Nancy Pickard - The Scent of Rain and Lightning

A look of disappointment crossed his face.

“In a few minutes,” she said quickly.

They talked for a while about nothing-his school, her school, how his mother was, how her grandparents were, and then out of the blue, he said, “I’ve never told you I’m sorry.”

She was honestly puzzled. “For what?”

All she could think of was the time they’d bumped into each other and she’d dumped soda down her front. She was on the verge of saying It was my fault when he said, “For what happened to your parents.”

Her breath caught in her throat.

It was too much: what he’d just said and who he was. It was too much to hear from him and she couldn’t take it in. It frightened her and upset her and confused her. It brought up feelings of anger and grief and all of the powerful emotions she was always trying to submerge.

Suddenly she wanted to hit him, push him, hurt him.

“What happened to them? Like, it just… happened? Like nobody did it?”

Grief-stricken, helplessly furious, and suddenly without the words to express any of it, Jody turned and ran away from him, back to her truck, back to Rose, back to the ranch.

For many nights afterward she tossed and turned, unable to sleep as she kept hearing his voice calling after her, sounding as sorry as he’d said he was and as upset as she was, “Jody!”

June 9, 2009

IT WAS A beautiful June day in a season bursting dangerously with hope when she saw Collin Crosby again. By that time she was twenty-six years old and he was thirty. They were twenty-three years away from her father’s death, her mother’s disappearance, and his father’s incarceration. On this particular day, Jody wasn’t worried about anything worse than how to ease away from her lover and whether or not she’d prove to be a good high school teacher. And then her uncles walked into her parents’ house and reinforced her belief in bad following good as inevitably as the moon chased the sun.

Billy. Crosby. Released from prison. Coming home.

Following that announcement, the sun still shone through Jody’s new curtains, but now it cast malevolent shadows. A breeze still blew through the screens, but now it carried no sweet, imaginary scents of lilac and honeysuckle. In the front hallway of Hugh-Jay and Laurie’s house, in the space of a few words, their daughter’s world turned brittle as a winter field. She shivered like a slender weed taken by surprise and caught defenseless by an early, killing blizzard.

“How could this happen?” she screamed at them. “His sentence got commuted? What does that mean?”

“It means he gets out with time served,” Meryl told her.

“He got pardoned?”

“No, not pardoned, Jody. Commuted.”

“What’s the difference?” She felt lost in a terrifying thicket of jargon.

“He would have to prove actual innocence to get a pardon.”

She stared at him, aghast. “They let him out, but they still think he’s guilty?”

“They’re not saying that. They’re saying it was a smelly trial.”

“The smell is all over them,” Chase said. “He is guilty.”

“Smelly?” She was deeply sarcastic now. “Is that the official legal term, Uncle Meryl? What was smelly about it?”

“The county attorney has cooperated with Billy’s lawyers to say he messed up the case. He says his conscience got to bothering him as the years went by.” At the doorway, Bobby made a sound of incredulous disbelief, but Meryl kept talking. “He says he withheld evidence from the defense attorneys. Billy’s new attorneys got the original defense attorney to say he messed up, that he didn’t provide an adequate defense or file timely motions. They even got a juror to claim she wouldn’t have voted for conviction if she’d known all this at the time.”

“Withheld what evidence? What about the honest evidence that he’s guilty?”

“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 running, out of breath, tripping and stumbling and feeling as if she would die of fright even before he caught her. The nightmares tapered off as she grew up, but lately they’d reappeared, and now she knew why: they were warnings, predictions of this shocking day.

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.