by J. A. Jance
Terry Buckwalter, however, pushed her empty glass across the bar. “I’ll take another,” she said.
The bartender disappeared, returning a moment later with a tall drink that looked like nothing more serious than a glass of iced tea. Without a word, Terry tore open two packets of artificial sweetener and stirred them into the glass. Only then, as she stirred the dark brown liquid, did Joanna notice the other thing that was different about Terry Buckwalter—her wedding ring was missing. There was a pale circle on the tanned skin of her finger that showed plainly enough that a ring had once been there. Now it wasn’t.
Glancing at her own left hand, Joanna caught sight of the two rings she still wore. One was the plain gold band she had worn from her wedding day on. The other was the diamond solitaire engagement ring, an anniversary present from Andy that she hadn’t actually received until after he was already in the hospital, dying. She had gone from the middle of September to almost the end of January without finding the strength to remove either one of them. Terry Buckwalter had removed hers within the first twenty-four hours.
“So what do you want?” Terry asked, as her eyes met Joanna’s in the reflection of the mirrored bar. Distractedly, she ran the ringless hand through her hair. When she took her hand away, the precision-cut hair fell flawlessly back into place. For a change, Helen Barco had outdone herself.
“I just wanted to talk to you,” Joanna said.
“To talk or to lecture?” Terry Buckwalter demanded. “You disapprove, don’t you—of my new haircut, of my playing golf, of everything about me.”
“Terry, I certainly didn’t mean—”
“Didn’t you?” Terry Buckwalter interjected, her whole body radiating hostility. “That’s why you didn’t leave when all those other women did. You wanted to have a private word with me. You wanted the opportunity to give me the benefit of all your vast experience as a recent widow. You wanted to let me know what’s appropriate and what isn’t. Well, Sheriff Brady, here’s some news from the front. I’m not nearly as good as you are at playing that role. The part suits you to a T. On me, it sucks.”
As Terry’s voice rose, heads turned in their direction as other people in the bar—mostly male foursomes—glanced their way.
“Please, Terry,” Joanna began. “You don’t understand. All I—”
“Yes, I do understand,” Terry returned. “I understand perfectly. So you and Andy had a fairy-tale marriage. Lucky for you. Bucky and I didn’t. I made the best of a bad bargain, and maybe so did he. But all that’s over now. Your Andy’s dead, Joanna. Here you are getting to play sheriff and to do things maybe you’ve always wanted to do. It’s time for me to do the same thing—time for me to do what I want for a change. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Joanna murmured, hoping to calm the woman down. If nothing else, to get her to lower her voice. “Yes, I’m sure I do.”
“No, you don’t,” Terry Buckwalter returned coldly. “I don’t think you do at all.”
With that, she slammed a five-dollar bill down on the counter. “Keep the change, Nate,” she called to the bartender, then she stood up and stalked out of the room.
Left behind with the men in the room still staring at her, Joanna wondered what she had done wrong and why her asking to talk to Terry had unleashed such a powerful reaction. Half a minute later, a speeding white T-Bird flashed by the glassed-in front entryway on its way out of the parking lot.
Maybe she’s right, Joanna found herself thinking. Maybe I don’t understand.
EIGHT
FEELING FRUSTRATED, Joanna left the Rob Roy for the fifteen-mile drive back to Bisbee. Along the way, she mulled over what had happened with Terry. Joanna had been curious about whoever was with Terry on the day after Bucky Buckwalter’s death, but that hadn’t been her primary concern. More than anything, she had wanted to speak to Terry, widow-to-widow, long enough to mention the inadvisability of making any momentous financial decisions in too much of a hurry.
That heartfelt warning had gone unsaid in the face of Terry’s seemingly unprovoked anger. What was going on? Prior to Joanna’s arrival in the bar, she had observed Terry Buckwalter and Peter Wilkes from a distance for the better part of half an hour. During that time the two of them had been chatting away as though neither of them had a care in the world.
Maybe that was it in a nutshell. Maybe, with Bucky Buckwalter dead, that was absolutely true. If Peter Wilkes and Terry Buckwalter had something going, then Joanna’s seeing them together might well have precipitated Terry’s angry reaction.
Small towns have certain expectations of what’s appropriate and what isn’t after the death of one of their own. Bisbee, Arizona was no different. Joanna wondered how many other luncheon attendees had witnessed and been shocked by Terry’s carefree attitude the day after her husband’s murder. The difference between police officers and ordinary citizens, however, was that the former’s opinions could lead to questions of an official nature—to questions and, sometimes, to convictions.
Other people might disapprove—quietly or otherwise—of Terry’s actions: of her peeling off her wedding ring less than twenty-four hours after her husband’s death or of her possibly carrying on with Peter Wilkes. As for Joanna, personal reservations aside, she had a moral obligation—a duty—to learn whether or not cause and effect were involved. Was it possible that Terry Buckwalter and/or Peter Wilkes had something to do with Bucky’s death? If so, that would go a long way toward explaining the sudden chill in the air when Joanna had interrupted Terry’s lighthearted performance as the merry widow.
Joanna couldn’t recite the exact statistics, but she knew full well that people were far more likely to be murdered by those nearest and dearest to them than they were by complete strangers, mere acquaintances, or business associates. In some troubled marriages, homicides became a permanent substitute for divorce, although, once again, statistically speaking, violence-prone husbands used that escape hatch far more often than did vengeful wives. still, women weren’t immune. They resorted to such a method of dissolving a relationship, too, on occasion, especially when the murderous wife had a possible alternative to the troublesome husband already lined up and waiting in the wings.
Is that what’s going on here? Joanna wondered.
It was generally assumed that Peter Wilkes was involved in a devoted, long-term relationship with his partner—the guy named Myron who ran the restaurant. But just because that was common gossip around town didn’t necessarily make it true. Maybe Peter Wilkes was a switch-hitter—AC/DC, as Andy used to say.
Clearly Peter Wilkes and Terry Buckwalter were up to something that went beyond a simple above-the-board pro/golfer relationship. Whatever it was, neither of them had been willing to discuss specific details in front of Joanna.
Suppose, Joanna told herself, Bucky was an insurmountable roadblock to whatever Wilkes and Terry had in mind. What might the two of them have done then when someone from out of town, someone with a perfectly believable motive for Bucky’s murder, had shown up on the scene? Slowly, the idea began to coalesce in Joanna’s mind. If Terry wanted to ditch Bucky Buckwalter, wasn’t Hal Morgan the perfect fall guy?
Unbidden, Joanna’s mind wandered back to the previous afternoon. She remembered how Terry Buckwalter had casually reached into her pocket and pulled out that damning scrap of paper—the one containing Hal Morgan’s purportedly handwritten note. If, as Terry maintained, the note had been hidden in her makeup case for months, why did she suddenly and conveniently have it in her possession, to pass along to investigators on the very day of her husband’s death?
That’s easy, Joanna thought. To point a finger at someone else. At Hal Morgan.
One terrible injustice had already been visited on the man. He had lost his wife to a senseless, tragic death. Now another blow was about to fall if he ended up being charged with murder in the death of Bonnie Morgan’s killer.
That hadn’t happened yet, not officially, but only because Ernie Carpenter had so far be
en too busy to get around to crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. At this point, Morgan was still only a suspect—some would have said prime suspect—in the case.
With her heart quickening in her breast, Joanna realized that Bucky Buckwalter’s killer had counted on that. Whoever the perpetrator or perpetrators were, they had killed the man with some confidence that the homicide investigation would go no deeper than the obvious: Hal Morgan had come to Bisbee with a clear motive for wanting to harm his wife’s killer. If that man was now dead, it naturally followed that Hal Morgan had killed him.
What came over Joanna then wasn’t exactly a chill. It was more like a vibration—a telling, steady thrum that came to her from the inside out, letting her know that she had stumbled onto something—something important. She had never experienced any sensation quite like it, but she knew at once what it was. Without understanding how, she knew—beyond a doubt—that Hal Morgan was innocent. He hadn’t killed Bucky Buckwalter. Somebody else had, someone who had cynically exploited Hal Morgan’s lingering grief and had used it to further his or her own deadly purposes.
The moment of realization rang so true that Joanna felt almost giddy. She was suddenly so excited—so energized and focused—that she had to concentrate on lifting her foot off the accelerator to keep from mashing it all the way to the floor.
And then, in that peculiar way minds work, a long-buried memory surfaced in her head. She was twelve years old again and sitting at the breakfast table in her parents’ home on Campbell Avenue. Eleanor had been cooking breakfast and was just then slamming the frying pan into the sink, when Big Hank Lathrop came into the room and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Sheriff D. H. Lathrop had been out all night investigating a homicide crime scene. He had come home at sunup to shower, change clothes, and eat breakfast before heading back to the office.
“I don’t know why you had to be out there all night like that,” Eleanor complained as she slid a loaded plate in front of him. “You’re not as young as you used to be, Hank. You can’t expect to work around the clock without having it affect you.”
“But Ellie…” he objected. Big Hank Lathrop was the only person in the world Eleanor Lathrop ever allowed to call her by a nickname. “You just don’t understand how great it feels. I knew from the beginning, from the moment we got there, that George Hammond was lying through his teeth when he said that him and his buddy—”
“He and his buddy.” Eleanor’s habitual corrections of her husband’s grammar were so much business as usual that Big Hank barely missed the beat of his story. “…he and his good buddy, Lionel Dexter, were out hunting. Hammond claimed that he stumbled and that his thirty-ought-six went off by accident. All of a sudden, right while he’s in the middle of telling this long, complicated story, I realize it’s a crock. Ol’ George is making it up as he goes along. I can’t tell you how I knew; I just did. As soon as I caught on to him, I couldn’t stand to walk away without managing to trip him up.”
The whole time Big Hank had been speaking, ostensibly he had been telling the story to his wife. But every so often, as he spoke, his eyes would stray to Joanna, including her in the conversation, saying to her—in that quiet, unspoken way of his—that she, too, was included in the storytelling. The message behind his words came through to his daughter loud and clear. He was letting her know that it was all right to love something—to care passionately about it—even if someone else in your life, someone you loved, didn’t necessarily share your enthusiasm.
Sitting down across from him Eleanor’s disapproval was as plain as the permanently etched frown that furrowed her forehead. “Did you?” she asked. “Trip him up, I mean.”
Big Hank’s face had lit up like a Christmas tree as he continued. “You bet. All night long Georgie had been telling us about tripping over something—a rock, or maybe even a branch or a root. He claimed that’s how come the gun discharged. So come sunup, I tell him, ‘Okay, Mr. Hammond, all’s we need now is to have you show us whatever it was you tripped over.’ So he leads us to this big ol’ rock and tries to pass that one off as being it, except anybody who knows a thing about guns and trajectories and all that can see it isn’t true. From where the rock is and where and how we found the body, you can tell those two things just don’t add up.
“‘Look here, Georgie,’ I said. ‘This whole thing’s a bunch of B.S. It couldn’t have happened this way, and you know it. How about if you just haul off and tell us the truth?’ And you know what happened? He did. Just like that. Broke down in tears and started spilling his guts. The thing is, if I hadn’t called him on it, George Hammond might have gotten away with murder.”
Eleanor, listening in silence, refused to be swayed by either her husband’s story or by his enthusiasm in telling it. “You still shouldn’t have stayed out all night,” she responded at last when he finished. “You’ll be paying for this foolishness the whole rest of the week.”
It was amazing to Joanna how everything about that whole scene had lingered in her memory. It was all there, in full living color and sense-around sound. She could hear and smell the frying bacon. She cringed at the enamel-chipping clatter when her mother pitched the frying pan into the sink and avoided the soul-shriveling frown that etched her mother’s forehead.
Even at age twelve, Joanna had known there was more at stake in that small kitchen than the loss of one night’s sleep. Although she was years away from being able to sort it out, she understood there were other, more weighty issues hidden in the dark undercurrents of the words being bandied back and forth across that kitchen table. And now, some seventeen years later, Joanna finally did see.
After years of enduring her mother’s unremitting criticism, she realized that D. H. Lathrop had been Eleanor’s target long before his daughter was. When he was no longer there to bear the brunt of it, Joanna had been forced to take his place. The constant arguments between mother and daughter—disagreements that lingered to this day—were and had always been nothing more than extensions of that original conflict. It was a natural outgrowth of who Joanna’s parents were and what made them tick.
Big Hank Lathrop had thrown himself into living without reservation. He had grabbed hold of everything life had to offer. Eleanor had clung to the sidelines. Unable to compete with her husband out in the world, she had cut away at him at home, constantly trying to whittle him down to her size. She was smart enough not to reveal her hand by directly belittling his triumph in the Hammond case. That would have exposed her own jealousy of his devotion to duty. Instead, she cloaked her rebuke in the socially acceptable guise of wifely concern—of Big Hank’s needing his rest—rather than saying what she really meant. Never once did she admit that anything that took her husband’s attention away from her—Big Hank’s job included—was a rival to be attacked on all possible fronts.
Suddenly, as clearly as Joanna sensed Hal Morgan’s innocence, she could see that her mother had spent her whole lifetime claiming the high moral ground, all the while cutting everyone else down to size. In negating other people’s accomplishments, she magnified her own.
The things that had driven Big Hank—the same needs and desires that had sent him out on a nightlong mission to match wits with a killer—were the ones that motivated Joanna as well. Those were the very ingredients lacking in Eleanor’s own makeup. She had lived her life vicariously, first through her husband’s work, and later through Joanna’s work and her happiness with Andy as well. No wonder Eleanor Lathrop was angry and drowning in self-pity. Only by diminishing others could she maintain her own fragile self-worth.
Those insights all washed over Joanna in a series of crushing waves. When the flood ebbed, it left behind, like debris deposited on a sandy shore, an adult understanding not only of both of Joanna’s parents but of herself as well.
There could be no doubt that, in spite of it all, D.H. Lathrop had continued to love his wife. The reverse—Eleanor’s love for Big Hank—wasn’t as easy to discern. Big Hank had managed to main
tain the relationship by learning to disregard the hurtful things that came out of Eleanor’s mouth. Unfortunately, that simple survival trick was one his daughter had yet to master.
Joanna realized now, though, that he had demonstrated it back then. With Joanna sitting at the breakfast table, watching and hanging on his every word, he had simply set Eleanor’s biting criticisms aside. He had let them flow over him and then he shook them off as a dog sheds a coatful of water. Instead of internalizing his wife’s carping, he had simply deflected it. But first, he had winked at his daughter.
“That’s funny, Ellie,” he had said. “I must be younger than you think, because I don’t feel the least bit tired. Fact of the matter is, I think I could go out right this minute and lick my weight in wildcats.”
Seventeen years later, Joanna felt exactly the same way—ready to take on all comers. She had left the Rob Roy feeling drained. The hassle with her mother over the ride home, as well as the confrontation with Terry Buckwalter, had taken their toll. But now, convinced she had made a vital connection in the Buckwalter case, she felt miraculously recovered. Rather than driving directly back to the department, she headed for the Copper Queen Hospital.
On the way, she radioed to the department to see if Ernie Carpenter could meet her there. Unfortunately, Dispatch reported that he was still up in Sunizona. Putting the radio mike back in its clip, Joanna made up her mind.
That’s all right, she told herself. I’ll make like the Little Red Hen, and I’ll do it myself.
Once inside the hospital, she saw Deputy Debbie Howell stationed in the hallway outside the door of Hal Morgan’s private room. Instead of going directly to the room, Joanna headed for the nurses’ station. Mavis Embry, the heavyset woman issuing orders at the nerve center of the hospital, had been a recent nursing school graduate working in the delivery room on the night Joanna Lathrop was born. Now she was the Copper Queen’s head nurse.