Left for Dead

38

11:30 A.M., Monday, April 12

Patagonia, Arizona

Aside from the delivery guys, the Patagonia post office itself was a one-woman operation. Patty Patton might have made a pitch to the higher-ups, asking to have some part-time help to cover the windows during lunchtime and breaks, but she didn’t want to rock the boat. There was a lot of talk these days about shutting down “underperforming” post offices, and she didn’t want hers to be one of them.

As a consequence, between eleven and twelve each day, Patty closed the window and then sat at the sorting table to eat her peanut better and jelly sandwich and to down the remains of her thermos of coffee. Once upon a time, she had imagined her life would be different, that she and Roland would travel around the world and dine in all kinds of exotic places. She hadn’t expected to live her whole life without venturing outside the confines of Patagonia. But those were the choices she’d made and the way she’d lived her life, and most of the time she had few regrets.

It was quiet in the back room. Over the bank of mailboxes, she could hear people chatting and greeting each other. At some point, while she was eating dessert—a container of banana yogurt—she heard a siren or two. She wondered about them, but not that much. She was a lot more perturbed by the fact that Jimmy Carson hadn’t bothered to come back by to let her know what was going on with Phil. That seemed odd—out of character. Jimmy was usually far more dependable than that; his mother, Eunice, had seen to that long ago.

At twelve sharp, Patty downed the last slurp of coffee and put away the remains of her lunch. She didn’t want people from out front looking through the service window and thinking she used the sorting table as a cafeteria.

Patty was not a tall woman. In order to reach the window and conduct business, she had to spend most of the workday perched on a three-step stool hidden behind the counter. When Patty opened the window after lunch, Maxine Browning, Patagonia’s ace gossip, was waiting outside the window, drumming her fingers on the counter and looking pointedly at her watch.

“It’s not like you to be even a minute late,” Maxine complained. “But I suppose with what’s going on over at Phil’s, we’re lucky you’re open at all. I’d like a sheet of those breast cancer stamps, please.”

“What is going on over at Phil’s?” Patty asked, trying not to sound too concerned or alarmed as she retrieved the page of stamps.

“Something bad, I guess,” Maxine said. “There are cops all over the place. I wouldn’t be surprised if that woman finally got around to putting a bullet in her head. Christine Tewksbury has been crazy as a loon for all these years. I’m surprised Phil didn’t place her in some kind of home long ago. I probably would have. Having that ugly Christmas tree around year after year would have driven me batty.”

Patty felt a clutch in her stomach. If it had been something wrong with Christine, Phil would have called. This had to be something else, maybe something far worse.

“And what about Deputy Reyes?” Maxine continued. “I’m hearing that the reason he got shot is that he was dealing drugs on the side. With his poor wife pregnant and everything. I swear, if the cops are crooked, who are you supposed to trust these days?”

At that point, the woman behind Maxine, Annie Davis—who was head volunteer in the all-volunteer town library—jumped into the conversation. “That’s right,” she said. “I heard they found drugs galore when they searched Jose Reyes’s house. The sheriff’s department isn’t releasing squat about it—they’re claiming that the Department of Public Safety has taken over the case, but all that’s doing is giving Sheriff Renteria a chance to save face. If he’s got a bunch of crooked drug-dealing cops working in his department, that man is history. There’s no way in hell he’ll be able to weather that kind of scandal and get reelected.”

Patty knew Jose and Teresa Reyes because she knew most everyone in town, but she was far less concerned about them than she was about Phil and Christine Tewksbury.

“What can I do for you, Annie?” Patty asked, trying to maintain her focus and move the process along. She needed to get the customers out of the way so she could think.

“My cousin in Fargo asked me to send her eight pints of my prickly pear jelly,” Annie replied. “She wants to give a jar to each of the members of her bridge club. Flat rate is the way to go, right?”

“Medium or large?” Patty asked.

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “What do you think would hold eight pints of jelly?”

“Large, most likely,” Patty said. “You’ll want to put in plenty of packing. You don’t want jars of sticky jelly knocking together and getting broken.”

Patty had to scramble down off her stool to go over to her box bin. That morning, when she’d been helping Jess do the mail load-in before running Phil’s route, Patty had discovered that Phil had squirreled away a dozen of the large flat-rate boxes in the back of his truck. No doubt someone on the route had asked for them, but since Patty’s inventory of flat-rate boxes was getting dangerously low, she’d dragged the boxes back inside. If someone on the route needed them, they’d have to come to the post office and pick them up.

“Since this is where Phil works, it seems to me as though someone would have the simple courtesy to come tell you what’s going on,” Annie complained. “It’s not fair to leave you in the dark like this.”

That was Patty’s opinion as well. Another twenty minutes crawled by. Patty collected box rent. She made arrangements for several return-receipt-requested items that were being sent to the IRS. She sold a roll of Forever stamps. When the phone rang behind her, she leaped off the stool and raced to answer it. Eunice Carson, Deputy Carson’s mother, was on the line.

“When I saw they had Jimmy outside Phil and Christine Tewksbury’s house directing traffic, I couldn’t stand it any longer,” Eunice said breathlessly. “I had to go check. You’re not going to believe it. He told me Phil is dead. When they dragged Christine out of the house, she was screaming like a banshee.”

Patty was glad she wasn’t standing on her stool when she heard the news. For a moment the room seemed to spin around her. “Phil is dead?” she repeated. “You mean like a heart attack or something? I know he went to see his doctor a few weeks ago, but according to him, it was just a routine physical. I didn’t think there was anything seriously wrong with him.”

“Definitely not a heart attack,” Eunice said. “She evidently beat the crap out of him with a baseball bat.”

“She who?” Patty asked.

“Christine,” Eunice responded. “Who do you think? According to Jimmy, when he got there late this morning, she was sitting in a chair in the living room next to that godforsaken Christmas tree. The bloody bat was right there with her the whole time. She didn’t even bother trying to hide it. I can hardly get my head around the idea that those kinds of things can happen right here in Patagonia.”

“Hello,” Shelley Witherspoon called to Patty from out front. “Is anybody there?”

“Thanks for the call,” Patty said. She put down the phone and returned to the window.

As soon as Shelley saw Patty’s ashen face, her jaw dropped. “Patty, you look terrible. Are you all right?”

“I’m not feeling well,” Patty Patton said. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you today.”

For the first time in her entire career with the United States Postal Service, Patty Patton put the CLOSED sign in place and shut the window for the day shortly after noon. Taking her keys, purse, and lunch bag, she went out the back way and locked the door behind her. Jess hadn’t returned from running the route, but he’d be able to leave the mail truck inside the building’s lockable chain-link fence and drop the keys in through the mail slot.

One of the things Patty had always loved about her job was the commute—a two-block walk along the edge of a busy highway. Today it seemed to take forever, and once she got home, she didn’t stay. Instead, she got in her aging Camaro, one her mother had bought new back in the seventies, and drove out to Phil’s house.

There were half a dozen cop cars in evidence, including one she recognized as being Jimmy Carson’s squad car. Traffic cones had been set up, creating a temporary DO NOT CROSS barrier that Patty made no effort to enter. She parked her car well away from the cones. Before exiting the car, she grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her glove box. Yes, Patty was a smoker, but she didn’t want to be tempted into creating a smoking room outside the back door of her post office. So the cigarettes stayed in the car and the car stayed safely at home when she was working. This afternoon all bets were off.

Wearing an orange traffic jacket, Jimmy stood in the middle of the small side road that led to the Tewksburys’ house, doing nothing while he waited to direct nonexistent traffic. “Hey, Ms. Patton,” he said when he saw her. “Sorry.”

What does that mean? Patty wondered. Is he sorry to see me; sorry Phil’s dead; sorry he didn’t come back to give me the news?

“Your mom called,” Patty said.

Jimmy nodded. “I thought she would.”

No doubt Jimmy had been instructed to keep his mouth shut, but Patty Patton had known him all his life, and she didn’t hesitate to play that card. “Is it true Phil is dead?”

Jimmy nodded. “Yes, he is. The body’s already on its way to the morgue.”

“What’s going on in there, then?” she asked, blowing smoke in the air and nodding in the direction of the house. Most of the activity seemed to center around the free-standing garage a short distance away from the Tewksburys’ kitchen door.

“Crime scene investigation.”

When Eunice had told Patty that Christine was responsible, Patty had assumed the deadly assault had played out inside the house. “You mean it happened inside the garage?” she asked.

Deputy Carson sighed before he answered. “I shouldn’t be talking to you like this, Mrs. Patton, but yes, it happened inside the garage, and Christine has been taken into custody. When I came by this morning to check on Phil, the way you asked me, I rang the door and nobody answered. Since it was a welfare check, I let myself in, and there she was, sitting in the living room. I asked her if she knew where her husband was. There was a bat sitting on the floor next to her chair. She picked it up and told me to get out. So I did.

“But on the way out, I decided to check the garage. I looked in the window and saw the tarp there on the floor with a pair of feet sticking out from under it. The door was locked, so I broke it open to check on Phil. He was already dead as a doornail, with his head bashed in. I immediately called for backup. When we went back into the house, Christine was sitting there, still holding the bat. I guess I’m damned lucky that she didn’t use it on me.”

“I don’t believe it,” Patty declared.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “Phil really is dead. He must have been dead for a couple of hours before I found him.”

But Patty was looking at the distance between the back door to Phil’s house and the stand-alone garage. “I mean I don’t believe Christine did it,” she said. “According to Phil, she hasn’t set foot outside the house in years. He claimed she was agoraphobic—that the very idea of leaving the house caused panic attacks.”

“I’d call it a rage attack, not a panic attack,” Jimmy observed. “She went off again a little while later when Sheriff Renteria showed up with the chief detective. One of the crime scene guys told me that the bat has something on it that looks like bits of blood and hair. They’ll have to examine it before they know for sure if what’s there belongs to Phil. Christine must’ve been ashamed, because she even covered the poor guy with a dropcloth before she finished him off.”

Patty was sure this was Jimmy’s first homicide ever. He was visibly excited and talking way too much. She also doubted that anything she said to him would be given much credence. “I want to talk to whoever is in charge of the investigation,” she said.

“That’ll be Detective Zambrano,” Jimmy agreed. “But you’ll have to wait until he’s done in there.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

Finished with one cigarette, Patty lit another, then retreated to the Camaro and leaned against the back of the trunk to wait. Minutes later, a blue SUV—a fancy one Patty didn’t remember seeing before—pulled up to the barrier. When a tall blond woman got out and started toward the house, Jimmy rushed forward to head her off.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s a crime scene. You can’t go there.”

“My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m looking for Sheriff Renteria. Someone has broken into the home of one of his deputies. I’m here to report it.”

“He’s busy.”

“Then I’ll wait.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said, motioning toward Patty. “You and everybody else.”