maybe that’s what this was, a charm.”
“It’s not a charm,” Belle said, her voice harsh. She turned it over, showing a circular clasp on the back of it. “It’s designed to hold the ropes of a bolo tie.”
The “charm” was a silver rearing horse.
Jody took it from her, noticing with alarm that her aunt’s hand was trembling, and looked more closely at the back of it. “Is this an inscription? M.T. M.T.? Meryl Tapper? Aunt Belle, did this belong to Uncle Meryl?”
“Yes,” Belle whispered, and then she finally looked into her niece’s eyes. Her own were filled with tears and she looked frightened. “Jody, I gave it to him for Valentine’s Day that year.”
“That year?”
“The year your parents…” She couldn’t finish her sentence. “The last time I saw him wear it was the night they died. He told me the next day he’d lost it. I never saw him wear it again. Jody, if he lost it at the Rocks that night…”
Belle suddenly ran from around the counter.
Jody, her heart pounding with dread and her mind trying to refuse what it was hearing, ran after her aunt. She followed her down the basement stairs into the storage area where Belle kept box upon box of things she had been given, had bought, had found, herself. Like a woman gone mad with terror, Belle pulled at the boxes, destroying her neat piles, reaching back farther and farther until the reached a row at the farthest remove from the front line of boxes. She knocked boxes aside, heedless of what emptied out of them until she reached one on the bottom. It looked different from the others-not like ordinary storage containers but like a cardboard box that a law firm might use to store old transcripts. Jody had seen old ones just like it in her uncle Meryl’s law office.
“Get me scissors!” Belle ordered her, pointing to where they hung.
Jody got them and gave them to her aunt, who ripped into the old, threaded wrapping tape that had been wound around the box as if its contents were valuable enough to be stored in Fort Knox.
When the tape was undone, Belle lifted the lid off.
Jody saw only what looked like rotten fabric inside, but Belle saw something that made her burst into tears and rock back and forth on her knees and moan. Scared, anxious, Jody knelt beside her and put a gentle hand on her aunt’s shoulder, only to have it shaken off.
“Aunt Belle, what is that in the box?”
“Sheets,” her aunt sobbed. “The bloody sheets from the bed in the room where your daddy died. Meryl gave me this box to store the next morning. He said it had confidential records of one of his clients and it would be safer stored here than in his office.” And then she said two things that shocked her niece. “Damn her! Damn her, damn her! I saw her flirt with him, but I thought, well, she flirts with every man. I should have known, I should have known.” She lifted the loathsome sheets-and what looked like pillowcases-out of the box and said the second thing that shocked her niece. “Why didn’t he just destroy these? Why, oh why, did he leave them here?”
Jody stood up and backed away in horror.
“Uncle Meryl killed my dad?” She began to shriek, over and over, until Belle had to come and take hold of her to stop her. But she couldn’t stop Jody from screaming, “What did he do to my mother, what did he do to my mother?”
MERYL MIGHT NOT have confessed, even when confronted with the irrefutable DNA evidence of the remaining hair strands that the sheriff turned over to the state crime lab, since any old semen stains on the sheets were long past using. He still might have pleaded not guilty and gone to trial. There wasn’t any other evidence to connect him to the murders, and the fact that he’d had sex with Laurie Linder didn’t prove he’d killed her husband. Based on past and recent events, his defense still could have built another case against Billy Crosby to provide the jury with reasonable doubt.
But Jody and her grandfather visited Meryl.
Hugh Senior sat across from him and stared without speaking.
Jody begged her uncle to tell her where her mother was.
She thought it was her grandfather’s stare that broke him, rather than her pleading, and even then he didn’t say it directly to them. He told the sheriff, claiming that he felt squeamish about telling his niece that he’d put her mother’s body in a feedlot waste lagoon.
Jody doubted that he confessed out of pity, but shame worked fine, too.
After that it was easier for him to admit to killing Valentine as well.
“None of it was murder, it was just one terrible accident after another,” he maintained to the sheriff and to everyone else who’d listen to him, as if he had never intended to kill anybody. This, despite the fact that he confessed to killing Valentine in order to put all the investigative energy into a new murder trial instead of the old one, because he felt threatened by the sheriff’s taunts about using the hair for DNA analysis. “The other deaths,” Meryl protested, in full lawyerly self-righteous dudgeon, “Hugh-Jay and Laurie, they were tragic accidents, too. It was all a terrible tragedy, not a crime. Hugh-Jay was my best friend, he was like a brother to me, and I loved-I love-the Linders, I owe everything to them.”
Two weeks after his arrest, Meryl Tapper had a massive heart attack.
The weight he had gained over the years-perhaps unconsciously to disguise the fact that he had ever been a man whom a beautiful woman might desire-helped kill him. The Linder family was grateful for the easy ending; after Billy’s rampage at the ranch, they had no appetite-not even Bobby or Chase-for more revenge.
44
“GRANDMA,” JODY SAID, after she finished telling about her day, three months later. “I need to ask you something.” They were in her kitchen in the big stone house in Rose, and not at the ranch, because her uncles and their children were in town and some of them were staying with her. Even in Jody’s house, it was Annabelle who was doing the cooking on this night, which was a wonderful luxury for a young schoolteacher coming home from a full day of teaching.
On this early winter evening, Jody felt exhausted and exhilarated, all at the same time. One of her shyest students had shown courage in raising her hand and answering a question that afternoon.
Jody felt inspired to speak up, too.
“Do you remember what you advised me about Collin Crosby?”
Annabelle was peeling potatoes, but she stopped and looked over at Jody.
Jody could tell that she didn’t remember.
“You told me to be kind to him.”
“Oh.” Her grandmother went back to peeling, but slower than before. The burden of guilt she and Hugh felt for wrongly accusing Billy, and for Red’s death, and for harboring their son’s killer in the family was almost unbearable sometimes. It had aged and humbled them, given them new nightmares, turned them softer and sadder, made them more forgiving of other people, if not of themselves yet. Sometimes Hugh Senior had forgetful moments when he still thought Billy had done it all and hated him for all of it, and then later he’d remember with a shock that was brand new again.
Jody sensed she couldn’t do anything for them except love them.
Gently, she asked, “How do you feel about him now?”
Annabelle laid down the peeler and stared out the window above her sink.
“I feel… I feel so guilty about him, honey.”
“Anything else?”
“Grateful. He saved your life by calling us when a lesser man might have let us reap the whirlwind that we sowed.”
“Maybe we should invite him to supper some evening.”
“What?” Annabelle turned so fast that she brushed a potato off the counter. It bounced once, then rolled toward Jody’s feet. She picked it up, sniffed at the raw freshness of it, and then put it down on the table where she sat. Before Christmas, she’d painted the table and chairs bright blue.
“Jody, we can’t do that. It would be so awkward for everybody. Worse than awkward, it would be awful. He wouldn’t come anyway, and I don’t blame him. I’m sure he doesn’t want anything to do with us.”
