to memory now. The family had driven out to the Rocks with some out-of-town relatives that morning, a sightseeing trip they always took with visitors.
“It might be something Mommy dropped,” she answered.
She recalled even now the look he passed to her grandmother over her head when she said that. She was six, old enough by then to know her mother was missing and that people had looked for her and that a lot of the looking had taken place at the Rocks. They got cemented in her mind when she was little as a place her mommy might have gone.
She was old enough to sense that she’d said something wrong.
She remembered Grandma Annabelle coming over to her.
“Is that why you picked it up, sweetheart?”
“What?”
“This?” Her grandmother held out the object for her to see.
“It might be Mommy’s.”
That was all Jody remembered of the incident. She didn’t know what was said next. She just remembered getting the feeling they didn’t like it that she’d picked up the thing because of her mother. It may have been the first hint she’d revealed that she didn’t totally believe that her mother was as dead as her father. She was only a child, though, so she didn’t give up trying to snag their interest in her discoveries. The next time she found something, she showed it to Chase.
“Not a good idea,” he said, or words to that effect.
That criticism struck her to the core. It also pissed off her six-year-old self.
“It is, too,” she insisted.
“The reason it’s not a good idea,” he instructed her, “is that hundreds of people leave stuff out there every year. All you’re going to bring back is dirt and germs and other people’s trash. You don’t want to do that.”
But oh yes, she wanted to.
With Uncle Bobby still in the Army, he never saw her fossils.
Uncle Meryl was sympathetic, but did not encourage her macabre hobby.
Aunt Belle took action, lifting her treasures out of her small hands and walking them to the trash bin near the barn. Belle dumped them there, over the rim above her niece’s head, and deep, where not even a child standing on a bucket could reach them.
“No,” Belle said to Jody, as if she were a puppy to train. “No!”
Yes! the child thought, and from then on kept her secret from all of them.
They started monitoring her visits to the Rocks.
She had to wait until she could go with other families, or her Girl Scout troop, and after that she had to wait until she was old enough to drive out to the Rocks on her own or with girlfriends or boys.
“What are you doing?” her friends would ask.
“Picking up the litter,” she’d claim. It earned her an undeserved reputation for being an ecological good citizen. Or, she thought more likely-just a nut. Every now and then she had to stop her well-meaning friends from “helping” her. Sometimes she resorted to offering to get rid of their collections of trash for them, just so she could go through it in her room late at night down on the carpet in the space between her bed and the wall.
Jody couldn’t stop looking, because she couldn’t be sure.
There had been a Kansas playwright, William Inge, whom she hoped to introduce to her honors classes if she ever got to teach any. He’d written Picnic, Bus Stop, Splendor in the Grass, and a play called Come Back, Little Sheba, in which a lonely wife kept going to her back door in the vain hope that her lost dog had returned. Sometimes Jody felt as if she had to keep opening doors in case her mother might be standing there.
Partway up the Sphinx, she examined the ground, not the horizon.
That was why she missed seeing dust rising on the road from an approaching vehicle.
25
IT WAS A beat-up old truck speeding toward the Rocks.
Soon its driver was parked and walking toward her, daylight visible through his bowed legs.
“Aren’t you even goin’ to ask me what my reason was?”
Red Bosch stood with his hands at his skinny hips, looking up to where Jody sat on the haunches of the Sphinx. She resisted her desire to pick up rocks and hurl them at him.
She could barely make herself look at him.
“You followed me.” She made it an accusation.
“You could give me the benefit of the doubt, you know.”
Jody did pick up a rock then, but only rolled it around in her hands, looking down at it instead of at Red, feeling sick at the thought of what she had done with him without knowing what he’d been doing behind her back, behind the backs of everybody in her family.
“He was too drunk, Jody.”
She looked off into the distance, not at him.
“When I picked Billy up in Bailey’s parking lot, he was almost unconscious drunk. There was no way he could sober up enough to get from his house to your house, not drivin’ and not on foot. No way. Not within the time frame when your dad got killed, that’s for sure.”
“You were sixteen!” Her tone mocked his interpretation of events.
“Well, I knew what drunk was. I wasn’t a sheltered kid, Jody.”
She flushed. Not like you, he meant.
“Jody, they didn’t give him a breath test.”
Finally, she glanced at him, but then quickly away again.
“Did you hear me? I’m tellin’ you they didn’t check his blood alcohol level. Now why do you suppose that was?”
She didn’t say anything but was thinking furiously, back to all the transcripts and records she had read over the years. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the results of a breath test, or any testimony about one. It never occurred to her to realize one was missing.
“I’ll tell you why that was,” Red persisted. “It’s because it would have screwed with their assumption that he did it. A blood alcohol test would have proved he couldn’t have functioned anywhere near well enough to do what they said he did. Hell, Jody, he was still stumbling when they picked him up the next morning. He could barely put two words together. There is no way on God’s green earth that he got off that couch, crossed three blocks in thunderin’ rain, got into your parents’ house, climbed the stairs-”
“Stop.”
“-And then drove his truck somewhere with your-”
“Stop!”
Her right foot jerked reflexively as if she were trying to brake. It dislodged pebbles. They rolled to the ground, coming to rest near Red’s boots, raising a faint clatter and tiny puffs of white dust. Red stepped forward onto one of the pebbles and ground it to powder.
“I’m sorry this makes you feel bad,” he said.
“It doesn’t make me feel bad,” she lied. “It makes me furious.”
He smiled slightly, ruefully. “I get that. But this is why I kept in contact with him. You can understand that, right? I never believed he did it. I thought Billy got a raw deal. I was young and maybe idealistic, I guess. Or maybe I’m just a dummy, but I know what I know. I’m not saying Billy wouldn’t have done it, but just that he couldn’t. Not that night anyway. And nobody listened to me about how drunk he was because, like you said, I was sixteen and what did I know? Especially since they all had their minds made up already. He did it, that was that, and nothing different was ever going to be considered.” The look he gave her was pleading. “But he didn’t do it, Jody. I’m not sayin’ I like the guy. And please understand, when I say I kept contact with him, I mean like three Christmas cards and one five-minute visit over twenty-three years-”
“You went to see him in prison?”
