37

TWO NIGHTS LATER Jody walked up to where Collin stood beside his car in front of the Testament Rocks. His father was in jail, charged with so many crimes that once he was convicted of any of them, the question of his guilt or innocence in the death of Jody’s father would no longer matter. One way or another, Billy Crosby was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“Let’s walk,” she said. “Okay with you?”

He nodded, and took her hand to hold.

“Is the ranch okay?” he asked her.

“Yes. Grandma and I hauled a couple of big tarps out of the barn and laid them on top of the fires and pretty much stamped it all out. That, plus a garden hose, took care of it. There are some burnt spots, but that just means new grass will grow there.”

Collin stopped and pulled her around so he could look at her.

“What about you? How bad did he hurt you?”

Under her jeans and long-sleeve shirt she was black and blue; her ribs and other spots on her body still hurt so much she had to move carefully. “I’ll be fine. Thanks. A lot more fine than I’d have been if you hadn’t called my grandparents.”

“You scared me to death when I heard you scream. And then I heard his voice. I’m so sorry, Jody.”

“Not your fault.” She saw how sad he looked. “This is impossible, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he answered in a low voice that held all of the regret she felt inside of her. “Your family-”

“Still believes your father killed my parents. And they blame you for Red’s death, because you set your father free to do it.” At the mention of Red’s name, Jody’s throat closed and she had to look down to hide the tears in her eyes.

“I doubt that’s ever going to change,” Collin said.

Tears or no, Jody looked up at him. When he saw her eyes, he gently took her in his arms for a moment. When he felt her wince-in spite of the fact that she tried desperately hard not to-he released her. But she’d been raised by her family to be bold, and so now she was. “Then we may never have another chance to be together, Collin. I can’t abandon my family.” She looked into his eyes. “But I can’t bear the thought of never loving you.”

They walked together back to his car.

Like teenagers, like the couple they might have been if life had allowed it, they made love in the backseat, at first carefully because of her wounds and then with more abandon as her body loosened from its stiffness and she refused to let pain stop her. They laughed and cried and said goodbye to each other. Afterward, hours afterward, Jody drove home to her own house and Collin drove back to his home in Topeka.

Jody went to sleep in the smallest bedroom, the guest room at the end of the second-floor hallway, where nobody else in her family would go. She lay down on the bed in the room where her father had been murdered. It couldn’t be said that she cried herself to sleep. Instead, she thought the whole night through about how her life was now defined by the word “never.” I’m never going to be with Collin again. We’re never going to know who killed my father. I’m never going to know what happened to my mother.

38

September 3, 1986

LAURIE STEPPED ONTO the second-floor landing and lifted her fingers from the banister. She looked back and saw that she had dripped rainwater all the way up. Ooops, she thought, feeling tipsy and reckless, and then: It’ll dry. She felt excited from the run into the house through the heavy rain and by the feeling now of being trapped inside with her handsome brother-in-law.

Chase stepped out of a guest bedroom carrying dry clothes in his hands. He had wrapped them in towels to try to keep the moisture off them from his own wet body and clothing.

“You going to be okay here tonight by yourself?” he asked her.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, a little dreamily. “Just fine, Chase.”

He tilted his head and smiled at her. “I think Laurie’s drunk. Is Laurie drunk?”

“She might be.” She giggled. “Are you?”

“Nah. That business with Billy sobered me up, darn it.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Yeah. Seriously, what if your power goes out?”

“Seriously, it’s night. I’ll be asleep. And I have candles.”

He waggled his eyebrows at her flirtatiously. “I could keep you company.”

“You could go on and get out of here before your dad comes and gets you.”

They both laughed. She loved flirting with Chase and leading him on, and anybody could see that he loved flirting right back at her and being led, but that’s as far as it would ever go, she had figured out, because for all his wild ways, there were certain things Chase would never do. Fooling around-really fooling around-with a wife of one of his brothers was high on that list of taboos for him. Sometimes Laurie thought that Chase, unlikely as it seemed, was the most like her father-in-law of all the Linder siblings, and that his playboy appearance was a cover for a rigid set of principles: you did your work, you respected your elders, and you didn’t mess around where you could cause a mess. Hugh-Jay was more forgiving than that. And it wasn’t Chase who had flunked out of K-State, after all, it was Bobby. Everybody in Rose had expected Chase to be the Linder brother who lived up to his name and pursued Laurie, but he never did, and she had figured out it was because he sensed early on that Hugh-Jay wanted her.

“Sleep tight,” he said, and took the stairs two at a time.

“’Night, Chase,” Laurie sang out, and laughed, because he was hurrying as if he were afraid of her. For a moment she considered calling him back and making it difficult for him to leave, but she was just sober enough to recognize that for the bad idea it was-he wouldn’t weaken, and she’d be mortified.

Also, as much as they annoyed her, she liked being a Linder.

She liked being given a trip to that fancy hotel in Colorado, for instance.

Even before she heard the back door slam behind Chase, she was undoing her wet clothing, unzipping her shorts, pulling her T-shirt over her head, unhooking her bra, and letting it all fall to the floor as she danced in circles toward the bath in the master bedroom.

She stepped into the shower and let the water cascade over her. It was dangerous, people said, to bathe during an electrical storm, but Laurie wasn’t concerned about that. Her life seemed to have come equipped with its own lightning rod that deflected bad luck away from her.

When she got out, she didn’t dry off.

She’d dripped up the stairs, she would drip down the stairs.

It felt wonderful to have the whole house to herself.

At the top of the stairs she suddenly realized she was standing in a completely dark house. She flicked a light switch and nothing happened. While she had been in the shower-where she’d opened the shades to get the illumination of the lightning and lit a candle instead of turning on the lights-the power had gone out.

She felt an urge to walk naked through the dark house where nobody could see her from inside or outside. She took a step toward the stairs and then another few steps and found it lovely and pleasurable to be moving without clothing, feeling the touch of her thighs against each other, her own bare arms brushing against her body.

She looked down at herself, and approved of what she saw.

How many boys and men had wished they could look at and touch what she was seeing and touching? From the time she was a child she’d been aware of the attention of men and that it was edged with something that gave her little thrills in deep places. She crooked her right arm, raised it toward her mouth and licked it, tasting honey. So this was what men tasted on her skin, she thought with amused pride, something sweet and sexy, making her a perfect pastry.

She laughed at that as she started down the steps.