by J. A. Jance
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.
“Joanna,” Eleanor Lathrop hissed from the sidelines, gesturing desperately. “Come here. Hurry.”
The look on Eleanor’s face was so pained that for a moment Joanna feared that her mother had been somewhere near the melee and that she, too, had been hurt in the scuffle.
“What’s the matter?” Joanna asked worriedly as she and Jenny hurried to her mother’s side.
“You’re not hurt, are you?”
Eleanor Lathrop shook her head. “For heaven’s sake, Joanna. Can’t you see those cameras are running?”
Joanna glanced back over her shoulder. Sure enough, three television cameramen were lined up, shoulder to shoulder, with their video cams humming away. “What about them?”
“Your dress, for one thing!” Eleanor wailed tearfully. “Your bra is sticking out. I’ve looked all over for your buttons, and I can’t find them any where. The only thing I have in my purse is this. Now go in the rest room and use it.”
Desperately Eleanor pressed a huge safety pin into Joanna’s hand. Looking down at it, Joanna was tempted to burst into her own storm of semi hysterical laughter. But she didn’t.
Because it really wasn’t a laughing matter. That safety pin encapsulated the difference between Joanna and her mother: between the active participant and the bystander. With the car screaming down on them, Joanna’s prime concern had been to keep people from harm. Eleanor’s prime consideration, on the other hand, was always and forever the maintaining of appearances.
With a sudden flash of insight, Joanna realized that same difference had always separated her parents from one another as well. That was why her father
was dead. He had been physically incapable of driving past a stranded woman and her worn out tire, and changing that tire had killed him.
D. H. Lathrop had offered to help because that was the kind of man he was. It was his natural part of him he was helpless to change. And when he died as a direct result of his own kindness, people had called Big Hank Lathrop a hero. No one tried to change him or make him anything other than what he was.
To be fair, if it was all right for someone to be a doer and a hero, wasn’t it equally all right to be a bystander? Yes, Eleanor was concerned about appearances, but was that wrong? And if it was wrong, was it more or less wrong than changing a tire and being killed for it?
Slowly, Joanna closed her cupped hand around the safety pin. She looked at Eleanor, whose eyes were still scanning the nearby sidewalk in search of the missing buttons. Joanna’s heart squeezed her with a sudden quickening of understanding, like the first sensed movement of a baby within her womb.
At twenty-nine years of age, with emergency lights pulsing all around her, with video cameras rolling, and with only incomplete election results starting to trickle in, Joanna Brady had just learned something important about her mother. She had also learned something important about herself.
She was a chip off the old block. She was definitely her father’s daughter. But she was also her mother’s.
Jenny,” she said, looking down at her own daughter and holding her torn dress shut at the same time. “Would you please see if you can help Grandma find my buttons?”
“Where are you going?” Jenny asked.
“Into the women’s rest room to try to fix my dress. As soon as you find a button, bring it in there. And bring along a sewing kit as well. Ask Grandma Brady. I’m sure she has one in her purse.”
As soon as Joanna started into the building, Dick Voland came charging after her. “Just a minute. Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the rest room,” Joanna answered evenly.
“Everybody else went to the hospital. I need someone to give a preliminary statement to one of the officers here, to explain exactly what went on.”
“I can do that,” Joanna said, “but it’ll have to wait.”
Dick Voland was old school-male, stubborn, and used to having people snap to whenever he gave an order. “Wait for what?” he demanded.
“For me to fix my dress,” Joanna replied. Then she turned her back on him and walked into the rest room where no old-school male in his right mind would dare to follow.
The SCRATCHES don’t show all that much,” was Eva Lou Brady’s practical and unperturbed assessment of her daughter-in-laws appearance after viewing the videotaped version of Joanna’s victory speech. “Your eye looks real funny, though.”
It doesn’t feel very funny,” Joanna returned.
The previous night’s fall had taken its toll. Joanna had limped over to her in-laws’ house that morning and gratefully accepted Eva Lou Brady’s pampering breakfast that included eggs and bacon, mashed-potato parries, and hot homemade buttermilk biscuits. There was no hurry. Milo had ordered her to take the whole day off. With pay.
Using all the makeup tricks at her disposal, Joanna had done her best to camouflage the damage done to her face, but not even Helen Barco’s considerable skill with foundation and blush could have successfully masked the purplish bruise that blossomed garishly beneath Joanna’s right eye.
Carrying coat and schoolbooks, Jennifer stopped in front of her mother and studied her face with an unsmiling and reproachful gaze. “You promised you’d be careful,” she said. “Scout’s honor, you said.”
Those accusatory words were the first ones Jennifer had spoken to her mother that morning.
“People were in danger,” Joanna answered. “I was afraid someone might get hurt.”
“It could of been you,” Jennifer shot back.
“Could have,” Joanna corrected reflexively.
“Have,” Jennifer repeated woodenly, scowling.
“Jenny, are you ready?” her grandfather called from the front door. “I don’t want to be late.”
“Where’s he going?” Joanna asked.
“Search and Rescue called this morning,” said Eva Lou. “Harold Patterson’s turned up missing. With all the excitement last night, it took awhile for someone to figure out that his car was there in the convention-center lot, but he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t at home, either, so they are talking about organizing a search. Jim Bob wants to go to the meeting, since he’s a whole lot better at talking these days than he is at searching.”
“Where are they going to look?”
“Out on the ranch, I guess, although since his car was in town, seems to me like that would be the first place they’d look.” Eva Lou sipped her coffee. “Those Pattersons do seem to be having their troubles, don’t they?”
“They do that,” Eva Lou’s daughter-in-law agreed.
Joanna had only seen the car as it careened toward them. Burton Kimball, standing off to the side, had insisted in his statement that the vehicle in question belonged to Rex Rogers, his cousin’s outta-town attorney, and that the driver of the Cadillac was none other than Holly herself. Joanna was more than mildly curious about what was going on, but she had no real official recourse, and she wasn’t about to call up Dick Voland to ask him.
While Joanna scarfed down her breakfast, Eva Lou Brady poured two more cups of coffee and then sat down across the table. “What’s Jenny so bent out of shape about?” she asked.
“Remember last night when Jenny said she didn’t want me to win the election?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she’s worried about me, afraid something bad will happen to me, just like it did to Andy.”
“Makes sense,” Eva Lou said. “And with your face all tore up the way it is, I can see why she might have some cause.”
“what happened last night could have happened to anyone. When there is an emergency like that, you do what you have to do because you’re a person, because you care what happens to other people. It has nothing whatever to do with whether or not you’ve been elected sheriff.”
“True enough, I suppose,” Eva Lou agreed. “I mean, if a Methodist minister can end up in the hospital with a concussion, I guess it really could happen to anybody. How is Marianne, by the way?”
“They only kept her for observation. Jeff says they’ll most likely let her out sometime today.”
After that, an awkward and unusual silence seemed to spring up between the two women. Eva Lou Brady was the one who finally broke it.
“Lord knows I don’t mean to pry, Joanna, but I have to ask. Have you made any kind of arrangements for Jenny? I mean, with this new job and all, what if something awful did happen? Jim Bob and I could take Jenny in if we had to, but we shouldn’t. It wouldn’t be good for her in the long run. She needs somebody younger, someone more your age.”
Joanna dropped her gaze and didn’t answer. That in itself was answer enough. She hadn’t made any such arrangements, although she understood all too well the ramifications of not doing so. like writing her will and appointing potential guardions to care for Jennifer were two of the nagging loose ends of her life. In the awful aftermath of Andy’s death, those were two distasteful yet essential tasks she had not yet found courage enough to face.
“Maybe,” Eva Lou continued, not unkindly, “once you do get all those details straightened out, you should talk them over with Jenny. She’s a smart little girl. I think just knowing you’ve handled things and prepared for the worst would make her feel better, less alone. After all, both of your lives had been put through a wringer. I don’t blame her for being scared.”
“No,” Joanna said, with a rueful shake of her head. “I don’t blame her, either.”
The phone rang, and Eva Lou hurried to answer it. The caller was none other than Marianne Macula looking for Joanna. “When there wasn’t any answer out at the house, I figured I’d find you at the Bradys’. How’s the candidate…Excuse
me, hoWs the sheriff doing this morning?”
“The sheriff-elect is stiff as a board,” Joanna returned. “Rolling around on sidewalks isn’t good for me. I hurt in places I didn’t know I owned. And I’ve got a shiner where you clipped me under the eye. How are you?”
Marianne laughed, sounding far more chipper than she should have. “Bored stiff. Ready to be out of here. If it comes down to a contest of who’s more hardheaded, it’s a toss-up. You’ve only got a black eye. They thought I had a concussion.”
“Let’s call it even,” Joanna said, laughing into the phone herself, and starting to feel a little better.
Maybe the painkillers were finally starting to do their stuff-the painkillers and, of course, a great breakfast. “What’s on your agenda today?” she asked
“The doctor says I’ll be out by noon. It’s time for me to get out of the campaign-manager business and go back to being just plain Pastor Macula,” Marianne replied. “But I wouldn’t have missed this election for the world. It’s been fun, hasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure ‘fun’ is the word that applies. How’s Linda Kimball doing?”
“Fine. They didn’t even keep her overnight. Just put her arm in a brace and a sling and sent her home,” Marianne answered. “By the way,” she added after a pause, “speaking of the Patterson van, have you heard anything more about Harold?”
“Just that they still haven’t found him. Grandpa Brady left here a little while ago to go work on organizing a search.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Marianne asserted quietly.
Joanna had been too preoccupied with her own concerns to give Harold Patterson’s unexplained disappearance that much thought. Marianne’s blunt pronouncement brought it home.
“Why do you say that?”
“I talked to Ivy just a little while ago. She wasn’t home last night, either. I’m not sure what’s going on, because she mentioned something about moving into an apartment. But she also said she went by the Rocking P early this morning. The city cops were getting ready to ticket Harold’s Scout, so she drove it home and discovered that no one had done the chores. Based on that alone, Burton Kimball talked Judge Moore into granting a continuance.”