by J. A. Jance
The dinner was vintage Eva Lou Brady, what her husband called “old-fashioned comfort food”—meat loaf, mashed potatoes, canned-from-the-garden green beans, cherry Jell-O with bananas, and homemade pumpkin pie for dessert. Jim Bob and Eva Lou were still dealing with Andy’s death—still grieving over their lost son—but helping with Joanna’s survival seemed to give purpose to the elder Bradys’ lives. Joanna was only too grateful for their unwavering support. Her own mother was another matter entirely.
While Eleanor sniffed disdainfully and picked at her food, Joanna ate with far more relish than she would have thought possible. Eating food Eleanor disapproved of was one way of continuing the Lathrop family mother/daughter grudge match that had been years in the making. Although hostilities between them boasted occasional periods of relative truce, none of those had ever blossomed into a lasting peace.
“I thought you were going to wear your winter gray,” Eleanor said, holding tight to her fork while a piece of Jell-O quivered delicately on the tines.
“It had a spot on it,” Joanna lied. She turned to her father-in-law. “Any word on the turnout?” she asked, daring at last to make some direct reference to the election.
“Better’n anybody figured,” he replied. “It’s turned into a real horse race.”
Jennifer made a face. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
“Why don’t you want to talk about the election, Jenny, honey?” Eva Lou Brady asked mildly. “Don’t you want your mama to win?”
“No!”
And there it was. The dining room grew quiet while Jennifer’s blurted answer hung in the air like a dispirited balloon.
“That can’t be true, Jenny,” Jim Bob Brady said. “Of course you want her to win. She’s doing it for all of us—because we need her. She’s doing it for you.”
Jennifer’s eyes flashed with defiance. “She is not. She’s doing it for her.”
With that, Jennifer flung her crushed paper napkin into her plate, shoved her chair into the wall behind her, and crashed from the table.
“What in the world was that all about?” Eleanor Lathrop demanded. “Whatever’s gotten into her?”
Joanna carefully folded her own napkin. “I’d better go talk to her,” she said.
Jennifer had slammed the bedroom door shut behind her. Joanna knocked and waited.
“Come in,” Jenny said finally, reluctantly.
Her grandparents had furnished the extra bedroom with Jenny specifically in mind, making it a home-away-from-home; a place where she was always welcome. A serviceable secondhand day-bed sat in one corner of the room. The coverlet—a homemade quilt—was strewn with a collection of matching pillows. Jennifer lay on the bed sobbing, her head buried beneath the body of a huge brown teddy bear.
Joanna stood in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, unsure whether or not she should enter the room. A yawning, treacherous gulf seemed to lie between her and her daughter. Had there been a time like this for her own mother? Joanna wondered. A time when Eleanor had stood frozen in a doorway wondering helplessly how to comfort her own grieving child?
Joanna noticed a shadow on the floor of the room. It looked like a tightrope stretching between the doorway and the bed, between her and her despairing, sobbing child.
Joanna’s heart caught in her throat. What would happen if she made the wrong decision? What if she somehow failed to successfully negotiate the distance between them? Would Joanna be destroying whatever relationship had once existed between herself and her daughter? Was history bound to repeat itself?
“Could I talk to you, please?” Joanna asked.
Jenny pulled the teddy bear more tightly over her head and didn’t answer.
“I need to know what’s wrong,” Joanna continued softly. “I need to know why you don’t want me to win.”
Jenny rolled over, flinging the teddy bear aside, allowing her mother a glimpse of her tear-stained, desolate face. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.
Joanna resisted the temptation to close the distance between them. This was a turning point. She needed to hear Jennifer’s answer, needed to listen to what the child had to say without smothering her in a word-strangling embrace.
“What are you afraid of?” Joanna asked.
Jennifer’s chin quivered. “That you’ll die, too,” she whispered. “That somebody will kill you, too, just like they did Daddy. If that happens, I’ll be all alone.”
That was it. The answer when it came was so blindingly simple, so logical, that it took Joanna’s breath away. Of course! Why hadn’t she seen it coming? If she had been a better mother, a more perceptive parent, maybe she would have.
“Just because I’m elected sheriff doesn’t mean someone’s going to try to kill me.”
“But Sheriff McFadden got killed,” Jennifer returned with unwavering childish logic. “And Daddy. And Grampa.”
“Grandpa Lathrop died because he was changing a tire in traffic—because he was helping someone—not because he was sheriff,” Joanna pointed out.
But even as she said the words, Joanna knew they weren’t the right ones. They didn’t address Jennifer Brady’s very real concern; didn’t do justice to her heartfelt worry. D. H. Lathrop had died by legitimately accidental means—if drunk drivers can ever be considered truly accidental. But the other two hadn’t.
Walter McFadden and Andrew Brady had both died violent deaths as soldiers in the ongoing warfare between good and evil, between wrong and right. And Jenny wasn’t mistaken in her concern. Winning the election would put Joanna Brady directly on the front lines of that exact same conflict.
As though negotiating a minefield, Joanna walked carefully to the side of the bed and settled on the edge of it with her hands folded in her lap. Still she made no attempt to touch her daughter. “Sometimes you have to take a stand,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?”
“Your dad saw what terrible things drugs and drug dealers were doing to the people around him. He decided he had to try to stop it and…”
“And they killed him,” Jenny finished.
The room grew quiet. From the dining room came the hushed murmur of muted conversation.
“Everyone must die sometime, Jenny,” Joanna said at last. “Grandpa and Grandma Brady. Grandma Lathrop. You. Me.”
“But Grandma and Grandpa are old,” Jennifer objected. “Daddy wasn’t.”
Again the room grew still as Joanna struggled to find the right words. “Do you remember the night of Daddy’s funeral?”
Jennifer nodded wordlessly.
“We made a decision that night, the two of us together, a decision for me to run in your father’s place, right?”
“Yes.”
“And when we said it, people believed we meant it—people like Jeff and Marianne, Angie Kellogg, your grandparents, and lots of other people, too. They’ve all worked hard to see that what we said that night comes true.”
“But…”
“No. Wait a minute. Let me finish. You’re not the only one who’s scared, Jenny. That’s the reason I was late coming to dinner. While I was sitting outside Helen Barco’s shop and worrying about whether or not I wanted to win the election, I fell asleep.”
Jenny’s eyes widened. “You’re worried, too?”
Joanna nodded. “And for the same reasons you are. If I win, what happens then? Maybe you’re right. Maybe the bad people who came after Daddy will come after me as well. But I promised to run for sheriff. Promising to run means that if you win, you’re also promising to do the job. Even if you’re scared to death.”
Jennifer moved slightly on the bed, cuddling closer, putting her head in her mother’s lap. “I don’t want to be alone,” she whispered, grasping her mother’s hand, squeezing it tight.
Joanna felt hot tears well in her eyes. “I know,” she said. “I don’t want you to be, either. I’ll try to be careful.”
“Promise?”
Not letting go with one hand, Joanna used the other to b
rush a strand of damp hair off Jennifer’s still tear-stained cheeks. Unable to speak, she nodded.
“Girl Scout’s honor?” Jennifer pressed.
“Girl Scout’s honor,” her mother whispered in return, while Helen Barco’s mascara streamed unnoticed down her face.
Twelve
ONCE MORE Harold awakened, caught in a disorienting spin—the turbulence between real and dream, between known and unknown. He had no sense of how much time had passed, but the sky far overhead was dark now. Blackness surrounded him like some all-enveloping, evil shroud.
Harold was so desperately cold that he wondered for a moment if maybe he was already dead; already put away in that cut-rate casket he had taken off Norm Higgins’ hands. Eventually, though, he sorted it out—remembered where he was if not how he’d come to be there. Remembered that his body was broken; that he was trapped and unable to move.
Harold was lying there trying to think of a rational way to escape his prison when he heard the familiar wheeze and thrum of his old Scout’s much overhauled engine. He heard it laboring up the steep dirt track toward the basin, toward the glory hole. It must be Ivy, he thought at once. Had to be Ivy, come to search for him. Who else would bother? And who else would know to come here looking?
Sudden tears filled his eyes—not tears of self-pity but tears for his daughter, for Ivy. What would happen to her now? After taking care of her mother all those years, would she have to spend the next ones taking care of him as well?
He wished suddenly, fervently, that he had died in the fall. He upbraided himself for not trying harder to die. He should have concentrated on that rather than on trying to find some way out.
Now, with Ivy approaching ever nearer, Harold was filled with a desperate need to escape his broken body quickly—to do it now, before Ivy found him. Before she had a chance to call for help. Before she had a chance to call for help. Before she could turn him over to the care of doctors who would try valiantly to patch the shattered pieces back together.
He already knew that wouldn’t work. Broken backs didn’t magically heal themselves. Once the doctors finished screwing around with their casts and braces and astronomical bills, Ivy Patterson’s worst nightmare would materialize and she would be handed yet another cripple to care for.
If Ivy calls to me, Harold thought wildly, I won’t answer. I’ll pretend I’m already dead. Maybe she’ll go away and leave me alone. Overnight, he would simply will himself to die. He had seen his own father do it after he was hurt in the mining accident. He knew it was possible. And the cold would help.
But even as Harold toyed with the idea, the Scout’s engine grumbled closer, climbing steadily, grinding up over the final incline. As the Scout came closer, a flash of light splashed across the small pile of wood-chip-sized rock that made up the mound of tailings around the mouth of the glory hole. Almost directly overhead, the engine coughed once and backfired as the ignition was switched off. Harold heard the driver’s door creak open on familiar rusty hinges; heard leather shoe soles scrape across loose shale, pausing long enough to climb over or through the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the glory hole. Then there was another sound of something heavy, cardboard perhaps, scraping along the ground.
Harold pressed his lips together, and forced himself to keep quiet. He was determined not to answer, no matter what. He waited for Ivy to speak to him and was surprised when she didn’t. Instead, a flashlight switched on. A powerful beam of yellow light slid down the darkened walls of the shaft, searching here and there, to the right and then the left, before finally settling on his body. Still nothing was said, nothing at all.
He was tempted to speak then, but abruptly the light switched off. In the sudden jet-black darkness, everything was still until the first five-pound river rock plunged toward Harold with accidental, but still deadly, accuracy.
Long before it hit him, he heard it bouncing off the walls and knew what it was. And in that split second, he remembered everything. But by then it was much too late.
The rock hit him full on the chest, sending a long splinter of broken rib deep into his heart. Harold Patterson died instantly, died in exactly the nightmarish way he had always dreamed he would, with the rocks of retribution raining down around him.
The barrage continued uninterrupted for some time as the rocks plunged through the darkness. Some of them hit him. Most didn’t, careening harmlessly off the walls of the shaft. At last, when all the ammunition was gone, the flashlight came back on. This time, the hand that held it trembled violently, and the wavering beam jerked crazily as it zigzagged down the rocky walls, panning through the darkness in search of a body.
When the light finally settled on Harold’s inert form, on his open and unblinking eyes, there was a single, sharp intake of breath, a sigh of relief. And then the flashlight fell, plunging—still lit—through the eerie, enveloping silence. It slammed into Harold’s shattered chest, bounced once, then rolled off into the water.
Soon after that, the Scout’s engine choked and coughed back to life. It shuddered once, then caught and kept on running. As the International rumbled away toward Juniper Flats and Bisbee beyond that, the flashlight—one of Harold’s best—continued to cast a feeble, flickering light that lingered in the darkness of the glory hole. Even totally submerged, it still glowed through the murky water, long after the Scout had disappeared into the overcast night.
Thirteen
JIM BOB and Eva Lou Brady weren’t exactly social butterflies. It took some serious persuasion to convince them that they should attend the post-election party at all. They agreed, finally, only on the condition that Jenny ride with them. Joanna suspected it was a ploy giving them a convenient excuse to leave early, pleading the necessity of getting Jenny home and in bed because of school the next day.
Jenny opted to ride with the Bradys. Eleanor Lathrop went with friends. That meant Joanna Brady drove to the post-election party at the convention center alone.
Brave words to Jenny notwithstanding, Joanna was filled with grave misgivings as she made her way uptown. In her only previous attempt at elected office, she had run for student-body treasurer of Bisbee High School. She still remembered sitting in Miss Applewhite’s biology room (which doubled as Joanna’s homeroom) while Mr. Bailes, the principal, read the winners’ names over the intercom. With the sharp smell of formaldehyde filling her nostrils, she had listened intently, holding her breath the whole while, as he droned through the congratulatory list.
After what seemed forever, when he finally reached the position of treasurer, the name he read wasn’t Joanna Lathrop’s.
Joanna no longer remembered which of her classmates actually did win. Someone else’s victory wasn’t nearly as important as her own personal loss. The memory of that defeat came to her as clearly and painfully now as if it had happened yesterday.
She remembered how her face had flushed hot with embarrassment, how she had fought back tears of disappointment while well-meaning classmates told her, sympathetically, “Better luck next time.”
There’ll never be a next time, Joanna had vowed back then. It turned out she was wrong about that. Here she was, twelve years later, running for office after all.
“Whatever you do, don’t cry,” she lectured herself sternly, repeating words Marianne had been telling her for weeks. “Win, lose, or draw—do not cry.”
There were two readily available parking spaces directly across the street from the convention-center entrance, but Joanna ignored them both. Instead, she drove farther up the street, parking at the upper end of the lot near the post office. She locked the car and started toward the plaza, where she counted three different vans bearing the logos of Tucson television stations, as well as one more from a station in Phoenix.
Cochise County elections didn’t usually garner that much interest from out of town, but this year’s race for sheriff was different. The earlier deaths of both declared candidates had spurred uncommon statewide and national media attention. The fact that
Joanna was both a candidate and the widow of one of the slain men had contributed to keeping the hotly contested election in the human-interest spotlight. Not only that, but pundits continued to dwell on the idea that if Joanna Brady won, she would be the first female county sheriff in the state of Arizona.
Rather than go directly to the convention center and into the glaring lights of the waiting cameras, Joanna delayed her entrance by crossing the street and approaching the building with the wary attention of a battle-weary scout reconnoitering enemy territory. Stopping in the park, she gazed at the pale green building that appeared a ghostly gray in the evening light.
And truly, the convention center was a ghost. The structure that now functioned as the Bisbee Convention Center had once housed Phelps Dodge Mercantile—a branch of the company store—in the days before most of the jobs in the domestic copper-mining industry literally went south—to Mexico and South America.
In their heyday, P.D. stores in a dozen separate mining communities had been true department stores—places where, by signing a chit, company employees could purchase everything from groceries to furniture, from washing machines to ladies’ fine millinery, and have the cost automatically deducted from future paychecks.
Joanna didn’t actually remember shopping in this particular store, although she must have accompanied her mother there on occasion when she was little. She did have a dim, lingering, and traumatic recollection of being lost on a store elevator once, of searching frantically for her mother, and of being found much later among the glass-walled showcases. Eleanor had been furious with Joanna for wandering away on her own. In the very best of times, Bisbee had boasted a grand total of only three elevators, so the chances were good that Joanna’s vaguely remembered incident had actually occurred in the uptown P.D. store, especially since that had been Eleanor’s favorite place to shop. Before the relatively upscale P.D. closed for good, Eleanor Lathrop wouldn’t have been caught dead shopping at a J.C. Penney.