“Come on, Jody. I’m not leaving unless you do.”

She thought about staying, on the chance of getting a look at Billy Crosby, but the only defensive weapon she had with her was her backpack. “I find it really hard to believe he’d make a special trip just to look at the scenery,” she said, with an edge of sarcasm.

“Maybe not. I’m just tellin’ you what he told me.”

“Criminals like to return to the scenes of their crimes, though.”

“Babe.” He shook his head at her. “Come on.”

“Go on ahead,” she said, working up to her feet. “I’ll follow you into town.”

Appearing satisfied with that, Red turned to go, but she stopped him.

“I’m not saying I believe you.”

“You believe me they didn’t give him a drunk test, don’t you?”

“Yes. I mean, I guess. I’ll find out for sure from Uncle Meryl.”

“Do that. Do you believe me when I say he couldn’t have done it?”

“I don’t know what I believe right now, Red! But I do believe that you believe that.”

He let out a breath of relief at that admission from her.

She made it better by adding, “I’m sorry I didn’t let you explain.”

Red made a gesture that brushed away hurt feelings. “Not a problem.” And then suddenly he was scrambling up the rocks to where she sat, using his bare hands and the toes of his boots to get to her.

“Wha-” she started to say, when he planted a kiss on her lips.

Then he plunged down the slope again, making her hold her breath for fear he’d break his neck. Once on the ground, he kept moving. When Red was halfway to his truck, he turned back to yell, “You’re coming, right?”

“I promise!” she yelled back at him.

Jody stared at the back of his truck until it was well on the way out.

It was strange to think of Red, when he was only sixteen, being so intimately involved with what happened that night and the next day. He’d been right there in the house with Billy, and he’d been there when the sheriff showed up in the morning. It must have been a lot for a kid like him to take in, Jody thought. Maybe he had devised his theory about Billy’s drinking because it was too frightening to think he’d been in the house with a murderer. Or maybe Red couldn’t bear to wonder if he might have stopped Billy and prevented it all from happening. What if he hadn’t picked Billy up? What if he hadn’t taken him home? Could that have changed anything? And then on top of everything, he’d gone to work full-time for the family of the murdered man and missing woman.

Breath test or no, there were all sorts of reasons he could be wrong.

But what if he was right…

Almost everything in her resisted the idea. And yet…

Come what may, I have to know what happened to my mom.

Jody stood up on the haunches of the Sphinx, shaded her eyes and looked in every direction as far as the huge rock formation would allow. Only the scenery at her back remained blocked from her view.

Why do I keep coming here for searching and solace?

With a catch in her breath, she thought, Because it is huge and solid and it changes so slowly. Unlike her own life, with its devastating, breathtaking alterations, this landscape shifted minutely over centuries, its dust sloughing off of these rocks no more dramatically than cells shed by her own skin. That made it comforting, even while it was also painful because she mysteriously felt so close to her mother here.

She sat down again, feeling a little stunned by her epiphany.

After a bit, she slid on her butt back down to the ground.

Again, she paused to look into the distance, and had another stunning thought: What if this commutation of Crosby ’s sentence is opportunity rather than disaster? What if it shifts all the evidence, bringing a new truth to the surface like wind moving the dirt around here at the Rocks?

After a few moments she trotted back to her truck, feeling as if something within her had both opened and focused, like a long-slumbering dinosaur waking up to turn its eyes toward dinner.

THE NEWLY ALERT FEELING lasted until she reached the edge of town.

There, Jody saw a rough, hand-lettered sign:

go back where you belong in jail!

A frisson of instinctive, unstoppable, vindictive pleasure shot through her, bullying her epiphanies out of the way and letting all the pain and fury of the past twenty-three years pour in again. The bulk of the evidence still pointed in one direction. She’d heard Red, himself, suggest that Billy Crosby was more dangerous now than when he’d gone to prison.

She sped past the sign, nodding her heartfelt agreement with it.

26

BEFORE RUNNING INSIDE to stuff a suitcase she didn’t want to pack, Jody grabbed the green backpack she had thrown onto the seat beside her in her rush from Testament Rocks. It wasn’t any heavier, because Red Bosch had distracted her from searching.

She unzipped it. A mildew smell wafted up to her nose.

Inside, she saw a woman’s scarf-navy blue and yellow with a pattern of keys and locks. There was also half of a rat-tail comb-the business half-and a single clasp earring with a reddish stone in its center.

Once inside her house, she decided to throw away the broken old comb, because who could ever possibly remember if such a thing had belonged to her mother? She chose to keep the scarf and earring, though, and ran into the kitchen, where she washed off the jewelry until the fake stone glowed. She took one of her own earrings out of the hole in her ear and tried on the found earring, crying “Ow!” when her fingers slipped and allowed the clamp to pinch her lobe.

“How do women ever wear these things?”

After carefully taking it off again, she dropped it into her shirt pocket, put her own back on again, and proceeded to wash the scarf with dishwashing liquid. She rinsed it out, wrung it as dry as possible, shook it and slapped at it to get some wrinkles out, and then walked it out onto the back porch, where she laid it on top of a railing, weighted down a corner with a flowerpot, and left it to dry in the sun and the breeze. Then she raced upstairs and headed back down to the smallest guest room at the far end of the second floor. She moved fast this time, to keep the shivers at bay.

Inside the room, she opened the closet door.

There, piled in a heap, was the rest of her collection of backpacks.

It was a collection of a couple dozen packs in which she’d gathered objects from the rocks over many years. Some were crammed full, others held only a few things.

She knew it was strange, maybe even crazy.

She could only guess how it would look to anybody who happened upon it, which was why she had never shown her stash to anybody. It was why she stored them in this room-because nobody in her family ever wanted to enter here. They could barely tolerate the idea that she did. Prior to moving in, Jody had stored her treasures in various places like hollow tree trunks or old wells, often having to shift them elsewhere. But now she had what she figured was a permanent hidey-hole for backpacks and Christmas presents.

As she closed the door on them, she remembered what a poet had written about “the quivery earth,” a phrase she had never forgotten. The ground in Rose had gone all quivery on her this day-dirt and rock turning without warning to gelatin that wobbled under her boots. If she lived in San Francisco on top of a fault line, she couldn’t have felt any more shaky. Foundations were cracking and giving way-her trust in Billy Crosby’s prison sentence, and now her belief in how much he deserved it…

Red had to be mistaken, that’s all there was to it.

Jody shook off her doubts. There was too much evidence.

Billy had to have done it. No one else was ever suspected, and the idea of those strangers driving back to take that kind of revenge was nonsense. How would they even have known where her father lived, and why would they have done such a thing in such a storm?