wouldn’t have helped him up. I would have let him lie there. But he didn’t. He fell into it and started snoring. I sat on our back stoop and watched him until the sun came up. He never left, Jody. He didn’t go anywhere. He didn’t go to your house and hurt your parents. I’ve always known that, because I watched him all night.”
Chills were running through her nonstop.
“You were, what, seven? Maybe you fell asleep and you didn’t know it?”
“But I didn’t. I never did. I felt responsible for my mother’s life. I couldn’t fall asleep.”
She felt so confused and overwhelmed that she couldn’t speak.
Her voice came out sounding choked. “Why didn’t you say anything-”
“I did. Nobody believed me except Mom and Red. Mom and I went to the sheriff to tell him and he lectured her for using her son to lie for her husband. That was awful.” He shook his shoulders in a voluntary shudder and looked away, down toward the other end of the street and the other deputy’s car. “After that, she didn’t want me telling anybody.” Collin looked back at Jody again. “People wonder why she stuck with my dad, don’t they?”
She nodded. “Are you aware that they think she hooked up with Byron at the grocery store?”
He snorted. “That’s all in Byron’s mind. To her, he’s just her boss.”
“Why does your mom stay with your dad, Collin?”
“Because she knows he didn’t kill anybody and she used to love him and she feels guilty about him and she always hoped he might change.” Collin shook his head. “He’ll never change. She’s seeing that now. They’ve already been fighting. My mom refused to let him in her bedroom tonight and he was so angry about it that I know he would have hit her if I hadn’t been there.”
Jody couldn’t keep her hands from flying to her mouth.
“Here’s an irony for you,” Collin said, sounding bitter. Jody wanted to go to him and take his hands and squeeze them to comfort him, but she brought her hands down from her mouth and kept them at her sides instead, and stood there listening. “He’s sleeping in the hammock again, just like he used to do. Only this time he doesn’t even have the excuse of being drunk. We couldn’t stop him from having a few beers at Bailey’s, but I wouldn’t buy him any more to take home. Now he’s just a stone-cold sober son of a bitch. You saw how he is. I’m getting him away from her as soon as she’ll let me, which I have a feeling may be first thing in the morning.”
Jody swallowed. “So you felt you had to get him out of prison because…”
“Because otherwise I’d have to go through my life knowing my own father had been wrongly convicted and I hadn’t done anything about it. And because my mother knew it, too.”
“You remind me of my grandfather.”
He looked askance at that. “Why?”
“Men of principle, both of you. It can cause a lot of grief.”
Collin looked taken aback at that, but then he said, “Yeah. I’m afraid I’ve caused you some of that today.”
“Oh, hell, what’s a little more?” she said with false lightness, and then felt ashamed for the self-pitying sound of it. She lowered her head so she didn’t have to look him in the eye. Although she heard his feet moving over the distance separating them, she was still surprised when she felt the heat of his body right in front of her. They stood on an incline with her slightly above him, which still didn’t bring her face level with his. Somehow gravity pulled her close to him and she found herself pressed against him. Collin’s arms came around her, and hers went around him, and he rested his chin on top of her head as she breathed in the scent of his skin. They stood like that for several minutes, neither of them saying anything, but their arms getting tighter around each other, holding on as if this were the only chance they’d ever have to embrace. There was a moment when Jody thought she felt him kiss her hair. She shivered and pressed even closer into his body, feeling more deeply comforted by his touch than she had ever felt before and wanting with all of her heart to give back to him the same profound feeling.
It felt so wonderful and so impossible that she wanted to weep.
Finally, she pulled away and Collin released her.
Jody looked into his eyes once more and then turned and walked away from him. One hesitant step. Two steps. She didn’t hear him do the same so she guessed he was watching her go. Unable to bear leaving him, she turned around to see if he was there, which was why she could see the shocked and frightened look on his face- which mirrored hers-when they both heard a sound that could only have been a gunshot coming from the direction of his parents’ house. There was no other sound, no scream that followed it, no other boom of gunfire, just the one shot that cracked the night silence as if it had broken a sound barrier.
Jody started to run with him toward his home until he turned to say, “No, please! Stay here. Get out of sight. Don’t make me worry about you.” And then he said, “I’ve always loved you, Jody.” Shocked as much by those words as by the gunshot, she stopped where she was, then ducked back into the shadows beside the car in the driveway and watched Collin Crosby run home, his long legs covering the sidewalks, the street, and his yard faster than either of the screeching cars of the deputies could get there. Her heart screamed No! when Collin pulled open the front door and disappeared inside. She prayed frantically for his safety. She watched Ray and the other deputy park at strange angles in the street, saw neighboring lights come on, watched the two sheriff’s men advance cautiously toward the house with guns drawn.
And then she saw Collin come back outside.
Jody stood up where she was.
He walked past the deputies as if they weren’t there while they called to him, “Is anybody hurt? What’s going on inside?” Instead, he came straight to Jody and faced her.
Her voice shaking, she asked, “Is your father-”
“It’s not Billy,” Collin said, his face distorted with all of the emotions running through him. “It’s Mom.”
Too shocked to speak, Jody stared at him.
“He shot her. Point-blank in the face. Killed her. He took her car and he’s gone.”
She stammered. “But I didn’t see a car-”
“Hers was parked in back.”
There were potholed alleys that ran the length of some blocks, emptying into other streets.
He put his face in his hands and began to weep. “This is my fault, this is all my fault, Jody. I should have left him there. I never should have tried to get him out.”
Jody reached out to grasp his shaking shoulders, with hands that were also shaking, but he broke away without another glance and returned to where the deputies still waited with their guns out, ignorant of the fact that it wasn’t Billy Crosby who’d been killed by some local vigilante, it was Valentine Crosby-who had waited for her husband all those years only to have him kill her soon after their reunion. Staggered by the shock of it, Jody watched a few more moments and then, sensing that her presence was useless, she turned and went slowly toward her own home. She wanted to run, to escape, to get as far away from Rose as she could go, though only if she could grab Collin and take him with her. Instead, frightened, sad, confused again, and bone weary, she climbed back into her truck to drive out to the ranch to tell them before they heard it from anybody else.
33
IT WASN’T EVEN two o’clock in the morning yet.
Jody drove fast, taking advantage of the fact that every law enforcement officer in the county had more important things to do now than to chase speeders like her. Her high beams showed her fence lines, sleeping cattle, sweet young growths of soybeans and sunflowers that she flew past as she navigated the curves in the road with a skill that came from familiarity-which was a good thing, since as she approached the gate, she couldn’t even remember how she got there. The whole drive was a blank in her mind.
All she could think of was Collin’s face as he told her about his mother, Collin’s arms as he held her, Collin’s grief, and Collin’s confession of love for her. She tried to recall how his mother had looked yesterday in front of Bailey’s, but she couldn’t remember anything about Valentine. She’d been aware only of Billy and his son. She felt grieved and guilty about that, realizing she had totally ignored a woman who-at that moment-had only a few hours to live. If she could have gone back in time, she would have run at Valentine and pulled her away, yelling, “Get away from him, get away from him now!”
As Jody neared the ranch gate, she drove past Red Bosch’s place again. This time she saw that his garage door was all the way down and she felt a tweak of surprise. Since it wasn’t her truck hiding in his garage, it must
