The Quiet Streets of Winslow (19 page)

I drove out of Leupp toward Flagstaff, with a view of the Painted Desert to the north of me and ahead of me the San Francisco Peaks, and from there I took I-17 home. It was after dark when I arrived, and I stopped at the Rock Springs Café, hoping to see Audrey Birdsong, and I did. She brought me coffee.

“It won't keep you up?” she said.

She wore jeans and a blue v-necked sweater, and her hair was in a braid down her back. Her eyes were bluer than I remembered, perhaps because of the sweater.

“If I'm tired enough, I can always sleep,” I said.

“I used to be that way when Carl was alive. But now it takes me forever to fall asleep. Too much on my mind, I guess.”

“Memories, I imagine,” I said.

“No. Not so much anymore.”

I ordered the Mexican Combo Plate, and as I waited for it I watched her move around the restaurant. I was the only customer save for two bikers at a booth, and after they left she briefly sat down with me.

“Are you still on Abbott Street?” she asked me, and I nodded. “I miss that neighborhood,” she said. “I live in an apartment on Old Black Canyon Highway now, across from the Dollar General. I miss seeing houses when I look out my window, you know, seeing families. But I can't move back. I can't pay the mortgage.”

“I thought you sold your house,” I said.

“I couldn't afford to. We refinanced, when Carl got sick. We should have known better, but, well, we didn't. I guess I've been lucky to find renters, although renters are a hassle. They come and go, and don't give you notice. And there are always small problems with the house, so it's like you're on call all the time. I see why people hire somebody to look after things. I would, if I had the money.”

“I guess it would be different if you had the skills.”

“Even then,” she said.

I paid the check, and she brought me change and walked outside with me. It was a warm night with a soft wind that caught the brown strands that had come loose from her braid.

“This reminds me of the nights Carl and I went walking,” she said. “We used to wonder if we'd see you.”

“Did you?” I said, and paused. “Both of you?” I asked.

“Both of us.”

“I don't mean to be disrespectful to his memory,” I said. “You know that.”

“Yes,” she said.

We could see the headlights on the interstate from where we stood, and above them the stars that were emerging from the darkness.

“I'm not grieving like I once did,” Audrey said. “You have to get over things.”

I nodded. Conversing with women was not a skill I possessed. One reason I used to drink, to make an excuse for myself, was that it made me more comfortable around women. Not a lot more comfortable, but some. I had been a drinker when I met and married my wife—so much for comfort, in other words. I had better sense sober.

“I'm in the middle of an investigation,” I said, “by which I mean I'm short on time right now, I'm just too busy, but when it's over—”

“I'd like that,” she said.

I was getting into my SUV when my cell rang—Leslie Hoover, the assistant deputy sheriff who was looking into a few matters for me, including a verification of Mike Early's alibi.

“I haven't found one, Sam,” she said. “But I spoke to Early's brother-in-law and learned something the sister hadn't told us. Mike Early got a call on his cell as they were having breakfast. That was about seven thirty. Said it was a guy who was supposed to work, that day, in place of Mike, saying he could only work until one. So Mike would have to head back. I told this to Bob McLaney, and he got us a warrant for Mike Early's cell, and guess what? The call came from a pay phone in Holbrook. Now why would somebody Mike Early works with in Paradise Valley be in Holbrook?”

I thanked her and thought about it and decided it was too late to question Mike Early by phone. Better to ask him in person, anyway, see his reaction as well as hear it.

chapter twenty-eight

NATE ASPENALL

I
DIDN'T WANT TO
leave Winslow after I bought Jody the ring. I drove as far as Flagstaff and checked into a motel. I didn't see any sense in driving to Chino Valley only to drive back the next day or the day after that if she said yes. And if she said no, what difference would it make where I was? It wouldn't matter then. Not much would.

My room had a double bed and a picture over the bed of a deer posed in a moonlit canyon. I was on the second floor, facing south, away from the mountains. Beneath the window was a Dumpster and beyond the Dumpster a stand of cottonwoods. If there was a creek beyond the trees, I couldn't see it, although there was still light, a rose-colored stain left from the sunset.

On my way to the motel I had picked up a pizza and a six-pack, and I sat up in bed with the TV on and the sound muted. I felt hopeful, and because of that I drank one beer after another and forgot to eat. Whether or not Jody would call and how soon or how late was in my mind, in spite of her having said she needed time to think. Maybe it wouldn't take her much time. She had lived with me for months, and she knew I had a college education, which would enable me to find a
better job, make more money, provide for her as I should. I imagined the house I would buy her someday—a two-story frame house, painted whatever color she wanted, with a nicely equipped kitchen where she would cook for us, or else I would learn to.

I would have been satisfied with us living in the RV, but I wanted to make up for what she had lost in her childhood—a house and family, a sense of security. Maybe I wanted to make up for the family I had lost, too. I used to wonder if the holes and gaps in your life predicted your future.

What I didn't picture was Hannah or any children of our own. That should have been a hint as to how unreal that picture was, that daydream I was having, lying on a bed in a motel room, getting drunk, when fifty miles away Jody might have been . . . but I didn't see that it was unreal. I suppose the alcohol got in the way, and the hopefulness. I had asked her to marry me, expecting her to say no, half expecting her to laugh. Instead she had looked at the coral ring as if it meant something to her that she couldn't tell me about, something she had kept secret from me.

She had gotten her hair cut in a stylish way, parted on the side and straight to her chin, much shorter than it used to be. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans and boots. The men in that small bar were looking at her, watching her as she walked down the hall to the restroom and back. They were envious of me. If I hadn't been there, one would have come over and bought her a drink, sat and talked to her, hoped she'd go home with him. Wherever Jody went, men followed.

There was a good side to that and a bad side, and when I started thinking of the latter I put the room key in my pocket and went out into the night to walk the streets of Flagstaff. It was late, and a light snow
started falling, despite the fact that it was late April. I had left the room without a jacket, but I had drunk enough not to feel the cold. I walked down Milton Road all the way to University Drive and walked through the campus. A real campus, not the kind of commuter school that I had attended, where you lived at home, where your life didn't change much from high school.

The campus was hilly, with a creek flowing through it. There were trees and paths and bicycle racks. I sat on a bench across from a dormitory and looked at the lit-up rooms: bunk beds and desks, a girl sitting at a computer, a girl standing at the window, talking into a cell phone. Three long-haired boys walked past me, laughing. Somebody jogged past. I could see a small group of students outside a building, smoking. The late hour didn't matter here. Everybody did what they wanted to. That was what college was for. To leave home and try your wings, to be protected but not, to make that transition in a softer way, so that the shock of the world wouldn't be too much for you.

I thought about the life I had missed, the four years I could have had in a place like that, making my own decisions, forging my own path, becoming who I was meant to become. Why hadn't I? Why had I lacked the courage back then? Why had Lee and Sandra not pushed me? Why hadn't somebody said, This is what you do, Nate? This is how you go about having a life.

But I had missed my chance. You couldn't go backward. As I left the campus and walked back to the motel there was a change in me that I couldn't explain. It was as if I had glimpsed in the sky a spaceship that would save everybody on Earth but would leave me behind. I was a planet in the wrong orbit. I was a whale finding itself in fresh water. I had walked farther than I realized and began to doubt that I would ever get back.

Back in the motel room I did not undress. I lay on the bed and thought about texting Jody just to make a connection, to do it for my sake, not for hers. I pictured what she might be doing at that moment, which was a mistake. It allowed reality in, and now it was there in front of me. She had wanted me out of Winslow, and I knew what that probably meant. There were a hundred ways of lying to yourself, of telling yourself that what was true wasn't, and I had done a great deal of that. The anger began slowly, but once I saw it I wasn't able to stop it.

On television an angry-looking man was standing at an open window in a high-rise apartment building. Below him was New York City, all those lights shining in the streets below. Jump, I wanted to tell him. Nothing in your life is going to get better. Your wife has left you. You have lost your job, your children won't speak to you. Then I looked at his face and realized he looked more lonely than angry, and at that moment a woman came into the room and put her arms around him.

W
HEN
I
WOKE
I didn't know where I was. A sound had startled me, and I couldn't identify it—a car door slamming, maybe. Then I was asleep again, and Jody was in bed with me, naked, and I had my hand on the small of her back. I fought not to wake, but your dreams can't keep you in them. There wasn't what you would call real light yet—just the suggestion of it beneath the blue-dark sky with its scattering of stars. I thought about the house and life I had envisioned for Jody and myself, and understood that it was possible to believe and disbelieve, to trust and mistrust, to hope and feel hopeless at the same moment. Somehow your mind could manage those discrepancies. I knew that Jody could be in bed with a man, as I lay in that motel-room bed alone, and I hated her for that. I hated her more than I ever had.

A
FEW MINUTES
is a long time to have an intense feeling. Hours is what it felt like. You lose track. It's deeper than time. When it subsided the dream began to come back to me, the one Jody trying to replace the other. That's how I would describe it.

chapter twenty-nine

TRAVIS ASPENALL

O
N
F
RIDAY
B
ILLY
Clay wasn't waiting for the bus. At school I learned that Billy's father had been found dead at six that morning. Jason's father was friends with Billy's uncle, who had been the one to find him.

“Vodka and empty pill bottles,” Jason said. “Lortab and Percocet. That was probably what he died from, not cancer. They won't know for a while. He didn't leave a note, or if he did, it hasn't been found. His girlfriend was a nurse, and that might be where the pills came from.”