The Quiet Streets of Winslow (8 page)

“You're going on again,” Bowman told her.

“I'm telling you things you don't care to know,” Mary said to me. “I see that. How about if I just pour you more coffee? Would you like a second cup?” I nodded and she poured me one and I waited for her to sit again.

“What else did Jody say about being due to get her child back?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Mary said. “Just that one sentence. I remembered it, because while I knew there was a child, I had heard that she—wasn't it a girl?—was with the father, and that they had moved away from Winslow years ago. I don't think anybody knew where they were.”

“How is it you know about him and the child?”

“This is Winslow,” Mary said. “It's small. You hear things. On top of that, I used to be in a quilting group with Alice Weneka. She's the woman who took in the boy who fathered Jody's baby. She took him in after his mother died. I believe her daughters were friends with him. Alice said that he—Wes Giddens, his name was—moved away with the baby. He needed a new start, she said.”

“Why was that?”

“Well, his mother had died here in Winslow, and his father was in prison. Wes hardly knew his dad, was what Alice said, but a lot of people were aware of it.”

“What kind of person was Wes?”

“Smart, according to Alice. Hoped to be a nurse someday, like she was. Alice was a nurse at the Indian Clinic. Maybe she still is, it's been so long since I've seen her.”

Mary looked up at the clock, took a pill from a container on the counter, and drew a glass of water for her husband.

“As far as you know,” I said, “he hasn't moved back here?”

“Not that I've heard,” Mary said.

“What about other people in Jody's life? Did either of you ever see Jody out and about?”

“No,” Bowman said. “As we told you, we hardly knew her. She moved in, with the little she had. She paid the rent on time, or close to on time.”

“The Navajo County deputy sheriff took me through the house,” I said, “but I'd like to see it again. You mind driving over there with me?”

Bowman seemed not to have expected that. But he got up from his chair and followed me out to my SUV. It was a cool, bright day, and he squinted at the sunlight.

“So you visited the house after she was living in it?” I said on the drive over. “That's how you knew she didn't have many possessions?”

“I went over to replace the shower nozzle,” he said. “That was three weeks or so before my wife and I left for our trip. Jody called and asked me to, and I did.”

“What did the two of you talk about?” I said.

“The shower nozzle.”

“That's all?”

“What are you asking?”

“I'm asking, was Jody flirtatious with you, or you with her?”

I pulled up in front of the rental, which was a small, plain, white house without shutters. The grass in front was sparse—sandy dirt, more than anything. Bowman looked at the house for a minute or two before speaking.

“She was a pretty girl,” he said. “When I first showed her the house and she asked if I could lower the rent she had looked at me in a certain way. I didn't want to say that in front of my wife. But I knew that look and what it meant, and I didn't say or do anything by way of response. I just told her no, like I mentioned earlier. I'm telling you the truth now. I know it's important.”

We got out of the SUV and went into the rental. Bowman walked slowly, either from reluctance or the state of his health. Jody's belongings were just as she had left them. Only after the investigation was concluded would they be given to Jody's mother, should she want them.

“There was a photograph here,” he said, pointing to the table beneath the living room window. “I saw it the day I replaced the shower nozzle. It was a picture of a young man standing in front of one of those recreational vehicles. He was on the small side, thirty or so, with longish, dark hair.”

“How is it you remember that so well?”

“Jody saw me looking at it. She said, ‘That's who I used to live with in Chino Valley. He's my boyfriend, sort of. He's coming up to see me in a few weeks.'”

“Word for word?”

“Yes. I remember wondering if she'd be moving back to Chino Valley with him, and I'd have to rent the place out again. That's why I recall it.”

“What else did Jody say about this boyfriend?” I asked.

“Nothing else.”

“Not his name, for example? Or his family?”

“No. Although she was talkative,” Bowman said. “I can tell you that. She didn't use good judgment in terms of keeping what should be private, private. But I wasn't much interested in the boyfriend, and I didn't act as if I was.”

“Well, sometimes people mention things in passing, you know, the name of a town, for example. You recollect Jody saying anything like that?”

“Just that the boyfriend lived in Chino Valley.”

When we were back in my SUV I showed him a copy of Nate Aspenall's driver's license, and he said, “Yes. That's him, I believe, the fellow in the picture.”

“How about this man?” I said. “Have you seen him before?” I showed him a photocopy of Mike Early's driver's license.

“No. He's not familiar to me.”

“What other information can you give me about Jody that would be easier to say here, away from your wife?”

He hesitated, his face shiny with sweat, despite the coolness of the afternoon. “The day I replaced that nozzle,” he said, “after she told me about the boyfriend, or whoever he was to her, she asked if she could call me if she ever needed help. ‘Help with what?' I said, and she said, ‘With anything, because you never know what could happen.' I said, ‘Well, I'm the landlord, so if it's related to the house, sure, call me,' and she said, ‘Can I call you if it's not related to the house?'

“I didn't know what to say. I thought about Mary and what she might think. I thought about the fact that Jody could have been in some kind of trouble, that maybe she was trying to tell me that. Then, as I was standing there, before I said a word, she unbuttoned her sweater
and took it off and removed her bra. Just stood in front of me like that, half naked, and I said, ‘You'd best call the police, if that's the kind of thing you're talking about,' and I got out of there as fast as I could. To tell you the truth, it was creepy to me.”

“And you didn't tell your wife.”

He looked at the wide, windswept street, at the end of which a train was passing on the Santa Fe Rail Line. “I cheated on my wife once,” he said. “She said she would leave me next time, and there hasn't been one. She wouldn't have believed the story about Jody, that I hadn't asked for it somehow, or hadn't acted on what Jody was offering me. You probably don't believe me yourself.”

“Let's go back a bit. What do you mean, creepy? Why did you have that response?”

“Jody was young. And small as she was, she looked younger still. I have a daughter and granddaughters, Deputy Sheriff. I may have cheated on my wife, but it wasn't with a kid or somebody who resembled one.”

“Did Jody ever call you after the conversation?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did she ever mention being afraid of anybody?”

He shook his head.

“Has anybody ever owned this rental besides you? Or rented it out on your behalf?”

“I bought it from an elderly man who had lived there most of his life,” Bowman said. “That was fifteen years ago. And nobody has ever rented it out but me.”

When I pulled up to his house I saw his wife watching from the living room window, looking relieved to see her husband coming up the walkway.

I
T WAS AFTER
eight when I returned to Black Canyon City, and I had supper at the Rock Springs Café. Audrey Birdsong waited on me. A year and a half ago, before her husband, Carl, had died, they had lived behind me, on Spencer Street. I used to run into the two of them walking at dusk in the neighborhood, before Carl got sick, and we'd stop and talk a minute. I had liked them both. Audrey had a freckled face that was wide at the cheekbones and narrow at the chin, and she resembled Julie Aspenall in terms of her height and long hair.

“Since when are you waitressing?” I said. As far as I knew, she did people's taxes.

“For a while now,” she said, “except during tax season. It's not as bad as it looks, Sam, and it keeps me busy, which is good for me. It keeps me from being lonely.”

So you're not dating anybody, I wanted to say. But I didn't know what the etiquette was, where a death was concerned, and I didn't want to seem forward or insensitive. What I did say was, “It can be lonely living alone.”

“Especially when you're not used to it,” she said. “Though you'd think I would be by now.”

She smiled with some sadness and I tried to think of something to say and couldn't, and she went to get my supper. As I ate she cleared and set tables for breakfast, and I pretended not to watch her. Then she brought my check, and I paid it, and we spoke a minute more about the warm temperatures starting and how soon we would be complaining. Then we said good night.

My two years of marriage had not been good ones. My wife had had an affair with a man she later married, something she still didn't know I knew. Other than my attraction to Audrey Birdsong, the only
woman I found myself drawn to was Julie Aspenall, and that had been going on a long time. I had been with Lee when he first saw her at the Crown King Bar, up in Crown King, and if he hadn't approached her, I would have. It was possible that she knew that. There had been an afternoon, once, close to Christmas, a year after my divorce, when she and I ran into each other at the Cave Creek Trading Post and went next door together to the Mexican restaurant. She showed me her purchases: an old Indian drum for Travis, and so on.

It was dusk when we walked out to the parking area, and she gave me a hug good night and kissed me. The hug wasn't unusual for her but the kiss was. If you were lost in the desert, you would remember your last glass of water for a long time. But it wasn't just that, and I wanted to think that it wasn't any kind of
just
for her, either. Not that anything had or would come of it. I wasn't the kind of person to wreck a friend's marriage, were that possible, and it wasn't. The Aspenalls were happy, at least happier than most married couples I knew. It was just that having a warm, reciprocal connection with a woman didn't happen to me often and it stayed in my mind.

I sat in the Rock Springs Café parking lot, thinking that the restaurant was about to close; soon Audrey would be coming out to her car, and I could ask if she'd be interested in getting together. But the idea of waylaying her made me uncomfortable. If I wanted to ask her out, I should call her, I thought. That was normal behavior. When I got home I would do that, I told myself, yet ten minutes later, at home, I looked up her number, wrote it on a slip of paper, and left it on my kitchen counter. I would wait until the Jody Farnell investigation was over, I decided. I didn't have time for a date now, anyway, which was true, and not just an excuse. Or at least not only an excuse.

chapter thirteen

NATE ASPENALL

J
ODY SLEPT DEEPLY
. I would get up in the night and stand at the foot of the bed to make sure she was breathing—the comforter rising and falling, the sound of her breath going in and out. It was around New Year's when I started doing that. Maybe I felt I had a right to, since I was taking care of her and since I was patient in terms of what I was hoping would happen between us. Her hair was dark against the white pillowcase and I would put my hand on it, or else I would rest my palm on the slight rise of her breasts under the bedclothes.

I dared myself, I suppose you could say. There was a getting-away-with-something quality to what I was doing, there in the silence, with just the two of us alone in the darkness. I could smell the soap she used, I was standing so close, and I imagined using it on her someday, her asking me to—
Come shower with me, Nate. Let's be naked together
. I believed she would let me do that and more, once she was ready, in whatever way she defined that word. Meanwhile I had this private experience of her, which I would never tell her about, no matter what happened between us. It wasn't hers to know.