to the defense.”
Jody was shocked. She had never, never heard Phelps criticized in this house before now. If anything, he’d been put on a pedestal. Linders contributed to his reelection campaigns, as much as the law allowed. They sported his motto, “Reelect the Law,” on their truck bumpers, and her grandfather still had one of those stickers on his Cadillac.
“Evidence that should have gone to the defense?” Phelps repeated, with barely contained anger under his drawl. “Why would you want it to, Chase?” It seemed to be an admission that he’d done it, but that he wasn’t backing down from considering it the right thing to do.
For the first time, Jody’s grandfather spoke up, in a somewhat milder tone than his son, a tone that suggested he was speaking more in sorrow than in anger. “So we wouldn’t end up like this, Don, with a guilty man getting out of prison.”
The sheriff looked around the room at all of them before returning his attention to the patriarch. “Is that what you think, Hugh? You’re going to stand there and accuse me of being dishonest like your son just did?”
“What else would you call it?” Chase challenged him.
Hugh Senior said, in the same regretful tone, “There wasn’t any need to withhold that evidence, Don, and if I’d known you had it, I would have told you to show it. You had a strong enough case without hiding anything. You could have withstood the silly business about the hat. You could have easily dismissed any suspicions about those strangers that Hugh-Jay supposedly saw that day.”
“I don’t appreciate this,” Phelps said, looking cornered and as ready to attack as they were. “We did the best we could, and we did it as honest as we could. We were young and green. Call it incompetence if you want to, but don’t you call it dishonest. Don’t you do that. You think we had any experience investigating a major crime? We had zero. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, and we still managed to hand the county attorney a damned good case.”
“Doesn’t look so good now,” Belle said in a harsh voice.
“Seems to me I remember getting a lot of pressure from this family to arrest Billy Crosby!” the sheriff shot back at her. “It didn’t used to be ‘you’ when you talked about it, it used to be ‘we.’ My department and the prosecutor’s office and this family, we were in it together, remember? Helping each other put the son of a bitch away. I don’t recall you folks wanting to help the defense back then,” he said with deep sarcasm.
“What they ‘wanted,’” Meryl Tapper said as he strode into the room and took a stance in the middle of it, “was a clean case that couldn’t be commuted as this one just was. That’s what they ‘wanted,’ Don. Now, because we didn’t get that, they have to live with the killer of their son and daughter-in-law ten miles down the road. Now their granddaughter has to move out of her parents’ home so she isn’t living three blocks from Billy Crosby.”
Meryl still wore the reddish polyester trousers, the plaid jacket, and the bolo tie that made Jody roll her eyes whenever she saw them, but any pretense of country bumpkin lawyer was gone.