The Quiet Streets of Winslow

by Judy Troy

Overview

When the murdered body of a young woman is found in a river wash in Black Canyon City, Arizona, Deputy Sheriff Sam Rush begins an investigation that leads deeper and deeper into the mystery of her death and the psychological mystery of identity. Nate Aspenall, with whom the young woman had been involved, is forced to confront the facts of her life and his own, and what he may have become with her. Sam Rush confronts the degree to which he is hindered by his assumptions about the Aspenall family, and by the knowledge of his own isolation. And Travis Aspenall, Nate's fourteen-year-old stepbrother, must come to grips with what love and sex do to people, what choices they make when threatened with loss, and how to figure out what you're left with when what you thought you knew and trusted has been thrown into question.

As the investigation takes Sam north to Winslow and Holbrook and brings Nate home, temporarily, to Black Canyon City, solving the mystery becomes more complicated. Additional suspects emerge. Nobody tells the truth. The victim's haphazard life was dangerous, and her relationship with Nate anything but straight-forward. As for Nate, his time in Black Canyon City is running out. His family is no longer certain of his innocence. In the midst of this, Travis struggles to grow up.

Set in the gorgeous setting of Winslow, Arizona - where the place becomes a fully realized character in this beautiful story - Judy Troy offers a murder mystery infused with inter-woven love stories and unforgettable voices, a masterful return for this wonderful writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619024700
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/10/2015
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Judy Troy is the author of Mourning Doves, which was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, West of Venus, a New York Times Notable Book, and From the Black Hills, an ALA Booklist editor's Choice. She won a Whiting Writers' Award in 1996, and lives in Auburn, AL, with her family.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Travis Aspenall

My 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 grey 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 veterinarian–not here in Black Canyon City, but in Cave Creek, ten 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 dribbling. 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 further 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 6' 3 and weighed some 70 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 Cecil–the girl I liked--and 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 started–with that April morning Damien and I took Pete for a walk before school.

Editorial Reviews

"Troy's subtle but emotionally wrenching prose raises deeply provocative questions about loyalty, morality, human frailty and the power of choice."--Kirkus (Starred)

"[A] quiet, intelligent literary whodunit. . .[T]he prose has a poetic sensibility that allows the novel to transcend the mystery genre."--Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

11/04/2013
Troy’s first novel since 1999’s From the Black Hills is a quiet, intelligent literary whodunit set in two small towns in Arizona. A crime and its aftermath is shown from three perspectives: those of high school student Travis Aspenall; his much older half-brother, Nate; and Sam Rush, the matter-of-fact, careful deputy sheriff who patrols an impossibly wide swath of this bleak, rugged terrain. The story opens in Black Canyon City, when Travis and his younger brother, Damien, find the body of Jody Farnell, a troubled young woman who had been fitfully employed as a waitress and loosely connected to Nate (he was in love with Jody; she didn’t return his affections). Troy slowly and methodically unfolds the story of Jody’s murder, as well as the stories of her three narrators and a large supporting cast. As in small towns everywhere, the locals all seem to know each other’s business, but at the same time, as Travis puts it, “There was always a way in which people in general were sort of strangers to each other.” At times the narrators sound overly insightful, but the prose has a poetic sensibility that allows the novel to transcend the mystery genre. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

01/01/2014
Long-absent Troy (West of Venus) returns with a desert-tinted triptych featuring three narrators. Deputy Sam Rush works an investigation of the murder of virgin/whore Jody Farnell; Nate Aspenall, a prime suspect in the murder and Jody's would-be lover, thinks existentially; and teen Travis Aspenall observes all, including his own coming-of-age story. The characterizations are sharp and distinct, the prose straightforward and elegant. Troy occasionally overreaches: a way too involved and precocious high school English class tackles Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" with such avidity that teachers might be moved to hilarity, envy, or nausea, and at one point, the ordinarily staid deputy quotes George Meredith, of all people. Well, it is fiction. Oh, the mystery? It's never officially closed, but acute attention to two details at the end by Nate and Travis will give readers the answer that Deputy Rush suspects but cannot prove. VERDICT Something for everyone, from murder to local color to interior psychology; like C.J. Box meets Anna Quindlen.—Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Library Journal

★ 2013-11-03
Within the framework of a murder mystery set in small-town Arizona, Troy (From the Black Hills, 1999, etc.) has written a tightly constructed psychological study about a family and community. Fourteen-year-old Travis and his younger brother Damien find a woman's body while walking their dog in Black Canyon City, Ariz., where their father, Lee, is a veterinarian. Lee's best friend, Sam, is the local sheriff investigating the case, which soon points uncomfortably close to home. It turns out the dead woman is Jody, a waitress whom the boys met with Lee when he took them to visit their much older half brother Nate, the son Lee had in his troubled, alcoholic youth before he became the upstanding citizen, family man and father he is now. Raised by his single mother and now in his early 30s, Nate had a rough time growing up and has become an underachieving loner who manages a trailer park in Chino Valley, where he met Jody. Drawn to her physically--as is every man she meets--and sympathetic to her grief over giving up her daughter to the Indian parents of the baby's father, Nate let Jody live in his trailer for six months. Although he was clearly in love with her and she was giving her sexual favors elsewhere, their relationship remained platonic until she moved back to her hometown of Winslow to be closer to her mother. Nate visited Jody at least once, but no one, including the reader, wants to believe he was the murderer; certainly not Travis, who is having his own coming-of-age experience of unrequited love, or Lee, feeling guilty that he failed Nate as a father. Trying to remain objective, Sam finds navigating through the evidence particularly difficult. And soon, he finds other men who had questionable relationships with Jody and who lack alibis for the murder. As each of the primary characters tells his version of events, Troy's subtle but emotionally wrenching prose raises deeply provocative questions about loyalty, morality, human frailty and the power of choice.

Kirkus Reviews