Tombstone Courage

TOMBSTONE COURAGE

By: Judith A. Jance

A Joanna BRADY MYSTERY

AVON BOOKS. A division of The Hearst Corporation

1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10019

Copyright C 1994 by J. A. Jance

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 9340351

ISBN: 0-38O76546-2

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

Published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc.;

for information address Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019.

First Avon Books Printing: April 1995

First Avon Books Special printing December 1994

Printed in the U.S.A.

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Prologue

ROCKS RAINED down on him in a steady, deadly barrage, small ones at first; then, gradually, larger. In the beginning, he managed to crawl out of the way, dodging this way and that, scrabbling on his belly with his hands and arms wrapped around his head, protecting it.

“Stop,” he begged, his voice strangely muffled the dirt and rocks beneath him. “Please stop. I’ll never do it again. Never.”

The brutal rocks kept falling. They fell onto his legs, his arms, the small of his back. He screamed in pain, in agony, but there was no escape, no place to hide.

The attack couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes from beginning to end, but for him-the target-it seemed like forever. And it was, because when it was over, he lay partially buried and lifeless on the rock-strewn floor of the hole, with a ten-pound boulder crushing part of his skull.

HAROLD Patterson squinted through the rain-blurred windshield. Checking for traffic, he pulled his rattletrap International Scout through the gate of the Rocking P Ranch and onto the highway. Pouring rain made it hard to see. Part of the problem was his eyes. Ivy, his daughter, was constantly nagging him about that, and she was probably right. Thank God his ears still worked all right.

At eighty-four, even with his new, thick trifocals, the old peepers weren’t nearly as good as they used to be. But Harold figured the real problem was the damn wiper blades. The rubber was old, cracked, and frayed. The blades squawked across the windshield, barely making contact and leaving trails of muddy water on the dusty, bug splattered glass.

In southern Arizona, it seemed like you never noticed that the wipers weren’t working until you needed them, and when you noticed, you were too busy driving blind to remember. The next time he went into an Auto Parts to drink coffee and shoot the breeze with the counterman, Gene Radovich, Harold still wouldn’t remember, not if it wasn’t raining at the time. It reminded him of the words in that old-time song “Manana” No need to fix a leaky roof on such a sunny day?

Same difference.

But that particular day-an unseasonably cold early-November morning-it was raining like hell.

A pelting winter storm had rolled into the Desert from the Pacific, filling the normally dry creek beds and swathing the Mule Mountains in a dank gray blanket that was almost as chilly as Harold Patterson’s stubborn old heart.

His daughter’s personal-injury trial was due to start in Cochise County Superior Court first thing tomorrow morning-Wednesday at nine o’clock.

Unless he could figure out a way to stop it. Unless he could somehow bluff Holly into agreeing to talk to him. Unless he could work a deal and convince her to call it off.

He had tried to talk to her about it several times since she arrived in town. That ploy hadn’t worked. That damn hotshot lawyer of hers had insisted that until Harold came to see her with his hat in his hand-to say nothing of a settlement it was a straight-out no go. His own daughter refused to see him, wouldn’t even tell him where she was staying.

His own daughter. Just thinking about it caused Harold’s gnarled, arthritic hands that had wrung the necks of countless Sunday-dinner chicken to tighten into a similar death grip on the smooth surface of the worn steering wheel.

Harold thought about Holly and her damn lawsuit the whole time he guided the wheezing yellow Scout over the rain-swept pavement of Highway 80, up the mountain pass locals called the Divide and then down the winding trail of Tombstone Canyon into Old Bisbee.

Holly had been a Fourth of July baby. He had wanted to call her Linda-Indy for short in honor of Independence Day, but Emily wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that if she had daughters, they would be named after their grandmother’s favorite Christmas carol, “The Holly and the Ivy,” regardless of whether or not they arrived any time near December 25. And Holly it was. Would she have been less prickly, Harold sometimes wondered, had she been given a different name?

Holly Patterson had entered the world sandwiched neatly between Bisbee’s traditional Independence Day Coaster Races and the annual Fourth of July parade down Tombstone Canyon.

She was born in the Old Copper Queen Hospital, the brick one up in Old Bisbee, not the new apricot-colored one down in Warren. It had been a hot, miserable morning. On that pre-air-conditioning summer day, the nurses had left the delivery room windows wide open in hopes of capturing some faint hint of breeze. Emily had screamed her fool head off. For several hours running. To a poor, anxious, prospective father waiting outside, that’s how it had seemed.

Harold remembered the whole morning as vividly as if it were yesterday. Left to his own devices in the waiting room, he had been propelled out of the hospital by his wife’s agonized cries. But with the windows open, there was no escape from Emily’s frantic shrieks. No one else in the downtown area-onlookers watching the races or waiting for the parade could escape them, either. The relent less screams echoed off nearby hillsides and reverberated up and down the canyons. People lined up on the sidewalks kept asking each other what in the world were they doing to that poor woman, killing her or what?

Pacing up and down in the small patch of grassy park between the hospital and the building that housed the Phelps Dodge General Office, Harold had wondered the same thing himself. What were they doing to her? And when old Doc Winters finally slipped Emily the spinal that shut her up, Harold had despaired completely. As soon as she grew quiet, he was convinced it was over, that his wife was dead.

Of course, that wasn’t the case at all. Emily was fine, and so was the baby. Men don’t forget that kind of agony. Women do. Had it been up to him, one child was all they would have had. Ever.

Afterward, holding the beautiful baby in her arms, nursing her, Emily had smiled at him and told him Holly was worth it. Harold wasn’t so sure. Not then, not ten years later when Ivy was born, and certainly not now.

Things change. The delivery room where both Holly and Ivy had been born now housed a Sun day-school classroom for the Presbyterian church across the street. A law firm-the biggest one in town-now occupied the lower floor space where the old dispensary and pharmacy had been located. In fact, Burton Kimball, who was Harold’s nephew as well as his attorney, kept his offices there. And as for the wopish Holly? Harold shook his head and clenched his jaw. Once more the powerful fingers tightened their viselike grip on the Scout’s loosey-goosey steering wheel.

Holly was Holly. Had it been in Harold’s power to make her life different, certainly he would have.

She had grown up tough, headstrong, and hard to handle runaway while she was still in high school. Well, she was back in Bisbee now, staying God knows where. He had heard rumors about Holly and that friend of hers tooling around town in somebody’s bright red Cadillac, lording it over whoever saw her. Harold wondered about the car.

It might possibly be hers, but Harold doubted it.

If Holly had enough money to buy a car like that, why was she back home, trying to take his ranch away from him? No, if she wasn’t dead broke, she had to be close to it. After thirty-four years with no letters, no phone calls, why else would she suddenly come back home to a place she despised? As a precocious sixteen-year-old, Holly had found life on the Rocking P worse than prison. What else but abject poverty could bring her home as a fifty-year-old demanding her fair share of the family fortunes?

Holly was Harold’s firstborn daughter. If she had needed help and asked for it, he would have given it to her gladly, regardless of the heartaches and disagreements that might have gone before.

But Holly’s reappearance had come in the form of a legal attack, mounted by some big-time California attorney who expected Harold to just lie down and play dead. And the attack had been aimed, with pinpoint accuracy, at the one place in Harold’s life where he was most vulnerable. And guilty.

Of course, he had denied Holly’s allegations.

And when the People magazine reporter had shown up at the Rocking P and told him she was doing an article on “forgotten memories,” Harold had tried to throw her off track without having to tell his side of the story. But the woman was one of those sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued little city women. He couldn’t remember now exactly how it was she had phrased the critical question.

He may have mentally misplaced the exact text, but he recalled the reporter’s meaning well enough. He had wondered if that particular line of questioning had come directly from Holly or from that so-called hypnotherapist of hers, Amy Baxter. The assumption behind the question was the idea that since one daughter had been forced to run away from home in order to avoid sexual abuse, what about the daughter who didn’t leave?

Was Ivy-the stay-at-home, old-maid daughter-a willing participant?

The reporter had made a big deal about the fact that Harold and Ivy lived alone together on the Rocking P, as though that in itself was enough to raise suspicions. Harold had exercised incredible restraint in not throwing the woman bodily out of his house. It was no surprise that the resulting article had made Harold sound like some kind of sex-crazed monster whose incestuous relations with his daughters had no doubt ruined both their lives.

The usually even-tempered Ivy had been livid when the article came out, and she had blamed Holly for it. Ivy had wanted Harold to sue, wanted him to have Burton Kimball go after the magazine for defamation of character. Harold had his own good reasons for refusing, but when he did, there had been a huge blowup between him and Ivy.

For weeks now, they had barely spoken, doing their chores together around the ranch, but with none of their customary camaraderie. By attempting not to fight with one daughter, Harold had inevitably quarreled with the other.

Determined to solve the problem with the least amount of damage to everyone concerned, Harold had put all his hopes in what would happen once Holly came home for the trial. He had thought that somehow he would be able to get his two daughters together in the same room where he would finally, once and for all, put the past to rest.

But that hadn’t happened.

For the entire week since Holly had been back home in Bisbee, she had insisted that all contact be conducted on a lawyer-to-lawyer basis. Harold hadn’t been allowed access to her by telephone, and no one would tell him where she was staying.

Well, that was changing today. He had figured out a way to make it happen, a way to bring her around.

Harold was coming to town with what, on the surface, would appear to be an enticing carrot. He was prepared to offer Holly the ultimate prize, total capitulation. Everything she wanted. For someone like Holly, that should prove irresistible, but there was a stick as well. And when it came to those two things, both carrot and stick, what he had to say would not be discussed on a lawyer to-lawyer basis.

Those were private matters to be discussed with his daughters alone. No one else.

Once and for all time, he would finally tell both of them the truth.

Surely, once they both knew the truth, he might be able to find some common ground, some avenue for reconciliation. Once he came up with the plan, he had allowed himself to hope it would work. Perhaps if Holly knew all of it, she’d call off the trial and her hired attack dogs. Harold Patterson could imagine nothing worse than having to endure the humiliation of a public trial. He could imagine how it would feel to sit in one of those overheated Cochise County courtrooms. The place would be packed with friends and neighbors, people who had known him all his life. He would have to sit there and be stripped bare; would be forced to listen while his daughter recounted the exact nature of his alleged crimes and the horrible things he had supposedly done to her.

The possibility that Holly might really remembered her caused Harold to squirm on the Scout’s sway backed front seat. Just thinking about it set off a severe ache that started in Harold’s breastbone, spread across both shoulders, and arched down his tense forearms.

What if she really did remember? What then?

Harold remembered hearing someone say that the truth would set you free. Could it do that for him? Harold doubted it. In this case, truth seemed like some kind of evil genie. Harold worried that once he rubbed the bottled past and set the genie loose in the world, things would never be the same. Telling the truth meant that long-made promises would have to be broken, that the lives of innocent people would be forever changed. But then, innocent people were always being hurt.

That was the way the world worked.

WEARING ONLY her bathrobe and with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, Joanna Brady stood in the kitchen doorway observing her daughter, Jenny. The nine-year-old was halfheartedly trailing a spoon through the cold, partially eaten contents of her cereal bowl.

“I thought you said you wanted oatmeal,” Joanna snapped irritably.

“If you don’t, fine. Give it to the dogs, but stop playing with it.”

The words were barely out of her mouth before Joanna wished she could take them back. Jennifer was eating next to nothing these days, giving her mother yet another cause for worry, something else to add to Joanna’s own considerable pain.

“I’m sorry,” Joanna apologized quickly, trying to make light of it. “I sound just like Grandma Lathrop, don’t I?”

And it was true. Those were exactly the kinds of things Eleanor Lathrop would have said-had said, in fact, especially when she herself was hurting.

Criticism had always been Eleanor’s trump card, but why did Joanna have to replay those old tapes now, with her own daughter, when all she really wanted to do was take Jenny in her arms, hold her, and comfort her? Instead of harping, Joanna needed to share her own hurt with Jenny.

After all, Joanna Lathrop Brady understood all too well how it felt for a daughter to lose a father.

The very same thing had happened to her.

But the pain of being a newly made widow somehow got in the way of consoling her daughter, the newly made orphan.

Joanna had always prided herself on the special relationship she shared with Jenny, but in the six short weeks since a drug-cartel hit man had gunned down Joanna’s husband, Cochise County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Brady, an unfamiliar wall of silence and misunderstanding seemed to have grown up in the Brady household. The once open give-and-take between mother and daughter was now full of uneasy silences punctuated by angry words and occasional bouts of tears.

Without glancing at Joanna, Jenny took her bowl and slipped wordlessly out of the breakfast nook, heading for the back porch. Always interested in a handout, both dogs, the recently adopted Tigger, a comical-looking golden retriever/pit bull mix, and Sadie, a rangy bluetick hound sprang from their usual resting places near the door and rushed to follow.

Joanna removed the towel and shook her red hair loose. She was pouring herself a cup of coffee when Jenny returned to the kitchen sink to rinse her bowl. The child’s troubled blue eyes were downcast; she seemed near tears. Long after all trace of food was gone, Jenny continued to rinse her dish. Joanna resisted the urge to tell her to turn off the faucet and not waste water. Once again she attempted to put things right.

“I’m sorry to be so impatient,” she said. “The election is today. I guess I’m nervous and in a hurry. We need to leave here early enough so I can vote on the way to work.”

Jenny turned from the sink to face her mother.

“Are you going to vote for yourself?” she asked.

“Vote for myself? Of course. Why do you ask?”

Jenny dropped her eyes and shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I thought a good sport always votes for the other guy. In games and stuff.”

Joanna stepped over to Jenny, held her by the shoulders for a moment, then lifted the child’s chin and looked directly into her eyes.

“This is something I have to do, Jenny,” Joanna said. “For us and for your dad. It isn’t a game. What if I didn’t vote for myself and then ended up losing by a single vote? It wouldn’t make sense for me to vote for one of my opponents, now would it?”

“I guess not,” Jenny mumbled, then dodged out of her mother’s grasp. “I’ve got to go get dressed.” As Jenny darted away, Joanna blinked back tears of her own. How could it still be less than two months since Andy died? It seemed much longer, more like a lifetime. How could her entire world have been turned so upside down in so short a time? Ostensibly, not that much had changed. They still lived in the same home, the same cozy Sears bungalow she and Andy had purchased from his parents years earlier. But the house was no longer the same place. Without Andy’s presence, it was far too quiet, and so was Jenny.

The cheerful, laughing, loving child who had eagerly marched off to tackle third grade the first of September… was no more. Two months later she had been transformed into a subdued, pale husk of her former self. She had turned into a somber miniature adult, living her life inside a hard, brittle shell.

Joanna’s heart ached with sympathy. She under stood what was happening with her daughter, but why did their mutual grief separate them rather than draw them together?

Shaking her head, Joanna retreated to her own room to dress. She stood dispiritedly in front of the closet door-a closet from which she had not yet found the heart to banish all trace of Andy’s clothes. With Andy’s scent still lingering around her, she tried to decide what she should wear.

What was the proper mode of dress for her today?

There was no manual of suitable behavior for a sheriff’s candidate who was also a recent widow.

Not only that, the question of what to wear touched on all the deeper questions as well. Why was she running for office in the first place? Why was she putting herself through all this? Why was she putting Jenny through this?

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, back during and just after Andy’s funeral when people’s feelings were running high. Friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers from all over the county had urged her to run, encouraged her to take Andy’s place on the ballot. Back then, even Jennifer had wanted her to do it. And when Joanna had reluctantly agreed, one of the reasons she had done so was the belief that running for office would be something she and Jenny would do together-would work toward together-a shared goal that would unite them and help take up both their time and energy. She had thought it would give them a needed focus and would keep their lives from being constantly centered on Andy’s death.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. Not at all.

In fact, as the campaign had heated up, it had become a bone of contention. Jenny had lost interest in the election process almost immediately. She had dragged her feet every step of the way, constantly creating logistical roadblocks of childish whimpering and whining rather than helping.

As for Joanna, even though she had worked hard on both her father’s and Andy’s separate campaigns for sheriff, in both cases she had been part of the campaign-a cog in the wheel, a member of the team-not the candidate. Doing it all on her own, without Andy there to backstop her, she had found overwhelming.

As the candidate, she had been forced to juggle all the time commitments of electioneering-the civic meetings, speeches, and doorbelling-that couldn’t be delegated to anyone else. Nor could she delegate the complexities of her life as a newly single parent or the demands of a job that was now a sole source of income rather than a shared one. The only good thing about all this was that sometimes when she fell into bed at night, she was too worn out to toss and turn.

At last Joanna chose two hangers and pulled them down from the clothes rod. One hanger held a winter-gray blazer made of a medium-weight wool. On the other was a pearl-gray blouse. She was in the process of laying out the clothes on the bed when the phone rang. Dropping what she was doing, Joanna hurried to answer.

“Hello,” Eleanor Lathrop said to her daughter.

“How are we holding up this morning?”

Not very well, Joanna thought. She said, “Fine, Mother. How are you?”

“What are you going to wear today?”

“Funny you should ask,” Joanna answered. “I was standing here in my underwear wondering that very thing.”

“Well, wear something nice,” Eleanor ordered.

“I was just watching the news from Tucson. They were talking about you, about how you’re the only woman candidate for sheriff in the whole state.

They said that if you’re elected, you’ll be breaking new ground. They plan on sending a television crew down here to cover it live.”

At the word “television,” Joanna sank onto the bed. “To cover me?” she managed.

“What about that new gray blazer of yours and that light gray blouse?” Eleanor continued. “Those would be good. And speaking of which, what are you doing after work?”

“After work?”

“I already checked with Helen Barco at Helene’s. She could do you right at four.”

“Mother Joanna began, but Eleanor rolled over the abortive objection.

“Now, Joanna, I know you don’t believe in going to the beauty shop all that much, but this is television. People all over the state are going to see you. It’s important for you to look your very best. Besides, I told Helen it’s my treat. It isn’t every day your daughter gets elected sheriff, you know.”

Eleanor’s initial opposition to Joanna’s candidacy had gradually changed-first to grudging acceptance and later to highly committed partisan support. It was one thing for Joanna to tell her mother to go jump in the lake. It was another thing entirely to insult a loyal campaign worker. Only Marianne Macula, Joanna’s campaign coordinator and best friend, had logged more hours on Joanna’s run for office than her mother, Eleanor Lathrop.

“All right,” Joanna relented. “Four o’clock?”

“Right. Shampoo, blow dry, makeup, and manicure.”

“Manicure, too?”

“It won’t hurt,” Eleanor told her. “You might even like it. Now what about Jenny? Is she going to come to the polls-closing party at the convention center or not?”

“I haven’t asked her. It’s a school night. If she comes at all, she shouldn’t stay very late.”

“Well, I’m sure the Bradlys would be glad to take her back home with them if she gets too tired.

Mark my words, Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady won’t hang around celebrating for very long.

They’re not much on socializing.”

That was something of an understatement. Joanna’s in-laws’ idea of social intercourse was limited to staying after church long enough for a post sermon coffee hour once or twice a month or going to a church-sponsored evening potluck.

“I’ll check on that,” Joanna said. She glanced at her watch. Time was flying. “I’ve gotta go, Mother,” she said.

“Okay,” Eleanor replied, “but don’t forget to vote. I’m on my way to the Get-Out-the-Vote phone bank as soon as I get off the phone here.”

When talking on the telephone, Eleanor Lathrop was in her natural element-a situation Joanna’s campaign manager had wisely utilized to the campaign’s very best advantage.

“I won’t forget,” Joanna assured her mother.

“And thanks for the appointment with Helen. That was very thoughtful of you.

After putting down the phone, Joanna returned to the closet. The gray blazer and blouse were promptly returned to their respective positions on the clothes rod. Out came a navy-blue coat-dress, double-breasted with two rows of large gold buttons. She would have preferred the gray blazer, but since that was her mother’s first choice, she’d be damned if she’d wear it.

Joanna was finishing drying her hair when Jenny tapped on the bedroom door. Jenny, already fully dressed and followed by the two dogs, flopped dejectedly on her mother’s bed, while the dogs settled on the floor nearby.

“That was Grandma Lathrop on the phone,” Joanna said.

“She wanted to know if you’re coming to the party tonight, the one uptown.”

“Do I have to?”

Looking past the reflection of her own blue dress in the mirror, Joanna saw that Jenny resembled her blond, blue-eyed father in looks, but in the personality department she definitely took after her mother.

“Of course you don’t have to,” Joanna returned.

“But you are my daughter, and I’d like you to be there.”

“Even if you lose?”

Joanna sat down on the bed to put on her shoes.

“I don’t think we’ll lose,” she said, trying to sound far more confident than she felt. Her two opponents, Frank Montoya, the Wilcox city marshal, and Al Freeman, the assistant chief of police from Sierra Vista, hadn’t cut her any slack. The results of the election were by no means guaranteed.

“And even if we do lose,” she continued, “we have to go to the party anyway. No matter what, we should go there to thank our supporters.”

But then, in the brief silence that followed, something from Jenny’s voice perhaps a quaver of doubt in the way she spoke registered tardily on Joanna’s brain. She turned to her daughter “You do want us to win, don’t you, Jenny?”

“I guess,” Jenny whispered.

“Good.”

Joanna rose to her feet, pulling the child along with her. For a long moment, they stood there next to the bed in Joanna’s small bedroom, clinging together in a fierce and mutually protective hug.

Eleanor Lathrop had always claimed to have eyes in the back of her head. Her daughter made no such assertions, so while she and Jenny hugged each other, Joanna didn’t see that, behind the child’s back, Jennifer Ann Brady’s fingers were tightly crossed.

On both hands.

Traveling DOWN Tombstone Canyon, Harold was tempted to drive right by the Canyon Methodist Church. At the last minute he swung into the parking lot. This was, after all, Election Day. From the time he first became eligible, Harold’s voting record had been absolutely perfect. He had never missed a single election.

Now, though, with the trial due to start the next day and with Bisbee’s gossip mills churning out stories about his family troubles on an overtime basis, Harold actually wanted to skip it, to let this relatively unimportant election pass by without his vote. But that would have been perceived as cowardly. Harold Lamm Patterson was no coward.

He doffed his rain-stained Stetson and shook the water off it as he stepped inside the basement social hall of Canyon Methodist Church, the place where his precinct had voted for the last thirty two years. He had hoped the hall would be fairly empty except for the usual band of election-board workers, but that wasn’t the case.

The enterprising ladies of the United Christian Women’s Prayer Fellowship were holding a bake sale. Several of the town’s leading female citizens were clustered around a huge coffee urn, chatting and laughing.

None of the women were strangers to Harold, and he did his best to stay out of their way. One - in particular, Tottie Galbraith, had cut him dead the last time Harold had encountered her in the post-office lobby. That had been right after the People article.

Tottie had almost broken her neck, crashing into the revolving door in her haste to avoid him.

This time, her behavior was somewhat more subtle but no less disapproving. Although she must have glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, she gave no hint of recognition. Instead, she raised one eyebrow and shifted her position so she could continue standing with her back turned in his direction. Meanwhile, the previously energetic hum of the women’s voices dropped to the merest of whispers.

Harold didn’t have to hear what they were saying to know they were talking about him. His ears flamed red, but he didn’t cut and run. In fact, he thought wryly, anything that kept him from having to speak to Tottie Galbraith couldn’t be all bad.

Harold was almost safely past the group when, at the last moment, Marliss Shackleford broke free from the others and came after him, hand ex tended, lips arranged in a phony but welcoming smile.

“Why, Harold Patterson!” she exclaimed. “How are you managing to hold up through all this, you poor thing?”

Fifty years after leaving high school, Marliss had yet to outgrow the gushiness she had learned as a local cheerleader. She had devoted twenty-five years to her life’s work-writing “Bisbee Buzzings,” a weekly piece that passed for a society column in the Bisbee Bee, the town’s barely extant daily newspaper. Marliss Shackleford’s enthusiasm at being a large fish in a very small pond remained undimmed.

“Fine, Marliss,” Harold reassured her. If he couldn’t avoid her altogether the best tactic was to get Marliss talking about something else. “I’m doing just fine,” he said. “How are the grand kids?”

“Oh, the twins are just fine.” She beamed. “So nice of you to ask. Care for some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I only stopped by to vote. You know how it is-too much to do and not enough time.”

Marliss nodded as she fell in step beside him.

“Isn’t that the truth? Hardly enough time to turn around. But I wanted to talk to you all the same, Harold, just to let you know that a lot of us here in town think it’s a crying shame what Holly is doing. And to her own father yet. It’s a crime, if you ask me.”

“Thank you, Marliss,” Harold said, still hoping to shut her up. “I surely do appreciate that.” But Marliss continued undeterred, without even acknowledging the interruption.

“For her to go away all those years and come back now just to raise all kinds of fuss, I don’t understand it at all. Not for a minute! Do you?”

“No, ma’am,” Harold agreed, edging away, trying to reach the relative safety of the table where a stern-faced Barbara Wentworth presided over the list of registered voters. Marliss stuck to him like glue.

“I read that whole article in People magazine,” she continued. “I surely did. I don’t see how they can get away with printing such terrible stuff. We used to call it yellow journalism in my day, and that’s exactly what it is. After all that wild publicity, where in the world is Judge Moore going to find an impartial jury? I mean, doesn’t everybody read People? And as for all the awful things they said about Bisbee in that article… My goodness, if I were Judge Moore, I’d give that girl a swift spanking and send her right back home to California where she belongs.”

Marliss seemed able to talk without ever having to pause long enough to draw breath. About the time Harold decided there would be no escape, that he was destined to stand there trapped for ever, the Reverend Marianne Macula, pastor of Canyon Methodist Church, came to his rescue.

Deftly insinuating herself between Marliss and her hapless victim, Marianne took Harold’s hand and shook it firmly.

“Why, hello there, Harold,” Marianne said with a polite, dismissive nod in Marliss Shackleford’s direction. “Is Ivy here, too?”

For a moment, Harold seemed unable to answer.

“N-no,” he stammered finally. “I came by myself.

I don’t know where she is.”

And he didn’t, either, not for sure. Most likely she was still at the house, but the usually steady Ivy had become unpredictable of late. In fact, she had left the house the night before right after chores, and she hadn’t returned until just before sun-up. That was something else that was bugging Harold, another bone of contention, and some thing she had never done before.

Since the big blowup over Holly, Ivy had suddenly taken to coming and going without bothering to tell him where she was going or when she’d be back. Of course, since they weren’t speaking, how could she?

This new situation with Ivy reminded Harold of Holly, back when she’d been an errant teenager. But Ivy was no teenager. At forty years of age, she hardly needed to ask her father’s permission to do any damn-fool thing she pleased. He saw this latest incident as one more thing to lay at Holly’s door.

“I see,” Marianne said.

Harold’s mind had wandered briefly. When he came back to himself, Marianne Macula was examining his face so closely that he wondered what she saw there. And when she said, “I see,” what exactly did she mean? Did this Reverend Macula somehow know more about what was really going on out at the Rocking P than Harold wanted her to?

“All this trial business must be almost as hard on her as it is on you,” Marianne continued. Her voice was kind: sincere and caring where Marliss Shackleford’s had been sharp and self-serving.

Harold dropped his gaze and examined his mud-spattered boots. “Yes,” he allowed reluctantly. “I reckon it is.”

Marianne reached out and took the old man’s hand. “You take care of yourself now, Harold.”

She turned to Marliss and engaged her in some kind of small talk that finally set Harold free to go vote. He quickly planted himself front of Barbara Wentworth’s table and gratefully dived into the election process.

In other times, he and Barb Wentworth would have shot the breeze while she found his name in the voter-registration list, showed him where to sign, and gave him his ballot. This time, Barbara seemed disinclined to talk. Did even the no-non sense Barbara Wentworth read People? he wondered.

Minutes later, breathing a sigh of relief, Harold escaped to the relative privacy of a voting booth.

He read each page of the ballot carefully. It wasn’t a very exciting election. The usual people were running for the usual offices, and no one would be particularly surprised when the incumbents were reelected to their traditional positions in the state legislature or on the board of supervisors. As far as county races were concerned, the only one of any special interest to Harold Patterson was the wide-open contest for the office of sheriff.

Two months earlier, right after the primary and when the general-election ballots had already been printed, all hell had broken loose in Cochise County. Both candidates for sheriff, the two men whose names even now were listed on the pre printed ballots, had perished the previous September in a series of harrowing events that had stunned the entire state. The previous sheriff, Walter V. McFadden, and his opponent, Deputy Andrew Brady, had succumbed to gunshot wounds within days of one another.

In the ensuing investigation, the community had been shocked to learn that several long-term members of the Sheriff’s Department had been deeply involved in drug-trafficking. By the time the smoke cleared, Joanna Brady-widow of one of the dead men-had agreed to run for sheriff in her husband’s stead. For the past two months, the murders, the investigation, and the subsequent campaign for sheriff had been front-page news.

Only Holly Patterson’s forthcoming legal battle with her father had finally displaced the Sheriff’s Department from top position on the front pages of the Bisbee Bee.

Joanna Brady was someone Harold Patterson remembered as the feisty daughter of yet another Cochise County sheriff, the long-dead D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop. Big Hank had once played poker with Harold on a fairly regular basis. The other two current candidates from Wilcox and the other from Sierra Vista-weren’t people Harold knew personally. In fact, standing in the voting booth, he barely remembered their names.

What he remembered best about Joanna Lathrop Brady was seeing her as a sprightly little red haired imp in a freshly pressed Brownie uniform standing outside one or the other of the Phelps Dodge Company stores. She had been a capable businesswoman even way back then, selling him Girl Scout cookies and carefully counting back the change. That long-ago child with her two missing front teeth deserved far better cards than the tough ones life had dealt her with disturbing frequency.

When she was a high school sophomore, Joanna’s father had died in a tragic automobile accident. Now, somewhere under thirty years of age, she was already the widow of a gunned-down police officer, but she wasn’t ready to give up and quit. By agreeing to run in her husband’s place, she showed plenty of grit and determination, Qualities Harold Patterson both possessed himself and admired in others.

To Harold’s way of thinking, a vote for Joanna Brady was a vote for continuity, for the way things ought to be.

In the space provided for write-in candidates, Harold used a stubby pencil to write in Joanna Brady’s name. Then, squaring his shoulders, he emerged from the voting booth and dropped his ballot into the box. Voting for Joanna Brady felt good. It almost made the stop at the church worth while; almost balanced the scales for his having to put up with the likes of Tottie Galbraith and Marliss Shackleford.

Almost, but not quite.

Harold left the church before anyone else could corner him into a conversation. He certainly didn’t want to hang around long enough to risk running into Ivy when she came in to vote.

After all, it was bad enough that Harold was forced to undergo public attacks from one of his two daughters. He worried that if Ivy saw him there in the church and simply cut him dead, that would be almost as bad or worse than a noisy row with Holly. That would give the ladies of the United Christian Prayer Fellowship so much to talk about that they wouldn’t shut up for a week.

Harold Lamm Patterson, one tough old bird, could handle just about anything, but the prospect of having Ivy-his favorite spurn him in public was more than he could endure.

BisBEE As it is known now was created in the fifties when several different hamlets, including Old Bisbee, incorporated into a single entity. Forty years later, the old lines of demarcation still persist.

That election morning, seven miles down the road in the Warren business district, not much work was being conducted at the Davis Insurance Agency on Arizona Street. When Joanna arrived, she found two baskets of “good wishes” flowers from clients waiting on her desk. A box of glazed doughnuts and a percolator of coffee covered most of the surface of the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist herself, a young woman named Lisa Connors, fielded an occasional business phone call between serving coffee and doughnuts to the steady parade of drop-by well-wishers.

Milo Davis himself, flushing with good humor from the tip of the resin-imprisoned scorpion on his bob tie to the top of his shiny bald pate, had, shook hands, and told people he wasn’t losing an office manager, he was gaining a sheriff.

Milo’s shoulder-whacking jest was made with the best of intentions, but it bothered Joanna all the same.

From high school on, this building with its single, three-office suite was the only workplace she had ever known, and Milo Davis had been her only boss. If she won the election, all that would change. Joanna felt like a reluctant and uncertain fledgling about to be shoved from the nest, regardless of whether or not she could fly. And yet she did want to win, didn’t she?

At nine, Milo left for a nine-thirty appointment.

Moments after he left the office a call came in from a newspaper reporter from the Arizona Sun in Tucson. When Lisa put the call through to Joanna, the woman explained she was calling for an Election Day comment from the woman who might possibly be Arizona’s first female county sheriff. The reporter’s questions were the sort Joanna had come to dread during the course of the campaign.

As far as the media were concerned, the election of the Cochise County sheriff was newsworthy primarily because Joanna Brady, one of the three candidates, was a woman. And no matter how she answered the questions, the way the articles were written generally made Joanna sound like a wild eyed, gun-toting feminist-an unlikely cross between Dirty Harry and Gloria Steinem.

Finished with the call, Joanna was sorting through a stack of home /office underwriting requirements and correspondence when Harold Lamm Patterson appeared at Lisa’s desk. Standing politely with a damp and battered Stetson in hand, he asked to see Milo right away. Joanna heard Lisa tell Harold that Milo was out for most of the morning, and she saw the look of grave disappointment that washed across the old man’s leathery features. Like everyone else in town, Joanna knew Harold Patterson had his hands full with his ring-tailed bitch of a daughter back home and making trouble. There was no reason to add to the old man’s woes.

Getting up, Joanna wandered to the outer office and stopped beside Lisa’s desk. “If it’s something, urgent, Mr. Patterson,” Joanna suggested, “perhaps I could be of help.”

I would appreciate it, ma’am,” Harold Patterson said sincerely.

“I surely would.”

When ushered into Joanna’s office, Harold took the seat she motioned him into. Like a wary old bird poised for sudden flight, he perched uneasily on the chair with his hat balanced precariously on one knobby knee. He squinted at her through narrow, lidded eyes.

“You’re Hank Lathrop’s little girl, aren’t you? The one who’s running for sheriff?”

Joanna nodded without comment. Little girl?

Hardly, but compared to Harold’s eighty-odd years, she must seem improbably young for that kind of responsibility.

“I reckon your daddy would be real proud of you if he could see you today,” Harold continued.

“I voted for you, by the way. Stopped off on my way into town.”

Joanna felt a flush creep up her neck. “Thank you, Mr. Patterson. I appreciate that. But tell me, what can I do for you today?”

“I’m used to dealing with Milo,” Harold Patterson hedged. “And with Milo’s father before that…”

“It’s all right, Mr. Patterson. If you don’t want me to take care of whatever it is, that’ll be fine.

The problem is, I have no idea how long Milo will be gone. It could be after lunch before he comes back. I do have access to all of the files, and Harold leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice. “It’s personal, ma’am,” he whispered so Lisa couldn’t hear. “Personal and confidential.”

Joanna took the hint, got up, and firmly closed the connecting door between her office and Lisa’s.

“There,” she said, sitting back down. “Is that better?”

Harold nodded. “What do I have to do to change the beneficiaries on my policies?” he asked. “Do I have to bring the policies into the office, or what? I think they’re over at the bank.”

“Oh, no. If that’s all you want, I can do it in a minute. All you have to do is fill out a change-of beneficiary form.”

“Just one form for all the policies?”

“No. You use a separate form for each one, but I will need the policy numbers.”

“Damn. I don’t have them along.”

Joanna smiled. “No problem, Mr. Patterson.

Give me your date of birth.”

“November the twelfth, 1910.”

Joanna switched on her desktop computer and booted it up. Once she had entered Harold Patterson’s name and birth date into the database, the screen showed her a listing of his set of several policies. Harold Patterson had come into the world when automobiles were still a rarity. He watched the computer operation with some interest.

‘You have five policies in all with us, Mr. Patterson,” Joanna said a moment later. “Would you care to have a printout on each one?”

“You can do that?”

‘Certainly.”

Joanna typed in a series of commands, and moments later the dot-matrix printer behind her whined out a stream of printed paper. Tearing off the tractor-feed holes and separating the printouts into individual sheets, she handed them over to Harold. He sat there for some time, squinting at each one in turn.

‘Is everything in order?” Joanna asked.

He looked up at her as if startled at the sound of her voice. “Oh, yes. They seem to be fine.”

Joanna reached into her bottom drawer, thumbed through a series of files, and came up with a fistful of change-of-beneficiary forms. “You don’t have to complete them here, but they do have to be properly witnessed at the time of signing. Did you want to change the beneficiary designation on all of the policies?”

Harold first nodded, then shook his head. “Yes.

Well, no. I’m not sure.” Finally, he tossed the stack of papers back onto Joanna’s desk.

“How can I tell?” he demanded in disgust.

“Eyes are so damn bad, I can’t hardly read the damn things.”

Joanna picked them up and glanced through them. “Your daughter Ivy is the sole beneficiary on all of them,” she explained. “If she’s not then living, the proceeds are to be divided equally between your nephew, Burton Kimball, and your daughter Holly. If you’d like to make a change in those arrangements, Mr. Patterson, I’d be happy to complete the forms for you.”

To Joanna’s surprise, Harold Patterson’s eyes filled with a sudden pool of tears that threatened to overflow his eyes despite the old man’s valiant attempt to blink them back.

“Always thought of myself as sort of a care taker,” he mumbled hoarsely. “Thought I’d take care of what my pa gave me and pass it along to my children and to their children’s children. As it turns out, my girls are the end of the line. Instead of valuing the Rocking P and what I’ve worked for all my life, they’re fighting over it.”

He shook his head sadly. “Reminds me of a pair of dogs I had once, years ago, an older one and a pup. The old dog had this blanket, an old, wore out horse blanket, that he slept on out in the barn.

The pup took a liking to that blanket and tried to make off with it. There was plenty of blanket to go around. They could have both used it, but they each pulled and tugged on it until there was nothing left but pieces. Turned out neither one of them had the good of it.”

Harold paused and looked at Joanna. “You see what I mean, don’t you?”

Joanna nodded. “I think so, yes. Your daughters?”

He nodded wearily. “And the Rocking P is the blanket. Or maybe I am. You want your children to grow up to like each other or at least get along, but it seems like that’s not how things work out most of the time.”

“Mr. Patterson,” Joanna said kindly, “I can see that you’re under a good deal of stress today. Understandably so.

Why don’t you take the printouts and the change-of-beneficiary forms with you and give yourself some time to think things over and sort them out.”

As she talked, Joanna folded the two separate stacks of paper together into a single letter-sized sheaf and placed them in a blank manila envelope.

“Talk to your daughters and your nephew. If you think it will help. You can wait until tomorrow or the next day and speak to Milo himself about this.

In other words, don’t rush into anything. And if you do change the beneficiary and later on you think better of it, then all you have to do is sign another set of forms.” She smiled. “We’re bureaucrats here, Mr. Patterson. We like doing paper work. It gives our lives meaning.”

For the first time since Harold Patterson entered her office, Joanna noticed the ghost of an answering smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the envelope and putting it in his pocket. “Thank you kindly.

Sounds like real good advice.”

He used the arm of the chair for support and awkwardly raised himself up. “I’m so stiff,” he said, “I must be getting old. And I ought to be ashamed of myself, acting like such a damn fool in public. I hate to be so much trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” Joanna assured him.

Harold Patterson held out his gnarled hand, and Joanna shook it warmly, hoping her outward appearance camouflaged the lump in her throat. She didn’t want him to see how much his distress affected her.

Standing before her, he seemed shrunken some how, as though the very act of talking with her about his problems had robbed him of some of his vitality. He seemed far more frail than when he’d first walked into her office a short time earlier. It hurt Joanna to see this proud old man reduced to near tears, awkwardly mumbling apologies and thanks.

There was much Joanna Lathrop Brady should have thanked him for. Buying all those Girl Scout cookies was only the barest beginning. Although she hadn’t learned the truth of the matter until much later, Harold Patterson’s behind-the-scenes lobbying had resulted in Joanna’s being nominated for Girl’s State the year after her father died. And when she graduated from Bisbee High School the year after that, Harold had delivered an inspiring if homespun commencement address.

As they shook hands now in Joanna’s office, she remembered that other long-ago handshake on a warm May night under the lights of the baseball stadium. The principal had called out Joanna’s name, and she had marched across the stage to the place where Harold Patterson, as president of the school board, was dispensing the coveted red and-gray diplomas. Every graduate in line both before and after Joanna Lathrop received a straightforward handshake, and so did Joanna.

But after that, and before she could continue across the stage, Harold had grasped her by both shoulders and held her for a moment. Looking her straight in the eye, he said, “Your daddy would have been very proud.” Then he had winked at her, given her a gentle shove, and sent her on her way.

Other people had said much the same thing to her that night, but Harold’s words were the only ones she remembered specifically. The timely encouragement and comical wink, both from her father’s old poker-playing buddy, had given her a much-needed boost. His kindness had helped propel her across the stage and somehow granted her permission to toss her red cap with its gray tassel high in the air along with everybody else’s when the long ceremony was finally over.

Now, with the tables suddenly reversed, what comfort could she offer him in his time of need?

“We’re here to help, Mr. Patterson,” she said softly “Anytime. It’s no trouble at all.”

Harold Lamm Patterson nodded and started toward the door, where he paused with one hand on the knob. “What’s Milo Davis going to do with out you if you go and get yourself elected?” he asked.

Joanna had been wondering that herself, but it wasn’t a subject she had broached aloud, not with Lisa and certainly not with Milo. It seemed as though talking about what might happen if she won could bring her bad luck, sort of like stepping on a crack and breaking your mother’s back.

She laughed. “Nobody’s indispensable, Mr. Patterson. I’m sure Milo and Lisa would get along without me just fine.”

“Well,” Harold Patterson said, “they may just have to.”

When he finally limped out of her office, Joanna followed him as far as the office window. His mud-splattered Scout was parked out front in the place usually reserved for one of Milo Davis’ several Buicks. To Joanna’s surprise, the old man by passed the Scout. And instead of utilizing the crosswalk, he marched across Arizona Street on a long, jaywalking diagonal, making straight for the bank.

“That poor man,” Lisa said, as she and Joanna watched him cross the street.

“You mean because of his daughters?” Joanna asked.

Lisa nodded. “What a mess. How old is he?”

“Eighty-four?”

“Jeez. And here he is with his whole life blowing up in public before his very eyes. How can he stand what they’re doing? How could anybody?

Lisa was twenty-three years old. Recently engaged, she and her fiance’ were busy planning a big, spare-no-expense wedding that was scheduled for sometime the following summer. Both of Lisa’s parents were still alive and well. Listening to her “Most of the time,” Joanna said quietly, “you are a lucky girl.” Joanna was startled by how young Lisa seemed how young and inexperienced.

“It’s because you have to, because God doesn’t give you a choice.”

And, she added silently to herself, because you never know how much the people you love are going to hurt you until it’s far too late.

ALL HIS life, Harold Patterson had been the kind of man who, when faced with a particularly onerous task, would lay out the entire job in a very orderly fashion. Then he would set about doing each separate part of the chore, carrying each one through to completion before going on to the next. Today was like that. He had mentally organized each separate part of his scheme before ever coming to town Having gathered insurance forms, he headed straight for the bank.

When Sandra Rose Henning had graduated from high school, her scholastic standing should have made her a shoo-in to receive scholarship help. She was offered some, but not enough to make a difference. Faced with the grim reality of two disabled parents to support, she had chucked the idea of going on to college. In June, while her classmates were busily planning their fall school wardrobes, Sandy hustled down to the local First Merchant’s Bank and wangled herself a job as a teller.

Thirty-two years and fifty-five pounds later, she was still there, only now she was the manager of the Warren Branch. First Merchant’s had changed some over the years, and rumor had it that the bank was about to be gobbled up by an out-of-town conglomerate.

Still, scuttlebutt said that all of Bisbee’s neighborhood branches, strung like so many pop-beads along what had formerly been a ten-mile bus route, would soon be consolidated into a single large branch at the new shopping center in Don Luis. That rundown area, once a primarily Mexican enclave, was now the unlikely location of a new shopping area that boasted the town’s only Safeway, and soon, perhaps, the town’s only bank.

Sandy Henning wasn’t particularly worried about the coming merger. Regardless of what happened, she was sure she would still have a job. If it meant being demoted to “personal banker” or even going back on the teller line, that hardly mattered. Sandy liked people, and people liked her.

She was seated at her desk when Harold Patterson marched into the bank. She had been Harold’s “personal banker” since long before a worried banking industry had invented the term.

When she had been promoted and moved from the downtown branch to Warren, Harold’s accounts and business had followed her, even though, from a geographical standpoint, the bank in Old Bisbee was seven miles closer to the Rocking P which should have made it more convenient. But the uptown branch didn’t have Sandy.

Sandy’s heart went out to Harold as soon as she saw him. Despite his advancing years, he had always stood ramrod straight. Now, though, his shoulders drooped, as if the weight he carried on them was more than even his tough old spine could bear. And his step, while certainly not faltering, seemed somewhat slower, more hesitant.

Sandy rose to greet him. “Good morning, Mr. Patterson. How are you today?”

“Fair to middlin,” he answered. “Can’t complain.”

Although he could have complained, Sandy thought, and probably should have.

She and Holly Patterson would have graduated from high school the same year-if Holly had stayed around long enough to bother, that is. During their junior year, Holly had eloped with some high-flying, fast-talking real-estate developer from California. The marriage hadn’t lasted more than three months, but when it was over, Holly Patterson didn’t come home to what she had often called “backward Bisbee.” Sandy Henning had always considered Holly’s abrupt departure a case of good riddance. A week after Holly’s much-publicized return, a single glance at Harold Patterson’s haggard face did nothing to change the banker’s mind.

“What can I do for you today, Mr. Patterson?” she asked.

He fumbled in his pocket for a key ring and removed a small key. “I’d like to take a look at my box,” he said. “There are some items in there that I need to go over.”

Settling himself at a partially screened table, he removed his glasses and rubbed his bleary eyes while he waited for Sandy to bring his safety deposit box from the vault.

Holly’s demands were so outrageous that they should have been laughable. She wanted a full public confession of Harold Patterson’s alleged deeds. In addition, she demanded as damages to half the Rocking P. That was what bothered him most, rumors that with this so-called therapist as a partner, Holly expected to build a recovery center, a place for people who realized late in life that they too had been abused by members of their own families.

Those were the terms of settlement. If the case went to trial, her lawyer had told Burton that he - intended to go for blood-for everything they could get, for title to the whole shooting match if they could get it.

That wouldn’t happen because the case wasn’t going to trial. Because Harold Patterson himself was going to see to it.

It was easy for Ivy and Burton Kimball to tell him what to do. They weren’t caught between a rock and a hard place, and they didn’t know the whole story. In addition, they didn’t have Harold’s two prime pieces of motivation, either. For one, he wanted to live long enough to see his daughters together and reconciled for once in their lives.

And the other? With one major exception, he had lived his whole life as an honest, upright, law abiding man.

Before Norm Higgins planted him down in Evergreen Cemetery, Harold Patterson wanted his reputation back.

He had weighed all the risks. If he fought Holly in court and lost, he risked losing everything. If he settled, he handed over half the ranch to Holly-to the prodigal daughter who had turned her back on all of them for thirty-some-odd years-while dispossessing Ivy, the nonprodigal with the ranch, who had cared for her invalid mother through years of steady decline that led inevitably into helpless insanity, who had always put other people’s needs and wants before her own.

What would happen to Ivy if the Rocking P was cut in half or disappeared altogether? Like the baby King Solomon threatened to divide in the Bible, a ranch the size of the Patterson spread was of no more use cut in half than half a child would be. It took the whole ranch to make a living, to make a life.

Returning to the table with the box, Sandra Henning easily turned her key in the lock. Harold’s hand trembled as he attempted to insert his own.

It took three separate tries before the key clicked home. The long metal drawer flipped open, and the old man slumped back into his chair.

By eleven o’clock, Harold had sorted through all the papers in the drawer. In one stack, he put the papers that would stay in the safety-deposit box-the insurance policies he didn’t need in order to change the beneficiaries, the few ribbon wrapped letters he and Emily had exchanged during those rare times when he was actually away from home.

In the other stack were the things Harold would need to take with him to Burton Kimball’s office, will and the deed to the Rocking P.

At the very bottom of the drawer, Harold found the last item, the single yellowed envelope that he and Emily had together solemnly sealed away years earlier. Emily was the one who had insisted on a greasy candle-wax seal that now allowed some of the loopy, old-fashioned writing from the letter itself to bleed through onto the outside surface of the envelope. It was almost as if the words themselves were eager to escape their paper bound prison.

Harold could have broken the seal and opened it, but he didn’t. There was no need. The faded pencil-written words were committed to memory, seared into his heart even more clearly than they were into his brain. He remembered them all; was incapable of forgetting even one.

He sat holding the envelope and wondering what he should do with it now. He had kept it all these years because he had promised Emily he would; because she had begged him to, and because he had been afraid he might someday need it. Now, though, if his gamble paid off, if he could go to Holly and get her to listen to reason, maybe he could finally destroy the letter and be done with it. Maybe he could go to his grave taking the letter’s ugly secret with him.

Finally, after many agonizing moments of indecision, he placed the fragile, unopened envelope in the stack with the insurance policies and placed the whole pile back in the drawer. If Holly and Ivy didn’t take his word for it, didn’t accept his version of what had happened, then it would be time to remove the letter from the safety of its hiding place. By then he would know if he was taking the letter out to show it to his daughters or to burn it once and for all.

Pushing back his chair, Harold stood and signaled to Sandy Henning. “I’m ready to go now he said.

When she came to retrieve Harold’s safety deposit box, Sandy peered closely at Harold through her red-framed bifocals. “Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Patterson? Your color’s not all that good.”

Harold stood and picked up his hat. “I’m fine, Miz Henning,” he said, carefully replacing the tiny key in the narrow pocket of his jeans. ”I’m just a little wore out is all. Don’t go getting all pistol sprung about me.”

Leaving the bank, Harold drove straight to Evergreen Cemetery. For a long time, Evergreen had been the only burial game in town. During the first half of the twentieth century, it had been a lush, green, and well-tended place, irrigated for free with the mineral-rich effluent pumped from the underground mines. Then, in the late fifties, when Phelps Dodge started a leaching operation on the new open-pit tailings dump, the circulation of free mine water was removed from the community and returned to industrial use.

Bisbee’s would-be gardeners had been left literally high and dry. They could use the city’s drinking water pumped from a deep underground well down near Naco. But the clear well water, although fine for drinking, didn’t do a thing for the garden growers, because it came with two distinct disadvantages.

Not only was it outrageously expensive, it also lacked the abundant minerals that had once made Bisbee’s lawns, trees, and gardens flourish. And cemeteries, too, for that matter.

During the next decades, Evergreen Cemetery fell into such a dusty or muddy deterioration that the name “Evergreen” seemed little more than a cruel joke. When Emily Patterson had died five years earlier, the place was in such disrepair, Harold had been ashamed to bury her there, but the other cemetery in town, a relatively new one dating from the sixties, wasn’t much better. So Harold had bitten the bullet, bought a double plot in Ever green-he got a better deal that way-and a double headstone as well.

Driving to Emily’s plot, Harold was surprised to see that the place appeared to be in somewhat better shape.

The thinly paved drive still had pot holes here and there, but the grounds themselves were much improved. Maybe a new manager was on the job, a person who actually cared about the families of the people who were buried there.

Harold parked the Scout. The rain finally was letting up as he climbed stiffly down out of the truck and hiked over to the familiar plot. He took off his Stetson and stood bareheaded, staring down at the red granite headstone. Both his and Emily’s names and birth dates were already chiseled into the stone in elegant, graceful letters and numbers. Emily’s date of death was there as well.

The only date left to be filled in was that of Harold’s own death, whenever that might be.

Looking at the stone always made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Not because he was afraid of dying, but because seeing the two names linked together like that made him feel that he was still married to the old Emily; as though the woman he loved had just gone on ahead. With any kind of luck, he’d have a chance to catch up with her sooner rather than later, and things between them would finally be set right as well.

“The shit’s really hit the fan on this one, Em, he said, addressing her aloud as he usually did when he came to visit.

Years earlier, he might have looked around to make sure no one was watching or listening when he spoke to her like that. He no longer bothered.

After all, he was an old man. If people saw him talking to himself or acting funny, they’d think he was crazy, or senile, or both, and let it go at that.

“We still may be able to make it through,” he continued. “You know I’ve kept my promise all these years, but the price keeps going up, trying to keep it a secret in the first place. Maybe that’s higher all the time. Maybe we were wrong trying to hide it. God seems to have it in for me now. I’ve got this one last chance to do something about it, one more wild card to turn up. I hope to God that will do the trick. If not, I figure it’s time I stood up and took my punishment like a man. I just wanted you to know about it in advance. That’s all.” He closed his eyes tightly and bowed his head for a moment, murmuring a silent prayer. Afterward, he slammed the battered Stetson back on his head, turned on his heel, and hobbled back to the Scout with a real sense of purpose. Talking things over with Emily always gave him comfort and direction.

At the cemetery’s gate, he paused long enough for old Norm Higgins from Higgins Funeral Chapel and Mortuary to make a left-hand turn through the entrance. No doubt Norm was on an errand to scope out the location of some soon-to-be-used burial site. Harold supposed Norm and his boys had some poor old coot stashed in the cooler up at their place, waiting long enough for the deceased’s far-flung, out-of-town relatives to arrive on the scene before setting about the grim ceremonies of putting him in the ground.

“Go to Hell,” Harold thought, as Norm’s shiny gray limo squeezed past the disreputable Scout on Evergreen Cemetery’s narrow main track, at least it isn’t me they’re burying. He had his casket all picked out and paid for, same as his plot, but it wasn’t time to use it. Not yet.

Norm Higgins and Harold Lamm Patterson had known each other for sixty-some-odd years. In passing, they exchanged the kind of casual half wave/half-salute with which men of long acquaintance greet one another if they want to say hello but don’t want to make much of an issue of it. Both men waved and nodded and went on by.

Harold headed uptown, past the Lowell Traffic Circle and on up to Old Bisbee. Talking it over with Em really had helped prepare him for what he knew would be a knock-down, drag-out confrontation with Burton Kimball-his nephew as well as his attorney.

Some people around town discounted Burtie; thought of him as your basic pushover. But not Harold Patterson. The man who had raised Burton Kimball from a baby-the kind uncle who had taken an orphaned pup to raise and knew better than to dismiss either the younger man’s abilities or his tenacity.

Harold might use Burtie to further his own purposes, yes. But underestimate him? No. The coward’s way, of course, would have been for Harold to go ahead and do what he was planning to do without mentioning a word of it to Burtie. But Harold Lamm Patterson had never walked away from a fight in his whole life.

At eighty-four, he decided, it was too damn late to start.

As PREDICTED, Burton Kimball’s reaction was nothing short of astonished disbelief. “You’re going to do what?”

“You heard me. I’m gonna offer Holly whatever the hell she wants. But she’s gotta agree to see me.

Alone. No lawyers on either side. Including you.”

Kimball shook his head in disgust. “Uncle Harold, let me point out that you’ve already paid me a bundle of money on retainer to handle this case for you. Why would you suddenly want to go it alone at the very last minute? And why on earth would you suddenly agree to settle with that un mitigated bitch?

“Let’s go to court, Uncle Harold. Please. We’ll have the home-court advantage. People in this county know you. How many times have you served on the school board. Five. Six? You’ve lived here all your life, while Holly left town thirty years ago and only came back now to make trouble. Given a choice, who do you think the jury will believe?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Harold said. “I don’t want a jury.”

But Burton Kimball continued undeterred. “No one from around here is going to fall for this ‘Forgotten Memories’ bullshit. It’s all going to boil down to her word against yours, and she’s not going to win. People like Holly Patterson may be big news in People magazine and in New York and California, but Bisbee’s a part of the real world. I tell you, Uncle Harold, it isn’t going to wash here.

”If you settle, Holly gets whatever you give her, but if you win-if the jury finds in your favor you won’t have to pay that woman one thin dime.

Which one of those sounds like the better deal?”

“I still mean it,” Harold said. “You call her up and tell her I want to see her. You know where she is, don’t you?”

“I know,” Burton answered, “put as you know, I’m under a court order not to tell. Anyway, my advice still stands. Take your chances in court.”

“deaf? Burtie,” Harold put in mildly. “You’re not very old to be going stone-cold deaf. You’d better have those ears of yours checked. I told you once, and I’ll say it again. I’m not going to court tomorrow, and neither are you.

We’re going to settle this thing now. Today!”

Kimball prided himself on being a patient, reasonable man. In fact, Linda, his wife, insisted he was far too patient for his own good.

She blamed her husband’s overly forebearing nature for the fact that their two children, a boy of ten and a girl eleven, were spoiled rotten. Now, though, faced with his uncle’s unyielding bullheadedness, Kimball’s much-touted patience was beginning to fray.

Call her attorney. Tell him to have her meet me tonight,” Harold repeated. He paused and frowned. “Wait. Where should we go? I can’t have her coming to the house.”

“You could always do it here in my office, I suppose,” Burton allowed grudgingly, pulling out a pen and making a few quick notes on a yellow pad But Harold shook his head. “No. That won’t do.

It should be someplace else, someplace neutral.”

Burton Kimball sighed. “All right then, how about the hotel dining room over here at the Copper Hotel? That won’t be all that private, though.

But what makes you think she’ll agree to come, especially on my say-so?”

“I know Holly,” Harold said. “Once she realizes she is going to win, she won’t be able to resist.

Tell her to meet me there at six.”

Now it was Burton Kimball’s turn to shake his head, “Six is too late. If you’re serious about settling out of court, then do it early enough in the afternoon so Judge Moore can remove the case from tomorrow’s docket.”

“I am serious,” Harold Patterson returned resolutely. The two men’s eyes met and held across the younger man’s paper-strewn desk. Burton looked away first.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So you’re serious. But you’d better give me some idea of what you have in mind. That way, when I call Holly’s attorney, he can decide whether or not it’s even worthwhile to get together.”

“I already told you. Everything she asked for. Tell the lawyer that.”

“Uncle Harold,” Burt objected, “you’re a better businessman than that. You never start negotiating by giving somebody everything they want. Besides, she’s demanding half the ranch.”

Harold Patterson seemed suddenly very interested in the cleanliness of his fingernails. “So?” he asked innocently.

“So what about Ivy?” Burton demanded suddenly, his eyes alight with sparks of anger. “What about the daughter who didn’t run away from home? What about the one who stayed on and helped you look after the ranch? The one who took good care of her mother? Is this the thanks she gets?”

Angered, Burton let his voice rise in volume “And what the hell good is half a damn cattle ranch the size of the Rocking P? Half isn’t going to be enough for both of you to make a living or even for Ivy by herself, for that matter. And which half does she get? The part with the house and the well so she’ll still have a damn roof over her head? Or does Holly expect her sister to pitch a damn tent somewhere up on Juniper Flats?”

One of the few pleasures Harold Patterson found in being old was the ability to abandon an unpleasant current of conversation in favor of drifting back over the years. When the lines of the present became too harsh and glaring, when he tired of the bright colors and loud noises, he some times immersed himself in the cool, dim shadows of the past.

He did it again in that moment. When he looked across Burton’s desk, he didn’t see an angry forty five-year-old professional lawyer with a loosened silk tie knotted halfheartedly around his neck or the monogrammed cuffs of the stiffly starched white shirt. What he saw instead was a shirtless, towheaded seven-year-old boy barefoot child wearing nothing but a pair of Oshkosh coveralls cut off just above the boy’s scrawny knees.

Both of those bare knees were scraped raw and bleeding, as was the boy’s nose. There was a deep gouge on his chin, a cut Harold suspected was serious enough to require stitches, one that was going to result in a permanent scar.

It was summer. The boy and his uncle stood in the cool, gloomy barn. They faced each other in silence while a cloud of sunlit dust motes danced gaily around them. Dangling from the man’s hand was a thick, supple leather strap. The boy’s fists were clenched.

His chin trembled, and tears glistened in his eyes, but his head was unbowed.

“Burtie, your aunt Emily says you won’t tell Holly you’re sorry you hit her with the rock.”

“That’s ‘cause I’m not,” Burton Kimball declared fiercely, sniffing and wiping away the trickle of blood that had dribbled over the lump of his swollen upper lip. “If she ever does it again, I’ll hit her harder next time.”

Harold Patterson took a deep breath. He wanted desperately to impart this needed lesson to the boy, to make it stick. As his Christian duty, he had taken in his dead sister’s orphaned and abandoned son, had taken him to raise, but Harold was determined Burton not grow up to be like his no good, worthless father.

“Look, son,” Harold explained patiently. “This is important. It’s something you got to learn and understand once and for all. Men don’t go around hitting women. Ever. No matter what.”

“Holly was tickling Ivy,” Burtie countered. “She was tickling her, and she wouldn’t stop, not even when I asked her nice.”

“Tickling’s not bad,” Harold said. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Yes, she did, too,” Burton insisted. “Holly did it until it hurt, until Ivy cried, until she peed her pants.”

He blushed then, embarrassed that he knew about Ivy wetting her pants, humiliated by having to talk about it to Uncle Harold, and outraged that Holly had laughed at Ivy, pointing at her muddied garments and calling her a stupid cry-baby.

Burton sniffed again, but he straightened his shoulders. “Give me my licking, Uncle Harold” he said, swallowing hard. “But please don’t make me say I’m sorry.”

“Doc Winters sure did a good job of sewing up your chin that time,” Harold said suddenly shifting with a time-warping jolt back to the present. “Scar hardly shows at all.

Looks more like a dimple. Who’s that movie actor? The good-looking one with the dimple?”

“Kirk Douglas,” Burton answered mechanically “But don’t change the subject, Uncle Harold, I want to hear you tell me exactly what you think will happen to Ivy if you go through with this fruitcake idea.”

Remember that time I had to give you a licking in the barn after you chucked Holly over the head with a rock?”

“I remember,” Burton Kimball answered grimly.

“You were right back then, you know,” Harold said, “Holly was the one who should have had her butt whupped over that one. I used the strap on you because your aunt Emily insisted, but I didn’t hit you all that hard, not as hard as I could’ve. And here you are, all these years later, still sticking up for Ivy.”

“It seems to me,” said Burton Kimball, “that I shouldn’t have to. Her father should be the one looking after her instead of her cousin.”

There was another momentary lull in the conversation.

“I reckon this means I’ll have to change my will,” ‘ Harold ventured. “I already talked to Milo Davis’s girl about changing the beneficiary agreements on my life insurance.”

Maybe, in the interim, Burton Kimball, too, had been caught up in a remembered glimpse of that long ago scene in the barn; of that determined and unrepentant little boy standing his ground in a swirl of spinning dust motes.

“You’re changing the life insurance, too? Dear God in heaven. I don’t believe it. What’s gotten into you?”

“I’ve got two daughters,” Harold said. “The way it was setup wasn’t fair. One was in;one was out. I’ve thought about it all week. I’m going to talk to Holly about settling this thing with the understanding that she’ll have half the ranch, and Ivy will have the rest. Beyond that, I’m going to treat ‘em fifty-fifty. That’s fair.”

Rolling his chair away from the desk, Burton Kimball got up and stalked over to the window.

He stared silently out through the glass, studying a sudden burst of sunshine that glinted, blinding and silver, off the still-damp pavement of Main Street.

The relationship between Harold Patterson and Burton Kimball was far more complicated than simply nephew and uncle, lawyer and client. Harold was the only father Burton had ever known.

He had been raised and put through school by the unwavering kindness of this stubborn old man.

Without Harold’s financial support, neither college nor law school would have been possible. Everything Burton Kimball was or owned, he owed to the generosity of this supposedly tough and hard bitten character.

Burton Kimball had spent most of his forty-five years as Ivy Patterson’s champion and protector. The Pattersons had raised all three children in a manner that made them more like brother and sisters than cousins.

Burton was five years younger than Holly, and Ivy was ten, but the dynamics of their childhood had always been the same. The two younger children had banded together as small but determined allies, united in their mutual resistance to Holly’s constant bullying and torment.

From Burton Kimball’s earliest memory, Holly Patterson had been mean as a snake. Now, some forty years later, the bitch was doing it again, in spades.

And so Burton Kimball found himself standing in front of the window, torn by a lifetime’s worth of conflicting loyalties, rocked by disappointment and betrayal.

How could he condone a father turning on his own daughter? How could he help Harold Patterson rob Ivy of her birthright?

The plain answer for Burton was that he couldn’t. He gave it one last try. “There’s nothing fair about it,” he said. “Don’t do it. Don’t cut Ivy out like this. Holly wants the Rocking P. She doesn’t need it. She’s got her career. Ivy’s different. She’s spent her whole life working like a dog on the ranch, and you know it. She’s never held a regular job, and I know for a fact that you’ve never paid a dime’s worth of wages or Social Security on her.”

Holly’s broke,” Harold Patterson asserted.

Burton stopped in mid-sentence. “You know that for a fact?”

“She hated Bisbee,” the old man answered. “The only reason she’d come back was if she had to.”

“Uncle Harold,” Burton said evenly. “Are you saying I’m supposed to feel sorry for Holly?”

“You don’t know what happened to her,” Harold answered softly. “You don’t know any of it.”

“No,” Burton agreed. “You’re right. I don’t know because you haven’t told me, even though I’m your attorney. If anyone ought to know, I should. What did happen to Holly, Uncle Harold?” Burton asked, his voice once more controlled, “Tell me the truth. Let me help you.”

But Harold said nothing. For more than a minute no further word passed between them.

“You won’t tell me?” Burton said at last.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

Burton swung away from the window then turned and stared down at the old man who continued to examine the backs of his mottled, liver spotted hands with the utmost concentration and studied unconcern. And as Burton looked down at his uncle, a slow dawning-an awful realization washed across him. The younger man’s face blanched.

“That’s not true, is it,” he said coldly.

“What’s not true?” Harold asked.

“That there’s nothing to tell.”

Harold looked up at Burton. On his face was an expression of feigned innocence, one that even the most inept juror would have seen right through.

“My God!” Burton whispered. “It did happen, didn’t it. Holly’s telling the truth! That’s why you don’t want to go to court. That’s why you’re suddenly willing to settle. You’re afraid people around here friends and neighbors, the folks who think Harold Patterson is the salt of the earth-will finally see you for what you are.”

With no warning, Harold Patterson’s eyes betrayed him. Again, as they had several times that day, they brimmed over with unexpected and unwelcome tears. He tried to brush the telling dampness away, but he wasn’t able to, not before Burtie saw the tears and surmised what they meant. With a clutch in his gut, Burton Kimball stumbled into the realization that Holly Patterson was telling the truth.

“If that’s the case,” the lawyer said carefully, “then maybe you’d better go ahead and settle. But I won’t help you. I won’t have any part of it. Because you disgust me, Uncle Harold. I can’t even stand to be in the same room with you.”

He started toward the door.

“Does that mean you quit?” Harold asked.

Burton paused at the door. He answered with out looking back or raising his voice. “Yes, that’s what it means,” he answered slowly. “Given the way I feel at this moment, I don’t think I could adequately represent you. You’ll be better off with someone else, maybe with one of my partners.”

“Please, Burtie,” Harold begged. “Your partners don’t know anything at all about this case. Don’t walk out on me now, not when I need you to help me get in touch with Holly or with her attorney. Nobody else could do that. Only you.”

Burton felt the wave of cold fury begin to rise in his chest, threatening to drown him, to rob him of breath and speech both. It was all he could do to summon what could pass for a normal voice, but with a supreme act of selfcontrol, he managed.

“Holly’s staying at Coo Viejo,” he said, “court order be damned! You’ll have to do your own dirty work, Uncle Harold, because I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll help you!”

With that Burton Kimball stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Harold sat for several minutes, alone in the empty room, regaining his composure; coming to terms with the idea that he now had what he wanted, but not the way he wanted, not at this high a price. He had never thought he’d lose Burtie as well. Never.

Shriveled by this latest penalty, it took some time for Harold to gather his strength and make his way out of Burtie’s private office. In the reception area, he paused in front of the desk that belonged to Maxine Smith, Burton’s secretary.

“When Burtie gets back,” Harold said, “give him a message for me, would you? Tell him I’m sorry, and tell him thank you.”

“Why certainly, Mr. Patterson,” Maxine said, jotting a quick note on a message pad. “Any thing else?”

“No,” Harold Patterson said, shaking his head. “That’s all.”

Holly PATTERSON sat in the back upstairs bedroom and stared out the window at the tawny wall of rock and tailings that rose two hundred feet in the air. Nothing green grew on the dump. It was dead, empty earth that reminded Holly of the moon. And of herself.

The Stickley rocker with its stiff leather back and broad, flat arms groaned each time it arched across the hardwood floor. The sound reminded her of a door creaking shut. The door to her heart.

She rocked and rocked. A cheerful fire crackled in the little stone fireplace, but nothing warmed her. Not the fire and not the two layers of woolen sweaters she was wearing, either. She was cold, and she was frightened. She had warned Rex Rogers, her lawyer, that it would be bad for her to come here, but Amy had insisted that they had to do it on her father’s home turf, and Rex had backed her up. They said there’d be a much better settlement if they bearded the lion in his own den.

Amy Baxter, her hypnotherapist, had told Holly that coming back to Bisbee wouldn’t be that big a deal, had assured her that she’d be perfectly fine.

Maybe for publicity and legal reasons, Rex and Amy were right, and Bisbee was the correct place to be. After all, they were the experts who had handled similar cases in towns and cities all over the country. But for Holly, being here was wrong. Bisbee and all the people in it were what she had spent thirty years trying to drink and drug out of her memory. Now that she was back, so were all the old bad feelings.

No one here gave a damn that she had gone out into the world and made a success of her life for a while. If anyone in Bisbee knew or cared that she had a screenwriting play sitting in her aged unit back in Studio City, no one mentioned it.

And if anyone knew that she had reached the pinnacle of success only to fall off and land in a series of mental and drug-rehab institutions, no one mentioned that, either. They didn’t care if she was a success or a failure. That didn’t matter. The people of Bisbee hated her anyway. They hated her because she was Holly Patterson. That was reason enough.

Holly pulled the sweater tighter across her chest and looked down toward the base of the house.

Amy, dressed in sweats, was down on the terrace working out on a trampoline. Catching sight of Holly peering out the window, Amy smiled and waved. Holly didn’t wave back. Now that the rain was gone and a fitful November sun was peeking through the cloud cover, Amy Baxter was far too energetic for Holly to tolerate. Too energetic and too positive.

Holly, on the other hand, was more like that gaunt, brown-needled pine tree thirsting to death at the top of the once-lush gardens, remnants of which still lingered on the grounds of Cosa Viejo.

Holly knew about the gardens because she and Billy Corbett had ditched school there once during sixth grade. They had taken off their clothes and lain naked in the ivy until they were both itchy and covered with aphids.

Billy had bragged to classmates at school that he had already done it. Twice. Holly had called him a liar and had dared him to prove he wasn’t.

They agreed to meet in the covered garden behind Cosa Viejo, a wonderful turn-of-the-century mansion at the top of Vista Park. In an earlier life and under a different name, the brown stuccoed mansion, with its mission-style and molded-plaster details, was a place one of Bisbee’s original copper barons had once proudly called home.

By the late fifties, the mansion had been renamed Cosa Viejo and the huge dump was already inching slowly across the desert toward the lush backyard, although the tailings weren’t nearly as close then as they were now, nor as tall. Fueled by grumbling trucks and noisy ore trains, the dump grew larger day by day. And the steady round-the-clock barrage of dust and noise began having serious detrimental repercussions on the fine old house.

The wealthy widow lady who owned it and had lived there for twenty years sold out to a sharp eyed investor who carved it up into low-cost apartments for oversexed newlyweds who didn’t mind being awakened at all hours of the day and night by the roar of heavily laden trucks and the thunder of cascading boulders.

At the new landlord’s direction, the gardens out back that had long been nurtured by a loving full time gardener were ignored. Left to their own devices, the covered arbors dried up and went to seed. For a while, without human intervention, only the ivy and one tall tree were tough enough to hold out against the dry realities of the arid Southwest. Now Jaime Gonzales, the new gardener, was starting the slow process of reclaiming the gardens and the upper terraces, but on that far lower level, all that remained was that one old tree, brown-needled and dying.

Holly remembered how tall and alive it had been, green against a warm blue sky that spring afternoon. The precocious eleven-year-old Holly Patterson had been flat on her naked back, waiting for poor, hapless Billy Corbett to figure out how to make his dinky, useless “thing” stand up. It finally did, after Holly showed him how to rub her stiff little nipples with his groping fingers, but even then it didn’t work. When Holly had taunted him, laughed at him because he didn’t even know where to put it, Billy had slapped her hard across the face. His blow had left a bright red handprint on her cheek, one she had been hard-pressed to explain to Mama that afternoon when she came home from school.

Remembering that time, Holly rocked even harder and pulled the sweater closer around her body. Billy Corbett had died in Vietnam. His was one of the first names on the memorial plaque over by the new high school.

It served him right, Holly Patterson thought, thirty-nine years after that jewel-dear spring after noon.

Whatever Billy Corbett got, it served him right.

There was a knock on the door. Holly jumped, surprised by her own nervousness. She would have to remember to tell Amy how she was feeling and ask her what it meant. Ask her to put her under and calm her, make the bad feelings go away. Maybe, later on, they could go for a ride in Rex Rogers’ bright red Cadillac. Maybe Amy would even let Holly drive.

She had read in the paper that Marliss, the old battle-ax who wrote a weekly column for the Bisbee Bee, actually thought the car belonged to Holly. That was a laugh. When she was evicted from her last roach-plagued apartment, Holly Patterson had scarcely anything left to call her own. Amy had helped her salvage the few paltry possessions that remained in storage back in California. And what she had she could keep only so long as she continued to pay the month-to-month storage rental.

The knock came again, and Holly realized she hadn’t answered. “Who is it?”

“It’s me. Isabel.”

“Come in.”

Isabel Gonzales, the gardener’s wife who served as both cook and housekeeper, bustled into the room. She stopped short when she saw Holly’s untouched lunch tray.

“You don’t like what I cook for you?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Isabel shook her head and ducked her tongue “Not eating is bad for you. It will make you sick.” This place is making me sick, Holly thought And it wasn’t just Billy Corbett, either, although at first she had thought it was, hoped it was. No it was something else, something much more than that, something about the dump itself, perhaps. Whatever it was, it remained just out of reach beyond the grasp of her conscious mind.

She had felt it the first day, as soon as she had set foot in the house. Of course, it was nice of Paul Enders-Pauli to his friends-to lend his “cabin by the lake” to his friends when he found out they were going to Bisbee on business. Of course, there was no lake anywhere near Bisbee. But for someone who lived in the high-pressure world of Hollywood costume design, it was important to have a hideaway where he could go to let the creative juices flow. Besides, Cosa Viejo had been such a wonderful period-piece bargain that he simply couldn’t afford to turn it down.

Paul Enders was only the latest in the long list of Cosa Viejo’s would-be rescuers. The exodus of miners in the late seventies along with a real estate glut had left even low-cost rentals sitting empty and in even worse decay. Into that economic slump came an unexpected sum of remodeling money that likely had its source somewhere in Colombia’s drug cartel. Cocaine paid the bills for returning Cosa Viejo to a single family residence.

Alleged drug money repaired the dry rot, renewed the plumbing, fixed the wiring, and cleaned up and replanted a few of the gardens.

The job was only partially finished, however, when the feds moved in to take over. That was how Pauli Enders had picked the place up in the late eighties at a bargain-basement price.

Paul Enders said he found Cosa Viejo to be a homey place where he could work on a project and not have his creative bursts interrupted by unexpected visitors. He claimed that working in a room that overlooked that wild brown dump made him feel that he was perched somewhere Just below the rim of the Grand Canyon. But what was good for Pauli was bad for Holly, although why it was bad for her she couldn’t quite fathom.

What was it about the dump? Why did it call to her so? Why did its looming nearness keep her from sleeping or eating or thinking?

“Well,” Isabel was saying, “are you coming or not?” She sounded impatient, as though she’d said much more than that, only Holly had heard none of it.

“Coming?” Holly repeated stupidly. “Coming where?”

“Downstairs. To see your father. He’s waiting to see you.”

“My father? Here?” She quailed and pulled back into the chair, rocking desperately. “I don’t want to see him. I can’t.”

“Mrs. Baxter says you should come on down.”

“No. Tell her I won’t come.”

“All right,” Isabel said. She went out and closed the door. Moments later the door opened, and Amy bounded in. “What do you mean you won’t come?”

“I don’t want to see him. I can’t.”

Amy came over to Holly’s rocker and knelt in front of it. “Yes, you can, Holly. You’ve got to. He wants to settle. He’s willing to make a deal, but you have to talk to him in person.”

“No. Please.”

“Come on, Holly, after all this, don’t back down now.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ve already come this far and done so damned much hard work to get here,” Amy insisted. “This is the one last thing you have to do to regain your self-respect and take control of your life. Now’s your chance to hold your father’s feet to the fire. He’s managed to get away with what he did to you all these years. Don’t let him do it again. He owes you. And you owe it to yourself.”

“Can’t Rex talk to him?”

“Rex is in California today, remember? He’ll be back tonight, in time to be in court tomorrow if he has to. It’s up to you, Holly. I know you can do it. Take a deep breath now. Relax.”

Holly nodded, then distractedly ran her fingers through her sweat-matted hair. “But I’m a mess,” she said. “I can’t see him like this. I’ve got to shower, wash my hair, put on makeup.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

“Please.”

At last Amy relented. “Alright,” she said with a smile. “Get in the shower. I’ll tell him to come back a little later.”

“You’re sure I can do it?”

Amy came over to Holly’s rocker and knelt in front of it.

“Do you remember what I told you when you first came to me for help? After we met at that meeting?”

Holly nodded. Her spoken answer was almost a recited catechism. “That I’d have to trust you, but that the only way to learn to trust others was to trust myself.”

“Think how far you’ve come since then, Holly. Think how much you’ve accomplished. Child molesters are basically cowards, and you’ve called his bluff. That’s why he’s here. That’s why he’s come to offer you a settlement. You don’t have to be scared of him anymore. The tables are turned. Now he’s scared of you.”

“That doesn’t seem possible.”

“But it is. Go get in the shower. I’ll tell him to come back in an hour.”

“Not an hour,” Holly said flatly. “That’s too soon. It makes me sound too eager. Tell him to come back at four.”

“Alright,” Amy said. “Four it is.”

Long after the door closed, Holly lingered in the chair without moving. If this was what she wanted; then this was what was supposed to happen; how come she felt so awful? If this was victory, why was she shivering and sweating at the same time? Why was the prospect of seeing her father again after all these years so terrifying?

Finally, though, after an hour or so, she managed to pull herself together enough to rise up out of the chair and head for the shower. If Amy still believed in her, maybe Holly Patterson could somehow find a way to believe in herself.

She had to. Amy had said it was the only way she was going to win. And winning was supposed to be worth it.

IN THE relative pre-lunch quiet of Bisbee’s Blue Moon Saloon, Angie Kellogg was studying her Arizona state driver’s license manual as though her very life depended on it. Studying was something she had done so seldom in her short life that it came as a surprise. Even to her.

On the run from her drug-cartel, hit-man boy friend, Angie was an ex-L.A. hooker who had landed in Bisbee two months earlier. Under circumstances that still amazed her, she had been taken under the protective wing of an unlikely trio of rescuers made up of Joanna Brady, Reverend Marianne Macula, and Bobo Jenkins, one of Bisbee’s few African Americans. As the enterprising owner/operator of the Blue Moon, he had offered Angie Kellogg her first legitimate employment.

Determined to be out of “the life,” Angie was walking the straight and narrow for the first time in her short existence. She had purposefully changed her lifestyle, but not necessarily her clothing. Her trademark skintight jeans, platform heels, and voluptuous figure continually provoked comment and notice in the post office and Safeway.

They also made her by far the best-looking relief bartender in town. Bobo, a sharp businessman with one eye on Angie’s figure and the other on the daily receipts, was quick to notice a distinct upswing in business whenever Angie Kellogg pulled a shift.

He joked that she was his most valuable employee. Since she was also his only employee, Angie didn’t take that compliment very seriously.

But in a place as small as Bisbee, where a severely limited population also limited the number of drinkers, anything that improved the bottom line of a marginally profitable business was an addition to be welcomed with open arms.

At first Angie Kellogg didn’t pay that much attention to the well-dressed man who crashed through the swinging door of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge and slouched over to the farthest booth. It was a little before eleven-thirty when he ducked into the bench seat with his back to the entrance.

Annoyed to have her quiet study time interrupted prior to the normal lunch-hour rush, Angie put down her driver’s license manual and hurried over to take his order. “What’ll you have?” she asked.

“A Bloody Mary,” he answered. “A double.”

Angie guessed the stranger might be an attorney right away, although of a far better caliber than the ones her various L.A. pimps used to bail their girls out of the slammer.

“Hot or not?” she asked.

Bobo had directed Angie to ask the question in just that way, carefully explaining that some customers liked mild Bloody Marys while others wanted the drink so fired with Tabasco sauce that they required a water chaser. When Bobo, an athletically built black man, asked that particular question, no one gave him any crap. When Angie did things usually went from bad to worse in a hurry.

The dweeb lawyer answered her with a disturbingly blank stare, and Angie braced herself for the inevitably rude comment that was bound to follow. If it was bad enough, she was fully pre pared to tell him what he could do with the piece of celery she was supposed to put in the drink to stir it.

“I beg your pardon?” he said finally. “What was it you asked me?”

“The drink,” she prodded. “How spicy? Hot or not?”

“Not very,” he said.

Angie flounced away from him, tossing her blond hair. Maybe he didn’t go to bars much. He acted like he didn’t even speak the language, like he was from a foreign country or something. But at least he hadn’t propositioned her. Bobo had made it clear that if Angie wanted to keep her part-time job as relief daytime bartender, “fraternizing with the customers,” which Angie translated to mean screwing around, was absolutely forbidden. To be honest, there weren’t that many men who looked remotely interesting to her these days, and certainly not for free. As far as that job was concerned, Angie Kellogg was permanently on vacation.

By the time she delivered the lawyer’s drink and collected his money, the first of her noontime regulars had wandered in from outside. Archie McBride and Willy Haskins were already arguing when they sauntered into the bar and settled into their usual places at the far end of the counter nearest the door. Angie brought two vodkas along with Coors draft chasers without bothering to ask. They always ordered the same thing anyway, and it was too hard waiting for them to stop yammering long enough to get a word in edgewise. The two old guys, both former underground miners, had been retired from Phelps Dodge for at least twenty years. They were relatively harmless maintenance drunks who had to keep a certain amount of liquor in their systems to keep from dipping into DTs. Their ongoing arguments never caused much trouble, although Angie always hoped the conversations would steer clear of politics or religion.

If it had been just the two of them, Angie might have tried to grab a few more minutes’ worth of study time, but they were joined by another noon time imbiber, Don Frost, who meandered in out of the Gulch and settled onto his usual barstool. Don, part of Bisbee’s arts community, was a sculptor specializing in what he called “Mixed Media Dreg Art.” Frost’s pieces consisted of hunks of discarded junk, glued and/or welded together Sometimes, on a good day, they were even painted. Although Don Frost’s work was prominently displayed in galleries around town, they seldom ever sold. He subsisted on monthly checks from some kind of trust fund that allowed him to drink and eat as long as he lived in a $150-a month apartment above an abandoned Mom-and Pop grocery store up Tombstone Canyon.

Sometimes, toward the end of the month and toward the end of that month’s money, Don Frost would come into the Blue Moon and hit up Bobo for a loan to tide him over. Bobo was always careful to ask for an accounting at the beginning of the next month.

“It’s good business,” Bobo told Angie with a sly grin, “Sure I lend him money, and he always pays me back from the next check. And that keeps it all in the family-he borrows here and drinks here too.”

Twenty-three-year-old Angie liked working as Bobos relief bartender, her first-ever nonhooking employment. It was honest work that enabled her to keep up the payments on a modest two bedroom house that had once served as company housing. It allowed her to indulge in her new found hobby of bird feeding while still maintaining most of the cash nest egg Joanna Brady had helped her finesse away from Adam York and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Most of the time Angie enjoyed her job, but some of the customers got to her-Don Frost most of all. An obnoxious loudmouth and self-appointed expert in everything, Frost freely shared with Angie his encyclopedic knowledge of mixology and was forever offering her unsolicited advice as she struggled with learning the intricacies of her new job.

Don Frost landed himself quite a catch, always hinting that there was a whole lot more money where the trust funds came from, and whatever woman was lucky enough to land him would be in for quite a ride. Since Angie was literally the “new girl in town,” Frost maintained a constant barrage of what he regarded as flirtatious banter. He had even gone so far as to bring in one of his recently completed works of art for her approval. Angie Kellogg’s taste in art was fairly unsophisticated. When Don assured her this was a five thousand dollar piece, she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to pay that much money for a chunk of painted garbage. Had Angie still been working the streets, one dose of Don Frost would have been more than enough. But here he was one of Bobo’s regulars, someone whose daily presence contributed to both paychecks and tips. So she made the best of it.

With a sigh, Angie plucked the driver’s training manual off the counter. As she slipped it into her purse and stowed it under the bar, Don noticed. “So when do you take the exam?” he asked.

“Soon,” she replied.

The stranger in the booth caught Angie’s eye and waved to her. “I’ll have another,” he called.

Angie left Don Frost sitting at the bar and went to mix the bloody Mary. “When you make up your mind,” she said over her shoulder, “let me know.”

When she came back from delivering that drink, Frost was ready to order his early-in-the-month Kahlu’a and coffee. By the end of the month, he’d be down to beer spiked with occasional shots of tequila.

“Why do you suppose Mr. Burton Kimball is out slumming?” Frost demanded morosely, nodding toward the stranger in the booth as Angie put the chipped coffee mug down in front of him.

“I’ve never known him to set foot in the Gulch.”

“Who’s Burton Kimball?”

“If Bisbee had a Mayflower, Burton Kimball’s family would have been on it. It’s his uncle’s case that’S supposed to start in Judge Moore’s court tomorrow. You’ve probably heard about it. The daughter claims her old man liked to play hide the salami with her when she was little. Now she’s hired herself a lawyer, and she’s taking his ass to court, suing him for damages.”

“Good for her,” Angie said, and hurried down the bar to bring Willy and Archie another pair of beers.

“You got something against men?” Don Frost asked, when she came back past him.

“Only ones who mess with their daughters,” she replied.

“You’re not one of those feminists, are you?”

“A what?”

“Don’t you ever listen to Rush Limbaugh?”

“Who?”

“That jerk on the radio. I don’t listen to him either,” Don Frost said, pushing his cup away “He makes me sick. Give me another.”

Angie poured herself a cup of coffee at the same time she made Don Frost’s drink. “Let me give you some advice about when you take the driving part of your test,” Frost said. “Signal for every thing. And keep checking the rearview mirror. They mark you off if you don’t check that enough. Do you know the manual forward and backward?”

Angie shook her head. “I should have spent more time studying over the weekend, but I was busy with the phone bank.”

“Fun bank?” a puzzled Archie McBride called from down the bar. Years of setting off dynamite blasts and loading ore cars underground had left Archie very hard of hearing. His twenty-six-year old hearing aid had finally given up the ghost and he refused to buy another.

“How the hell does a fun bank work?” he demanded loudly. “And where do we sign up? Right, Willy?”

The two old men collapsed against each other in gales of raucous laughter while Angie frowned and shook her head. “Phone bank,” she repeated more loudly. “For Joanna Brady. For the election.”

“Oh,” Archie said. “That’s right. The election. Isn’t that today? You voted yet?”

Everyone in the room shook their heads. For the first time in her life, Angie Kellogg had actually wanted to vote. She had even found a candidate she wanted to vote for-but she had come to town too late to register for this election.

The guy at the booth waved to her again. She went over to him, expecting him to order another drink. “Would it be possible to use the phone?” he asked.

Angie Kellogg studied the man Don Frost had called Burton Kimball. She was gratified to realize her first impression had been right. The man really was a lawyer. At first glance, she had assumed he must be better than the lawyers she had known, the ones who had plied their trade by bailing whores out of jail, their retainers paid by pimps or drug dealers. But she had been wrong. If Burton Kimball was defending a child molester, a man who screwed his own daughter, then he was no better than the lawyers she had known before. In fact maybe he was worse.

Local?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

Bobo didn’t generally allow customers to use the house phone. An Outgoing call could be made only from the phone in the back room. Angie’s first instinct was to tell this pervert-loving bastard to take a hike and go make his precious phone call from a pay phone, preferably one in the middle of a busy street.

But then another thought came to her. Hadn’t Don Frost just told her that the attorney’s big-deal trial was due in court the next day? What would happen if the attorney for the defense was too damn hung over to hold his head up? Keeping him out of court probably wasn’t realistic, Angie decided, but she could maybe make him wish he’d stayed home. Even a novice bartender was capable of inflicting that much damage.

“You can use the phone in the back room,” she told him with a beguiling smile. “The number’s on it in case someone needs to call you back. By the way, what’s your name?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer. “I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”

“Burton Kimball,” he said, but he dropped his voice as though he really didn’t relish the idea of other people hearing him.

Angie held out her hand. “I’m Angie. Glad to meet you, Burton. Welcome to the Blue Moon. Care for another drink? It’s on the house. Sort of an introductory offer.”

“Sure,” Kimball said. “As soon as I make this call.”

When he came back, the new Bloody Mary was waiting in his booth. It seemed quite a bit stronger than the previous ones, and hotter.

Angie Kellogg watched with satisfaction as Burton Kimball stirred the new drink with the stalk of celery and swilled some of it down. His eye brows shot up and down and he made a face as though he was surprised by the extra jolt of Tobasco. But instead of complaining about the extra heat or the extra booze, a triple instead of a double, he nodded his thanks.

Angie smiled in return and returned to looking after her other customers, anticipating with some pleasure the moment when, because he was so drunk, she would be justified in throwing Burton Kimball out into the street. With any kind of luck, he’d have to crawl back down Brewery Gulch on his hands and knees.

“Another?”

“Sure,” Kimball said. “As soon as I make this call.”

As HE drove home to the Rocking P, Harold Patterson found himself in a state of hopefulness that verged on euphoria. It was going to work. Holly would see him. The woman named Amy, who was Holly’s therapist or nurse or whatever, had been genuinely helpful. That was something he had never anticipated. He had built her up in his mind, expecting her to be some kind of monster. Rather than throwing him out of the house as soon as she learned who he was, Amy Baxter had been almost cordial.

He had sat nervously in Cosa Viejo’s long, box beamed living room, waiting for Amy to return from upstairs to tell him whether or not Holly would see him. When she first said Holly wouldn’t be down right away, he had been crushed. Then after learning she would see him later on in the afternoon, he was almost ecstatic.

Talking to Amy had given him some clues as to what he might expect of Holly’s current state of mind. “Don’t be surprised if she acts a little odd” Amy had said. “She has these little spells. They come and go. Sometimes she’s better, sometimes worse.”

No doubt, had the lawyer been there, had either one of the two lawyers been there, Harold was sure things would have gone in a far different fashion. He had been right to go on his own.

But now, with the prospect of finally confronting Holly, he had to break the news to Ivy as well. He had two daughters, and they were going to be neighbors on the Rocking P. if they were going to live in such close proximity then one couldn’t be privy to the terrible secret without the other knowing as well.

Harold pulled into the yard and was relieved to see Ivy’s faded red four-by-four Chevy pickup parked near the front gate. She was home. The only question now was would she listen to him? Would she give him a chance to talk?

Moving stiffly, slowly, Harold climbed out of the Scout just as the front screen door slammed open. A man named Yuri Malakov came out of the house, his arms stacked high with boxes.

“Hey,” Harold said. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”

Harold knew the man to be a newly arrived Russian immigrant and a friend of Ivy’s. Marianne Macula, the pastor up at Canyon Methodist Church, had hooked Ivy up with some kind of literacy program. For the past few weeks, the huge Russian and his stack of books had become a constant evening fixture at the Patterson kitchen table.

By day, Malakov worked as a hired hand over at the Robertson place a few miles closer to Tomb stone on Highway 80. By night, he and Ivy studied grammar and vocabulary.

Yuri stopped short when he encountered Harold standing on the porch. A few seconds later, the door opened again, and Ivy pushed her way out, a loaded suitcase in each hand.

“What are you doing?” Harold asked again. Ivy shouldered past him. “Come on, Yuri. Those boxes should go in first. There’s another stack in the kitchen that’s all ready to go. Bring them, too.” Obediently, Yuri shoved the boxes into a spot left in the back of the already loaded pickup. Then without a word to Harold, he turned and headed back into the house.

Ivy was short, stocky, and solidly built, an exact duplicate of her mother. After years of hard physical labor, of digging fence-post holes and wrestling stock, Ivy Patterson was far stronger than she looked.

She reached down and effortlessly tossed the suitcases into the bed of the truck. “Are you leaving?” Harold asked, unwilling to believe the evidence offered by his own eyes.

“You could say that,” Ivy answered. She didn’t look at him as she hurried past to retrieve the next stack of boxes Yuri was in the process of depositing on the front porch.

“But what’s happening? Where are you going?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“None of my business?” he echoed. “How can that be? I’m your father.”

“Well, pin a rose on you!” The cold bitterness in Ivy’s usually kind voice shocked Harold as much as if she had slapped his face.

“Ivy, please. I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Don’t bother. I already know. Burtie called and gave me the news.”

“He shouldn’t have done that.”

“Well, he did. And if you think I’m going to live here and share my home with that woman, you’re crazy.”

“But, Ivy, she’s your sister, and you have no idea what she’s been through. She’s had some bad luck, some really hard times.”

“Haven’t we all. Get the tarp, Yuri,” Ivy said, turning her back on her father. “I doubt it’s going to rain anymore, but we’ll lash it down just in case. That way, nothing will fly out of the truck once we hit the highway.” Together they spread the tarp over the load.

While Ivy began expertly tying it down, Harold limped over to the edge of the porch.

On either side of the top steps, framing the entrance to the porch, stood the knotted trunks of two huge wisteria vines. Harold had planted them himself when they were little more than twigs.

Those two vines had been Emily’s pride and joy, coming to the house with her when she first arrived as a bride.

He had always teased Em by telling her that those vines with their generous summer shade and sweet-smelling flowers were the best part of her dowry. In actual fact, they had been Emily Whitaker Patterson’s only dowry.

Slowly, struggling to steady his breath, Harold eased himself down against one of the trunks and looked up at the twining branches, leafless, now, and empty with the approach of winter. The twisted wood looked ancient, brittle, and felt as though a strong breeze would splinter it into a million pieces. Harold felt the same way.

“As soon as we unload this, we’ll come back for the horses. Natasha Robertson said Bimbo and Sam can stay on their place until I make other arrangements. They sure can’t stay with me at an apartment in town, and Yuri can look after them when I can’t.”

“Ivy, please listen to reason. You don’t have to leave home. It isn’t like that. You’ve got to understand.”

Handing the rest of the lashing process over to Yuri, Ivy Patterson stalked over to the bottom of the step. “What do I have to understand?”

“Why I’m doing what I’m doing. I have to talk to you. In private. I can’t say what I have to say in front of anyone else, anyone outside the family.

She eyed her father coldly. “Yuri is family,” she answered. “We’re going to be married as soon as we can make arrangements. Look.”

Ivy held up her left hand. Harold was astonished to see a ring where there had never been one before.

“Don’t you recognize it?” Ivy asked. “It’s Mother’s. The one she gave me before she died. On what little he makes, Yuri couldn’t afford to buy me a ring. It’s lucky I happened to have one.”

Harold Patterson was dumbfounded. “How can this be? How come I didn’t know anything about it?”

“Because you weren’t interested,” Ivy responded. “Because you were so wound up worrying about what was going to happen with Holly that you couldn’t see the nose on your face.”

Harold glanced at Yuri, who was standing by the truck. The Russian was looking up at them quizzically, his huge hands dangling awkwardly by his sides.

“But you haven’t known him very long, have you?” Harold objected. “How can you be……?”

“How long did you know Mother?” Ivy countered. “And I’m a lot older now than either of you were then. I’m forty years old. I’ve got a chance to grab some happiness before it’s too late, and I am by God taking it.”

“Does Burton know about this? Did you tell him anything about it?” Harold asked.

“No, I didn’t tell Burton. Why should I? This isn’t the old days, Pop. I don’t have to ask permission from every male relative before I make a decision. It’s my life. I’ve spent all these years putting other people first. Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not going to do that anymore.”

“But what about the ranch? What about the Rocking P?”

“What about it?” she raged back at him. “Have Holly come take care of it.”

“She can’t. She’s sick. She’s been sick for a long time.”

“She’s sick, all right,” Ivy retorted. “Holly’s a drug addict, Dad. Face it. She may have had talent once, but she’s burned her brain up on booze and cocaine and God knows what else.”

“A drug addict? Are you sure?”

“She’s been in and out of treatment half a dozen different times. That’s one of the reasons Burton doesn’t want you to settle with her. If it comes down to your word against hers, who’s going to believe her?”

Without answering, Harold leaned back against the wisteria trunk and closed his eyes.

“You went to see her, didn’t you?” Ivy flared “You’ve made arrangements to settle, haven’t you?”

“Not yet,” Harold murmured. “But I will. Later on today.”

“Why?”

“Because she couldn’t see me right then.”

“I don’t give a damn what time you go see her. What I want to know is why did you go at all? Burton told me what he thinks, but I want to hear it from you, from your own lips.”

Yuri moved closer to Ivy. Towering over her by nearly two feet, he put one protective hand on her shoulder. For years Harold Patterson had longed for someone to come into his younger daughter’s life, someone who would honor her and care for her the way she deserved. Yet now that Yuri had showed up on the scene, he seemed like more of an enemy than a friend.

Harold was glad the letter was still safely stashed in his box at the bank. After all those years, now that he was finally willing to share the awful secret with his two daughters, this one demanded unreasonable conditions. He couldn’t see spilling his guts after all these years with some interloping stranger hanging on every word.

Harold shook his head helplessly and didn’t answer.

Ivy shrugged off Yuri’s hand and moved closer, leaning forward until her face and her father’s were only inches apart. “Is it true, then?” she demanded. “Is that it?”

No,” he protested, holding up his arm as if deflecting a physical blow. “It’s not that at all. You got to believe me.”

“Well, I don’t. And no one else will, either, not if you settle. If you were innocent, you’d go to court to prove it. In the meantime, don’t bother splitting the ranch. Go back to Holly and tell her she can have the whole damn thing. I don’t want any part of it. Let her come back home and take care of you the way I took care of Mother if it ever comes to that. She can be the one who keeps the doors locked so you don’t wander outside without remembering to put your clothes on the way Mother did.”

“Ivy, please.”

But Ivy wouldn’t stop. “And when it gets to the point where you can’t feed yourself anymore, let your precious Holly be the one to ladle the soup into your mouth and change the filthy sheets and empty the damn bedpans. Tell her I’ve already done it once. Tell her I’ve already served my time, and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll do it again! Come on, Yuri, let’s go.”

As afternoon sunlight warmed the wet yard, a few chickens, the peacock, and two hens had ventured into the yard and were scratching for bugs in the damp dirt outside the fence. Harold sat without moving while the truck roared away, sending startled fowl squawking in every direction.

Only after the truck was entirely out of sight did he get up and wander into the house. With a staring gaze, he stood in the middle of the room and looked at the things that were missing-the things Ivy had packed to take with her-pictures, books, knickknacks that were probably every bit as much hers as they were his.

He stumbled over to the armchair in front of the fireplace where a small fire still burned on the grate. It was too bad he hadn’t brought the letter with him. He could just as well give up and burn the damned thing. The fire would have been only too happy to consume the old yellowed paper saturated with candle wax.

But giving up would have been too easy, and that wasn’t Harold’s style. Instead, he lurched to his feet and hurried through the house. In his bed room, he leaned into his age-mottled mirror and combed his sparse hair. He was old and butt sprung all right but he could still take care of his ownself. So far, anyway.

After sprinkling on a dab of Old Spice, Harold Patterson clambered into the Scout and once more headed for Cosa Viejo.

LATER ON, when Burton Kimball tried to recall the exact sequence of events, it was difficult for him to sort out that long, emotionally troubling afternoon.

What he did know for sure was that it had been right about noon when he strode into the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge, and all he could think about was Ivy, poor Ivy. What could he do to help her? What would become of her if she lost the Rocking P? Where, for instance, would Ivy go looking for a job?

Cattle ranching was all Ivy Patterson had ever known or cared to know. Working with her father on the ranch had been her whole life, but if cowboys were a dying breed, cowgirls were even more so. When Trigger, Roy Rogers’ old horse, went to the great pasture in the sky, someone had gone to the trouble of calling in a taxidermist to stuff the carcass. But whatever happened to Dale Evans’ horse? Burton wondered morosely. The way the world worked, Buttermilk probably turned into a horsehide sofa.

The bartender at the Blue Moon, a young slender blonde Burton Kimball never remembered seeing around town before, came out from behind the bar to take his order. Burton pulled himself out of the depressing morass of thought only long enough to order a Bloody Mary. As soon as the bartender walked away, he returned to his somber contemplation of Ivy Patterson’s dismal future and Holly’s treachery.

Because that’s how Burton saw it-as treachery pure and simple. Holly’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father were too much a part of current pop-psychology myth, a belief system that tended to blame everything from ingrown toenails to snoring on the convenient bogeyman of childhood abuse. The presence of Amy Baxter, a supposedly internationally recognized hypnotherapist, was designed to lend legitimacy to Holly’s claims.

But Burton Kimball wasn’t about to fall for the phony visiting-expert-therapist gambit. Amy Baxter’s professional attendance on Holly’s team didn’t impress him any more than Rex Rogers out-of-town lawyer act did. Despite Rogers’ claims to the contrary, the expected courtroom confrontation with her father had been played up as a necessary part of Holly’s recovery.

They could all claim until the cows came home that Harold Patterson was Holly’s only target, but Burton Kimball knew better. Harold’s destruction was only a means to an end. Holly’s real target was Ivy.

It had been that way from the beginning, almost from the moment Ivy was born. Long before the baby could talk or defend herself, Burton remembered Holly pinching her baby sister when she thought no one was looking just to hear Ivy cry.

When Burton had tried to tell his Aunt Emily, he had been punished for being a tattletale; for making things up.

And if Holly had hated Ivy then, now she had far more cause. After all, Ivy was still “the baby,” still the well-loved child-the easygoing, cooperative kid who never gave anyone a moment’s trouble. For someone who was a born troublemaker, whose entire family had been only too happy to see her leave home at sixteen, it had to be galling for Holly Patterson to come face-to-face with a sister who had never been thrown out of the nest; one who, at age forty, was still living happily at home.

It hardly mattered that Holly had gone off into the world, finding success in life and losing same.

As far as Burton could see, her favorite role had always been that of spoiler, of someone far more interested in destroying someone else’s happiness than in creating her own. It stood to reason that if Ivy wouldn’t leave her comfortable nest on the Rocking P, if Harold couldn’t be prevailed upon to give his daughter the necessary shove, then Holly would simply demolish it, making the ranch un tenable and useless for all concerned.

That seemingly had been her intention, and Burton Kimball’s only interest was to stop her. In attempting to do so, he had discovered the reality of what Harold Patterson only now suspected.

Holly’s much-vaunted success was nothing but a sham. Yes, she had an Oscar-at least she had won one once. But she had slipped a long way from the pinnacle. In preparing Harold’s defense, Burton had learned the truth about the extent of Holly’s drinking and drugging; about her ongoing merry-go-round of treatment and relapse.

Burton could see now that he had been wrong to withhold that information from his client, but he had done so deliberately. He knew Harold too well. The old man was all wool and a yard wide. Burton had worried that if Harold had guessed how desperate Holly was, he’d simply give away the store. And now, despite Burton’s scheming to the contrary, that’s exactly what had happened.

Burton had counted on going to court. Had banked on Harold’s not caving in to Holly’s demands; on his being able to demonstrate to the jury exactly what kind of person she was. Now the awful reality was slowly sinking into Burton’s consciousness. He had been outmaneuvered.

Without paying much attention, he downed one drink and ordered another. The problem at the moment was finding a way to regain control. Harold had made up his mind to settle, and once Harold Patterson made up his mind about something, it would be a hell of a job to change it. The biggest difficulty with someone like Harold was the fact that his word was his bond, and so was his hand shake. He’d do what he said he would do regardless of whether or not his name was on the dotted line. It was slimy bastards like Rex Rogers who never made a move until all contracts had been properly drawn, signed, and executed.

Suddenly, sitting there by himself in the booth, Burton Kimball wondered if Ivy knew she was about to be run over by a train; wondered if she had any idea what her father intended to do.

Ethically, Burton didn’t have a leg to stand on, but it wasn’t fair for her not to have some warning. Burton waved to the bartender. This time, when she approached the booth, he asked her if he could use the phone. At first, he thought she was going to turn him down, but then she relented. Directed to the phone in the back room, Burton dialed the Rocking P. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered.

Leaving the phone, a slightly tipsy Burton Kimball returned to the table, where a new Bloody Mary was waiting for him. Now that he’d decided to do it, now that he’d decided to tell Ivy, he could hardly contain himself. He gulped that drink and hardly noticed that this one was much hotter than the other two. And much stronger. When it was gone, he tried the phone once more and ordered yet another drink.

By the end of the fourth drink, Burton Kimball was well on his way to being drunk. He was also more than a little worried. He should never have told Harold he quit. That was dumb. How would he ever be able to lobby on Ivy’s behalf if he was outside the case looking in? He should probably track Uncle Harold down and unresign. Was unresign a word?

Disresign maybe? There had to be some kind of word that said what he meant, but he couldn’t think of it.

There may have been more drinks after that.

Burton seemed to remember singing show tunes with a toothless old miner at the end of the bar.

By the time he finally reached Ivy by phone, Burton could barely talk. Mumbling incoherently he blurted out the news. The dead silence on the other end of the line sobered him instantly.

“Ivy,” he said, when the silence persisted. “Say something. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. But she didn’t sound fine. “Do you want me to come out? Can I do something to help?”

“You’ve done enough,” she said.

When he put down the phone, a subdued and surprisingly sober Burton Kimball paid his bill.

The bartender had been very nice, so he left her a sizable tip. Unfortunately, as soon as he stepped outside, as soon as the bright sunlight hit him, he was drunk again.

Staggering, Burton managed to make it down the street without seeing anyone who knew him.

He found his car and succeeded in inserting the key in the lock on the fifth try. Settling in the seat with his head against the backrest and telling himself that all he needed was a little nap, Burton Kimball passed out cold.

For a fleeting moment, when he first awakened in the shadowy gloom, Harold thought it was all a dream-the same one he always had, the terrible nightmare that had haunted his sleep and hounded him out of bed for more years than he cared to remember.

The dream was forever the same. Harold would find himself trapped in a glory hole, in one of those useless, abandoned exploratory shafts that covered the stony pastures of the Rocking P. And took place in the very same glory hole that was one, the one nearest the summit of the Muleuntairs, high up among the red rock bound, scrub-oak-dotted cliffs called Juniper flats.

In his sleep, Harold’s nightmare prison was just like this real one, measuring eight feet in diameter by thirty feet deep. Uneven slide-prone sides rose in an almost perpendicular fashion from a dank, ram puddled floor to the rounded lip at the top, left by a pile of excavated tailings. Rocks and other things-foul things he didn’t want to think about-littered the floor and made footing uncertain.

In real life, a sturdy barbed-wire fence surrounded the tailings mound and separated it and others like it from the Rocking P’s pasture land.

The fence served as a lifesaving deterrent to thirsty desert-dwelling livestock that might otherwise be drawn to their deaths by the luring smell of water.

In Harold’s dream, the fence never did any good, because it never kept him from falling in and being trapped.

Each time the nightmare opened, Harold would find himself on his hands and knees, his desperate fingers groping and clawing along the steep wall, searching for some hold, some purchase, that would allow him to scramble up and out of his rocky cage, But each movement, each tentative touch, would jar loose stones and pebbles that would rain back down on his body, sending dirt and gravel spewing into his watering eyes and mewling mouth, battering him into the ground like some shamed biblical harlot.

In his terror, he always cried out to Emily “Help me, Em. Please help.”

Of course, Emily never answered his panic stricken cries, and why would she? She’d been dead for five years now and had been out of reach for many years before that. Emily Patterson was long dead but not forgotten.

On this day, though, once his brain cleared, Harold realized this waking nightmare was no dream.

Instead of sopped, sweat-drenched bedsheets beneath him, when he came to himself, there were rocks-real rock that were all too cold and sharp, especially the one that was biting painfully into his shoulder. This time he really was trapped in the dank depths of that very same glory hole, the one he had always avoided whenever possible.

He lay flat on his back and tried squinting up through the darkness at the distant blue far above him. That had to be sky, although he couldn’t really tell for sure, couldn’t actually see it. His glasses had somehow disappeared in what must have been a fall, although Harold couldn’t remember it. Without his trusty spectacles, Harold Patterson was as good as blind.

Blind, he thought grimly, but maybe not helpless. He tried to shift his weight then, to dislodge whatever it was that was digging into his shoulder. But even that slight motion was too much. A crushing wave of pain washed over him-a pain so intense that it flattened him, robbed him of breath, and rolled his eyes back into his head.

Ribs, he thought to himself when he struggled back to wavering consciousness. Shattered ribs. No telling what damage they might do if he tried to move again, if they poked into something vital, a lung perhaps, or maybe even his wildly pounding heart.

So he lay still and tried to think, tried to imagine what he could do to save himself. The glory hole that had for years tormented his sleep was miles from the house, so there was no point in calling out for help. No one would hear him. Unless someone came out there deliberately. Unless they came looking for him.

He tried then to remember how it was that he had come to be near the glory hole in the first place. Had he been out doing chores? Feeding cattle? Working fences? Try as he might, he couldn’t corral his memory into any kind of order. What ever had happened earlier in the day, before he fell into the hole, remained a total mystery, as did the days immediately preceding that. It was as though his memory of the last few days prior to this terrible awakening had been wiped out of existence.

Had he told anyone he’d be working this part of the ranch? Would anyone have an idea of where to start looking once he turned up missing? If he couldn’t remember how or why he had come to be there, would anyone else? Would Ivy realize he was hurt and institute a search, or would she simply shrug her shoulders and forget it, annoyed that her father was once again late for dinner?

At first, shock helped deaden the pain, but as that natural analgesia disappeared, increasing clarity brought with it excruciating agony. Even lying perfectly still, the shattered ribs still stabbed and poked at him with each ragged breath. He was aware of shards of splintered bone pressing and piercing where no bone should have been.

In addition to the pain, he grew increasingly aware of a familiar but fetid smell. It was some time before recognition crystallized in his brain.

The appalling stench - a combination of human excrement and urin - belonged to him. Both bowel and bladder must have let go at once. He had no control whatsoever.

Harold Lamm Patterson was an experienced stockman who understood the meaning of such things. If he was lying in a pool of his own bodily filth and waste with no muscle control and no sensory awareness from the bottom of his fractured ribs down, that meant his back was broken. It meant he was going to die.

That realization was too much for him. Merci fully, he again lost consciousness. For the time being, his physical pain eased, but not the mental torment, for soon the dream came again-the dream this time somehow layered in with nightmarish reality. The part of him that recognized it as a dream welcomed it, even though it was more vivid, more terrifying, than ever before.

The scene had barely opened-he was still crawling around, looking for a way out-when the rocks began to fall in a horrifyingly accurate barrage. At first, only small pebbles rained down on him, but the sizes of the rocks grew steadily larger and their weights heavier. He tried dodging out of the way, but he couldn’t. There was no place to hide. No place to get away.

“Em, help me. Please… please.”

IT TURNED out to be one of the longest days of Joanna Brady’s existence. Once Harold Patterson left her office, the morning seemed to drag. At lunchtime, she drove from Warren up to Old Bisbee for a celebratory, end-of-campaign lunch with Jeff Daniels and Marianne Macula.

Jeff-a full-time, stay-at-home, minister’s husband-had planned the event, weeks earlier-win, lose, or draw. With the election over, Jeff hoped life with his pastor turned campaign manager wife would return to some semblance of normalcy. Their usually neat parsonage had deteriorated to a shambles while Marianne masterminded the whole campaign and Jeff handled the mass mailings out of the room that usually served as Marianne’s study.

It was a great lunch, complete with an appropriate set of toasts.

Later in the afternoon, how ever, the effects of the champagne kicked in, and it was all Joanna could do to keep from falling asleep at her desk. As much as she hated the prospect of going to a beauty salon, she was grateful when it was time to abandon the office in favor of Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty.

Helene’s looked exactly like what it was - an ill disguised two-car garage that had been hammered-and-longed into a beauty shop by virtue of some very creative do-it-yourself plumbing and electrical work provided by Helen Barco’s retired handyman husband.

When Joanna sat down in the chair, Helen Barco took one look at her, shook her head, clicked her tongue sadly, and said, “Oh my, no. This will never do. Your mother tells me you’re going to be on the TV news tonight. We don’t want one of our girls looking like something the cat dragged in, now do we?”

“We certainly don’t!” And an hour and a half later, Joanna didn’t.

The remodel job on the building might have been amateurish, but the finished-product Joanna Brady who walked out the door of Helene’s at five-thirty that afternoon was strictly professional classic make-over. Her red hair had been cropped off in a short but stylish cut. Her makeup had been professionally applied. Lipstick and un accustomed nail polish matched perfectly. She’d have to remember to use the lip-liner Helen had insisted she take.

“Good luck,” Helen Barco said as Joanna headed out the door. “I hope you win. Eleanor’s very proud of you, you know.”

The fact that Eleanor Lathrop might be proud of her for any reason at all was a notion Joanna found somewhat foreign. It didn’t seem the least bit likely. In her whole life, she could count on one hand the other rare instances when Eleanor had been proud of her or had come out and said so.

Joanna sat in her Eagle, leaned back against the headrest, and closed her eyes. Her neighbor, Clayton Rhodes, was still handling the evening chores, so there was no need for her to rush home. It was a good thing, too. Working round the clock, she had driven herself to the very edge of exhaustion.

Cochise County measured eighty-five miles by eighty-five miles. In fighting to win the election, Joanna had covered damned near every inch of it. She had worked on the campaign tirelessly and with every ounce of her being. Yet even now, this close to the end, she still didn’t know if she wanted to win. That was crazy, especially now when there was nothing to do but wait. The polls would close at six-in twenty-five more minutes. After that, it was simply a matter of time, of letting the election officials count the ballots and eventually certify a winner-whoever that might be.

Sometime later, Jim Bob Brady’s knuckles rapped sharply against the window beside her head, jarring Joanna awake. Embarrassed, she sat up straight, pulled her coat around her, and rolled down the window.

“I just wanted to sit here and think for a while, she said. “I must have dozed off.”

“You coulda fooled me,” her father-in-law returned, standing with both hands on the window sill. “You were dead to the world, snoring so loud, it’s a wonder the glass didn’t break. And sitting out here in the chill like this, you’re liable to catch your death of cold.”

Obligingly, Joanna reached over and switched on the engine, but the air that blew through the heater seemed colder than that outside the car.

What time is it?” she asked.

Half-past six. Dinner’s on the table and getting cold. That mother of yours is tearing her hair out.”

“And so they sent you out looking for me. Sorry to cause so much trouble. Let’s go then,” Joanna said, but Jim Bob Brady refused to budge.

You’re still not sleeping so good, are you?” he said accusingly.

Joanna yawned and stretched. She was stiff with cold. “Only when I’m not supposed to,” she returned with a disparaging smile. “I have a hard time closing my eyes and keeping them shut when I m in bed at night, but I’ve spent a whole hour sitting out here in a freezing car, sleeping like a baby. Helen Barco’s neighbors must think I’ve lost my mind.”

“Helen Barco’s neighbors are too damn nosy,” Jim Bob Brady muttered under his breath, finally letting loose of the window and returning to his own vehicle.

Eleanor Lathrop met them at the front door of the Bradys’ duplex apartment on Oliver Circle.

“Where in the world have you been?” she demanded. “I tried calling Helen, but she was already closed. All I got was her answering machine.”

“I’m sorry,” Joanna said. “I fell asleep. In the car.”

“In the car!” Eleanor echoed. “In this weather? And with dinner already on the table!”

Eva Lou Brady brushed aside the controversy. “Don’t worry about it, Eleanor. No harm’s done. Go wash up, Joanna. And see if you can drag Jenny away from that TV set long enough to come eat. It won’t take but a minute to warm all this back up in the microwave.”

The dinner was vintage Eva Lou Brady, what her husband called “old-fashioned comfort food”-meat loaf, mashed potatoes, canned-from the-garden green beans, cherry Jell-o with bananas, and homemade pumpkin pie for dessert. Jim Bob and Eva Lou were still dealing with Andy’s death. Still grieving over their lost son but helping with Joanna’s survival seemed to give purpose to the elder Bradys’ lives. Joanna was only too grateful for their unwavering support.

Her own mother was another matter entirely.

While Eleanor sniffed disdainfully and picked at her food, Joanna ate with far more relish than she would have thought possible. Eating food Eleanor disapproved of was one way of continuing the Lathrop family mother/daughter grudge match that had been years in the making. Although hostilities between them boasted occasional periods of relative truce, none of those had ever blossomed into a lasting peace.

“I thought you were going to wear your winter gray,” Eleanor said, holding tight to her fork while a piece of Jell-O quivered delicately on the tines.

“It had a spot on it,” Joanna lied. She turned to her father-in-law. “Any word on the turnout?” she asked, daring at last to make some direct reference to the election.

“Better’n anybody figured,” he replied. “It’s turned into a real horse race.”

Jennifer made a face. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

Why don’t you want to talk about the election, Jenn honey?” Eva Brady asked mildly. “Don’t you want your mama to win?”

“No!” And there it was. The dining room grew quiet while Jennifer’s blurted answer hung in the air like a dispirited balloon.

“That can’t be true, Jenny,” Jim Bob Brady said.

“Of course you want her to win. She’s doing it for all of us-because we need her. She’s doing it for you.”

Jennifer’s eyes flashed with defiance. “She is not She’s doing it for her.”

With that, Jennifer flung her crushed paper nap kin into her plate, shoved her chair into the wall behind her, and crashed from the table. “What in the world was that all about?” Eleanor Lathrop demanded. “Whatever’s gotten into her?”

Joanna carefully folded her own napkin. “I’d better go talk to her,” she said.

Jennifer had slammed the bedroom door shut behind her. Joanna knocked and waited.

“Come in,” Jenny said finally, reluctantly.

Her grandparents had furnished the extra bed room with Jenny specifically in mind, making it a home-away-from-home; a place where she was always welcome. A serviceable secondhand day bed sat in one corner of the room. The coverlet - a homemade quilt - was strewn with a collection of matching pillows. Jennifer lay on the bed sobbing, her head buried beneath the body of a huge brown teddy bear.

Joanna stood in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, unsure whether or not she should enter the room. A yawning, treacherous gulf seemed to lie between her and her daughter. Had there been a time like this for her own mother? Joanna wondered. A time when Eleanor had stood frozen in a doorway wondering helplessly how to comfort her own grieving child?

Joanna noticed a shadow on the floor of the room. It looked like a tightrope stretching between the doorway and the bed, between her and her despairing, sobbing child.

Joanna’s heart caught in her throat. What would happen if she made the wrong decision? What if she somehow failed to successfully negotiate the distance between them? Would Joanna be destroying whatever relationship had once existed between herself and her daughter? Was history bound to repeat itself?

“Could I talk to you, please?” Joanna asked.

Jenny pulled the teddy bear more tightly over her head and didn’t answer.

She mued softly. “I need to know why you don’t want me to win.”

Jenny rolled over, flinging the teddy bear aside allowing her mother a glimpse of her tear-stained desolate face. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.”

Joanna resisted the temptation to close the distance between them.

This was a turning point. She needed to hear Jennifer’s answer, needed to listen to what the child had to say without smothering her in a word-strangling embrace.

“What are you afraid of?” Joanna asked.

Jennifer’s chin quivered. “That you’ll die, too,” she whispered. “That somebody will kill you, too, Just like they did Daddy. If that happens, I’ll be all alone.”

That was it. The answer when it came was so blindingly simple, so logical, that it took Joanna’s breath away. Of course! Why hadn’t she seen it coming? If she had been a better mother, a more perceptive parent, maybe she would have.

“Just because I’m elected sheriff doesn’t mean someone’s going to try to kill me.”

“But Sheriff McFadden got killed,” Jennifer returned with unwavering childish logic. “And Daddy. And Grampa.”

“Grandpa Lathrop died because he was changing a tire in traffic-because he was helping someone not because he was sheriff,” Joanna pointed out.

But even as she said the words, Joanna knew they weren’t the right ones. They didn’t address Jennifer Brady’s very real concern; didn’t do justice to her heartfelt worry. D. H. Lathrop had died by legitimately accidental means-if drunk drivers can ever be considered truly accidental. But the other two hadn’t.

Walter McFadden and Andrew Brady had both died violent deaths as soldiers in the ongoing war fare between good and evil, between wrong and right. And Jenny wasn’t mistaken in her concern.

Winning the election would put Joanna Brady directly on the front lines of that exact same conflict. As though negotiating a minefield, Joanna walked carefully to the side of the bed and settled on the edge of it with her hands folded in her lap. Still she made no attempt to touch her daughter.

“Sometimes you have to take a stand,” she said softly.

“What do you mean?”

“Your dad saw what terrible things drugs and drug dealers were doing to the people around him. He decided he had to try to stop it and…”

“And they killed him,” Jenny finished.

The room grew quiet. From the dining room came the hushed murmur of muted conversation.

“Everyone must die sometime, Jenny,” Joanna said at last. “Grandpa and Grandma Brady. Grandma Lathrop. You. Me.”

“But Grandma and Grandpa are old,” Jennifer objected. “Daddy wasn’t.” Again the room grew still as Joanna struggled to find the right words. “Do you remember the night of Daddy’s funeral?” Jennifer nodded wordlessly.

“We made a decision that night, the two of us together, a decision for me to run in your father’s place, right?”

“Yes.”

“And when we said it, people believed we meant it, your grandparents, Jeff and Marianne, and lots of other people, too. They’ve all worked hard to see that what we said that night comes true.”

“But…”

“No. Wait a minute. Let me finish. You’re not the only one who’s scared, Jenny. That’s the reason I was late coming to dinner. While I was sitting outside Helen Barco’s shop and worrying about whether or not I wanted to win the election, I fell asleep.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “You’re worried, too?”

Joanna nodded. “And for the same reasons you are. If I win, what happens then? Maybe you’re right. Maybe the bad people who came after Daddy will come after me as well. But I promised to run for sheriff. Promising to run means that if you win, you’re also promising to do the job. Even if you’re scared to death.”

Jennifer moved slightly on the bed, cuddling closer, putting her head in her mother’s lap. “I don’t want to be alone,” she whispered, grasping her mother’s hand, squeezing it tight.

Joanna felt hot tears well in her eyes. “I know,” she said. “I don’t want you to be, either. I’ll try to be careful.”

“Promise?”

Not letting go with one hand, Joanna used the other to brush a strand of damp hair off Jennifer’s still tear-stained cheeks. Unable to speak, she nodded.

“Girl Scout’s honor?” Jennifer pressed.

“Girl Scout’s honor,” her mother whispered in return, while Helen Barco’s mascara streamed un noticed down her face.

ONCE MORE Harold awakened, caught in a disorienting spin-the turbulence between real and dream, between known and unknown. He had no sense of how much time had passed, but the sky far overhead was dark now. Blackness surrounded him like some all-enveloping, evil shroud.

Harold was so desperately cold that he wondered for a moment if maybe he was already dead, already put away in that cut-rate casket he had taken off Norm Higgins’ hands. Eventually though, he sorted it out-remembered where he was if not how he’d come to be there. Remembered that his body was broken; that he was trapped and unable to move.

Harold was lying there trying to think of a way to escape his prison when he heard the familiar wheeze and throb of his old Scout’s much overhauled engine. He heard it laboring up the steep dirt track toward the basin, toward the glory hole. It must be Ivy, he thought at once. Had to be Ivy, come to search for him. Who else would bother? And who else would know to come here. Sudden tears filled his eyes-not tears of selfpity but tears for his daughter, for Ivy. What would happen to her now? After taking care of her mother all those years, would she have to spend the next ones taking care of him as well?

He wished suddenly, fervently, that he had died in the fall. He upbraided himself for not trying harder to die. He should have concentrated on that rather than on trying to find some way out.

Now, with Ivy approaching ever nearer, Harold was filled with a desperate need to escape his broken body quickly-to do it now, before Ivy found him. Before she had a chance to call for help. Before she could turn him over to the care of doctors who would try valiantly to patch the shattered pieces back together.

He already knew that wouldn’t work. Broken backs didn’t magically heal themselves. Once the doctors finished screwing around with their casts and braces and astronomical bills, Ivy Patterson’s worst nightmare would materialize and she would be handed yet another cripple to care for.

if Ivy calls to me, Harold thought wildly, I won’t answer. I’ll pretend I’m already dead.

Maybe she’ll go away and leave me alone. Over night, he would simply will himself to die. He had seen his own father do it after he was hurt in the mining accident. He knew it was possible. And the cold would help.

But even as Harold toyed with the idea, the Scout’s engine grumbled closer, climbing steadily, grinding up over the final incline. As the Scout came closer, a flash of light splashed across the small pile of wood-chip-sized rock that made up the mound of tailings around the mouth of the glory hole. Almost directly overhead, the engine coughed once and backfired as the ignition was switched off. Harold heard the driver’s door creak open on familiar rusty hinges; heard leather shoe soles scrape across loose shale, pausing long enough to climb over or through the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the glory hole. Then there was another sound of something heavy, cardboard perhaps, scraping along the ground.

Harold pressed his lips together, and forced himself to keep quiet. He was determined not to answer, no matter what. He waited for Ivy to speak to him and was surprised when she didn’t.

Instead, a flashlight switched on. A powerful beam of yellow light slid down the darkened walls of the shaft, searching here and there, to the right -;and then the left, before finally settling on his body. Still nothing was said, nothing at all.

He was tempted to speak then, but abruptly the light switched off. In the sudden jet-black darkness, everything was still until the first five-pound river rock plunged toward Harold with accidental, —but still deadly, accuracy.

Long before it hit him, he heard it bouncing off the walls and knew what it was. And in that split second, he remembered everything. But by then it was much too late.

The rock hit him full on the chest, sending a long splinter of broken rib deep into his heart. Harold Patterson died instantly, died in exactly the nightmarish way he had always dreamed he would, with the rocks of retribution raining down around him.

The barrage continued uninterrupted for some time as the rocks plunged through the darkness.

Some of them hit him. Most didn’t, careening -harmlessly off the walls of the shaft. At last, when all the ammunition was gone, the flashlight came back on. This time, the hand that held it trembled violently, and the wavering beam jerked crazily as it zigzagged down the rocky walls, panning through the darkness in search of a body.

When the light finally settled on Harold’s inert - body, on his open and unblinking eyes, there was a single, sharp intake of breath, a sigh of relief.

And then the flashlight fell, plunging-still lit through the eerie, enveloping silence. It slammed into Harold’s shattered chest, bounced once, then rolled off into the water.

Soon after that, the Scout’s engine choked and coughed back to life. It shuddered once, then caught and kept on running. As the International rumbled away toward Juniper Flats and Bisbee beyond that, the flashlight one of Harold’s best, continued to cast a flickering light that lingered in the darkness of the glory hole. Even totally submerged, it still glowed through the murky - water, long after the Scout had disappeared into the overcast night.

JIM BOB and Eva Lou Brady weren’t exactly social butterflies. It took some serious persuasion to convince them that they should attend the post-election party at all. They agreed, finally, only on the condition that Jenny ride with them. Joanna suspected it was a ploy giving them a convenient excuse to leave early, pleading the necessity of getting Jenny home and in bed because of school the next day.

Jenny opted to ride with the Bradys. Eleanor Lathrop went with friends. That meant Joanna Brady drove to the post-election party at the convention center alone.

Brave words to Jenny notwithstanding, Joanna was filled with grave misgivings as she made her way uptown. In her only previous attempt at elected office, she had run for student-body treasurer of Bisbee High School. She still remembered sitting in Miss Applewhite’s biology room (which doubled as Joanna’s homeroom) while Mr. Bailes the principal, read the winners’ names over the intercom. With the sharp smell of formaldehyde filling her nostrils, she had listened intently, holding her breath the whole while, as he droned through the congratulatory list.

After what seemed forever, when he finally reached the position of treasurer, the name he read wasn’t Joanna Lathrop’s.

Joanna no longer remembered which of her classmates actually did win. Someone else’s victory wasn’t nearly as important as her own personal loss. The memory of that defeat came to her as clearly and painfully now as if it had happened yesterday.

She remembered how her face had flushed hot with embarrassment, how she had fought back tears of disappointment while well-meaning class mates told her, sympathetically, “better luck next time.”

There’ll never be a next time, Joanna had vowed back then. It turned out she was wrong about that.

Here she was, twelve years later, running for office after all.

“Whatever you do, don’t cry,” she lectured her self sternly, repeating words Marianne had been uttering for weeks. “Win, lose, or draw not to cry.”

There were two readily available parking spaces directly across the street from the convention center entrance, but Joanna ignored them both.

Instead, she drove farther up the street, parking at the upper end of the lot near the post office. She locked the car and started toward the plaza, where she counted three different vans bearing the logos of Tucson television stations, as well as one more from a station in Phoenix.

Cochise County elections didn’t usually garner that much interest from out of town, but this year’s race for sheriff was different. The earlier deaths of both declared candidates had spurred uncommon statewide and national media attention. The fact that Joanna was both a candidate and the widow of one of the slain men had contributed to keeping the hotly contested election in the human-interest spotlight. Not only that, but pundits continued to dwell on the idea that if Joanna Brady won, she would be the first female county sheriff in the state of Arizona.

Rather than go directly to the convention center and into the glaring lights of the waiting cameras, Joanna delayed her entrance by crossing the street and approaching the building with the wary attention of a battle-weary scout reconnoitering enemy territory. Stopping in the park, she gazed at the pale green building that appeared a ghostly gray in the evening light.

And truly, the convention center was a ghost. The structure that now functioned as the Bisbee Convention Center had once housed Phelps Dodge Mercantile branch of the company store in the days before most of the jobs in the domestic copper-mining industry literally went south-to Mexico and South America.

In their heyday, P.D. stores in a dozen separate mining communities had been true department stores-places where, by signing a chit, company employees could purchase everything from groceries to furniture, from washing machines to ladies fine millinery, and have the cost automatically deducted from future paychecks.

Joanna didn’t actually remember shopping in this particular store, although she must have accompanied her mother there on occasion when she was little. She did have a dim, lingering recollection of being lost on a store elevator once, of searching frantically for her mother, and of being found much later among the glass-walled showcases. Eleanor had been furious with Joanna for wandering away on her own. In the very best of times, Bisbee had boasted a grand total of only three elevators, so the chances were good that Joanna’s vaguely remembered incident had actually occurred in the uptown P.D. store, especially since that had been Eleanor’s favorite place to shop. Before the relatively upscale P.D. closed for good, Eleanor Lathrop wouldn’t have been caught dead shopping at a J.C. Penney.

Since the store had been closed now for twenty some years, Joanna’s knowledge of the building’s faded merchandizing glory came to her primarily secondhand, through her mother’s steady harping back to the once-glorious good old days. Back then the P.D. store in Bisbee had been the place to shop.

In its heyday the store had offered so much, much more than its withered successor humdrum, lowly grocery store that still clung stubbornly to life a few miles away in the Warren business district.

With modest renovation, the building’s interior main floor had been redesigned into a meeting hall configuration. The Bisbee Convention Center hosted each year’s flurry of summer high-school reunions as well as other events. An echo of the store’s retailing glory remained in the thin inner shell of shops that lined the edge of the marbled main floor. There, enterprising merchants hawked turquoise jewelry, curios, and knickknacks to any stray tourists who happened to wander inside. A modestly upscale restaurant occupied one corner of the building and usually catered whatever required catering.

Joanna Brady knew almost all those individual merchants on a first-name basis and had played on the tennis team with the woman who owned and operated the restaurant. All things considered, the Bisbee Convention Center should not have been a scary place for her, yet tonight it was. Impossibly so. Standing outside in the cold, watching others arrive and hurry inside, was far preferable to going inside herself.

“I see you’re not all that eager to go inside, there,” a familiar male voice teased from behind her.

Joanna turned to greet Frank Montoya, the Will cox city marshal, who was one of her two opponents in the race for sheriff. During a series of joint-candidate appearances in front of local civic groups, Joanna had come to like Frank-a tall, scrawny, crew-cut Mexican-American of thirty five. Frank’s ready wit and screwball sense of humor camouflaged real dedication to his work and a serious sense of purpose.

Frank Montoya was the son of once-migrant farmworkers who had, years before, settled in Wilcox on a permanent basis. He came to law enforcement through a hitch in the army as an MP and with an associate of arts degree in police science from Cochise College. In an area of the country where Mexican-Americans were still often deemed second-class citizens, voters in Wilcox had surprised themselves and Frank, too, by electing him to serve as city marshal while he continued to commute back and forth to the university in Tucson to earn his B.A. in law enforcement.

“Hi, Frank,” Joanna returned lightly. “You’re right. I’m not looking forward to it. I’d much rather have a root canal.”

“Me, too,” Montoya agreed with a laugh. “The Big Guy showed up a few minutes ago. I watched him go inside. He was in seventh heaven with a television camera following his every move and with two microphones stuck in his face. It makes it easier for him to talk out of both sides of his mouth.”

Joanna couldn’t help laughing.

Al Freeman, the heavyset former chief of police in Sierra Vista, was the third candidate in the three way race for sheriff. In campaign appearances and brochures, Freeman had self-importantly characterized himself as the “only law-enforcement professional” running for the office of sheriff. That tactic had effectively thrown Joanna and Frank Montoya together in an uneasy alliance, which, to their mutual wonder, had blossomed into an un likely friendship.

With a lessening of tension, Joanna grinned back at Frank. “I don’t know what’s been worse, limping around with doorbelling blisters on both feet or having to sit through Al Freeman’s endless red neck-and-proud-of-it speeches.”

“No question in my book,” Frank Montoya said, “Al Freeman’s speeches win that contest hands down.”

They both laughed then, in unison. Frank held out his hand and smiled. “So may the best token win, Joanna,” he said solemnly. “I hope to hell one of us beats the pants off that loudmouthed bastard.” They shook hands. “By the way,” Frank added, “I like the haircut. Your mother’s doing?”

“How did you know?”

“Take one guess,” Frank said, running one hand over his own freshly trimmed hair. “Joanna, our mothers may be from opposite sides of the

THE USUALLY mild-mannered and easygoing Linda Kimball was on a tear. The Election Night bash in Bisbee’s new convention center, a bipartisan effort where political enemies buried the hatchet and socialized, was also the primary fund-raiser for a prominent local arts group called the Bisbee Betterment Society.

As one of the movers and shakers behind the annual event, Linda was required to play hostess.

Armed with a glass of plain fruit punch and an ironclad smile, she was doing her duty, but she was also looking for her husband. With some real fire in her eyes.

Three hours after he should have been home and two hours after they were due at the convention center, Burton still hadn’t showed up or even called. Normally, that wouldn’t have bothered her.

Linda understood that the unexpected often happened in Burton’s work life, especially the day be fore he was due in court with an important case.

And if he had been working, she wouldn’t have minded or said a word. After all, Burton’s job was what made their comfortable lifestyle possible.

They lived a far more affluent existence than Linda had ever dreamed possible growing up in Cotton wood as the daughter of a school-cafeteria worker and a none-too-successful used-car salesman.

Burtie’s tardiness had nothing to do with work.

That was the problem. Linda already knew from several different sources that it had more to do with booze than the practice of law. Word had come back to Linda that Burton had spent a good part of the afternoon in the Blue Moon Saloon up Brewery Gulch. Of all places! If Burtie was going to go drinking, couldn’t he at least do it someplace a little more respectable?

One of Linda’s “friends” could barely contain her glee when she called with the news, which she had heard from someone else who’d heard it from a friend of Don Frost, who was a classic lush if ever there was one. To add insult to injury, not only had Burton been drinking in the bar, every body in town evidently knew it.

The last time Burton Kimball had gotten himself really plastered was at his own bachelor’s party twelve years earlier. He was still green around the gills by the time the wedding party got to the church the next afternoon. Linda Kimball had a whole wedding album of pictures as documented evidence to prove it. She had told Burtie then and there that if he wanted to be married and stay married, he’d better knock off the drinking. And he had. Until now.

Without Burton at the party to offer his technical assistance, Linda herself had been forced to over see the placement of Harvey Dawson’s repaired television monitors, which would broadcast both local and statewide election results. Statewide results would come from Tucson stations, while local ones would be displayed on Bisbee’s public-access channel. There typed messages listing local election results would be mixed in with civic and commercial announcements.

Linda had noodled her way through the television monitor confusion only to find herself caught in the middle of a last-minute run-in between Bisbees two competing caterers. On this one night, they were forced to work together. And when a turf war broke out, Linda settled it. But as the evening wore on, as she was forced to handle one crisis after another, Linda’s temper rose and Burton Kimball’s rapidly tumbling husbandly stock fell that much further.

As Bisbee parties went, the Bisbee Betterment Society Election Night bash was not to be missed.

Even early on, the center’s main-floor meeting room was brightly lit and smoky. A local country western band twanged away plaintively in the background. Busy circulating, Linda was near the door when Joanna Brady and Frank Montoya came in together. When Frank wasn’t looking, Linda gave Joanna a discreet high sign.

Linda had grown up with a father addicted to Angie Dickinson’s Police Woman. Linda Kimball who baked her own bread, canned her own vegetables, and sewed her own clothes would have been the last person to think of herself as one of those “women’s libbers.” Still, it had done her heart good to vote for a woman for Sheriff for a change, especially over that loudmouthed bigot named Al Freeman.

Linda started over to say hello, but Joanna was intercepted by one of the Tucson television reporters who was stationed just inside the main entrance. The reporter squeezed herself in between the two candidates, cutting Frank out of the picture and shoving a microphone in Joanna’s direction.

“Mrs. Brady, are you excited about the possibility of becoming Arizona’s first female sheriff?” she asked.

Linda thought she detected a hint of annoyance in Joanna’s voice as she answered. “Being a female has nothing to do with it. Law enforcement is the only real issue here.”

“I see,” the reporter returned. “What about the campaign? Has it been difficult for you?”

Linda cringed inwardly at the crassness of the question. Everyone in town knew how devastated Joanna Brady had been over the death of her husband. Was this reporter some kind of idiot? Had she asked Linda Kimball that same question under similar circumstances, she could have expected to have her teeth rattled by someone shaking her by the fully padded shoulders of her fashionable wool blazer.

Joanna paused, as if gathering her resources.

“Election campaigns are always difficult,” she returned evenly. “Regardless of who wins, I’ll be happy to have the election out of the way.”

Linda wanted to cheer, “Good for you!” but she didn’t.

“If you win tonight,” the reporter continued, “when will you start work?”

“what do you mean, when will I start? Newly elected officials are all sworn into office early in January.”

The reporter looked puzzled. “But I thought…”

“You thought what?”

“I was speaking to Mr. Freeman just a few minutes ago. He said that someone on the board of supervisors had told him they want to fill the Sheriffs vacancy immediately-right after the election, without waiting until January.”

A deep red flush stole up Joanna Brady’s face.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she returned coldly.

Behind Joanna the door opened, and Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady came in with their grand daughter walking stoically between them.

“Isn’t that your daughter?” the reporter asked, catching sight of them. “She’s such a cute little thing. I wanted the camera to get a shot of the two of you together.”

“You’ll have to ask Jenny whether or not she wants to be on TV. It’s up to her.”

The reporter turned questioningly to Jenny, who shook her head emphatically. “That’s that then,” Joanna said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…

As Joanna hurried past, Linda Kimball reached out and shook her hand. “Congratulations, Joanna. Good job,” she said.

Linda could have been talking about just the election, but she actually meant far more than that.

In that brief exchange with the reporter, she had caught a glimpse of Joanna Brady’s basic honesty and toughness.

Those were qualities Linda Kimball should have recognized. She had them in abundance herself. Still steamed by her encounter with the reporter, Joanna took Jenny with her and set off across the room to where she had caught sight of Milo Davis standing visiting with Jeff Daniels and his wife, Reverend Marianne Macula.

“So,” Jeff was saying to Milo, “we actually took back the study today. Cleaned out all the mass mailing stuff, unburied Marianne’s desk…”

“I even vacuumed,” Marianne chirped proudly.

“You vacuumed?” Joanna teased, coming in on the tail end of the conversation. “I don’t believe it. That only happens once in a blue moon, doesn’t it, Jeff?” she asked.

“Mark your calendars then,” he said, “because she did it, and we’re not just talking her study either. She vacuumed the whole house.”

Marianne smiled good-naturedly at the ribbing, “Just don’t expect it all the time. It’s decompression. With all the campaign work over, I needed something to do with my hands.”

Jenny naturally gravitated toward Jeff, who took her by the hand and led her toward the refreshment table.

Meanwhile, Marianne examined Joanna’s face. “What’s the matter? You look upset.”

Joanna glanced back over her shoulder toward the reporter, who was still stationed by the door, “That reporter just told me that, according to Al Freeman, the board of supervisors wants to swear in the new sheriff right away. Is that possible?”

Milo, juggling a glass of wine and a plate of hors d’oeuvres, munched thoughtfully on a carrot stick. “Are you just now hearing about that?”

Marianne frowned. “That creep,” she said. As far as Al Freeman was concerned, Marianne’s venture into political campaigning had divested Reverend Macula of some of her Christian charity.

“He always did claim to have an inside track with county government.”

“But it’s not such a bad idea,” Milo Davis said.

“After all, the position is vacant. Swearing in the winner right away will give the new administration a head start on solving departmental problems. Dick Voland’s been doing an okay job on an interim basis, but the board would be well within its authority to install the new sheriff immediately.”

“But what if I win?” Joanna objected.

Milo looked at her with a shocked expression on his face. “What do you mean, what if? Are we having a crisis of confidence here? Of course you’re going to win.”

“But I couldn’t just go off and leave you high and dry like that. Not without any notice.”

“I’ve had plenty of notice,” Milo said reasonably, “It’s not going to be a problem. As soon as you said you’d run, I started looking for your replacement.”

Trying to mask the flicker of hurt she felt, Joanna looked away.

She had worked at the Davis Insurance Agency first as a receptionist, and later as office manager, from the moment she graduated from high school eleven years earlier. Before Andy’s death, Milo had been grooming her to take over much of the selling end of the business as well. Was he really finding it so easy to replace her?

“You’ve found someone then?” she ventured tentatively, dreading his answer.

Milo’s cheerful grin wounded her to the soul.

“Yup,” he said, sounding proud and almost gleeful. “Lisa took the last of her licensing exams just last week. The results came in today’s mail. I won’t be able to start taking her out on calls with me, though, until after we find a new receptionist. That could be a whole lot tougher proposition.”

Joanna was dumbfounded. “I see,” she mumbled.

Milo nodded. “Lisa’s had her hands full, working on the licensing exams and trying to stay ahead of the regular workload as well.”

Especially since she was doing it behind my back, Joanna thought bitterly. She said, “What happens if I don’t win, Milo? Does this mean I’m out of a job?”

“Are you kidding? We’ll still need to hire a new receptionist. If I have two full-time agents working for me, I’ll finally start getting to take some time off. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my wife voted against you today for that very reason. She has her mouth all set for us to go on a two week cruise in the Caribbean come January. If you win she might not get to take it.”

One of Milo’s golf-playing buddies showed up then. Marianne took Joanna by the arm. “The candidate looks as though she could use some fresh air Come on.”

Linda Kimball caught sight of Burton the moment he stepped inside the door. He was green alright, the same shade as in the wedding pictures and in the video she’d taken of him and the kids when they got off the teacups ride at Disneyland.

His hair was standing on end. His clothes looked as though he’d slept in them.

Linda was at his side before he was ten feet into the room. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded in a tense whisper.

“I’m looking for Uncle Harold,” Burton answered wanly. “Have you seen him? His Scout’s out back in the lot. He must be here somewhere.”

“believe me,” Linda returned coldly, “if Uncle Harold were here, I would have seen him. I’ve been watching this door like a hawk. Now how about telling me what you’ve been up to, mister. I’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors, and I don’t like any of them. Come to think of it, I don’t much like the way you smell, either.”

“Linda, please,” Burton said, glancing anxiously around the crowded room. “Do we have to talk about this here? Couldn’t we have this discussion later?”

“We’re discussing it now!” Linda answered, her voice rising in pitch. “Right this very minute!”

Burton took her arm and guided her back to the door. “Come on, he said. “People are listening.”

“Listening isn’t all they’ve been doing,” Linda replied. “They’ve been talking a blue streak. Everybody in town knows you’ve been out drinking. How come you spent the afternoon at the Blue Moon up Brewery Gulch?”

Burton Kimball’s shoulders sagged. “You know about that?”

“Damned right I know about it. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

But something about Burton’s careworn face, his desolate expression, muted the worst of Linda’s anger. “What’s wrong?” she asked more quietly, once they were outside.

Burton leaned against the wall of the building.

“I quit Uncle Harold’s case,” Burton said. “He’s going to settle with Holly out of court.”

“Why on earth would he do a stupid thing like that?”

Burton shrugged hopelessly. “Who knows? He’s going to split the ranch in half. When he gets done, there won’t even be enough left for Ivy to make a living.”

That was it. Ivy again! Linda might have known Ivy would be at the bottom of it. She had known her husband for fourteen years and had been married to him for twelve. She had never for one moment doubted that Burton loved her and their two children, but from the beginning she had always known that Ivy Patterson came first.

“And I did something awful,” Burton continued. “If he wanted to, Uncle Harold could see to it that I was disbarred.”

Linda felt a clutch of concern. “What did you do?”

“I told Ivy about Uncle Harold’s decision,” Burton said. “I got all tanked up, called Ivy, and breached my lawyer-client privilege. I can’t believe I did it. That’s why I’m looking for Uncle Harold. I’ve got to find him, try to make things right.”

“You know Uncle Harold would never disbar you,” Linda said confidently. “Not in a million years.”

“He should,” Burton Kimball replied grimly. “I certainly deserve it.”

“No, you don’t.”

Linda reached out to hug him then, wrapping her comforting arms around his chest, ignoring the stench of booze that lingered around him like a foul-smelling cloud.

Gratitude flooded through Burton Kimball.

Linda was steady and dependable. Like Uncle Harold, she, too, was salt of the earth. He was lucky to have a woman like her in his life. Leaning against her, he closed his eyes and inhaled the shampoo-clean fragrance of her hair.

He never saw the car coming, not until it was far too late. If it hadn’t been for Joanna Brady, Burton and Linda Kimball both would have been smashed flat, just like that, embracing each other and resting against the building.

Without Joanna’s timely intervention, not only would the speeding car have flattened Burton and Linda Kimball, it would have done exactly the same thing to Reverend Marianne Macula.

WHEN MARIANNE and Joanna stepped out of the building, the clear night air was a relief after the crowded, overheated, and smoky convention-center floor. Still stung by what she regarded as Milo’s underhanded actions, Joanna was eager to talk but she wanted some privacy.

Just outside the entrance near the curb, they encountered an embracing man and woman who seemed in need of some privacy of their own. Joanna led Marianne across the street.

“Don’t you think you’re overreacting to all this?” Marianne asked after listening to what was on Joanna’s mind. “It looks to me as though Milo thought you already had enough on your plate without adding in the complications of helping Lisa study for and pass her insurance exams.”

But Joanna wasn’t entirely mollified. “So you think he was being considerate instead of sneaky?”

“That’s my opinion,” Marianne replied. “Opinions are just exactly that-not worth the powder it would take to blow them up. But why not give him the benefit of the doubt?” They had walked through the park as far as the base of the steps leading up to the Copper Queen Hotel, then they had stood at the bottom of the steps to talk. Now, though, aware of the autumn chill, they started back toward the convention center.

The events of the last few months had instilled a new wariness in Joanna Brady. She observed things about her more; things that before would have passed unnoticed.

While they stood at the base of the steps, Marianne had been standing with her back to Main Street while Joanna faced it. Twice in five minutes’ time, she had seen the same red car pass by on the street.

Something about it had piqued her interest and attention. Maybe it was the speed, or rather the lack thereof. The car was going exceptionally slowly. Maybe it was the make and model.

The Cadillac would have been a standout car any where. Or maybe it was the color. Under the mercury-vapor halogen lights, the bright-red paint job glowed deep purple.

Chilled and ready to go back inside, Marianne and Joanna headed back toward the building. Marianne was talking, saying something neither of them could remember later. With her face turned toward Joanna, Marianne had just stepped out of the crosswalk and up onto the sidewalk when, with a squeal of tortured rubber, the accelerating car lurched half onto the sidewalk less than half a block away.

Joanna saw the whole thing at once; the on coming car; the couple, still locked in their embrace and totally unaware of the danger; Marianne, chatting away in lighthearted unconcern.

With only milliseconds in which to react, Joanna screamed, “Watch out!” Grabbing Marianne by the shoulder, she propelled her forward into the the recessed entryway.

Startled by the warning, the man and woman straightened up and separated. The man stepped backward toward the safety of the building. The woman stayed where she was, directly in the path of the car. Joanna could see that the man was safe.

But unless the car swerved back off the curb and into the street, the woman, transfixed by fear, was a goner.

Without even thinking about it, Joanna seized the woman’s wrist as she leaped past. There was a whiplash jerk as the woman’s arm was wrenched forward. Joanna heard the sickening pop of a dislocating shoulder, heard the shriek of pain, and then the two of them plowed forward into the entryway where a shaken Marianne was just scrambling to her feet. Joanna and the other woman landed on top of Marianne in a muddled heap of flailing arms and legs. Joanna’s jawbone smashed into something hard in a skull-cracking explosion of stars.

It took seconds for Joanna’s head and vision to clear. When they did, she was sandwiched between the other two women. Beneath her, Marianne’s body was unnaturally still, while above someone moaned, “My arm, my arm! I think it’s broken.”

“Linda,” Burton Kimball said, reaching for his wife. “My God! Are you all right? They tried to kill us! Somebody call the cops.”

By then people were trying to come out through the door, but Marianne and Joanna both blocked the way. With her head still spinning, Joanna managed to roll off. The door opened far enough for some of the people inside to squeeze out onto the sidewalk. Not surprisingly, one of the first people out the door was Jeff Daniels. Right behind him was the television cameraman.

Jeff was kneeling beside his stricken wife when Marianne’s eyes fluttered open. “What happened?” she whispered.

Someone, the cameraman most likely, hurried to help Joanna to her feet. Her dress was torn, and three of the four gold buttons were missing.

Undersheriff Richard Voland appeared out of nowhere. “What’s going on here?” he asked, turning to Joanna.

“There was a car,” she stammered, pointing in the direction where the speeding vehicle had plunged off the steps at the end of the sidewalk and disappeared. “A red Cadillac. On the side walk. It tried to run us down.”

Voland looked where she pointed, but by then no car was visible. “A car on the sidewalk?” he asked disgustedly, as though the story was too farfetched to be given the slightest credence.

“Whatever would a car be doing on the sidewalk?”

“Trying to kill us,” Burton Kimball answered.

“Somebody call an ambulance. There are people hurt here.”

The sound of Burton Kimball’s voice galvanized Dick Voland into action. While he started issuing orders, Joanna knelt beside Jeff. “Is Marianne all right?”

Jeff shook his head. His wife was struggling to sit up, but he forced her back down to the side walk and covered her with a jacket someone handed him. “Lie still, Marianne,” he whispered urgently. “YOU stay right where you are.”

Unable to help Marianne, Joanna turned to Linda and Burton Kimball. Linda sat shivering on the curb, resting her injured arm on her lap while tears streamed down her face. She was trying not to cry, but the pain was too much. Burton at tempted to put his jacket across her shoulders, but she ducked away.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t put anything on me. It hurts too much.”

Joanna’s stomach turned. The car hadn’t hurt Linda Kimball; Joanna Brady had.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, feeling sick. “I didn’t mean…”

Linda Kimball looked up at her through anguished, tear-filled eyes. “My God, Joanna, don’t apologize. My arm hurts like hell, but if it weren’t for you, we’d all be dead.”

And then something funny happened. Linda Kimball started to laugh. “Did you hear that, Burtie? she gasped. “Here’s Joanna, trying to…

apologize… for hurting… for hurting my arm. “My God! That’s the funniest thing… I ever heard of.”

The laughter was high-pitched and hysterical, and it echoed eerily in the street even as the can yon walls began to reverberate with the sounds of approaching sirens.

“Be quiet,” Burton Kimball urged. “You’ll hurt yourself more.”

But Linda only giggled harder. “I know…” she managed. “It only hurts… when I laugh!”

Jenny somehow pushed her way through the milling throng of adults and threw her arms tightly around Joanna’s waist. “Mommy,” she wailed in a small, frightened voice. “Are you okay? You’re bleeding.”

Dazed, Joanna reached up and touched a finger to her face. There was a cut on her face where Marianne’s head had smacked into her cheek bone cut, but not much blood. “It’s no big thing,” Joanna assured Jenny. “I’m shook up but okay.”

Looking down at the top of her daughter’s head, Joanna was suddenly aware that her double breasted navy-blue dress, missing three critical buttons from the front, was gaping open to reveal an expanse of white bra to any and all who cared to see. With one hand still on Jenny’s shoulder, she tried to hold the dress shut with the other.

People milled around them. Even though inside the city limits it wasn’t the county’s jurisdiction, Dick Voland had placed himself in charge, issuing orders to the city cops who answered the call, helping direct the arriving ambulance.

Joanna was well aware that Dick Voland had been all over the county campaigning on Al Freeman’s behalf. Andrew Brady and the undersheriff had never seen eye-to-eye. There was even less love lost between him and Joanna. It annoyed her that his very first reaction to something she said had been outright disbelief. When Burton Kimball had said the exact same thing, he had automatically accepted it at face value. If that was the way he acted, what would happen if they ended up having to work together?

Despite Marianne’s plaintive insistence that she was perfectly fine, the attendants and Jeff quietly overruled her and loaded her onto a gurney. With the city’s single ambulance loaded and headed for, the hospital, the ambulatory Linda Kimball and her husband climbed into the back of a waiting police car.