by J. A. Jance
Working in Cochise County allowed him to keep an eye on his widowed grandmother. The fact that Juanita Raymond refused to charge him rent was a side benefit, but he was determined to look after her. She was spry and in good health, but that might not always be the case, and since Grandma Juanita had looked after him for the past dozen years, Garth wanted to be there to return the favor should she need the help. None of that would have made sense to his unemployed classmates up in Tucson, but it made sense to him.
It was a cold, clear night, with uncountable stars glittering against a velvet black sky. Chief Deputy Hadlock had left the satphone with him, just in case, but he’d had no occasion to use it because nothing at all had happened. Some other officers might have been tempted to do a half-assed job by spending the night dozing inside the Tahoe. That wasn’t for Garth. Staying awake was easier if he was outside, so he spent most of the time actively patrolling the area, walking back and forth along the shoulder of the road next to the crime scene. He had hand warmers in the pockets of his jacket, and those helped. Only when his feet got too cold did he climb into his vehicle again, fire it up, and leave it idling with the heater on high long enough for his feet to thaw out.
About midnight a double-curved moon peeked out from behind the Peloncillos. As soon as he saw it, he was transported back to the first time he’d ever visited this small mountain range that straddles the Arizona–New Mexico border. It had been during white-tail season, and he had come here with Grandpa Jeb.
They’d camped out near a blazing fire on a late-October night similar to this one but not nearly as cold. Garth was twelve years old at the time, and it had been his first-ever hunting trip. They were curled up in their sleeping bags next to the fire when a moon just like this one made an appearance.
“What you’re seeing right there is what they call a gibbous moon,” Grandpa Jeb had said, pointing.
“A what?” Garth asked.
“Gibbous means more than half the moon is showing. It could be waxing or waning right now—hard to tell. ‘Gibbous’ comes from an old English word that means ‘humpbacked.’ And that’s what they call moons like this in the book I’m reading—gibbous.”
At the time Garth’s mother, Betsy, hadn’t been dead for very long, but what he remembered most about her was that she’d been sick for years and in and out of the hospital more often than he could count. “Cancer” was a word that was mentioned in hushed tones in their household, but only when Garth was thought to be out of earshot. His mother’s mother, Grandma Peggy, had come to live with them early on, taking care of Garth when his mother was in the hospital and looking after both him and her daughter when Betsy was home.
Other kids had mothers who drove them to school and volunteered for the PTA and showed up at soccer games. In Garth’s reality Grandma Peggy did the driving while his mother lived out her days in a hospital bed set up in what should have been the family room of their home in Tempe, Arizona. To Garth’s way of thinking, that was how things were and how they would always be—with his father working, Grandma Peggy looking after the house, and his mother lying in the bed watching TV. Except that didn’t happen. His mother died, and everything changed.
For a while things seemed to be the same. Grandma Peggy stayed on and made sure the household ran smoothly. That only worked until Laurie Magnussen appeared on the scene. Garth’s mother had been ill most of his life, but she had also been naturally quiet and reserved. There was nothing quiet about Laurie. She was younger than his father. She was blond, loud, bossy, and flamboyant—from the tips of her brightly lacquered fingernails to the toes of her very high-heeled shoes. She had walked into his father’s life and assumed total control.
Now that Garth was older, he saw Laurie for what she was—a gold digger who’d been looking for a free ride. Once she was ensconced in her new husband’s house, after a surprisingly hasty courtship, her first order of business had been to get rid of Grandma Peggy. Laurie had declared war on the older woman, and it was only a matter of months before her incessant harping and constant criticism drove his grandmother out of their lives.
On the night of that first hunting trip, it had been five months since Garth’s father and Laurie had effectively exiled him from their lives by shipping him off to his grandparents’ farm near Elfrida. The original plan—at least the stated plan—had been for him to stay there over the summer while Laurie and his father finished remodeling their new place in Paradise Valley and got settled in. Somehow, once summer ended and it was time for school to start, the decision had been made—without any input from Garth himself—that he should stay on in Elfrida. Grandma Juanita had promptly enrolled him in Elfrida Elementary School, and that was that.
When his father drove him down from Phoenix, Garth had fully expected to hate being stuck on the farm. He was sure he’d be bored to death, thinking he would miss his friends, his video games, and his skateboard. Instead he spent the whole summer tagging along after Grandpa Jeb, who in short order taught him how to drive a tractor, plow a straight line, stack hay, and run the irrigation system, all the while feeding the boy little nuggets of wisdom.
Garth’s twelfth birthday came along in mid-July. That evening after supper, once Garth had blown out the candles on his birthday cake, Grandpa Jeb had gone to his gun rack, taken down a polished .22 rifle—an old Remington—and presented it to his grandson.
“My old man gave me this on my twelfth birthday,” Jeb had said, handing it over. “I’m giving it to you on the condition that you promise to take care of it and learn to handle it properly. If you do enough target practice between now and then, once white-tail season rolls around in October, we’ll go hunting.”
“Hunting?” Garth had repeated, barely believing what he’d just heard. “For reals?”
“For reals,” Grandpa Jeb had replied.
Under his grandfather’s supervision, Garth learned how to clean and load the weapon. Over the next couple of months, hours of target practice more than filled the void in Garth’s life created by the absence of both his skateboard and his video games. And now here they were—hunting. The first day out, they’d seen several does but no bucks.
“That’s okay,” Grandpa Jeb had said. “If you’re gonna hunt or fish, you need to pack along plenty of food and a full load of patience.”
That night Garth lay on the hard-packed earth staring up at the rising moon. “How’d you know about gibbous moons?” he asked. “How come you know so much stuff?”
“I read about it,” Grandpa Jeb said. In the months Garth had lived in Elfrida, the only books he’d seen Grandpa Jeb reading out in the living room at night had been the King James Bible and the Farmers’ Almanac. Garth was pretty sure neither one of those had anything to say about gibbous moons.
“I found it in your grandmother’s World Book Encyclopedia,” Grandpa Jeb replied.
“You mean those red-and-gold books on the shelf in your bedroom?”
“That’s right,” Grandpa Jeb said. “Those are the ones. Grandma picked them up at a church rummage sale a year or so ago. I’d always felt stupid because I never graduated from high school, but your grandmother’s a wise woman. ‘Jebbie,’ she says to me, ‘you don’t have to have a high-school diploma in order to get an education. If you read a page or two of this every night, you’ll be more educated than most of those tomfool, hotshot kids graduating from college these days.’ So that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, reading a page or two every night just before bedtime. I do my learning reading then, in hopes some of it will maybe soak into the old gray cells overnight.”
“You read a page a night?”
“Thereabouts—sometimes more, sometimes less.”
“How far are you?”
“I’m at the beginning of the N’s now,” Grandpa Jeb said. “Just finished the M’s a couple of days ago. That’s where I read all about the moon. And gibbous is one of those things that stuck with me.”
Ever since it had stuck with Jebediah Raymond’s grands
on as well.
Chapter 17
AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, GARTH CLIMBED INTO THE Tahoe and sat with the heater running while he ate the last of the ham sandwiches Grandma Juanita had packed and sent with him for this long, overnight shift. When the sandwich was gone, he polished off the last thermos of coffee, thinking about his grandmother with every sip. She had been the one unwavering presence in his life from the time he was eleven, and she still was.
On that first hunting trip, Garth and Grandpa Jeb never got a deer, but they did the second year, and the year after that, and the one after that as well. There was a guy in town who did the butchering for them, and Grandma Juanita always found ways to cook the venison they brought home, doing so without a word of complaint. Her rule of thumb was as follows: if you aren’t going to eat it, you sure as hell shouldn’t shoot it.
That was one of the interesting things about Grandma Juanita. She went to church every Sunday, but her pewmates would have been surprised to learn that at home she was the one who sometimes dished out the salty language.
When Christmas rolled around that year, Garth’s dad, Cooper Raymond, came to fetch him and take him home to Paradise Valley, except as far as Garth was concerned, Paradise Valley wasn’t home. The friends he’d had before still lived in Tempe, and even when he was able to connect with them, it wasn’t the same. They’d all moved on, and he was an outsider. As for the few kids living in Cooper and Laurie’s new neighborhood? They showed no interest in hooking up with someone who was there visiting for Christmas, especially not a hick who spent most of his time living on a farm in Elfrida.
“Where the hell is Elfrida?” one of the boys had asked him sneeringly. “Is that even in Arizona?”
Well, yes it was.
Being in Paradise Valley and under Laurie’s thumb for two whole weeks felt like being in prison. She treated Garth like he was six instead of twelve. She expected him to be in bed by eight o’clock every night—in bed with no TV—while she and his father did whatever they usually did at night, which obviously included a lot of drinking and partying. At home with Grandpa and Grandma Raymond, everybody went to bed at nine. Laurie fixed him microwavable dinners to eat alone in the kitchen while she and his father ate their dinner at the dining-room table after Garth was tucked away in the “guest” room, and that’s clearly what it was—a guest room. Boxes with his stuff in them, including the clothing he’d outgrown, were stored in the garage. There was no place in the house that had been designated as belonging to him. This was their house—Laurie’s and his father’s house—not his.
During his visit the only time Garth wasn’t under her control was when he woke up in the morning. He was used to getting up early because that’s when Grandpa and Grandma got up. The first time he went downstairs and found his dad drinking coffee at the kitchen counter, Garth had poured a cup for himself.
“Hey,” his father said. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Garth returned. “Grandma Juanita lets me have coffee in the mornings.”
“Yeah,” Cooper Raymond replied with a chuckle. “I suppose she does. She let me start drinking coffee when I was about your age.”
Garth slipped onto the barstool next to his father’s. “How come Laurie doesn’t like me?”
“She’s never had any kids of her own. I don’t think she knows what to do.”
They were quiet for a time. “I don’t like this house,” Garth said. “It’s too big. I liked our old house better.”
“That was Mom’s house,” his father said. “This is Laurie’s.”
“How come there’s no carpet? There’s carpet in Grandma’s house.”
“Laurie likes tile. I like tile.”
But you don’t like me, Garth remembered thinking.
For the next two weeks, he savored those early-morning hours when he was alone—after his dad left for work and before Laurie finally came out of the bedroom and started bossing him around. He walked the hilly, winding streets of Paradise Valley. They were all paved. The streets back home in Elfrida were mostly dirt. And that’s where he wanted to be—back home with Grandpa and Grandma.
That was the only year Garth went to Paradise Valley for Christmas. Although his father was conscientious about sending monthly checks to cover Garth’s upkeep, he came to Elfrida to visit on increasingly rare occasions, and when he stopped by, he never stayed long. From more than two hundred miles away, Laurie was still running the show, because, Garth realized now, his father had been pussy-whipped—he had always been pussy-whipped.
“I don’t know why he never takes Garth home with him,” Grandma Juanita grumbled to her husband one night after their son left Elfrida to drive back to Phoenix. “That’s where he belongs.”
“He says Laurie doesn’t like kids and she isn’t good with them,” Grandpa Jeb had replied.
“That’s a bunch of bull crap,” Grandma Juanita snapped. “Since Coop already had a son when he met her, he should have figured that out before he ever married that awful woman.”
Of course, Grandma Juanita never said anything like that directly to Garth. She and Grandpa had been having a quiet conversation in the privacy of their bedroom. Garth, sitting in the room next door, had overheard the remark and couldn’t have agreed more. Obviously, Garth didn’t like Laurie, either. That made them even, he supposed, and he was grateful for being able to stay on with his grandparents, with people who actually did like him.
He had graduated from Elfrida Elementary and gone on to Valley Union High School. Grandpa Jeb doted on his grandson, and Garth returned the favor. More than simply loving the older man, Garth respected him. His grandfather was a farmer, someone who lived close to the earth, and it was hardly surprising that Garth had planned on following in Grandpa Jeb’s footsteps.
Garth got involved in 4-H his first year at Elfrida Elementary. By the time he was a senior at Valley Union High, he was president of Future Farmers of America. As far as academics were concerned, Garth was an excellent student, if not the top one. A Mormon girl named Anna Lee Smith beat him out as valedictorian, but being named salutatorian was enough to win him a full-ride scholarship to the University of Arizona. Garth’s father had majored in business and become a CPA. Wanting a major as far away from his father’s as possible, Garth signed on to study agriculture.
All that changed at the end of his sophomore year. Grandpa Jeb was out repairing a fence line one afternoon late in May when he’d been attacked by a marauding pair of UDAs, border crossers from Mexico, who had beaten him to a bloody pulp and left him to die before driving off in the old man’s pickup. When her husband failed to come home at dinnertime, Juanita went looking for him. She found him lying near death and summoned help. He was airlifted to University Hospital in Tucson, where doctors worked feverishly to save him.
Grandpa Jeb was hospitalized in the ICU for the better part of three weeks, but he never fully recovered. When it came time to release him from the ICU, the doctors had given Juanita two grim choices, suggesting that she transfer him either to a nursing home or else to a brick-and-mortar hospice facility. Disregarding their advice, Grandma Juanita had elected to take her Jebbie home.
Back in the Sulphur Springs Valley, neighbors and friends from church had rallied around the Raymonds, taking turns bringing food and taking care of chores while Grandma Juanita and Garth, out of school on summer break, looked after Grandpa. Cooper and Laurie had made several brief appearances, staying long enough to murmur a few trite words of compassion, but without lifting a hand or offering to do any of the hard work that goes with actual caregiving.
Over the years Grandma Juanita had never knowingly said anything disparaging about either her son or his wife in Garth’s presence. Coop and Laurie had enough good sense to stay in a motel in Douglas when they came to visit, but when they dropped by the house, they expected to be treated as honored guests, showing up at mealtimes and never seeing a need to do any of the cleanup afterward.
One day by the time th
ey finally departed for Paradise Valley, Grandma Juanita had been pushed to the end of her endurance. She’d been washing the lunchtime dishes with Garth wiping them dry when she finally lost it.
“That no-good son of mine is worthless as teats on a boar hog,” she had muttered fiercely, “and that wife of his is even worse. How dare she come around here sneering because we don’t have a dishwasher!”
Then, much to Garth’s surprise, Grandma Juanita burst into tears. It was the first and only time he’d ever seen her cry. Putting down his towel, he gathered her into his arms and held her while she sobbed against his chest.
“I didn’t raise your father to be like that,” she said at last, straightening up. “I raised him to be a good boy, and look how he turned out.”
“How Cooper Raymond turned out is his fault not yours,” Garth had told her. “Definitely not yours!”
Once back at home, Jebediah required round-the-clock care. The double bed the couple had shared during most of their married life was banished to a shed outside and replaced by a more functional hospital bed. Grandma Juanita had decamped to the bedroom that had always been Garth’s, while he was reduced to bunking on the sofa in the living room.
One night when Grandma Juanita was taking the night shift, Garth ventured into the room to see how she was doing. He found her sitting next to her husband’s bed with an open volume of the World Book resting on her lap—volume A, as it turned out. Afraid the book might fall off her lap and land on her foot, Garth attempted to remove it without disturbing her. Naturally, that didn’t work. She jerked awake and then held the book to her breast as though fearing that he might tear it away from her.
“Have you started reading this, too?” he asked.
“I’m reading it to him aloud,” Grandma Juanita said. “I’m not sure if he can hear me. I hope so.”
Garth had hoped so, too. After that, whenever it was his turn to stand watch, he located Grandma’s bookmark and he read aloud, too. These days after he got off shift, that tradition continued. Not every night, but often, when it was time to go to bed, he’d read a page or two as well, reading silently now rather than aloud. He was currently halfway through volume C.