Page 68

But then….

RANCH HAND KILLED IN ROADSIDE INCIDENT — Hit-and-Run Suspected

I glanced over at Jude, and he gave me a grim nod.

We both returned our attention to the screen. The article was short, not much more than a few lines with the barest facts. A young man named Tomás Padilla, twenty-three, was found early one morning along Highway 89 just north of Prescott, dead from injuries consistent with being struck by a vehicle. He’d been walking home after a shift at a nearby cattle ranch. His family — a mother and three sisters who lived in Chino Valley, according to the article — was being notified, and the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department was investigating. The last sentence in the article was a request to call the sheriff if they had any information.

Only Meg and Donald Lindley hadn’t made that call. They’d kept quiet and hoped no one would notice too much.

And that seemed to be the case, because even though I scrolled through several weeks’ worth of subsequent issues of the Courier, I didn’t see any other mention of the man who’d been killed in a hit-and-run on a cold evening in early April. No suspect was ever identified, and no arrest was ever made. Tomás Padilla had been buried in Prescott, in the same cemetery where Hazel was buried, and the case went cold and stayed that way.

Probably much to the Lindleys’ relief.

For a minute or so, I only stared at the screen, and Jude did the same. I could tell neither of us was quite sure what to do next.

Then I said, “Tomás Padilla has a family that’s spent almost sixty years not knowing what happened to him.”

And Meg Lindley had spent nearly six decades knowing and not doing anything about it.

Jude gave a grim nod, then leaned past me so he could print out the article we’d found. I got out my phone and entered a brief note.

Tomás Padilla. Chino Valley. Three sisters. It had been a long time, but I hoped they were still alive. And although Padilla was a common enough last name, I still thought we should be able to track them down.

I got up from my seat, and Jude carefully removed the reel from the microfilm reader and returned it to the basket along with the other reels the reference librarian had brought. After dropping it off at the reference desk and thanking Deborah for her help, we went outside.

A bench was located not too far from the museum’s main entrance, so by some unspoken agreement, both Jude and I headed over there and sat down. The sun was bright overhead, but the air was chilly, and I was glad of my thick jacket and boots. Maybe at some point, I’d be able to reconcile a clear, sunny day like this with temperatures that were way too cold for shirtsleeves, but right then, it still felt exotic, as if I was somewhere much farther away from Scottsdale than just Prescott, Arizona.

Seeing the actual crime laid out like that had been more jarring than I’d expected. Something that had felt abstract was now utterly real, even reduced to a few lines of newsprint.

“So, this is what Father Frank was wrestling with,” I said. A small wind had picked up, and yellow leaves went scudding across the concrete. “Whether to encourage Meg to tell her family…whether to let her take her secret to the grave, or to push her to a disclosure that would ruin her last few years.”

Jude was staring at the leaves as if the secrets of the universe might be hidden somewhere in their yellow shapes, now leached of the chlorophyll that had once made them green. I saw the way his jaw tightened as he turned toward me.

“I’d be willing to bet that Father Frank was leaning toward disclosure. He was that kind of man. Yes, he believed in the power of confession, but he also believed that people are owed the truth.”

“‘Some confidences should be kept,’” I said softly. “‘Some things, when they hurt the living, must come into the light.’”

Jude tilted his head at me. “Hazel quoting Frank, or her own words?”

“Either,” I replied. “They were both like that.”

We both fell silent again. It wasn’t an uncomfortable quiet, at least not exactly, but I could practically hear the gears turning in Jude’s head.

“So,” he said at last. “Wes found out somehow. Maybe Meg told him she was going to come forward and make a clean breast of everything. Maybe he found something she’d written — Meg is a big letter writer with a huge correspondence. She calls it her own private Facebook.”

I wanted to smile at that but couldn’t. Not quite, not when what she’d done and hidden was so terrible.

“Then Wes found out,” I said, picking up the thread of the story. “He decided his grandmother was too old and too frail, too close to the end of her life, to be put through the kind of ordeal that disclosure would create. He confronted Frank, but Frank wouldn’t back down. So Wes killed him.”

Stated plainly like that, the crime had a kind of grim plausibility.

“And the bar break-in?” Jude asked.

I’d been thinking about that, and I had a theory. “Wes was either checking that the door was still secure on the bar side, or — and this made more sense to me — he was looking for something Frank might have left there. After all, Frank came into the bar all the time. I don’t know if it was some notes or possibly a letter Frank kept for Meg. Something with Wes’s name or motive on it. But he didn’t find it because there actually wasn’t anything to find.”

Jude nodded slowly. “And Diane?”

It was all still conjecture, but it felt right to me. “Diane figured out what Wes did. She didn’t have anything to do with the murder, but she knew. She’s been steering me away from the family because she can’t bring herself to turn in her own son.”