Collin Crosby.
Furious at him all over again, Jody trudged upstairs to pack.
When she reached the second-floor landing, she stood for a moment looking up and down the long hallway with all of its rooms and doors. As if her cowboy boots were moving of their own volition, she turned left and started walking toward the small guest room at the far end. She kept its door open at all times so the sun could shine in during the day and so she could see lights coming from the room at night.
People wondered how she could live there, especially by herself.
This was my home. I want it back.
“But it’s so big,” people objected.
“I like big,” she replied.
She was used to it: big land and sky, big animals and cowboys, big plans for being a really good teacher and meeting a nice man and raising a family right here in this house with plenty of room for them. But first she had to tame it-both this house and her fears of it.
Jody stepped into the doorway of the little guest room.
She looked at the carpet without flinching.
Her father had lain there, shot through the abdomen, blood gushing from him. She’d seen photographs. She’d read the trial transcripts. She had insisted on hearing it all, seeing it all, and learning it all, even when it meant dragging facts out of her family that believed she’d be happier not knowing, even when it meant going behind their backs to ask other people, or going on the Internet, which wasn’t much help for a crime back then. It was the only way she could walk through life without always suspecting that people were keeping dark secrets from her. She didn’t like feeling as if people were staring at her and knew things about her life that she didn’t know, so she had set out to learn all of it, or as much as she could. She knew that her dad couldn’t have survived for long after he was shot, but nobody knew if he’d been conscious or how much pain he’d felt. She prayed that he hadn’t known what happened to him.
There was still so much that nobody knew, but at least she wasn’t the only one in ignorance. Why was her dad in the house that night? He was supposed to be in Colorado. There were unanswered questions about him, not to mention the huge gap of knowledge about her mom. Jody suspected that she had scrambled to get all the details she could about her father’s death to compensate for all she didn’t know about her mother’s fate.
It hadn’t helped much.
What she didn’t know about her mother ate at her, always.
She realized there were other important things she hadn’t known, like for instance that Billy Crosby might someday return to Rose, or that it could happen this soon.
A noise outside made Judy startle and whirl around to look down the hallway.
There was nothing there, but she was good and spooked.
She felt as if she had to get out of the house where his vile, contaminating presence seemed more real to her now than it ever had before. She forced herself to walk down the hall, down the stairs, to the front door, and then she ran for her truck.
SHE WAS ABOUT TO turn the key in the ignition when a man’s voice made her jump as if somebody had stuck a gun in her ribs.
“Hey.” Red Bosch grinned at how startled she was.
Jody leaned back against the seat and inhaled deep sucking breaths, trying to get her heart going in a normal rhythm again. “My God, Red, don’t sneak up on me like that. You nearly gave me a coronary.”
“Sorry.” He laughed again. “Where are you going?”
She tapped her fingertips on her steering wheel, resisting the question.
In the glare of midday, her lover’s face showed all thirteen of the years he had on her, but she didn’t mind that. It was merely evidence of hard work in the great outdoors, which she loved, too. Red just missed being good-looking, but he was appealing in a sexy, cowboy way. He wasn’t educated past twelfth grade and he talked with a country drawl that would have been laughed out of the movies for being excessive. But there was a sweetness about him-always had been, people said-that seemed to stem from his own easy acceptance of himself and of everybody else. He could gab with anybody and he laughed easily. Red had never had any trouble attracting women, except for the fact that there weren’t many available ones in his own county.
Jody looked at him standing beside her truck and felt glad to see him.
He was a relief from the angry intensity of her uncles.
She’d known Red all of her life. He looked like comfort to her.
They probably would never have bridged the divide of employer/employee, however-the age thing wasn’t a big deal to either of them-except for one night when she’d stopped by his house to give him a message from her grandfather. Red had handed her a cold beer and then another one, and before either of them quite knew what happened, they were staring at each other, naked in his bed, and Red was drawling, “Oh, shit, Jody, what have I done?”
“We both did it,” she said. “Let’s do it again.”
He had laughed, and that was the start of something good for a while.
It just hadn’t developed beyond that easy fun for Jody, and she was pretty sure it never would. Now she knew she had to do something about it because it looked as if it had passed that point for Red. It wouldn’t be right for her to encourage him.
“Don’t know where I’m going,” she lied.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
Red had been asking her things like that lately, demanding to know where she was and what she’d be doing. It was beginning to sound like possessiveness or jealousy, and she hated it.
When she shrugged, he said, “You want company?”
“Don’t you have to work?”
“Not if they can’t find me.”
“Are you forgetting they’re related to me?”
“I never forget that, babe, but they don’t seem to want to get anything done today.”
“How do you know that?”
“I tried calling a few times.”
“Red? Did you hear what just went on in my kitchen?”
“What?”
“They came to tell me that Billy Crosby has been let out of prison and he’s coming back here to live.”
“Yeah.”
Red looked down at his boots, leaving Jody to stare at the fabric button on top of his cap. “What do you mean… ‘yeah’?”
He met her eyes again, but with a squint, as if he found it difficult to face her all of a sudden. “I mean yeah, I know.”
“You know? How do you know?”
“Everybody knows by now. And…” He got a look in his eyes that she had never seen there before, as if he was wary of her, or had a guilty conscience. Jody tensed, waiting for something she had a feeling she wasn’t going to like. “I guess I may as well tell you. You’re bound to hear it eventually.” Red cleared his throat and looked away from her again. “The thing is, Jody, I kind of kept in touch with Billy.”
She recoiled as if he had thrown a live snake into her lap.
“You what?” Her words were quiet, but the syllables were drawn out slowly, imparting the impression that she had a warning rattle. “In prison?”
“Yeah, in prison. There’s a reason-”
He hadn’t heeded the warning, and she struck.
“A reason? You slept with me, Red. In my parents’ house. In their bed. We screwed. You work for my family. You take their money. You eat at their table. And all this time you kept in touch with the man who murdered my father and did God knows what to my mother?”
He got a confused look on his face as if he didn’t know what to say, and then Red picked the wrong thing. “You shouldn’t talk that way about what we do together, Jody. It means more to me than-”
“You son of a bitch!”
