Tombstone Courage

by J. A. Jance

  But the pain of being a newly made widow somehow got in the way of consoling her daughter, the newly made orphan.

  Joanna had always prided herself on the special relationship she shared with Jenny, but in the six short weeks since a drug-cartel hit man had gunned down Joanna’s husband, Cochise County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Brady, an unfamiliar wall of silence and misunderstanding seemed to have grown up in the Brady household. The once open give-and-take between mother and daughter was now full of uneasy silences punctuated by angry words and occasional bouts of tears.

  Without glancing at Joanna, Jenny took her bowl and slipped wordlessly out of the breakfast nook, heading for the back porch. Always interested in a handout, both dogs—the recently adopted Tigger, a comical-looking golden retriever/pit bull mix, and Sadie, a rangy bluetick hound—sprang from their usual resting places near the door and rushed to follow.

  Joanna removed the towel and shook her red hair loose. She was pouring herself a cup of coffee when Jenny returned to the kitchen sink to rinse her bowl. The child’s troubled blue eyes were downcast; she seemed near tears. Long after all trace of food was gone, Jenny continued to rinse her dish. Joanna resisted the urge to tell her to turn off the faucet and not waste water. Once again she attempted to put things right.

  “I’m sorry to be so impatient,” she said. “The election is today. I guess I’m nervous and in a hurry. We need to leave here early enough so I can vote on the way to work.”

  Jenny turned from the sink to face her mother. “Are you going to vote for yourself?” she asked.

  “Vote for myself? Of course. Why do you ask?”

  Jenny dropped her eyes and shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I thought a good sport always votes for the other guy. In games and stuff.”

  Joanna stepped over to Jenny, held her by the shoulders for a moment, then lifted the child’s chin and looked directly into her eyes.

  “This is something I have to do, Jenny,” Joanna said. “For us and for your dad. It isn’t a game. What if I didn’t vote for myself and then ended up losing by a single vote? It wouldn’t make sense for me to vote for one of my opponents, now would it?”

  “I guess not,” Jenny mumbled, then dodged out of her mother’s grasp. “I’ve got to go get dressed.”

  As Jenny darted away, Joanna blinked back tears of her own. How could it still be less than two months since Andy died? It seemed much longer, more like a lifetime. How could her entire world have been turned so upside down in so short a time? Ostensibly, not that much had changed. They still lived in the same home, the same cozy Sears bungalow she and Andy had purchased from his parents years earlier. But the house was no longer the same place. Without Andy’s presence, it was far too quiet, and so was Jenny.

  The cheerful, laughing, loving child who had eagerly marched off to tackle third grade the first of September…was no more. Two months later she had been transformed into a subdued, pale husk of her former self. She had turned into a somber miniature adult, living her life inside a hard, brittle shell.

  Joanna’s heart ached with sympathy. She understood what was happening with her daughter, but why did their mutual grief separate them rather than draw them together?

  Shaking her head, Joanna retreated to her own room to dress. She stood dispiritedly in front of the closet door—a closet from which she had not yet found the heart to banish all trace of Andy’s clothes. With Andy’s scent still lingering around her, she tried to decide what she should wear. What was the proper mode of dress for her today? There was no manual of suitable behavior for a sheriff’s candidate who was also a recent widow. Not only that, the question of what to wear touched on all the deeper questions as well. Why was she running for office in the first place? Why was she putting herself through all this? Why was she putting Jenny through this?

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time, back during and just after Andy’s funeral when people’s feelings were running high. Friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers from all over the county had urged her to run, encouraged her to take Andy’s place on the ballot. Back then, even Jennifer had wanted her to do it. And when Joanna had reluctantly agreed, one of the reasons she had done so was the belief that running for office would be something she and Jenny would do together—would work toward together—a shared goal that would unite them and help occupy both their time and energy. She had thought it would give them a needed focus and would keep their lives from being constantly centered on Andy’s death.

  But it hadn’t worked out that way. Not at all. In fact, as the campaign had heated up, it had become a bone of contention. Jenny had lost interest in the election process almost immediately. She had dragged her feet every step of the way, constantly creating logistical roadblocks of childish whimpering and whining rather than helping.

  As for Joanna, even though she had worked hard on both her father’s and Andy’s separate campaigns for sheriff, in both cases she had been part of the campaign—a cog in the wheel, a member of the team—not the candidate. Doing it all on her own, without Andy there to backstop her, she had found overwhelming.

  As the candidate, she had been forced to juggle all the time commitments of electioneering—the civic meetings, speeches, and doorbelling—that couldn’t be delegated to anyone else. Nor could she delegate the complexities of her life as a newly single parent or the demands of a job that was now a sole source of income rather than a shared one. The only good thing about all this was that sometimes when she fell into bed at night, she was too worn out to toss and turn.

  At last Joanna chose two hangers and pulled them down from the clothes rod. One hanger held a winter-gray blazer made of a medium-weight wool. On the other was a pearl-gray blouse. She was in the process of laying out the clothes on the bed when the phone rang. Dropping what she was doing, Joanna hurried to answer.

  “Hello,” Eleanor Lathrop said to her daughter. “How are we holding up this morning?”

  Not very well, Joanna thought. She said, “Fine, Mother. How are you?”

  “What are you going to wear today?”

  “Funny you should ask,” Joanna answered. “I was standing here in my underwear wondering that very thing.”

  “Well, wear something nice,” Eleanor ordered. “I was just watching the news from Tucson. They were talking about you, about how you’re the only woman candidate for sheriff in the whole state. They said that if you’re elected, you’ll be breaking new ground. They plan on sending a television crew down here to cover it live.”

  At the word “television,” Joanna sank onto the bed. “To cover me?” she managed.

  “What about that new gray blazer of yours and that light gray blouse?” Eleanor continued. “Those would be good. And speaking of which, what are you doing after work?”

  “After work?”

  “I already checked with Helen Barco at Helene’s. She could do you right at four.”

  “Mother…” Joanna began, but Eleanor rolled over the abortive objection.

  “Now, Joanna, I know you don’t believe in going to the beauty shop all that much, but this is television. People all over the state are going to see you. It’s important for you to look your very best. Besides, I told Helen it’s my treat. It isn’t every day your daughter gets elected sheriff, you know.”

  Eleanor’s initial opposition to Joanna’s candidacy had gradually changed—first to grudging acceptance and later to highly committed partisan support. It was one thing for Joanna to tell her mother to go jump in the lake. It was another thing entirely to insult a loyal campaign worker. Only Marianne Maculyea, Joanna’s campaign coordinator and best friend, had logged more hours on Joanna’s run for office than her mother, Eleanor Lathrop.

  “All right,” Joanna relented. “Four o’clock?”

  “Right. Shampoo, blow dry, makeup, and manicure.”

  “Manicure, too?”

  “It won’t hurt,” Eleanor told her. “You might even like it. Now what about Jenny? Is she going to come to the polls
-closing party at the convention center or not?”

  “I haven’t asked her. It’s a school night. If she comes at all, she shouldn’t stay very late.”

  “Well, I’m sure the Bradys would be glad to take her back home with them if she gets too tired. Mark my words, Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady won’t hang around celebrating for very long. They’re not much on socializing.”

  That was something of an understatement. Joanna’s in-laws’ idea of social intercourse was limited to staying after church long enough for a post-sermon coffee hour once or twice a month or going to a church-sponsored evening potluck.

  “I’ll check on that,” Joanna said. She glanced at her watch. Time was flying. “I’ve gotta go, Mother,” she said.

  “Okay,” Eleanor replied, “but don’t forget to vote. I’m on my way to the Get-Out-the-Vote phone bank as soon as I get off the phone here.”

  When talking on the telephone, Eleanor Lathrop was in her natural element—a situation Joanna’s campaign manager had wisely utilized to the campaign’s very best advantage.

  “I won’t forget,” Joanna assured her mother. “And thanks for the appointment with Helen. That was very thoughtful of you.”

  After putting down the phone, Joanna returned to the closet. The gray blazer and blouse were promptly returned to their respective positions on the clothes rod. Out came a navy-blue coatdress, double-breasted with two rows of large gold buttons. She would have preferred the gray blazer, but since that was her mother’s first choice, she’d be damned if she’d wear it.

  Joanna was finishing drying her hair when Jenny tapped on the bedroom door. Jenny, already fully dressed and followed by the two dogs, flopped dejectedly on her mother’s bed, while the dogs settled on the floor nearby.

  “That was Grandma Lathrop on the phone,” Joanna said. “She wanted to know if you’re coming to the party tonight, the one uptown.”

  “Do I have to?”

  Looking past the reflection of her own blue dress in the mirror, Joanna saw that Jenny resembled her blond, blue-eyed father in looks, but in the personality department she definitely took after her mother.

  “Of course you don’t have to,” Joanna returned. “But you are my daughter, and I’d like you to be there.”

  “Even if you lose?”

  Joanna sat down on the bed to put on her shoes. “I don’t think we’ll lose,” she said, trying to sound far more confident than she felt. Her two opponents, Frank Montoya, the Willcox city marshal, and Al Freeman, the assistant chief of police from Sierra Vista, hadn’t cut her any slack. The results of the election were by no means guaranteed.

  “And even if we do lose,” she continued, “we have to go to the party anyway. No matter what, we should go there to thank our supporters.”

  But then, in the brief silence that followed, something from Jenny’s voice—perhaps a quaver of doubt in the way she spoke—registered tardily on Joanna’s brain. She turned to her daughter.

  “You do want us to win, don’t you, Jenny?”

  “I guess,” Jenny whispered.

  “Good.”

  Joanna rose to her feet, pulling the child along with her. For a long moment, they stood there next to the bed in Joanna’s small bedroom, clinging together in a fierce and mutually protective hug.

  Eleanor Lathrop had always claimed to have eyes in the back of her head. Her daughter made no such assertions, so while she and Jenny hugged each other, Joanna didn’t see that, behind the child’s back, Jennifer Ann Brady’s fingers were tightly crossed.

  On both hands.

  Three

  TRAVELING DOWN Tombstone Canyon, Harold was tempted to drive right by the Canyon Methodist Church. At the last minute he swung into the parking lot. This was, after all, Election Day. From the time he first became eligible, Harold’s voting record had been absolutely perfect. He had never missed a single election.

  Now, though, with the trial due to start the next day and with Bisbee’s gossip mills churning out stories about his family troubles on an overtime basis, Harold actually wanted to skip it, to let this relatively unimportant election pass by without his vote. But that would have been perceived as cowardly. Harold Lamm Patterson was no coward.

  He doffed his rain-stained Stetson and shook the water off it as he stepped inside the basement social hall of Canyon Methodist Church, the place where his precinct had voted for the last thirty-two years. He had hoped the hall would be fairly empty except for the usual band of election-board workers, but that wasn’t the case.

  Handed the potential clientele of possibly hungry voters, the enterprising ladies of the United Christian Women’s Prayer Fellowship were holding a bake sale. Several of the town’s leading female citizens were clustered around a huge coffee urn, chatting and laughing.

  None of the women were strangers to Harold, and he did his best to stay out of their way. One in particular, Tottie Galbraith, had cut him dead the last time Harold had encountered her in the post-office lobby. That had been right after the People article. Tottie had almost broken her neck, crashing into the revolving door in her haste to avoid him.

  This time, her behavior was somewhat more subtle but no less disapproving. Although she must have glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, she gave no hint of recognition. Instead, she raised one eyebrow and shifted her position so she could continue standing with her back turned in his direction. Meanwhile, the previously energetic hum of the women’s voices dropped to the merest of whispers.

  Harold didn’t have to hear what they were saying to know they were talking about him. His ears flamed red, but he didn’t cut and run. In fact, he thought wryly, anything that kept him from having to speak to Tottie Galbraith couldn’t be all bad.

  Harold was almost safely past the group when, at the last moment, Marliss Shackleford broke free from the others and came after him, hand extended, lips arranged in a phony but welcoming smile.

  “Why, Harold Patterson!” she exclaimed. “How are you managing to hold up through all this, you poor thing?”

  Fifty years after leaving high school, Marliss had yet to outgrow the gushiness she had learned as a local cheerleader. She had devoted twenty-five years to her life’s work—writing “Bisbee Buzzings,” a weekly piece that passed for a society column in the Bisbee Bee, the town’s barely extant daily newspaper. Marliss Shackleford’s enthusiasm at being a large fish in a very small pond remained undimmed.

  “Fine, Marliss,” Harold reassured her. If he couldn’t avoid her altogether the best tactic was to get Marliss talking about something else. “I’m doing just fine,” he said. “How are the grandkids?”

  “Oh, the twins are just fine.” She beamed. “So nice of you to ask. Care for some coffee?”

  “No, thanks. I only stopped by to vote. You know how it is—too much to do and not enough time.”

  Marliss nodded as she fell in step beside him. “Isn’t that the truth? Hardly enough time to turn around. But I wanted to talk to you all the same, Harold, just to let you know that a lot of us here in town think it’s a crying shame what Holly is doing. And to her own father yet. It’s a crime, if you ask me.”

  “Thank you, Marliss,” Harold said, still hoping to shut her up. “I surely do appreciate that.” But Marliss continued undeterred, without even acknowledging the interruption.

  “For her to go away all those years and come back now just to raise all kinds of fuss, I don’t understand it at all. Not for a minute! Do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Harold agreed, edging away, trying to reach the relative safety of the table where a stern-faced Barbara Wentworth presided over the list of registered voters. Marliss stuck to him like glue.

  “I read that whole article in People magazine,” she continued. “I surely did. I don’t see how they can get away with printing such terrible stuff. We used to call it yellow journalism in my day, and that’s exactly what it is. After all that wild publicity, where in the world is Judge Moore going to find an impartial jury? I mean, doesn’t e
verybody read People? And as for all the awful things they said about Bisbee in that article…My goodness, if I were Judge Moore, I’d give that girl a swift spanking and send her right back home to California where she belongs.”

  Marliss seemed able to talk without ever having to pause long enough to draw breath. About the time Harold decided there would be no escape, that he was destined to stand there trapped forever, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, pastor of Canyon Methodist Church, came to his rescue. Deftly insinuating herself between Marliss and her hapless victim, Marianne took Harold’s hand and shook it firmly.

  “Why, hello there, Harold,” Marianne said with a polite, dismissive nod in Marliss Shackleford’s direction. “Is Ivy here, too?”

  For a moment, Harold seemed unable to answer. “N-no,” he stammered finally. “I came by myself. I don’t know where she is.”

  And he didn’t, either, not for sure. Most likely she was still at the house, but the usually steady Ivy had become unpredictable of late. In fact, she had left the house the night before right after chores, and she hadn’t returned until just before sunup. That was something else that was bugging Harold, another bone of contention, and something she had never done before.

  Since the big blowup over Holly, Ivy had suddenly taken to coming and going without bothering to tell him where she was going or when she’d be back. Of course, since they weren’t speaking, how could she? This new situation with Ivy reminded Harold of Holly, back when she’d been an errant teenager. But Ivy was no teenager. At forty years of age, she hardly needed to ask her father’s permission to do any damn-fool thing she pleased. He saw this latest incident as one more thing to lay at Holly’s door.

  “I see,” Marianne said.

  Harold’s mind had wandered briefly. When he came back to himself, Marianne Maculyea was examining his face so closely that he wondered what she saw there. And when she said, “I see,” what exactly did she mean? Did this Reverend Maculyea somehow know more about what was really going on out at the Rocking P than Harold wanted her to?