Tombstone Courage jb-11

by J. A. Jance

  “Take a message. I don’t want to talk to any body this morning, especially not Rex Rogers.”

  “You want me to hold all your calls?”

  “Please.”

  A few moments later, Maxine tapped on Burton’s door. “What did he say?” Burton growled.

  “He wanted to let you know that they’ll be filing a brief to amend the suit so it goes against Mr. Patterson’s estate. That is, unless Ivy is interested in negotiating a settlement now, without any more courtroom proceedings whatsoever.”

  Burton buried his face in his hands. “I should have known,” he said. “That’s Holly through and through, always more than happy to kick some body when they’re down.”

  He got up and took his coat off the hanger.

  “Where are you going?” Maxine demanded.

  “To see my client.”

  “I thought your client was dead.”

  “I’ve got a new one now,” he answered grimly.

  “She may not realize she needs me yet, but she does. How are the gossip mills working around town?”

  “Fine, I suppose. Why?”

  “Does anyone know where the honeymooners spent the night?”

  “I suppose if anyone did, Helen Barco would be the one.”

  “I’m going down the hall to wash my face. Get on the horn and see if you can find out where Ivy and her groom spent the night. It’ll be a whole lot easier to track them down if I have some idea where I’m going.”

  As usual, the fact that something threatened Ivy -was enough to jar Burton Kimball out of his funk.

  The same kind of lifetime habit that had brought him to his office that morning now propelled him to action. If Ivy was threatened, he had to do something about it.

  Even as she dialed Helen Barco’s number, Maxine didn’t understand what had gotten into him all of a sudden. Linda Kimball would have under stood, if she had known about it. Her husband was like that where Ivy Patterson was concerned, always had been.

  When Isabel Gonzales finished dusting and straightening the living room, she took the mornings paper out to the kitchen, where she sat down long enough to drink a cup of coffee and read the paper.

  Isabel had lived a quiet and fairly sheltered life.

  This was the first time a violent death of any kind had touched her life so closely. She tried to imagine how she would feel that morning if she were Holly Patterson.

  It was bad enough for Holly to come back home after all those years to bring such awful charges against her own father. Isabel had no idea what had gone on during that stormy afternoon session in the library on Tuesday. Isabel herself had ushered Harold Patterson into the room for the scheduled conference while Miss Baxter and Miss Patterson were still upstairs. She supposed they were some of the last people to see the old man alive. That saddened her, made her feel some how responsible.

  Mr. Patterson had been sitting there waiting when Holly came into the room, accompanied by Amy Baxter. Isabel had closed the door behind them and had gone on about her business, doing her best not to eavesdrop, but even in that huge house, she hadn’t been able to avoid the sound of raised and angry voices. When you’re used to a house being peaceful and quiet, it’s hard not to notice when people are yelling.

  Isabel had prepared a casserole and a salad for dinner, and she had left the house early -promptly at five-thirty-so she and Jaime could go vote. She had no idea how the library battle had ended, and she hadn’t seen Holly make off with Mr. Rogers’ fancy red car either. But she had certainly witnessed the awful aftermath.

  Holly’s appetite had been bad before. After the incident with the car, it was almost nonexistent. She had virtually quit eating altogether. Some times she drank something, but the food on the trays remained almost untouched. Isabel worried about it, but she didn’t mention it to either Miss Baxter or Mr. Rogers. As a Mexican-American housekeeper, Isabel Gonzales knew her place. She kept her mouth shut and tried not to listen to the noise of the rocker creaking away in Holly’s room directly over the kitchen.

  Someone would have to be crazy to rock that much, Isabel thought, to sit there rocking and staring out the window at nothing but the dump for hour after hour after hour. Of course, Miss Baxter would never use the word “crazy” or even “loco.”

  She said Miss Patterson had “emotional problems.” Poor thing.

  And then, just as those thoughts ran through her head, Isabel realized she was no longer hearing the rocker.

  Moments later, the kitchen door swung open, and a disheveled Holly Patterson stood there in her robe, leaning weakly against the doorjamb. “I want some more coffee,” she said.

  Isabel Gonzales had cared for a number of invalids in her life who were ill enough to require looking after, but not sick enough to need a nurse. She knew that after even a few days of bed rest, the transition from bed to walking around is a tricky one that requires careful negotiation.

  “You should sit down,” she said, hurrying to Holly’s side. “You shouldn’t be up walking like this.”

  Holly waved her away. “I’m fine,” she announced. “I’m really fine.” Nevertheless, she did totter over to the table and chairs just inside the door.

  While Isabel hurried to pour a cup of coffee from a fresh pot, Holly sank down at the kitchen table. Her eyes were drawn at once to the pictures on the front page of the paper that was lying there in front of her.

  The moment she saw the picture, a lifetime’s worth of forgotten memories boiled to the surface, threatening to drown her in a head-crushing wave.

  - The hours of careful probing sessions with Amy, the hazy, hypnotic, dreamlike questions and answers, had never come near this terrible, searing pain, had never cast a light on Holly Patterson’s interior darkness. Or her horror.

  She grabbed the newspaper and stuffed it into the pocket of her robe, thinking that perhaps if she could no longer see that smiling face, the pain would diminish enough so she could at least breathe. But even with his visage squashed in her hand like an unwary cockroach, she could still see his face. She could still remember.

  And then, in a moment of terrifying clarity, she caught a single glimpse of her own danger. Bolting upright, she knocked over the kitchen chair behind her.

  Isabel started at the sound of the falling chair.

  Thinking Holly had fainted, she spun around, almost spilled the full cup of coffee she had just poured. When she caught sight of Holly’s stricken face, she nearly dropped it altogether.

  Was the woman having some kind of seizure? a heart attack perhaps? Her mouth gaped open.

  She seemed to be trying to speak, or maybe even scream, but no sound came out of her open mouth.

  Slamming the cup back down on the counter, Isabel hurried to Holly’s side. “Miss Patterson,” she said. She pulled out one of the remaining chairs and pushed it in Holly’s direction. “What’s the matter? Sit down. Sit down right here. You look like you’re going to faint.”

  “She’s going to kill me!” Holly whispered hoarsely.

  “Miss Patterson, please. No one’s going to kill anybody. You’re imagining things. Please sit down.”

  With surprising agility, Holly Patterson dodged out of Isabel’s reach and made for the stairway.

  Isabel stood there listening as heavy feet pounded down the long overhead corridor that led back to her room.

  Isabel’s first impulse was to follow the woman.

  It was clearer to her now than ever before that Miss Baxter was right. In Isabel’s world, Holly Patterson’s “emotional problems” meant the woman was crazy as she could be.

  Upstairs, the bedroom door slammed shut, and Isabel breathed a sigh of relief. If Miss Patterson had tried to go outside or run away, she would have been far more worried.

  Instead, she had gone back to her room, back to where she was supposed to be.

  As soon as Miss Baxter and Mr. Rogers came back from their ride, Isabel would have to report the incident, although she still wasn’t entirely sure what had ha
ppened.

  Miss Patterson had been looking at the paper. Whatever she saw there, it had upset her terribly at a time when she had already been through too much. Remembering the look on the fleeing woman’s face, Isabel knew she had gone over the edge.

  Isabel stood waiting, expecting to hear the sound of the rocking chair resume, and finally it did. Isabel crossed herself and breathed a small prayer. “Let the poor soul alone,” she said to her self ‘Just let her be.”

  Burton was less surprised by the fact that Maxine had been able to locate Ivy and Yuri Malakov than he was by where they were found. They had stayed at the Lodge, a grade-B motel on the far side of Tombstone.

  The very look of the place offended him. Certainly, Ivy deserved a better honeymoon suite than this. He called their room from a house phone in the lobby. It was almost noon, but when Ivy answered, she sounded as though the phone had awakened her out of a sound sleep.

  “You’re where?” Ivy demanded, finally coming to her senses.

  “i’m in the lobby. I’ve got to talk to you, to both you and… Yuri. It’s important.”

  “Burt, I’m on my honeymoon. I’ve waited for it for forty years, and this is the only one I’ll ever have. Whatever you need, it can wait until tonight. We have to come back to the ranch then to do the chores. We’ll take on the funeral arrangements this evening.”

  “This isn’t about your father,” Burton said. “It’s about Holly.”

  “What about her?”

  “Her attorney called my office just a little while ago.”

  “Why?”

  “She intends to continue to fight you, Ivy, to file against the estate unless you want to negotiate now. Her lawyer will go to Judge Moore and amend the suit.”

  There was a long pause. “Holly can’t do that, can she?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do we do about it?”

  “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

  There was a pause. “All right,” Ivy said finally.

  “Wait there in the coffee shop. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  Burton went into the coffee shop, sank into a booth, and ordered himself a cup of coffee. He noticed Dave Hollicker come in a few minutes later, and Burton casually waved at the deputy as he went by.

  It didn’t occur to Burton Kimball that Dave’s appearance had anything to do with him, or that by interrupting his cousin’s honeymoon, he might be adding fuel to the fire of Ernie Carpenter’s growing conspiracy theory. Because by then, the Cochise County homicide detective was hot on the trail of the possibility that Burton Kimball, Ivy Patterson, and Yuri Malakov might all be in it together.

  Detective Carpenter was growing more and more convinced that the three of them, acting in concert, had murdered Harold Lamm Patterson.

  FOR A while after she went back up to her room, Holly sat on the bed barely allowing herself to breathe. No wonder people thought she was crazy. She really was crazy. In her mind’s eye, it was as though two parallel videotapes were running in tandem, the one from long ago and the other from Tuesday. The old one was horrifying and real. Although the colors had turned to sepia like the rusty shades of old pictures in a museum collection, the faces were still recognizable. Holly knew now who those people were. All of them.

  The other was in living color, although the clouds overhead had covered the dark red cliffs of Juniper Flats in a misty gray wool blanket. First there was her father telling her the real story, while from deep inside her came the first faint rustlings of recognition and remembrance. And then the tape ended, abruptly, as though cut off in mid-sentence. After that vivid mountaintop scene there was nothing but the warm, sweet, comfortable oblivion of forgetting. After that came an unreasoning anger that her father hadn’t come as he had said he would, that he had once again betrayed her.

  But that was silly. This time, she realized he hadn’t let her down at all. He had been there in the library, just as he had said he would be. He had offered to make amends, to make things right.

  And she had forgotten it somehow. That was the part that didn’t make any sense, unless she had been made to forget it.

  As she sat there, she tried her best to convince herself that she was wrong, that the sudden shock of panic that had overwhelmed her in the kitchen had to be some kind of horrible mistake. But it wasn’t. As much as it hurt, it was no mistake.

  She knew now that no chance meeting had caused Holly and hypnotherapist Amy Baxter to stumble across one another’s paths months earlier.

  Amy must have targeted her, come looking for her deliberately.

  Holly’s fall from grace as well as her intermittent drug-use woes had been well publicized among Hollywood insiders. Amy’s offer of help and much-needed counseling had been a precious lifeline to someone whose telephone calls were no longer returned and whose longtime agent had just cut her loose.

  And after hearing about Holly’s rocky relation ship with her family, after learning about the Rocking P, Amy had been only too eager to put Holly in touch with Rex Rogers. Of course, those two weren’t exactly mere nodding acquaintances.

  As the People article had pointed out, they had worked together on several separate cases and won monetary settlements in most of them.

  When she had first seen the magazine piece, Holly had been naively proud that Amy and Rex had been able to find so many other people to help other people just like her. She had thought that, with Amy as a partner and with the Rocking P as the site for a treatment center, she, too, would be able to make a contribution to their pioneering work.

  But now, for the first time, she saw it for what it really was-a scam. How many of the families mentioned in the article had paid damages for something that wasn’t necessarily true? How many of the supposed memories were being artificially augmented, Holly wondered, and how much had each of their families payed up to bury the past?

  Amy Baxter may have started out in life as a scholarship/charity case from the wrong side of the tracks, but she was well on her way toward amassing a fortune from a very lucrative practice, especially with Rex as her sidekick. If she happened to turn up a family with enough money to make it worthwhile, some of that money was bound to find its way to their treatment center; she and Rex could soon settle into partnership with a self-sustaining cottage industry of counseling the victims and suing the perpetrators.

  The silence of the house nudged its way through Holly’s solitary musings. Rex and Amy must still be out somewhere, maybe together, maybe separately. But when one or the other of them came back, Isabel was bound to tell them what had happened in the kitchen. If Amy once realized Holly knew the truth…

  The sense of her own danger came back again, as strong or stronger than when it first struck her in the kitchen. But if her friend Amy was really the enemy, where in God’s name could Holly turn for help?

  In the end, she was forced to beg for aid from the least likely source, her cousin Burton Kimball. Maybe he was a wimp, but she didn’t know anyone else to ask.

  Standing by the old-fashioned dial-type phone on the table in Cosa Viejo’s upstairs corridor, and keeping her voice low lest she be overheard, Holly tried calling Burton’s office. His secretary told her he was out, most likely for the rest of the after noon. Could she take a message? No, no message.

  Even more frightened, Holly tried to think of another solution. Was it possible, with everything that was going on, that Burton might have taken the day off? Pulling open the drawer in the table, she searched through the phone book until her trembling fingers finally located the Kimball’s home number. A woman answered after only one ring.

  “Who is this?” Holly asked.

  “Linda Kimball. Who’s this?”

  Holly had never met the woman Burton had married, but this was bound to be Burton’s wife.

  “Is your husband there?” Holly asked, rushing on in a strangled whisper.

  “Ivy?” Linda said. “is that you? Are you all right? You sound strange.”

  Ivy
! Holly had both envied and hated Ivy all her life. Ivy was the good girl, the favorite, the one who never got her clothes dirty; who never made mud pies out of eggs from the henhouse, who never thought up practical jokes to pull on other people. And yet, until Linda Kimball mistook Holly’s voice for Ivy’s, it had never dawned on Holly how much they were alike, how much they sounded alike.

  “I “I’m not Ivy; I’m Holly,” she managed. “I’ve got to talk to your husband. Right away.

  “What about?”

  “About his father; about mine.”

  “Burton isn’t home,” Linda said, her voice suddenly closed and flat. “He isn’t here, and I have no idea when he’ll be back.”

  “Where did he go? I’ve got to see him now It’s important.”

  “As soon as he gets back, I’ll have him call you.”

  “Don’t do that. He can’t call here.”

  “How can he get back in touch with you then?

  “I don’t think he can,” Holly Patterson said “because by then it’ll be too late. By then I’ll be dead.”

  With that, she hung up the phone. She looked up and down the hall. The house was still unnaturally silent, but even then she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive outside.

  Panicked, Holly knew she had to get out. Now.

  That was the only way to save herself. Holding her breath, she crept back down the stairs, grateful for the strip of carpeting that covered the hard wood risers.

  Pausing on the ground floor, she heard Isabel working industriously in the kitchen, chopping something, singing under her breath, but there were voices outside. Rex and Amy were walking up to the back door from the garage. They’d be there any moment.

  Still wearing her nightgown, robe, and fur-lined bedroom slippers, Holly tiptoed across the slate entryway and let herself out the front door. She walked bent over, hoping that, by staying close to the ground, she could avoid being seen by anyone, including Isabel’s gardener husband. She crept around the far side of the building and made for the ivy-covered terraces at the back of the house where she had once tried to seduce poor Bobby Corbett.

  Without looking back, she scrambled down the four-foot drops between levels of terrace. At every step, the thick, straggly vines reached out to entangle her feet and send her tumbling, but she kept on. At last she came to the far end of the property, where a barbed-wire fence barred her way. Beyond that lay the first few far-flung boulder massive hunks of rock waste that had bounced high and fallen wide as they tumbled down the steeply angled flanks of the dump.