The Quiet Streets of Winslow (4 page)

Harmony was one-fourth Navajo. A lot of people claimed to have Indian heritage, but you could see it in her black hair and round face. When she wore a white shirt it shone against her dark eyes and skin. I had had girlfriends before, girls I would be with for three or four weeks, but Harmony was the first girl I felt respect for. It wasn't automatic with her—liking you back just because you liked her. She had her own feelings she was loyal to. But she wasn't actually my girlfriend yet. For the last few weeks I had talked to her only at her locker and waited with her after school for her bus, which came before mine did. I had ridden my bike past her house plenty of times, but she didn't know about that.

The bedroom was cool, with the windows open, and the wind spun Damien's planetary mobile, which hung in the corner. Stars were light-years away, Damien had been learning at school. “If you could fly fast enough,” he would tell us, “you wouldn't get older.” He was always wanting to go backward. When he outgrew his clothes he wouldn't let my mother give them away, and he had the kind of nightmares younger kids had—monsters in the closet, snakes under the bed. “Hypersensitivity,” my mother said. That was what the doctor had told her. Maybe it was hereditary; maybe Damien would outgrow it. All it meant was that Damien felt too much. “Quit taking him to church,” my father told her. “That alone would make him less afraid.”

I heard my parents' footsteps in the hallway, and after a few minutes I heard them talking. The walls in our house were thin. Sometimes I heard more than I wanted to. I would think, Fine, do it. That's how Damien and I got here. But don't make me listen to it.

“What time will he get here?” my mother said.

“He'll get here when he gets here. You know how he is.”

“Maybe we don't know him as well as we think we do,” my mother said.

“I know Nate,” my father said. “I know my children.”

I fell asleep and woke later to the kitchen door closing. From the window I saw my father standing on the patio, smoking a cigarette. He had trouble sleeping, too, and as far as I knew that was the only time he smoked. But then there were things you would never know about your parents and things they would never know about you. There was always a way in which people in general were sort of strangers to each other.

chapter six

SAM RUSH

N
ATE
A
SPENALL ARRIVED
in Black Canyon City seven hours later than he said he would. Six thirty the following morning Lee got him up and the two of us walked him out to the wash and showed him where the body had been found. Nate squatted down and touched the rocks with both hands. His straight brown hair was thin, a bit straggly. He had on loose-fitting jeans and a gray-and-black-checked flannel shirt, worn almost threadbare. He had gotten a tattoo since I had seen him last—Jody's initials,
JPF
, vertically on the back of his neck. Beside the
J
was a small blue heart. He asked me when the funeral was going to be and I told him that the mother wanted it to be private and he expressed the view that that was selfish.

After we walked back I sat alone with Nate on the patio under the corrugated roof, just off the kitchen where the wind wasn't strong. There was a wicker table between us, and we both had gotten ourselves coffee. Nate seemed formal with me. I was in uniform, and the fact that he had known me all his life seemed to take second place to the uniform. Perhaps he saw me as two people now and was trying to figure out how to talk to both of us at once. He was intelligent; he always
had been. Not great in school growing up, but quick and smart. He had done better in college, but had dropped out a few months before graduation.

“Let's go back to the night Jody died,” I said. “It was Mike Early's RV that had the water leak, you told me. Where was the water leaking from?”

“A broken pipe under the shower,” Nate said.

“He contacted you directly? Or spoke to the manager of the RV park and had the manager contact you?”

“Directly. We're friends. Friends the way that neighbors are.”

Nate picked up his coffee.

“I've been to Chino Valley,” I said, “and I've spoken to Mike Early. You and he both seem pretty certain what night that was, but the woman in the RV across from his said that Early wasn't home that night. She was sure of it. She said he hadn't been there all day, and that she didn't see him or his vehicle again until the following night. She didn't know whether or not you were home. She can't see your RV as easily.”

“If you're talking about Doris Farmer,” Nate said, “she'll say anything to anybody. Plus, you know how the RV park is laid out, with the trees. It's not all that easy to see what's going on.”

“Unless you're nosy and make a point of it.”

Nate glanced in the direction of the Airstream, which was thirty feet or so from where we sat. The sun had come up and was glinting off the silver.

“Well, it's possible I was wrong about what night Mike had that leak,” he said. “Maybe he and I were both wrong. I get calls to fix things all the time. It's hard to keep track of what happened when.”

He looked at his coffee, in which the cream was separating, and he put his index finger in and stirred.

“What kind of relationship did Jody have with Mike Early, from your perspective, Nate?”

“They were friends. I told you that. Mike was lonely, and his son had disappeared, which gave him and Jody a connection to each other.”

“So Jody liked older men,” I said.

“You mean, in general? No. I don't think so. But she did like Mike Early. We both did.”

“Here's why I'm asking,” I said. “Mike has a picture of Jody that was taken in his RV. She's sitting at his table in a plaid robe. His plaid robe. I asked him.”

“You mean she's wearing it over her clothes.”

“No,” I said. “In place of.”

Nate's eyes were down. He was sitting perfectly still.

“What did Mike tell you about it?” he said.

“That it was raining the day that picture was taken. That she had gone for a walk and gotten wet and stopped in for coffee, and that he had given her his robe to wear while he took her clothes to the laundry room you all share, up near the manager's office.”

“Okay then,” Nate said. “There was a good reason for the robe.”

“Why wouldn't she have gone to your RV first to change out of her wet clothes?”

“Jody wasn't logical.”

“Why do you think Mike would have that picture right out there,” I said, “where anybody could see it?”

“Well, she's not naked or anything. So why shouldn't he have it out?”

“Maybe he likes the implication of the picture,” I said. “And maybe he has reason to feel that way. Maybe the rain that day gave Jody an excuse to undress in his RV, to excite him, to entice him a little.”

“I don't think she would have done that with him.”

“So it's the kind of thing she might have done with somebody, but not with him?” I said. “What makes you so sure?”

Nate shook his head.

“I knew her and you didn't,” he said.

“You could say that makes me the more objective one.”

“Objective, maybe,” Nate said, “but about somebody you never met, never talked to, never spent time with.”

“Well, you're right about that,” I said. “And so far you knew her better than anyone I've spoken to, which is why it's useful to me to have you here. It would be a help if you could stick around. Your dad said he would pay the rent on your RV until you were able to get back to Chino Valley.”

“He told me.”

“So just stay close, if you would,” I said.

“For how long?”

“I don't know. Two or three weeks, maybe longer. We'll have to see. Can you do that?”

“Do I have to?”

“I was hoping you'd want to help.”

The expression in his dark eyes was troubled, nervous, both resistant and compliant. He hesitated too long before answering.

“I'll stay as long as I can,” he said.

chapter seven

NATE ASPENALL

I
COULD ALMOST SEE
her lying there, that was the eerie part. Like a dead bird with its wings spread out, or a deer lying still and whole on the side of the road. Lee didn't walk down into the wash with me, but Sam did, shadowing me with his large frame and big, plain face, and I put my hands on the ground, feeling the rocks and gritty sand, hoping I could feel something of her, her soul or spirit or whatever it was that didn't want to leave the earth. The dog stood beside me, and I thought, Pete, you've got gray in your muzzle and you're slower than the last time I saw you. Travis and Damien are going to have a hard time losing you. But everything brought into the world is taken out again.

I read the Bible for a class in college. I also read philosophy, history, literature, psychology, and science. I don't mean just what I was assigned, but whatever I could find in addition. That's how you got educated, I believed, outside of what you were taught, outside of what you were supposed to learn. You read in order to figure out what questions to ask, never mind if you couldn't find the answers.

“When will the funeral be?” I said.

“That hasn't been determined yet,” Sam said. “It will be a private Catholic service in Holbrook. The mother wants it that way.”

“That seems selfish.”

“It's her right to be selfish,” Sam said. “It's her decision.”

In a strong wind we walked back along the wash, and I looked to the south at the small houses and mobile homes of Black Canyon City, the town split in half by the interstate, with Mud Springs Road running underneath it like a river. I used to describe the town to Jody and explain to her about Lee and his second family, where they lived and what they did and how old the boys were and what we did together and where I stayed, when I was there. I used to think about Lee's family a lot—what he had versus what I had. I think it's natural to want whatever has been put in front of you. “Once you find Hannah,” I used to tell Jody, “she can live here with us and we'll call us a family.” I pictured the three of us in my RV, with Jody and me together as a couple, maybe married. It was the first thought I had when I found out she was dead—that my dreams were gone. It was like I missed them, at first, almost more than I missed her. Everybody comes with attachments.

B
ACK AT THE
house, in the patio chairs under the corrugated roof, Sam Rush asked me questions and told me about the photograph Mike Early had of Jody in his robe. I hadn't known about it and it shocked me and I tried to act as if it hadn't. But I knew better than anyone how many men were attracted to Jody, and I also knew that she knew that and used it. I might have told Sam that if he were not so hard on her, not so judgmental and cold. I could have told him about the men at the restaurant who watched her, stared at her as she came out from behind the counter and crossed the room. One of them stalked her for a
month—followed her to the RV and drove past it daily, she said, until I happened to be there, one afternoon, and he saw me. Another customer had seemed decent and kind to her, at first. She had become friendly with him, just as she had become friendly with me, and one afternoon she walked outside with him and got into his car—a new red Altima, she said it was. She sat in his car because it was cold outside and she told him about Hannah and what a private detective would cost and he said, “Let me help you,” and he gave her $50, and the next day he came into the restaurant and said he would give her another fifty if she would sit in his car again. She considered it, she told me. She said that for five minutes it didn't occur to her that he could speed off in the car with her in it. The possibility just didn't come into her mind.