Desert Heat

FIFTEEN

The long, polished hardwood hallway of Greenway School still smelled exactly the way Joanna remembered it-dusty and lightly perfumed with hints of sweaty-haired children and overripe sack-lunch fruit. Worried about her daughter, Joanna walked swiftly toward the principal’s office. As far as Joanna knew, this was the first time Jennifer Brady had been sent to the office for even the smallest infraction.

Nina Evans, the five-foot-nothing fireplug of a woman who was the school principal, met Joanna in the hallway. “I’m glad I was finally able to locate you,” Mrs. Evans said irritably “I didn’t expect to find you at work today.”

School principals had never been high on Joanna’s list of favorite people, and Nina Evans was no exception. Joanna found herself bridling at the apparent rebuke in the woman’s tone of voice.

“What seems to be the problem?” Joann asked.

“Oh, you know how children are,” Nina sins said quickly. “I’m sure the boys didn’t mean any harm.”

“Which boys?”

“Jeffrey Block and Gordon Smith. According to what I’ve been able to learn, they evidently started it. Regardless of provocation, though, I simply can’t allow students to resort violence. That’s no way to teach problem-solving. It’s a short step from that kind of youthful behavior to starting wars.”

Joanna was in no mood to hear an educational lecture on the political correctness of violence. “What provocation?” she asked.

“No doubt Jennifer was feeling sensitive,” the principal continued, “and I don’t blame It’s always difficult for children to be in school after a traumatic event like this. In fact, not at all sure it was wise of you to send to school today, considering what she’s been rough.”

With her arms folded smugly across her chest, Nina Evans stood looking up at Joanna. There could be no mistaking her attitude of reproach and disapproval. The two boys may started the day’s altercation, but Nina was holding Jennifer primarily responsible. Somehow, the fight was all Jennifer’s and, through Jenny, ultimately Joanna’s.

Battling to control her temper, Joanna felt her jaws tighten and her face grow hot. “I didn’t send Jenny to school today,” she said firmly. “She came today of her own accord, because she wanted to. In fact, she begged me to let her. Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

Nina Evans replied with a noncommittal shrug. “At morning recess the boys were evidently teasing Jennifer and saying naughty things to her. She waited until noon and then punched them out when they were all three supposed to be on their way to the lunch-room.”

“Both of them at once?”

The principal nodded. ‘That’s what I’ve been told. Jeffrey’s parents took him over to the dispensary to have his thumb looked after, Gordon Smith’s mother picked him up about half an hour ago. Jennifer’s the only one still here. I didn’t want to send her home wit someone else without first having a chance to discuss the situation with you in person. It’s far too serious.”

“I want to see her,” Joanna said. “Where she?”

“In my office. You can go on in if you want.”

In the fifteen years since Joanna’s eighth grade graduation, the Greenway School principal’s office had altered very little. Personnel changes had occurred because elementary school principals come and go, but the same gray metal desk still sat in one corner of the room with the same old-fashioned wooden bench sitting across from it.

On the wall above the bench hung the familiar, but now much more faded, print of George Washington. The print, too, was exactly the same. Joanna remembered the cornerwise crack in the glass. She remembered how she had sat on the wooden bench herself and craned her neck to stare up at George Washington’s face on that long-ago spring afternoon when her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Fennessy, had sentenced Joanna Lathrop to a day in the principal’s office.

Jennifer glanced up nervously as the door opened. Seeing Joanna, she dropped her eyes and stared at her shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said once.

Joanna walked across the room and sat n on the bench beside her daughter. “Tell about it,” she said quietly. “What did those boys say to you?”

For a time the child sat with her head low-and didn’t answer. Joanna watched as a fat, heavy tear squeezed out of the corner of Jennifer’s eye and coursed down her freckled cheek before dripping silently off her chin.

“Tell me,” Joanna insisted.

Jennifer bit her lower lip, a gesture Joanna recognized as being very like one of her own. “Do I have to say it?” the child whispered.

“Yes.”

“They said Daddy was a crook,” Jennifer choked out at last. “I told them they’d better take it back, but they wouldn’t, so I beat ‘ em up. Daddy wasn’t even a black hat, Mom, so why would they say such a thing?”

Joanna draped one arm across Jennifer’s small shoulder and pulled the child close. Milo had told her the town was choosing up sides. Now she understood far better what he had meant. Unfortunately, some of the first stones thrown had landed squarely on Jenny.

“What happened to Daddy didn’t just hap-pen to us, you know,” Joanna said slowly, groping for words. “We’re not the only people who are trying to figure out what happened and what’s going to happen next. Everyone else is, too. Those boys were probably just repeating things they had heard at home from their own parents.”

“You mean everybody’s talking about it? About us?”

“Pretty much.”

“And they all think Daddy was a crook?”

It was hard enough for Joanna to cope with the flurry of disturbing rumors. It hurt her even more to realize that Jennifer would have deal with them at her own level as well. She swallowed the lump in her throat.

“Not everyone believes that, Jenny,” she answered quietly, “but some people do. You’ve got to try to not let it bother you.”

“But it does,” Jennifer whispered fiercely. “It really does. It made me so mad, I wanted to knock Jeffrey Block’s teeth out. All I did was hurt his thumb.”

For a moment they sat side by side without speaking. “But it isn’t true, is it?” Jennifer asked forlornly, with a trace of doubt leaking into her questioning voice.

Joanna squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and held her tight. “No,” she declared, “but up to us to prove it.”

‘‘Can we?”

Joanna shook her head. “I don’t know if we can for sure, but we’re certainly going to try.”

“And then those boys will have to take it k, won’t they.”

There was a tough ferocity about Jennifer’s loyalty to her father that made Joanna smile in spite of herself. “Yes,” she agreed. “They’ll have to take it back, and so will Adam York.”

“Who’s he?” Jenny asked.

“Never mind,” Joanna answered.

“Will I have to stay here in the office until the bell rings?”

“No. You’re corning with me. I have lots of errands to run, and you’ll have to come along.” Joanna handed her daughter a tissue. “Here,” she said. “Blow your nose and dry your face. Did I ever tell you about the time I got sent to this very same principal’s office?”

Jennifer blew her nose with a bellowing, foghorn effect that belied her small size. “You?” she asked disbelievingly. “I didn’t think you ever got in trouble.

“It was in the fourth grade,” Joanna told her. “During arithmetic. The boy behind me was new to town. He didn’t stay long, but I never forgot his name-Kasamir Moulter. He copied all the answers off my paper. Mrs. Fennessy gave us both F’s.”

“How come she did that? If he copied your paper, he should have been the one in trouble, not you.”

“She thought I gave him the answers.”

“Even though it wasn’t true?”

“Even though.”

“Couldn’t you prove it was his fault?”

“How? It was his word against mine. Mrs. Fennessy believed him.”

“That wasn’t fair,” Jennifer protested.

“Two against one isn’t fair,” Joanna countered.

Jennifer looked up at her mother for a long time before nodding in understanding. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Will I come back to school tomorrow?”

Joanna shook her head. “I don’t think so. Mrs. Evans doesn’t want you in school for a day or two. She seems to think you’re a menace to society.”

For the first time, a hint of a smile played around the corners of Jennifer’s mouth. “I am, too,” the child said stoutly. “I did it just the way you taught me. You would of been proud Inc.”

“Would have,” Joanna corrected. “Come on.”

They found Nina Evans in the hall. “I’ll take Jenny home for now,” Joanna told the principal. “And I may keep her home tomorrow as well, but when she comes back, you might spread the word that if anyone else hassles her about what happened, they’ll end up dealing me.”

Holding jenny by the hand, the two of them marched down the hall. “Where are we going?” Jenny asked in a small voice.

“Did you eat any lunch?”

“No.”

“First we’ll go by Daisy’s and split a pasty,” Joanna said. “Then we’ll start working our through the list.”

Daisy Maxwell, the original owner of Daisy’s Cafe, had been retired for twenty years and dead for ten, but the restaurant she started still reflected her initial menu as well as the ethnic diversity of Bisbee’s mining camp origins when miners from all over the world had flocked to Arizona’s copper strikes. Along with the usual standbys of hamburgers and sandwiches, Mexican food, Cornish pasties and Hungarian goulash were featured as daily specials at least once a week. Grits were usually available, upon request, with breakfast.

Between the two of them, Joanna and Jenny wiped out most of the huge platter-filling pasty with its flaky outside crust and steaming beef-vegetable stew interior. Afterward they made a series of stops-at the mortuary, the florist, Marianne and Jeff’s-making sure the arrangements were solidified for the funeral on Saturday afternoon. They went by the Sheriff’s Department and spoke briefly with Dick Voland and Ken Galloway, both of whom readily agreed to be pallbearers. Joanna had wanted to speak to Walter McFadden about doing a eulogy, but they were told he had taken the afternoon off and had gone home early.

Everywhere they went-in shops and offices, on the street-people stopped them to murmur their condolences and to ask if there was anything they could do to help.

“Most people are pretty nice, aren’t they?”

Jennifer commented after the fifth such encounter.

Joanna nodded. “Most of them are,” she agreed.

It was late in the afternoon before they finally stopped by First Merchant’s Bank. Sandra Henning, the manager, was working with one of the tellers when Joanna and Jenny walked into the lobby. She looked up when they came through the door and then looked away again, but not before Joanna noticed a crimson flush creep across Sandy’s stolid features.

That’s odd, Joanna thought. She and Sandy weren^’t especially good friends, but they had lunched together on occasion and had worked various school and civic committees together. Joanna led Jenny over to the two chairs in front of Sandy’s desk.

‘We’ll sit here and wait for Mrs. Henning to finish,” Joanna said.

It was several minutes before Sandy Henning came out from behind the tellers’ line. She approached her desk uneasily, nervously smoothing her skirt and putting her hands in and out of the pocket on her fuchsia blazer.

“I’m so sorry about Andy,” Sandra Henning said as she eased her heavy bulk into her chair. “And the thing about the DEA, too. We to give them the information they asked for, Joanna. They had a court order. My hands were tied.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sandy. I know how those things work, but I did want to talk to you, one bureaucrat to another, to see if you can help me figure out where that ninety-five-hundred-dollar deposit came from.”

At once the flush returned, and the color of Sandra Henning’s face soon matched the brilliant hue of her blazer. “You mean nobody’s told you?”

“Told me what?” Joanna asked.

Sandy’s eyes swung away from Joanna’s face to that of the little girl who was sitting in the chair with her legs swinging free listening to their conversation.

“Why don’t you go ask one of the tellers for a Candy Kiss, Jenny?” Sandra Henning suggested. “Peggy, the lady down at the end of the counter, usually has a dish of them at her window.”

Jenny looked to her mother for permission, Joanna nodded. “Go ahead,” she said, “the go on outside and wait in the car. I’ll be they in a minute.”

With a shrug, Jenny did as she was told, Both women watched until the child was safely out the door then Joanna turned back to Sandra Henning. “What is it?” she asked, “What aren’t you telling me?”

Sandy ducked her chin into her ample breast. “When Andy brought the money in, Joanna, he had a woman with him.”

“What woman?”

“I don’t know. He never introduced us. Well, that’s not exactly true. He told me her name was Cora.”

“Cora who? I don’t know any Coras.”

“He didn’t tell me her last name, Joanna, but…”

“But what?”

“I thought somebody else would tell you,” Sandy said miserably. “I didn’t want to have be the one.”

A light came on in Joanna’s head. “But you told Ernie Carpenter about her, didn’t you.”

“Yes. And the man from the DEA as well. They asked.”

“Well, now I’m asking,” Joanna said, fighting to stay calm. “Maybe you’d better tell me, too.”

“She wasn’t a nice woman, Joanna,” Sandra said quickly. “And not from around here, either. We don’t see women like that very often.”

“Like what?”

“You know, short leather skirt, boots, big hair, lots of makeup. She was laughing and hanging on Andy, whispering in his ear.”

“They came to the bank together?”

“No. Actually, she was here first. She drove up and waited outside. He came a few minutes later. When he got out of his truck, she hurried over to him, gave him a big hug and a kiss and the envelope.”

“What envelope?”

“The one with the money in it. The ninety-five-hundred dollars in cash. They counted it all out together, right here at my desk.”

Joanna took a deep breath. “I see,” she said. Sandra Henning waited, as though she had no idea what else to say.

“You say she drove up to the bank?”

“That’s right. In one of those cute little Geo Storms, one of the turquoise blue ones. It had Nevada plates. I noticed that much.”

“How old was she?”

“Not very old. Early twenties.”

Joanna nodded. She felt queasy. The lunch-time pasty that had tasted so good hours earlier was a leaden mass in her gut, groaning and wanting to rebel. It was all too much. Everywhere she turned, someone new was accusing Andy of something else. Could any of it be true? She had thought she knew Andy as well as she knew herself, but all around her were people telling her she was a fool, and blind besides.

A storm of tears came bubbling to the su r-face. Joanna wanted to duck out of the bank before they struck. She didn’t want to make a scene in public, any more so than she already had.

“Cora,” she murmured, standing up. “Cora from Nevada, a girl with no last name.”

Sandra met Joanna’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Believe me,” Joanna returned, stumbling blindly away from the desk. “So am I.”

Outside, Jenny was waiting in the car. “What’s the matter?” she asked, as soon as she saw her mother’s face. “Did Mrs. Henning say something mean?”

“I’m okay,” Joanna said.

“But you’re crying.”

“I’m all right.”

Jenny settled back in the car seat and crossed her arms. “Are we going home now?”

Joanna gripped the steering wheel and ought about the question. Finally she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “We have to make one more op along the way.”

“Where?” Jenny asked.

“Before we go home, we’re going to go see Sherriff McFadden.”