Devil’s Claw

CHAPTER 9

Sheltered by a wall of Texas Canyon house-sized boulders and huddled in her sleeping bag, Lucy tried to sleep. It was far colder than she had thought it would be, but she didn’t dare start a fire. She was too close to the rest area. Someone might notice and come looking. The rocks in the ground beneath her-sharp-edged rocks that had seemed insignificant when she was choosing a place to put her bedroll-now cut into her back and legs.

Lucy was still shaken by what had happened earlier. She had gone down to the rest area to use the phone again, and her mother’s killer was still there-waiting. Stunned, she had melted back into the desert before he or any of the half dozen truckers stopped there noticed her. The rest of the afternoon and evening and far into the night she had struggled to find answers. He must have known she was there, but how? What he wanted she didn’t need to ask. He was looking for her-for Lucy-and for his computer disk. Once he found them, there was no doubt in Lucy’s mind about what he would do-take the diskette and kill her, the same way he had killed Lucy’s mother.

At last, as the sky gradually grew lighter in the east, Lucy slept. She was still sleeping hours later, when Big Red’s warning screech issued an alarm. He had made that peculiar noise other times when they had been together on their solitary Cochise Stronghold adventures. And always that particular sound meant the same thing-a warning that someone was coming.

Panicked into full wakefulness, Lucy scrambled out of the bedroll. Standing shaking in the full morning sun, she looked skyward. Outlined against the blue sky, Big Red flew in frantic circles, pinpointing the position of something or someone who was coming toward Lucy’s camping place from the south, from the direction of the rest area.

In a futile effort to keep warm overnight, Lucy had stayed dressed. Not only was she still wearing her jacket, she was also wearing her sneakers. Now she was glad she was. Grabbing only her backpack, she fled uphill and away from whoever it was who was coming-as if she didn’t know.

In Cochise Stronghold, she had often tried to teach herself the things her ancestor, the Apache chief, Eskiminzin, must always have known. With careful practice she had taught herself to run long distances over rough terrain, leaving behind little or no trail. She did this now. Leaping from rock to rock, she sprinted for nearly a mile, leaving no discernible footprints to mark her passage. At last, gasping for breath, she squirreled herself into a cleft between two huge boulders, and there she stayed-listening, waiting, and wondering how long it would be before he somehow tracked her there as well.

Joanna Brady awakened Sunday morning as Jenny eased herself onto the side of the bed. “Where’s Butch?” Jenny asked.

“He went home,” Joanna mumbled sleepily. She would have liked nothing better than to roll back over and sleep a little longer, but Jenny was fully rested and ready for conversation.

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“Why’d he go home?”

“Because that’s where he lives.”

Opening her eyes, Joanna studied her daughter. Jenny was perched on the edge of the bed with her blond frizz of hair backlit by morning sun. In that light, she looked more like a haloed angel than a little girl. Joanna felt a sudden surge of thanksgiving that, despite Andy’s death, Jenny seemed to be doing more than merely coping. She gave every appearance of being a well-adjusted, sweet, and relatively innocent child. When Lucinda Ridder’s father was killed, Lucy had been almost the same age Jenny was when Andy died. Now, as a fifteen-year-old, Lucy Ridder was at best a runaway and at worst a homicide suspect.

Joanna reached over, grabbed Jenny by the shoulders, and wrestled her into a smothering bear hug.

“What was that all about?” Jenny demanded once she had wriggled loose.

“I love you is all,” Joanna said, clambering out of bed. “Now that I’m awake, I suppose we’d better get out and feed those animals. They’re probably hungry. Compared to the schedule Clayton Rhodes kept, you and I are a couple of slugabeds.”

Butch showed up while Jenny and Joanna were out in the barn doing chores. By the time they finished and returned to the house, breakfast was ready. There were glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice and bowls of steaming Malt-o-meal waiting on the table.

“We’re a team,” Butch said cheerfully when Joanna kissed him good morning. “A well-oiled machine.”

The phone rang just as they were slipping into their places in the breakfast nook. Jenny scampered off to collect the phone and brought it back to the kitchen.

“Who is it?” Joanna mouthed as Jenny handed her the phone.

Jenny merely shrugged and rolled her eyes. “How would I know?” she returned.

“Hello?” Joanna said.

“Joanna,” Burton Kimball said. “Glad you’re there. Sorry to bother you so early on a Sunday morning, but I tried to reach you several times yesterday. When you didn’t return my calls, I was afraid you were out of town.”

Burton Kimball was a Bisbee-area attorney. His practice included a good deal of criminal defense work, and Joanna wondered which of his clients was in such dire straits that Kimball would be working this early on a Sunday morning.

“Sorry about that,” Joanna said. “I was out of town most of the day. Then, when we came back, I was called out on a case and didn’t get home until it was too late to return anybody’s calls. What’s up?”

“It’s about Clayton Rhodes,” Burton Kimball said.

“Clayton Rhodes!” Joanna exclaimed. “How can you already have a client, since my investigators aren’t close to having a suspect?”

“Mr. Rhodes was my client,” Burton returned. “I did some estate planning for him. His daughter showed up on her broom yesterday afternoon. The funeral is tentatively scheduled for Monday. Even so, Reba Singleton insisted on having the will opened and read yesterday evening. I tried contacting you beforehand so you could be here when it was read, but-”

“Why would I need to be there?” Joanna asked. “As far as I know, Clayton’s death resulted from natural causes. In any event-even in the case of an apparent homicide-there’s no need for a sheriff’s department representative to attend the reading of a will.”

“Not as a representative of the sheriff’s department,” Kimball responded. “You. Joanna Brady. The reason I wanted you in attendance is that you’re a major beneficiary.”

That stopped Joanna cold. “Me?” she asked dazedly. “I’m a beneficiary?”

“Yes. Clayton rewrote his will a year and a half ago. He left Rhodes Ranch to you-all three hundred and twenty acres of it. It’s free and clear, house and all.”

Joanna could barely believe her ears. “I don’t get it. Clayton Rhodes left his place to me?” she stammered. “That’s impossible! A ridiculous joke! You mean to say he left Reba out of his will entirely, that he disowned his own daughter in favor of me?”

“Not entirely. He and Molly had tons of savings bonds, as well as a whole bunch of certificates of deposit. There will be plenty of cash to pay final expenses, including all applicable income and estate taxes. Whatever money is left after taxes goes to Reba, but you’re to have the property and whatever personal effects Reba doesn’t want. You’re to deal with those as you see fit. No strings attached.”

Stunned, Joanna felt the blood drain from her face, causing both Butch and Jenny to cast worried looks in her direction. “What is it, Mom?” Jenny asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Clayton left two letters-one for you and one for Reba,” Burton Kimball continued. “I gave Reba hers last night. I was wondering if I shouldn’t bring yours out to you this morning. I want you to be aware of everything that’s going on because of Reba, you see. I’m concerned about her reaction. She and her father had been estranged for years-ever since her mother’s death-but I’m afraid this still hit her pretty hard. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t try to make trouble, if she hasn’t already, that is.”

“When did you read the will?” Joanna asked.

“Yesterday evening. She came to see me around noon, about as soon as she got to town, I guess. I don’t think she even bothered to go to the funeral home before she showed up at my house-in a limo, no less-demanding to see the will right then. In all my years in practice, I’ve never seen anything like it. I tried to stall; told her there were other people involved who should be present as well, but when I couldn’t reach you, I finally went ahead without you. She insisted. Have you seen her yet?”

“Briefly,” Joanna said. “She was out here at the ranch yesterday afternoon. When we came home from Tucson. Her limo was stuck in my wash. The driver had to call Triple A to come pull it out.”

“Did she say anything to you?” Burton Kimball asked.

“She seemed upset. She said something to the effect that I had killed her father by working him into the grave. She asked me about the status of the investigation. I told her that since Dr. Winfield had ruled Clayton dead of natural causes, there wasn’t going to be any investigation. As soon as she heard that, she went off on a wild tirade about George Winfield having a conflict of interest in the case, but I didn’t think anything of it. I chalked it up to her being overwrought. In situations like that, people end up saying all kinds of things they don’t really mean.”

“I believe she meant it, all right,” Burton Kimball said softly. “She meant every word. After the will was read, she threw a fit. She ranted and raged and said that she’d had her suspicions, but now she was sure you had murdered her father and that George Winfield was helping you by covering it up.”

“Mom,” Jenny insisted. “What’s going on?”

Joanna waved her to silence. “You don’t think she’s serious, do you?”

“Unfortunately, I do,” Burton replied. “Now how can I get you that letter? You need to know what’s in it. Should I bring it out to the house?”

“No,” Joanna said quickly. “We’ll be coming to town in a little while. We can stop by and pick it up on our way to church. Where will you be?”

“Linda and the kids are going off to church themselves,” Burton said. “How about if I meet you uptown at my office. Say, forty-five minutes?”

Joanna looked down at her untouched bowlful of Malt-o-Meal that, without the benefit of milk and brown sugar, had now cooled and congealed into a hard gray lump. “Give us an hour,” she said. “That’s the soonest we can be there.”

Two hours later, Joanna was sitting in a pew in Canyon United Methodist Church, while her pastor and best friend, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, read the morning’s scripture. Pregnant women are supposed to glow. That was especially true for Marianne, who was in the last stages of a long-sought but unexpected pregnancy. Her face was alight as she read the passage from Deuteronomy 30:19. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.”

For years Joanna had sung in the church choir, but the countervailing pressures of work and single-motherhood had eventually made regular attendance at weekly practice sessions an impossibility. Sitting in the choir loft behind the minister, it had been necessary to remain both awake and properly attentive.

Now, though, seated discreetly in the fifth pew back, Joanna paid scant attention to Marianne’s sermon for the day, “Choose Life!” Instead, she was preoccupied with her own set of issues. Most of Joanna’s wool-gathering focused on the letter in her purse, one Clayton Rhodes had laboriously written in ink in a spidery, old-fashioned scrawl. The letter had been dated barely two months earlier.

Dear Joanna,

By now you know of my intention to leave my place to you. I understand that if you marry Butch Dixon, it will be partially his, too.

I want you to know how much working for you these past few years has meant to me. When you’re old, it’s easy to get thrown on the scrap heap and forgotten. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Jenny and watching her grow. She’s a sweet kid in a way my own daughter never was.

I’ve seen how you are with High Lonesome Ranch. I know how much it means to you, and how hard you’ve had to work to keep it. If I were to pass my place along to Reba, she would take the first offer to sell it and wouldn’t care what became of it later. She may say this isn’t fair and she may try to make you feel sorry for her, but don’t fall for it. She treated her mother and me like scum. If she gets anything at all, it’s more than she deserves.

I wish you and yours the best, Joanna. You and Andy and Jenny have always been good neighbors.

Sincerely,

Clayton Rhodes

Joanna’s eyes had blurred with tears as she finished reading the text of the letter. After that, Burton Kimball had read aloud the applicable passages in Clayton Rhodes’ will. Since being given the letter, Joanna had read it through only twice-once in Burton Kimball’s office and presence, and again, aloud, when she returned to the Outback, where Butch and Jenny were waiting. Even so, sitting there in the church pew, Joanna could have recited the entire letter from memory. The words were etched on her heart.

“He can’t mean this” was the first thing Joanna had said to Burton.

“He meant it all right,” the attorney had returned calmly.

“But what about Reba? She’s his daughter, after all.”

“She’s also a complete bitch, if you’ll pardon the expression,” Burton said. “The will was properly drawn and witnessed a year and a half ago. And, as I told you on the phone, it isn’t as though she’ll be left with nothing. After taxes, she’ll still have a fair chunk of cash which, as far as I can tell, is all she’s interested in anyway.”

“A year and a half,” Joanna echoed. “But the letter is dated…”

“There was another letter,” Burton Kimball said kindly. “One that was written at the time we drew up the will. Clayton threw that one away and wrote this one after you and Butch Dixon announced your engagement. He told me he didn’t want Butch to feel left out. This isn’t in the letter, but Clayton told me he thought Butch was a fine young man. I guess the two of them had a long talk about the advisability of removing mesquite and trying to reintroduce native grasses.”

Joanna nodded. “It is something we’ve talked about, but there didn’t seem to be much point to doing it on a paltry little forty acres.”

Burton Kimball smiled. “Now you’ll have three hundred and sixty. That’ll be a lot more work.” The lawyer paused and smiled. “By the way,” he added, “congratulations from Linda, and me as well. On your engagement, that is. When’s the big day?”

“Next Saturday.”

“Well, then. I’m sure Clayton would be happy to know that he’s giving the two of you a terrific wedding present. The place will have to be appraised. The IRS will want us to establish current market value for estate-tax purposes. And, of course, that valuation will give you an official basis in the property should you later decide to sell it.”

“What about the will?” Joanna asked. “Is it contestable?”

Burton’s smile disappeared abruptly. “Every will is contestable if someone wants to go to the trouble, that is. However, Clayton stipulated that all costs related to contesting the will are to be deducted from the cash portion of the proceeds. In other words, if Reba tries to go against the will, she’ll have to pay her attorney’s expenses and mine as well. That’s assuming, of course, that you want me to handle it. That would also apply to the expenses of any other attorney you might choose to represent you.”

“Is that why Reba thinks I murdered her father?” Joanna asked. “State law dictates that people found guilty of killing someone aren’t allowed to profit from their actions. If she can somehow cast enough suspicion on me, she’ll be able to destroy the will without actually having to contest it.”

Burton Kimball sighed and nodded. “Let me remind you that I’m also a damned fine defense attorney, but that is what I meant when I warned you that she might make trouble.”

And now, as Joanna sat in church not listening to the sermon, that was what she was worried about, too. Clayton Rhodes had probably been dead for several hours when she had found him in his exhaust-filled garage, but she had had no way of knowing that at the time. She hadn’t been worried about preserving evidence when she smashed a hole in the door to get inside. She hadn’t been wearing gloves or worrying about leaving a trail of fingerprints when she reached in through the driver’s window to turn off the ignition key. She had been intent on saving the man’s life.

Unfortunately, her fingerprints would be found there, and they wouldn’t be wear-dated. If Reba set out to do so, she might be able to make the case that the prints had been placed on Clayton Rhodes’ ignition key long before he died rather than after. The idea that Sheriff Joanna Brady herself could turn into a homicide suspect should have been laughable. It might have been, if it hadn’t been so scary.

“Therefore choose life,” Marianne was saying from the pulpit. “Choose it for yourself and for your children. Choose it with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. Because it’s how you choose life now that determines both the now and the hereafter. If you can’t choose this simple living and breathing life, how will you choose eternal life? Because they go hand in hand, you see. It’s like what that old fifties song says about love and marriage,” she added, aiming a beaming smile in Joanna and Butch’s direction. “You can’t have one without the other. Therefore choose life. Let us bow our heads in prayer.”

With his shaven head glowing deep-red, Butch reached over and folded Joanna’s hand in his. “I told you we should have sat in the back row,” he muttered under his breath.

After the closing hymn, Butch and Joanna went hand in hand as they worked their way down the center aisle to where the Reverend Marianne Maculyea and her husband, Jeff Daniels, stood greeting attendees. Wanting to have a private word with her best friend, Joanna stalled long enough to be last in line.

Once Marianne’s early bouts of pregnancy-related nausea had finally subsided, she had gone on to have an uneventful and so-far uncomplicated pregnancy. Because Marianne would be officiating at the wedding, Butch and Joanna had set the ceremony for early April so as not to conflict with the baby’s due date. The wedding was now less than a week away. According to Dr. Thomas Lee, Marianne’s attending physician, the baby was expected in three.

Finished with shaking hands at the door, Marianne stood with one hand massaging her sore back and with the other resting on a belly so swollen that it left a telltale shelf protruding beneath her clerical vestments. With a squeal of joy, Jeff and Marianne’s adopted three-year-old daughter, Ruth, escaped the nursery attendant and slipped under her mother’s robe for a game of peekaboo with whoever happened to be nearby. As the last of the congregation headed for the fellowship hall and coffee hour, Jeff captured Ruth, scooped the squirming child into his arms, and carried her downstairs. Butch and Jenny followed, leaving Joanna and Marianne with a rare moment of relative peace and privacy.

Always attuned to what was going on with other people, Marianne gave Joanna a searching look. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You seemed pretty distracted during the service.”

“What makes you say that?” Joanna countered.

Marianne smiled. “Because you missed not one but two of the in-crowd jokes I put in the sermon especially for you. What’s going on?”

“Clayton Rhodes died and left me his place in his will,” Joanna blurted.

Surprise washed over Marianne’s face. “The whole thing?”

Joanna nodded.

“What about his daughter?” Marianne asked.

“I talked to Burton Kimball on the way to church this morning. According to him, she’s not a happy camper. She may go so far as to try to accuse me of murdering her father.”

Marianne’s gray eyes turned dark and stormy. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am. Dead serious.”

Marianne took a deep breath. “We need to get together and talk about this. We should also discuss any last-minute hitches or glitches in wedding plans. What are you and Butch and Jenny doing this afternoon?”

“Cleaning house,” Joanna replied. “My new mother-in-law shows up tomorrow, remember? We’re doing the oven, cabinets, closets-the whole bit.”

“I have an idea,” Marianne suggested. “I was supposed to have a steering-committee meeting this afternoon, but it’s been canceled. Before you and Butch go tear into your house, how about if we all meet at Daisy’s for lunch as soon as coffee hour is over? I’ll con Jenny into looking after Ruth, and that way maybe the four of us will have a moment or two to think straight.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Joanna replied with a laugh. “I’m sure Butch will agree to anything that will delay working on the oven that much longer.”

Joanna had barely set foot inside the fellowship hall when she was pounced upon by Marliss Shackleford, who had clearly been waiting just inside the door. It was an unfortunate piece of small-town life that both Sheriff Brady and her fourth-estate nemesis attended the same church-one which both of them refused to leave. Usually Joanna managed to avoid Marliss. This time she was trapped.

“It sounds as though you’ve had a busy few days of it,” Marliss began sweetly enough. “It’s too bad about what happened to Clayton. I know he’s been such a help to you all this time. How are you and Jenny managing without him?”

“We’re doing all right,” Joanna said stiffly.

“And then, of course, you do have Butch. I understand he’s something of a city slicker, but he seems bright enough.”

“He is trainable,” Joanna returned. “Just barely.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that he wasn’t.”

Of course, you didn’t, Joanna thought. “Of course not,” she said aloud.

“Have you spoken to Reba Singleton yet?” Marliss asked. “Clayton’s daughter? She’s in town, you know.”

“We touched base,” Joanna said. “That’s about all.”

“The Bee is trying to set up an interview for me with her. Molly and Clayton Rhodes were such old-timers around here that Clayton should get more than just the standard, run-of-the-mill obituary. It’s a little out of my usual line of work, but I told my editor I’d be glad to write the piece for them. I’m sure Reba will be able to give me all sorts of insights into the kind of person her father was.”

Great, Joanna thought. That’s just what I need. The poisoned daughter being interviewed by the original poisoned pen.

“I’m sure it’ll be very interesting,” she said, sidling away. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Marliss, I need to catch up with Jenny before she fills up on cookies and punch and makes herself sick.”