“You shouldn’t talk to me like this.” The sheriff put his cowboy hat back on, shoving it down on his head, and then looked straight at Hugh Senior. “This isn’t right. I never thought I’d hear this kind of thing from this family, and especially from you, Hugh. I thought as highly of your son as anybody else did in this county. I was just as upset as everybody else was. My wife cried about it. I worked my butt off to bring his killer to justice and make it stick.”

He started to walk out, brushing against Meryl, who didn’t budge.

Then he turned and said, “When I told Billy that if anything happened to any of you he’d be in trouble, you want to know what he said to me?” The sheriff paused and looked each of them in the face. “He said he didn’t give a damn. He said that if somebody killed another Linder, that was one crime he’d be happy to go to jail for this time, whether he did it or not.”

He let that sink in and then he shifted his weight and jutted his chin as if daring them to swing at it.

“But hey, if you’re all fired up to help the defense, I think I can be of some assistance, folks.”

Jody sensed a tightening of the tension among her family.

“You know that hair evidence that got thrown out?” the sheriff asked with a sly and aggressive look in his eyes. “Well, Billy’s boy came to me wanting some of those strands for DNA tests, ’cause we can do that stuff now where we couldn’t back then. I told him there wasn’t any left, that it was all destroyed in the earlier testing. But you know what? I think I might be able to come up with a few little hairs that got stuck back in an evidence box. You just never know what we might manage to find back there-since you’re all so eager to help him out.”

With that last volley, the sheriff slammed out the front door.

Within moments they heard his SUV spin gravel as he drove away.

“Why does he think a DNA test will help Billy?” Belle asked in a complaining tone. “It’s only going to prove once and for all that he did it. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“He’s just trying to shake us up,” Chase said, with a contemptuous downturn of his mouth, “because we pissed him off. We should have run somebody against him years ago.”

“Hell, I should have run against him years ago,” Bobby chimed in. “I couldn’t have been any worse at the job than he is.”

“Well, start thinking who we can put up for the job,” their father commanded, leaving Jody more astonished than ever. All her life she’d heard there was no finer lawman than Don Phelps, and now he was the enemy? Her grandfather was a self-pronounced lover of justice, and it was certainly true that she hadn’t been old enough to know what was going on at the time, but something about this whole situation with the sheriff didn’t sit right with her.

Maybe it would all come clear. It had to, she hoped.

“This outcome was unnecessary,” her grandfather was saying. “Billy would have been convicted without the shenanigans. There’s no excuse for it. Don can say what he wants to about how they didn’t know what they were doing, but inexperience or incompetence is no excuse for a lack of basic principles. It’s dishonest to circumvent the law like that, and look where it’s got us now.”

When he saw Jody, his intimidating formality melted and he smiled at her. “Hello, Granddaughter.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she ran over to get enveloped in a hug and then stayed close to him.

“Dad,” Belle said, sounding worried. “I think we just alienated our best protection.”

Meryl snorted. “The sheriff’s department is no protection for anybody, honey. Too few of them and they’re too far away to do us any good. We’re our own best protection. Always have been, always will be. That’s why we have guns.” He looked at his father-in-law. “I promise you this, sir. I’m an older, wiser lawyer now. Billy will screw up, we’ll get him again, and next time it will stick.”

His mother-in-law appeared in the doorway.

“Who’s setting the table for me?”

It made Jody feel anxious to think about what Billy’s “next time” might be, but none of the rest of them seemed to be worrying about that as she followed them in to supper.

30

AS JODY TRAILED her aunt around the table, laying dinner plates down between the silverware that Belle distributed, she said cautiously, “That was kind of rough in there.”

Belle retorted, “This whole situation is rough, don’t you think?”

“I know, but-”

“What in the world have you got on your head?”

Jody reached up a hand and touched the “found” scarf, which she had forgotten she was wearing, having tied it on after she left her own home. “Just a scarf.”

“You must have found it in a trash bin.”

“It’s clean, Aunt Belle.”

Her aunt shook her head at her niece’s fashion sense.

This was how Jody played what she thought of as her obsessive little game without anybody knowing what she was up to. She was waiting for the time when somebody in her family might blurt out, “Your mother had a scarf just like that!”

“Did my mom wear scarves?” she asked.

Her grandmother entered the room just then, followed by Bobby carrying a huge bowl of mashed potatoes and Meryl balancing fried chicken on platters in both hands. Hugh Senior was pulling out his chair at one end of the table, and Chase was in the kitchen fetching the gravy, green beans, and biscuits. The butter, jam, and a bowl of Waldorf salad were already on the table. Belle and Jody were setting the table with the “good stuff,” as Hugh Senior liked to call it. Apart from Thanksgiving and Christmas and other events of note, Annabelle only went formal at her dining table when she thought it might increase the likelihood of keeping her family on their best behavior. “There’s nothing like white linen napkins to keep a man in check,” she liked to advise her granddaughter.

Belle asked her mother, “Did Laurie wear scarves, Mom?”

“Not that I recall, no.”

“What about earrings?” Jody asked them. “Her ears were pierced, right? Did she ever wear those clip-on things?”

“Oh, God no,” Belle said, and laughed. “She wouldn’t have been caught dead-”

She bit her lip.

“Nice,” Chase said sarcastically, hearing her as he came in.

“Oh, Aunt Belle, don’t listen to him. You didn’t say anything wrong.”

“Everybody’s hypersensitive right now,” Meryl said, with a glance at his wife.

“We’ll all feel better after we eat,” Annabelle remarked. She looked around her table, checking things. “Which I believe we’re finally ready to do. We’ll begin with a prayer tonight, Hugh.”

THE TABLE SEEMED both fuller and emptier than usual to Jody that night-fuller with the additions of Chase and Bobby from out of town, but emptier because they’d arrived without any of their kids. Neither was married at the moment, so the table seemed short of wives, too. When Jody was young, she’d loved sitting at the “children’s table”-two card tables jammed together with a spill-proof plastic cover thrown over them-with her cousins.

At Annabelle’s command, any further talk about the day’s events was delayed until dessert and coffee. “I won’t have that man ruining my family’s digestion on top of everything else,” she announced, and so most of supper was a quiet affair, since there wasn’t anything else on their minds. There were long spaces where Jody heard nothing except the scrape of forks on plates and requests to pass the biscuits or some other favorite food. When anyone started to bring up Billy Crosby, Hugh Senior tapped his water glass with his knife to remind them of Annabelle’s decree.

Finally, the supper plates were cleared away and taken to the kitchen and Belle’s apple crisp à la mode was passed around on dessert plates. Jody, surprised she could be so hungry, ate it all right down to the melted vanilla ice cream that she scooped up with her spoon.