The Quiet Streets of Winslow (10 page)

“A wall between people who think one way and people who think the opposite way,” said a boy in the second row.

“Does the wall need to be there?” Mr. Drake said.

“It's already there,” said somebody else. “We're all, like, fighting with each other. We'll never get along.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it's always been that way.”

“Is that what Frost is saying in the poem?” Mr. Drake said.

“Maybe.”

“But what is possible for us now,” Mr. Drake said, “without a wall in here, that wouldn't be possible if we built an actual wall?”

“Well,” another person said, “we could cross the room and kill each other.”

“What if we think about this differently? More peacefully?”

“We could walk through the wall,” somebody else said, “since it's not there, I mean.”

“Yes. What else?” Mr. Drake said. “What happens in the poem?”

“We could walk next to each other,” Harmony said.

O
N THE BUS
home that afternoon, people were screwing around in the aisle and cracking jokes, and the bus driver was half participating and half telling them to shut up and sit down. How was he supposed to pay attention to the road with all that bullshit going on?

Billy was sitting next to me. After a while he told me that his mother was getting married again. He and his sister were being included in the ceremony, and his sister was into it, he said, because she liked the dress she was getting to wear and because she was an idiot. He, himself, was planning on waking up sick and staying home.

“It's bad enough that I'm going to have to live with this asshole,” he said.

His mother was marrying Cy Embrick, who owned Ron's Market. Cy was famous for having once lived with a woman who became an actress in X-rated movies, and for setting up folding tables and chairs in the parking lot of his grocery store and serving a free Thanksgiving dinner. But Billy didn't like the idea of his mother having somebody
permanent when his father didn't. Plus, his father was sick. His father had cancer—I wasn't sure what kind—and drove to Phoenix once a week for some form of treatment. Billy didn't talk about it, and neither did his father. It was just this thing going on all the time in the background of Billy's life, like rain always falling behind where he stood. I didn't like thinking about it. I had to remind myself, Oh, right. Billy's dad is sick. That's what's going on. Then I'd forget it again and start over.

chapter fifteen

SAM RUSH

“J
ODY CALLED
M
IKE
Early four days before she was killed,” I told J Nate. “She asked him to come up there. She told him that somebody was harassing her.”

It was shortly after seven, and I had woken Nate up. At the back of the Airstream the bed was unmade.

“She also told Early that her mother was seriously ill,” I said. “Jody asked him to come to Winslow, and he did. He had lunch with her the day she died. The waitress identified him.”

Nate's face was unexpressive. I had brought two take-out coffees from Byler's and two sausage biscuits, and he started drinking the coffee.

“The afternoon Mike Early was there,” I said, “he had a sexual encounter with Jody in his truck. You need to know that.”

“Why?”

“Because it happened.”

Nate blinked at the early light coming through the window opposite us.

“There must have been a reason,” he said. “Maybe he did a favor for her, and she didn't know how else to repay him.”

“With sex.”

“That was what most men wanted from her.”

“So you're not shocked. I thought you might be.”

“It doesn't matter what I am,” Nate said.

“Why is that?”

“It's not important. What difference can that make now? I don't think Mike was the one to hurt her. Somebody else did, the person she was afraid of, or the landlord, maybe, or Wes Giddens, possibly.”

“The landlord was out of town, Nate. I told you that. And for all Jody's talk of Wes Giddens, he wasn't and isn't in northern Arizona, not as far as I can discover. Did Jody tell you she had located him?”

“No. But she wanted her daughter back. She never stopped wanting that.”

“I've spoken on the phone to Alice Weneka,” I said, “the woman who cared for Wes Giddens after his mother died. She told me that Hannah was born more than a month early, with breathing problems and cocaine and alcohol in her system. Did Jody tell you that?”

Nate touched the wrapping of his sausage biscuit, ran his fingers over the edges of it.

“She told me she had problems, back then,” he said. “I knew she took drugs. But she didn't get specific.”

“Jody's mother has a picture of Hannah at three months old. Tiny infant, as you can imagine, born that early. That's the only picture she has. Have you seen pictures of Hannah? Did Jody ever show you one?”

“She had a picture of Hannah at about that age,” Nate said. “That's the only one I remember. She said that the Navajo family didn't believe
in them, and that until Wes and Hannah moved away the Navajo family had the baby most of the time, and that they didn't trust Jody or Jody's mother.”

“Since when do present-day Navajos not believe in photographs? I'm just asking,” I said.

“Jody could exaggerate,” Nate said. “I know that. She could change the truth sometimes in her mind.”

“It seems odd, more than odd,” I said, “that nobody has a picture of Hannah that's more recent. What I wonder is whether something has since happened to the child.”

“If it did, Jody didn't know about it. She wouldn't have lied about something so important to her. And she wasn't living in some other universe, Sam. She wasn't mentally ill, is what I mean. And she had good qualities. She had deep places in herself.”

“Doesn't everybody?”

“What is it you're saying?”

“That I think differently than you do,” I said. “More factually. For instance, I know that three significant facts about somebody—anybody—can reveal more than you realize.”

“What three, where Jody's concerned?”

“She had a baby at a young age, when she was doing drugs, with somebody she hardly knew. I learned that from Alice Weneka. The child never lived with Jody. And these stories about the child being with the father, and Jody being afraid of either him or somebody else, and Jody wanting to get the child back, Jody told to a number of men.”

“Which doesn't mean they're not true.”

“Or that they are,” I said.

“So that's how you see her.”

“It's a list, Nate, not an attitude.”

I finished my sausage biscuit and took a drink of coffee. Then I said, “I've spoken to the landlord, Paul Bowman, and his wife. They told me a similar story, a story in which Jody talked about the child she was due to get back. In addition, Jody asked Paul Bowman for protection. Asked if she could call him for help.”

“You don't believe there was somebody Jody was afraid of? You think she completely made that up?”

“I don't know about completely,” I said. “But why were you so quick to believe her, when you knew she could exaggerate?”

Nate was looking out the window at his father walking to his Jeep. Lee and I had played basketball in high school, and he had been quick, wary, and athletic. He was wary now, taking in my SUV. I had brought that on myself by taking on the case, but that didn't make me feel any better about it.

“Jody was more alone in the world than you think she was,” Nate said, “despite the men she told stories to, despite me, even. She felt alone. She had this tendency to trust the wrong men. There was somebody from Holbrook she mentioned being nervous about. She probably trusted him some, too, whoever he was. She didn't give me details. But she said she was afraid, and I believed her. The small bird makes the loudest sound.”

“Paul Bowman said that Jody mentioned you to him,” I said. “Said she had a picture of you standing outside your RV, and that she referred to you as her boyfriend.”

That touched Nate. His face softened. It had been some time since I had seen him wear that expression.

“When was that?” he said.

“Three weeks before she was killed. She said you were coming up to see her in a few weeks, which would have put you there close to the week she was killed.”

Nate unwrapped his biscuit but didn't eat it.

“Did she ask you to come see her,” I said, “the way she had before, when you met her in Flagstaff?”

“No. I offered to come see her, or asked, I guess, and sometimes she would say she wanted me to, and sometimes she would say she didn't. More often it was didn't. Things with Jody changed a lot, depending on her mood or how her mother was.” Nate picked up his coffee and took too big a drink. It spilled on his shirt. “She wanted whatever wasn't in front of her. That was what I came to believe. That what she didn't have was what she believed could make her happy. So she was always in a state of . . . I don't know. Longing.”

“That's a hard thing to resist in a woman,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“We like to fix things for them, make things better, be the salvation for a woman who will appreciate us and be grateful.”

“I gave that a try,” Nate said, “October through February. It didn't work very well. But Jody's unhappiness wasn't a game with her, and neither was the wanting what wasn't in front of her. She didn't see it in herself. She couldn't stop and look. She just couldn't. She didn't know how to. Her suffering wasn't an act.”

“I know,” I said. “That's when it's irresistible.”

Nate looked away from me, his face stubborn, but not as if he hadn't understood.

“If you did to go Winslow,” I said, “whether on your own or in response to Jody asking you to come, it would be understandable, given
that you were worried about her. Anybody could understand that, so long as you tell the truth about it. It's not just me you have to worry about, Nate. I don't work for myself. I report to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department. On every case I have a county attorney working with me. So it would be best to tell me now.”

“Would it?” Nate said, but kept quiet.

chapter sixteen

NATE ASPENALL

T
HERE WAS A
girl waitressing at Denny's named Carla Kirby with whom Jody had become friendly. Jody worked the morning shift, six to two, and Carla the two to ten, and often Jody would stay late, helping Carla set tables, fill salt and pepper shakers, fold napkins. Jody and Carla would sneak drinks from the vodka miniatures Carla kept in her purse, and they would confide in each other, as girls did, I learned, in their quick and what seemed to me overly-quick-to-trust friendships.

Jody spoke of Carla, but I had not met her. I had supper at Denny's alone one night in order to see what kind of person she was, how she was with people. I felt I should know. She smiled a lot, that was the first thing—a toothy smile that revealed big, buck teeth. When she said, “What can I get you?” she spoke loudly enough to be heard tables away. When she turned you could see her breasts move under her pink uniform. The upper part of her body was large, but her legs were thin, and she darkened her small, pale eyes with makeup.