Once there, she wasn’t sure why she had come.

And then she saw she wasn’t alone.

A male figure came out from around one of the tallest formations, wearing climbing gear.

Jody thought, I’m not the only crazy person who does things alone that you shouldn’t do alone.

She looked at how he was all wrapped up in ropes and belts and carrying equipment and decided that whoever he was, he was too encumbered to be a hazard to her.

Then she recognized him.

She thought about turning her truck back on and leaving.

Instead, she got out, grabbed an old backpack from behind her seat-because she liked to collect things at the Rocks-and stood there, looking at him. It was the only time she had allowed herself to do that, to stare openly at Collin Crosby.

Something-what the heck was wrong with her? she didn’t know-pulled her toward him. With a boldness she barely recognized in herself, she walked straight up to him and stood in front of him with her hands on her hips, while he looked a little flabbergasted.

“Isn’t it kind of stupid to climb alone?” she said.

“Like coming out to the Rocks by yourself?” he retorted.

“Like that, yeah.”

“I can be stupid sometimes,” he admitted, with a slight smile. “So far it hasn’t killed me.”

“I climb that one,” Jody bragged, pointing at a rock called the Sphinx.

That was stretching reality a little. What she did was clamber up a few yards to a good place to sit so she could gaze out over the landscape. When he turned to look in that direction, she stared at his profile.

He was disturbingly good-looking and he acted like he didn’t know it.

“The Sphinx?” he said, squinting at it.

“Yeah, but not with all that fancy gear. Where did you get all that stuff?”

He turned back toward her, making her take a quick breath. “Last summer I worked in a sports equipment store.”

“Where?”

“ Denver.”

“Really?” She was kind of wowed. But then he was twenty, and probably going into his junior year in college. “Are you in college somewhere?”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t keep up with your every move.”

He smiled that slight smile again. Her heart did things in response that she wished it wouldn’t do and for which she had no good excuse. “Darn,” he said. “And all this time, I thought you did.” He paused, suddenly looking less sure of himself. “I keep up with you.”

Jody stepped back. “Huh?”

“Well, not like I’m a stalker or anything. It’s just that I hear things. People talk about you around Rose. They’re proud of you.”

“Me? Why? They are?”

“Yeah, because you’re pretty and you’re smart and-”

“Wait. Stop.” Jody stepped back, too, and turned her back on him. She felt more flustered than she’d ever felt in her life except for the time when her friend had cursed Collin and pushed him back away from her. When she turned around, she said, “I don’t want to hear about that.”

He looked surprised. “You don’t want to hear praise?”

She laughed, kind of. “Do you have any idea how spoiled I am?”

He took in a breath, said, “Right,” and then gave her a look she couldn’t decipher. “Are you meeting somebody here?”

She thought about lying and saying yes. “No.”

“Have you got time to wait for me to get out of this stuff?”

She thought about saying no. “Yes.”

While he shed himself of everything draped over him, she fidgeted, not looking-as if he were stripping off his clothes. She felt as if she wanted to run away, back to her truck, and reverse her trip out here. But she hung on, pacing a little, feeling stupid and not understanding what was going on inside her own body when she looked at him, thought about him, talked to him… did anything in regard to him.

“Okay,” he said, and she turned around to face him again.

Now he was just an ordinary good-looking guy in shorts and T-shirt, except he seemed very sophisticated-two years in college already!-and it made her feel very young.

“I think I need to go home,” Jody said as her face grew hot.

A look of disappointment crossed his face.

“In a few minutes,” she said quickly.

They talked for a while about nothing-his school, her school, how his mother was, how her grandparents were, and then out of the blue, he said, “I’ve never told you I’m sorry.”

She was honestly puzzled. “For what?”

All she could think of was the time they’d bumped into each other and she’d dumped soda down her front. She was on the verge of saying It was my fault when he said, “For what happened to your parents.”

Her breath caught in her throat.

It was too much: what he’d just said and who he was. It was too much to hear from him and she couldn’t take it in. It frightened her and upset her and confused her. It brought up feelings of anger and grief and all of the powerful emotions she was always trying to submerge.

Suddenly she wanted to hit him, push him, hurt him.

“What happened to them? Like, it just… happened? Like nobody did it?”

Grief-stricken, helplessly furious, and suddenly without the words to express any of it, Jody turned and ran away from him, back to her truck, back to Rose, back to the ranch.

For many nights afterward she tossed and turned, unable to sleep as she kept hearing his voice calling after her, sounding as sorry as he’d said he was and as upset as she was, “Jody!”

22

June 9, 2009

IT WAS A beautiful June day in a season bursting dangerously with hope when she saw Collin Crosby again. By that time she was twenty-six years old and he was thirty. They were twenty-three years away from her father’s death, her mother’s disappearance, and his father’s incarceration. On this particular day, Jody wasn’t worried about anything worse than how to ease away from her lover and whether or not she’d prove to be a good high school teacher. And then her uncles walked into her parents’ house and reinforced her belief in bad following good as inevitably as the moon chased the sun.

Billy. Crosby. Released from prison. Coming home.

Following that announcement, the sun still shone through Jody’s new curtains, but now it cast malevolent shadows. A breeze still blew through the screens, but now it carried no sweet, imaginary scents of lilac and honeysuckle. In the front hallway of Hugh-Jay and Laurie’s house, in the space of a few words, their daughter’s world turned brittle as a winter field. She shivered like a slender weed taken by surprise and caught defenseless by an early, killing blizzard.

“How could this happen?” she screamed at them. “His sentence got commuted? What does that mean?”

“It means he gets out with time served,” Meryl told her.

“He got pardoned?”

“No, not pardoned, Jody. Commuted.”

“What’s the difference?” She felt lost in a terrifying thicket of jargon.

“He would have to prove actual innocence to get a pardon.”

She stared at him, aghast. “They let him out, but they still think he’s guilty?”

“They’re not saying that. They’re saying it was a smelly trial.”

“The smell is all over them,” Chase said. “He is guilty.”

“Smelly?” She was deeply sarcastic now. “Is that the official legal term, Uncle Meryl? What was smelly about it?”

“The county attorney has cooperated with Billy’s lawyers to say he messed up the case. He says his conscience got to bothering him as the years went by.” At the doorway, Bobby made a sound of incredulous disbelief, but Meryl kept talking. “He says he withheld evidence from the defense attorneys. Billy’s new attorneys got the original defense attorney to say he messed up, that he didn’t provide an adequate defense or file timely motions. They even got a juror to claim she wouldn’t have voted for conviction if she’d known all this at the time.”

“Withheld what evidence? What about the honest evidence that he’s guilty?”