The Quiet Streets of Winslow
Read The Quiet Streets of Winslow Online
Authors: Judy Troy
QUIET STREETS OF WINSLOW
Copyright © 2014 Judy Troy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Troy, Judy, 1951-
The Quiet Streets of Winslow : a novel / Judy Troy.
1.
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Murder--Investigation--Fiction. 2.
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Arizona--Fiction. 3.
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Mystery fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.R68Q54 2014
813' .54--dc23
2013026168
ISBN 978-1-61902-356-7
Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout Studios
Interior design by
meganjonesdesign.com
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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contents
To Georges and Anne Borchardt And Miller
“There is a crack in everything. It's how the light gets in.”
â
LEONARD COHEN
TRAVIS ASPENALL
M
Y BROTHER AND
I were walking Pete in the wash of the Agua Fria when he caught a scent and we found her. This was before school, in the windy dawn. Her eyes were wide open, brown eyes staring straight up at the pale sky.
“We better close them, Travis,” Damien said, and I nodded, but we knew better than to touch her. Her arms and legs were flung out as if somebody had tossed her down into the wash, as if she wasn't wanted anymore.
She was maybe four or five inches shorter than I was, thin and small, like even her bones were small. She was wearing a gray sweater and jeans and cowboy boots, and the boots reminded me of our mother's, with stenciling up the sides. But she was much younger than our mother was. She had short, dark hair and pale skin, pale enough to make her look like a tourist, only she didn't look like a tourist. She had a bracelet on her left wrist with a cross dangling from it, which made me wonder if she had been Catholic, like we were, and was somebody we had seen at church. I thought she looked a little familiar.
There were bruises on her neck, and her head didn't lay right, which was how I guessed that her neck was broken, that maybe somebody had broken it with their hands. The April wind was blowing down from the mountains and for half a second I thought she might be cold and almost took off my jacket to cover her.
Pete was nosing at her clothes. He was part Rottweiler and part some kind of hound, our father said. Our dad was a veterinarianânot here in Black Canyon City, but in Cave Creek, twenty miles down the interstate and a few miles to the east. Somebody had brought Pete into Dad's clinic and said, “I can't keep him anymore. You may as well put him to sleep,” and Dad brought him home instead. The dog's name had been Butch, but Damien had called him Pete from the start, so we kept it.
“Get away from the body,” I told him, and he stepped away and sniffed at a tumbleweed. We had had Pete's sister and brother, also, until they had died last year, but Pete had always been the most intelligent.
My brother Damien couldn't stop looking. Even when we had started home, he kept looking back as if he couldn't believe in that dead body being there. He was ten and I was fourteen. We didn't look alike. He had blondish-brown hair and green eyes, like our mother, and would probably be tall, someday, like her side of the family, whereas I was dark and on the small side, like Dad. Damien was a better athlete than I was. I liked fooling with a basketball in the parking lot of the Mission Church, where Father Sofie had put up a hoop, but the only thing I could do well was dribble. I felt that nobody could steal the ball away from me, but people could and did. For some reason that always surprised me.
I was walking fast and Damien walked fast to keep up with me. We lived on Canyon Road, north of the Agua Fria. You turned onto the gravel drive just past the cattle guard, and our stucco house was fifty
yards or so farther in. It had been my mother's idea to paint it blue. My father had built the house small, believing that people needed just so much, that anything more would cause you grief somehow. Nobody lived close to us. It was just desert all around, with saguaros and cholla and mesquite and creosote and the wind blowing all the time. If you climbed the desert ridge behind our house, you would be looking in the direction of the Perry Mesa National Monument, which tourists got lost every year looking for.
Parked next to our house was the Airstream we had lived in while our house was being built. Our half brother, Nate, stayed in it when he came to visit, and we all thought of it as his now. When he visited he almost never got up as early as we did, unless he happened to have been awake all night. Then you'd see him sitting on the steps of the Airstream in the morning, just sitting by himself as if he thought something might happen.
From a distance I could see my mother on the patio, looking for us; we'd been gone so long. When we told her she got Dad out of the shower and he called Deputy Sheriff Sam Rush, and when Sam arrived he told Damien and me to keep this to ourselves. Not to say a word to anybody. Then Sam and Dad headed to the wash. They had known each other since high school. Sam was six three and weighed some seventy pounds more than Dad. They were mismatched friends, my mother liked to say.
“You two sit down and eat,” Mom said to Damien and me. “Focus on school today. You have that history test, Travis. Whatever happened to that dead woman has nothing to do with you.”
Mom was wearing jeans and a blue shirt and her long hair was wet from the shower. She spoke sometimes about cutting it, and Dad would
protest. I liked long hair as well, although the girl I liked happened to have short hair, like the woman in the wash.
Pete's water bowl was empty, and when I started to get up to fill it Mom said, “You don't have time for that,” and did it herself. Then she opened the kitchen door and stood in the doorway, shading her eyes from the blaze of sun appearing.
“Finish eating and get your backpacks,” she said to us. “Your buses will be here soon.”
Damien and I would be on Trail Road by the time Dad and Sam Rush returned, and we wouldn't learn until later that the dead woman was Jody Farnell, whom we had seen once when we were visiting our half brother, Nate, in Chino Valley. Nate had taken us to a Denny's for breakfast and she had waited on us and Nate had said to Dad, “Leave her a good tip. She has a kid.”
Later, in science class, I would wonder whether you would be able to hook a brain up to a computer, one day, so that you could download what a murdered person had seen and heard and thought before she died. I imagined that it would be there, in the brain cells, the way that DNA survived in a strand of hair. Then I would think about Harmony Cecilâthe girl I likedâand wish there was a way to get inside her head, to make her think about me more often than she did, or to change the thoughts she might already be having.
Anyway that was how it startedâwith that April morning Damien and I took Pete for a walk before school.