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!”

She threw her truck into reverse, laid her right arm up on top of the bench seat, glared behind her down the long driveway, and gunned it, spraying gravel at him so he had to raise his arms to protect his face.

Jody was so angry at Red Bosch that she drove down the Main Street of Rose faster than she should have, but not so fast that she missed spotting all three of her uncles’ trucks at Bailey’s Bar & Grill. “That’s what you were all in such a hurry to do?” she said out loud inside her truck, feeling willing to be angry at anybody right at that moment.

At the edge of town her tires screamed around a corner and sped west toward the one place where she always felt closer to her mom than anywhere else in the world.

24

IN A CERTAIN LIGHT, the Testament Rocks turned white as bleached seashells. At those times, when Jody walked into that landscape, she felt like a black dot on a white slate, as visible as a prairie dog to a hawk, as uncomfortable as if she were naked in public. It was her least favorite light at the Rocks, because it washed out all other color, all subtlety of tone, and it was blinding. Sunglasses were not enough to make it possible to look at the rocks under such light, and so she donned a cap for its additional shade.

But being there, even like that, beat not being there on some days.

She stuck her hands down in her back jeans pockets and squinted up to the tops of the Rocks where golden eagles nested and red-tailed hawks flew by. She wouldn’t have gone so far as to claim she experienced instant peace of mind just from looking at them, but it was true that her heart rate slowed down and so did her breathing.

There was wind on this day, blowing bits of white dust around her.

Dust of chalk, she thought, dust of limestone, dust of bones.

She saw no other humans. No fossil hunters. No rock climbers. No tourists with cameras, no strangers taking potshots at beer cans or teenagers making out in their cars.

She had the place to herself, the way she liked it best.

After squinting at the Rocks for a few moments, she walked back to her truck, took a swig from a water bottle, and then pulled on her work gloves. They were soft and tough and they grasped her fingers like old friends that knew her well. If my uncles knew I was coming out here, they’d have made me bring along a snake hook and a pistol, she thought. But fortunately they didn’t know, and she had never seen a single snake out here anyway.

“I’ll leave you alone,” she said to any lurking reptiles. “And you return the favor, okay?”

Still, they were the reason she kept on her cowboy boots with their high-tops and thick leather instead of switching to shoes more suited to clambering around rocks. That was the thing about the Testament Rocks, she thought as she contemplated them-they were eighty-foot piles of contradictions, accessible yet distant, wild yet serene, safe if you were smart and lucky, but dangerous if you weren’t. They’d injured a lot of stupid or clumsy climbers, killed a couple of them, and snakebites weren’t unheard of, either. But they were also the backdrop for many of the county’s marriage proposals and not a few conceptions of its babies. There was a legend that if a girl closed her eyes at the Rocks and made a wish for love, the first boy she saw when she opened her eyes would be her husband.

Some girls should have kept their eyes closed, Jody thought.

A hawk screamed overhead as if to underscore the sentiment.

There had been boyfriends in Jody’s life, but nobody had ever proposed to her at the Rocks or anywhere else. She figured there was something about her that looked normal but that on closer inspection wasn’t-the part that made her wake up screaming, kicking against the bedcovers and hitting at the air to fight off her demons. Or rather demon, singular-the one named Billy Crosby. She tended to delay the moment when she had to tell a new man after a few dates, “Oh, did I mention my dad was murdered and there’s a man in prison for it, and my mom’s been missing ever since I was three years old?” At first, some men were sympathetic and fascinated, and they seemed to think they’d comfort and cure her. But the wise ones-in her judgment-knew there might always be places in her they couldn’t reach. They were smart enough to foresee distant and difficult times when she wasn’t with them in body, mind, or soul, and that they wouldn’t want to be with her at those times, either.

“You come with a lot of stuff,” a man had once told her.