Nancy Pickard - The Scent of Rain and Lightning

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.

“You shouldn’t talk to me like this.” The sheriff put his cowboy hat back on, shoving it down on his head, and then looked straight at Hugh Senior. “This isn’t right. I never thought I’d hear this kind of thing from this family, and especially from you, Hugh. I thought as highly of your son as anybody else did in this county. I was just as upset as everybody else was. My wife cried about it. I worked my butt off to bring his killer to justice and make it stick.”

He started to walk out, brushing against Meryl, who didn’t budge.

Then he turned and said, “When I told Billy that if anything happened to any of you he’d be in trouble, you want to know what he said to me?” The sheriff paused and looked each of them in the face. “He said he didn’t give a damn. He said that if somebody killed another Linder, that was one crime he’d be happy to go to jail for this time, whether he did it or not.”

He let that sink in and then he shifted his weight and jutted his chin as if daring them to swing at it.

“But hey, if you’re all fired up to help the defense, I think I can be of some assistance, folks.”

Jody sensed a tightening of the tension among her family.

“You know that hair evidence that got thrown out?” the sheriff asked with a sly and aggressive look in his eyes. “Well, Billy’s boy came to me wanting some of those strands for DNA tests, ’cause we can do that stuff now where we couldn’t back then. I told him there wasn’t any left, that it was all destroyed in the earlier testing. But you know what? I think I might be able to come up with a few little hairs that got stuck back in an evidence box. You just never know what we might manage to find back there-since you’re all so eager to help him out.”

With that last volley, the sheriff slammed out the front door.

Within moments they heard his SUV spin gravel as he drove away.

“Why does he think a DNA test will help Billy?” Belle asked in a complaining tone. “It’s only going to prove once and for all that he did it. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“He’s just trying to shake us up,” Chase said, with a contemptuous downturn of his mouth, “because we pissed him off. We should have run somebody against him years ago.”

“Hell, I should have run against him years ago,” Bobby chimed in. “I couldn’t have been any worse at the job than he is.”

“Well, start thinking who we can put up for the job,” their father commanded, leaving Jody more astonished than ever. All her life she’d heard there was no finer lawman than Don Phelps, and now he was the enemy? Her grandfather was a self-pronounced lover of justice, and it was certainly true that she hadn’t been old enough to know what was going on at the time, but something about this whole situation with the sheriff didn’t sit right with her.