The Scent of Rain and Lightning (23 page)

T
HE
H
ENDERSON
C
OUNTY
sheriff’s SUV was parked in front of the house when Jody drove up. She took a quick swig of water from the bottle in her truck—water that was tepid now—swished it around her mouth and spat it out. Then she popped in a couple of breath mints, and hurried to the kitchen door with the milk in both hands. Once inside the kitchen, she put one half gallon into the refrigerator, then went up to her grandmother—who stood at the stove turning over pieces of chicken with a long fork—kissed her on the cheek and set down the other half gallon on a countertop near her. She still wanted to say, Why didn’t you let me go with you to see the governor? Instead, she held back again.

Forcing herself to sound normal, she said, “Am I in time for the gravy?”

“Just right.” Her grandmother gave her a tired smile. “Go listen to what the sheriff is saying and come back and tell me.”

“Would you rather that I stir and you go?”

Annabelle shook her head. “No. I might say something I’ll regret.”

“You? To the sheriff? Why?”

“Just go on.”

Obediently, Jody followed the sound of a male voice coming from the direction of the living room. She passed through the dining room, where plates, napkins, and silverware were stacked, waiting to be placed around the big oak table with its man-sized upholstered chairs. Surprised to find that it wasn’t set yet—with her grandmother so far along toward finishing supper—Jody surmised that the sheriff’s visit was unexpected and interrupted the routine.

When she walked into the living room, she saw Sheriff Don Phelps standing beside the oak coffee table in front of the couch that her grandmother had recently redone in yellow silk to match the elegant floral print of her armchairs. It was a beautiful, feminine room, a contrast to the more traditional western appearance of the family room, her grandfather’s office, and the study that the men used more often, and where the decor ran more toward brown leather and dark wood.

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 innocent people, like tossing a hand grenade down the main street of Rose.

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 manner that befits that.”

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.

Maybe it would all come clear. It had to, she hoped.

“This outcome was unnecessary,” her grandfather was saying. “Billy would have been convicted without the shenanigans. There’s no excuse for it. Don can say what he wants to about how they didn’t know what they were doing, but inexperience or incompetence is no excuse for a lack of basic principles. It’s dishonest to circumvent the law like that, and look where it’s got us now.”

When he saw Jody, his intimidating formality melted and he smiled at her. “Hello, Granddaughter.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she ran over to get enveloped in a hug and then stayed close to him.