Tombstone Courage

by J. A. Jance

  “That’s fine,” he said, waving them away. “Tell the people down at the house to stay out of Harold’s room. That goes for everyone there. Tell them to leave it alone until I have a chance to go through it.”

  “Right,” Joanna said. “I’ll tell them.”

  At the point in the road where Dick Voland’s Blazer still blocked the way, they had to abandon the Scout in favor of Joanna’s Eagle. The hulking Russian had to scrunch his broad shoulders and duck his head in order to cram himself into the passenger’s seat, but he did so without complaint.

  While Joanna drove, he sat with his arms folded stubbornly across his massive chest, frowning and looking straight ahead, saying nothing. She looked at him from time to time and tried to decipher the troubled expression on his face.

  She was surprised at the complete change in Yuri Malakov’s demeanor. His appearance now was a complete 180 degrees from the way he had looked earlier, sitting relaxed and supposedly dozing on the running board of the pumper. And the change had been instantaneous rather than gradual. It happened the moment she had mentioned existence of that second body. The news had seemed to distress him in a way that went far beyond his supposedly slight connection to the Patterson clan and their troubles.

  “What’s the matter?” Joanna asked. “Is something bothering you?”

  Yuri glanced at her suspiciously. “What means ‘bother’?”

  “Bother is like worry,” Joanna explained. “Is something worrying you?”

  “Nyet,” he answered. “Nothing.”

  But Yuri Malakov, silent and brooding, certainly didn’t look worry-free.

  Thinking about his situation, Joanna realized it had to be dismaying to be thrown into a crisis—especially a crisis involving a murder investigation—in a place where the entire legal system was completely foreign. Not only that, he was having to sort through all the strange customs through a veil of stilted, inflexible classroom English.

  Joanna’s own four years of classroom Spanish—two in high school and two in college—had been difficult enough and barely qualified her to speak “menu Spanish” in unfamiliar Stateside Mexican restaurants. Had she been foolish enough to head for Spain or the interior of Mexico with only that rudimentary background, she could probably survive—order food and make her most basic needs known—but she had no illusions about her ability to communicate or to be understood. Complex ideas would have been far beyond her.

  But here was Yuri Malakov, a grown man able to communicate only basic messages. No doubt he had taken a good deal of classroom instruction in English years earlier—his formal, nonidiomatic way of speaking indicated as much. But still, it had to be terribly difficult to be living and coping with complex day-to-day issues in a foreign country where virtually no one other than perhaps a few second-generation Slavic miners spoke some version of his native tongue.

  As someone who had lived in one small Arizona town all her life, Joanna found the very idea of Yuri Malakov fascinating. What would drive a man to turn his back on everything familiar? To leave behind all family and friends? What kind of work had he done before coming here, and what career path had he abandoned in order to work as a hired hand for strangers on an isolated Arizona ranch? And what would possess a man, somewhere in his mid-forties, to set himself the task of grasping the intricacies of a whole new culture?

  Maybe that was it, Joanna theorized. Perhaps Yuri’s concern for Ivy Patterson was based primarily on her helping him make that difficult transition; gratitude for the invaluable role she was playing in his life as his English-language tutor. For a few moments, Joanna considered asking him, but then she let the idea go. He sat staring out the window, effectively shutting out any more questions. Besides, it didn’t seem worthwhile to fight her way through the difficulties of the communication barrier in order to discuss something as esoteric as motivation. Instead, they rode the rest of the way to the Rocking P ranch house in silence.

  As they entered the yard, the place looked positively idyllic. With a plume of inviting smoke curling out the chimney, the house and surrounding ranch seemed an improbable setting for two unexplained deaths. Several loose chickens scratched lazily in the dirt, and a fully adorned watchdog peacock strutted his stuff in the clear November sunlight. Marianne’s VW was still parked beside the gate, as was Ivy Patterson’s Chevy Luv.

  The ranch house was surrounded by a white picket fence that set off the yard proper with its blanket of winter-yellowed Bermuda grass from the rest of the grounds. The house was an early-twentieth-century period piece—a single story of living space topped by a steeply pitched tin roof. The metal roof shone with a coat of freshly applied paint as did the wooden siding, shutters, and trim. Everything about the place looked neat and properly maintained.

  A wide covered porch ran the entire length of each outside wall, creating a good eight feet of extra overhang and shade to help cool the house’s interior from Arizona’s scorching summer heat. Although the porch had to be close to ninety years old, none of the flooring sagged. Not a single spindly rail was missing or broken from the long span of banister. If some pieces of woodwork were no longer original, it didn’t show. They had been replaced and repaired so carefully that it was impossible to tell old millwork from new.

  Two massive wisteria vines, thick-trunked with age, stood guard on either side of the front entrance, sending out a tangle of naked gray branches that clung tenaciously along the front lip and gutters of the overhang. In the spring, the porch would be all but obscured by a curtain of lush greenery and cascading lavender flowers.

  Joanna was quick to note that the grounds of the Rocking P were surprisingly clear of junk. The outbuildings were all fully upright and freshly painted. No hulks of dead cars or rusting farm equipment had been left to crumble within sight of the house. Joanna’s High Lonesome suffered terribly in comparison.

  The wheels on the Eagle had not yet come to a complete stop before Yuri Malakov had the door open. He would have leaped out and been long gone if Joanna hadn’t stopped him. “Let me tell her,” she said. “It’ll be better if I do it.”

  Yuri glowered at her, but he subsided in the seat. “You do it then,” he said.

  As if on cue, the front door of the house opened. Ivy Patterson and Marianne Maculyea appeared on the porch together. Not surprisingly, Ivy’s usually cheerful face was shrouded in grief, but even Marianne’s features were frozen in an atypically grim mask.

  Joanna opened the gate and started up the walkway. To her surprise, Ivy left Marianne on the porch and came running forward. Instead of stopping when she reached Joanna, Ivy darted past and threw herself sobbing against Yuri Malakov’s massive chest. He reached down, folded her in his arms, and touched his chin to her hair.

  Yuri clicked his tongue soothingly. “Is okay. Yuri is here.”

  That small series of loving gestures turned all of Joanna’s previous conjecture on its ear. Yuri and Ivy might have known each other for only a matter of weeks, but clearly they meant far more to one another than simple teacher and pupil. They were in love. Even the desolation of her grief didn’t entirely obscure the glow on Ivy’s face as she abandoned herself to the comfort of Yuri’s encircling arms.

  Joanna cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Ivy, but I need to talk to you. There’s something you need to know.”

  Instead of looking at Joanna, Ivy stared up at Yuri’s stolid face, as if whatever she needed to know would be clearly written on his broad features. He shook his head. “She tells,” he said, nodding in Joanna’s direction.

  “Tell me what?” Ivy asked. “What’s wrong now?”

  This was Joanna’s first experience at delivering bad news in some kind of official capacity. Like a child thrust suddenly into the spotlight of a Sunday-school Christmas pageant, she was instantly out of her depth, stymied about what to say or where to begin.

  “Maybe we should go inside and sit down,” she suggested lamely.

  Glaring at her but holding tightly to Ivy’s hand, Yuri strode
up onto the porch and inside the house. “What about me?” Marianne asked, as Joanna started by.

  “Come ahead if you want to,” Joanna said.

  By the time Joanna and Marianne entered the living room, Ivy and Yuri were already seated side by side on an old-fashioned, faded leather couch. They sat close to one another, with Yuri’s long arm sprawled intimately across Ivy’s shoulder. A good-sized woman in her own right, Ivy Patterson seemed dwarfed and diminutive beside the hulking Russian. The fiercely protective look on his face was out of place—unless he and Ivy knew more about how Harold Patterson had come to be in the glory hole than Yuri had so far admitted.

  But still, Joanna’s first order of business was to inform Ivy of the presence of that second body. The cozy fireplace-warmed living room now seemed as bad a place to deliver that kind of news as the front porch had moments earlier.

  “What is it?” Ivy asked.

  Feeling every bit the unwelcome interloper, Joanna stumbled her way into a chair. For a few moments, she almost wished she were a man, wearing the lawman’s stereotypical Stetson. At least that way she would have had something to take off and put in her lap, some tangible object to use as a physical buffer between Ivy Patterson’s already significant pain and the news Joanna was about to add to it.

  “I’m so sorry about your father,” she began haltingly. “Harold Patterson was a wonderful man, and he’s going to be greatly missed.”

  Ivy Patterson nodded. Tears threatened, but she held them in check. “Thank you,” she murmured.

  “As you know, Yuri and I have just come down from up on the mountain,” Joanna continued. “From up at the glory hole. Did he have a chance to tell about what’s going on up there?”

  “Just that they wouldn’t let him bring Dad’s Scout back down the mountain.”

  Joanna nodded. “There’s a roadblock near the top, and the Scout is stuck on the wrong side of it.”

  Ivy shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. I suppose we can go up later and get it back. That’s how we brought it home from the convention center yesterday. Is that what you came to tell me?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “There’s something else.” She paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “I was up there with Dick Voland and Ernie Carpenter, the homicide investigator.”

  “Homicide,” Ivy repeated. “As in murder? You mean my dad didn’t just fall in? It wasn’t an accident?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look like an accident. In the meantime, that’s not all. There’s something else you need to know.”

  “What else?” Ivy demanded impatiently, sitting forward on the couch. “What more could there be?”

  Joanna took a deep breath. “Your father’s isn’t the only body down in that hole, Ivy,” she said. “Ernie Carpenter found a human skeleton down there with him, someone who’s been in the glory hole for a very long time. For years.”

  Ivy Patterson’s eyes grew wide with shock. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. “It’s true then!”

  “What’s true?” Joanna asked.

  Suddenly, a fresh torrent of tears coursed down Ivy Patterson’s cheeks. All color drained from her cheeks. She buried her face in her hands, while her whole body convulsed with sobs. For a moment, there was no sound in the room except Ivy’s desperate weeping and the crackles and pops from the mesquite log fire. No one else had anything to say.

  Eventually, Ivy drew herself erect, but the look on her face was far more dismayed than grief-stricken. “Mother always said there was a body in that hole,” she said softly. “She always said so, and I never believed her.”

  Joanna felt her own jolt of shock. “You mean to say your mother knew something about this?”

  Ivy nodded. “I’m sure of it.”

  “What about your father?”

  A strange look washed over Ivy’s face. Her flesh seemed to harden. Her jawline froze with visible anger. “That son of a bitch,” she murmured. “That rotten, low-down son of a bitch. He must have known it was true the whole time.”

  “Who must have known what was true?” Joanna asked, confused by the sudden shift in Ivy Patterson’s demeanor.

  “My father. That there was a body. When Mother told me that, he insisted she was crazy. Every time she brought it up, he claimed she was talking out of her head. That was about the time he started having someone watch her constantly—every minute, day and night. He said that if she was capable of making up such bizarre stories and of getting people to believe her, we’d have to be careful or they’d haul her away to Phoenix and lock her up in the state hospital.”

  “Wait a minute,” Marianne said. “If your mother was telling the truth, if the body was really there the whole time, then maybe she wasn’t so crazy after all.”

  “That’s right, maybe she wasn’t,” Ivy added grimly, with a ferocity that was chilling to hear. “At least not at first, but she was later. And why not? Dad started locking her in her room at night. He stopped trusting her, and she went downhill fast. Before long, he wouldn’t even let her out of his sight. Or mine. She did go crazy then, and maybe it happened because he drove her to it. Damn him anyway! How could he do that to her? How could he?”

  Ivy collapsed against Yuri’s shoulder, her whole body convulsed by a new paroxysm of broken-hearted sobs.

  Sitting there, Joanna sensed something odd. Before Ivy Patterson had learned about the second body, her reaction to her father’s death had been completely appropriate and understandable. But this new storm of tears was something else.

  The woman weeping inconsolably on Yuri Malakov’s massive shoulder wasn’t simply Harold Patterson’s grieving daughter. She was instead the betrayed child of a betrayed mother, a child who now—perhaps for the first time—finally was forced into seeing her once-trusted father through new eyes. Joanna’s revelation had coerced Ivy into holding Harold responsible for any number of past sins—either real or imagined.

  And Ivy’s betrayal, her profound distress, clearly stemmed from the fact that two bodies had been found in the glory hole up on Juniper Flats. Two bodies, not one.

  But there’s far more to it than that, Joanna thought uneasily, as she waited for Ivy Patterson’s spate of wild tears to subside.

  If Harold Patterson had betrayed his own wife and daughter, if he had somehow tricked them into believing he was something he wasn’t, then what had he done to the rest of the world?

  After all, a man capable of deceiving his family was more than smart enough to trick a mere insurance agent.

  Or a brand-new sheriff.

  Twenty-Three

  WITH SOME effort, Ivy pulled herself together and leveled her gaze on Marianne. “That settles it then,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to go through with it after all, just the way I talked about in the first place.”

  “But, Ivy…” Marianne protested.

  “No,” Ivy interrupted forcefully, “I’ve had it. I’m not going to change my mind again. I’ve spent my whole life looking out for everybody else. I’m not going to do that anymore.”

  At that juncture, the front door slammed open, and Burton Kimball rushed uninvited into the room. “Is it true?” he demanded. “Did they find him? Is he dead?”

  Beyond tears, Ivy’s eyes suddenly glimmered with cold fury. “He’s dead all right,” she said.

  Burton Kimball closed his eyes and shook his head. “Ivy,” he said, “I’m so sorry. But these things happen. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

  “It is not all right!” Ivy insisted. “It’ll never be all right. Don’t you understand? Dad lied to me.”

  A stricken look washed across Burton Kimball’s face. “If it’s about the will, Ivy, there shouldn’t be any problem. He said he was going to change it, he may have wanted to change it, but I wouldn’t do it for him. Not the day he asked about it. And I doubt he found anyone else to do it on such short notice. You should still end up with the ranch. That’s the way we set it up originally.
And even if Holly were to attempt to go against the will or try to continue the lawsuit against his estate, I don’t see how she’d win.”

  “I’m not talking about Dad’s will,” Ivy cut in icily. “It’s worse than that. Way worse. Mother was right all along, Burtie. About the glory hole. They just found another body in it.”

  Dismayed, Burton Kimball stopped short. “What do you mean, another body?”

  “Just what I said. Somebody else is dead and down in the glory hole with Dad,” she answered.

  Stricken, Burton Kimball staggered toward a chair. “How can that be? It’s crazy.”

  “That’s what Dad always told Mother, too—that it wasn’t possible for a body to be down there, that she was crazy for saying so, remember? Dad used us, Burtie,” she added bitterly. “He used us both, to spy on her and keep her in line, when the whole time she was telling the truth. It must have been true all along.”

  With every word, Ivy’s voice had risen both in pitch and outrage. Yuri soothingly rubbed her upper arm. “Be still,” he murmured. “Do not be so upset.”

  Ivy burrowed under Yuri’s arm not so much like a lost wild thing seeking the warmth of its nest, but more like an angry wounded bear retreating to her cave. As she rested against him, Burton shot Yuri Malakov a single scathing and questioning glance, but his full attention soon settled back on Ivy.

  “Who is this other body?” he asked. “Does anyone know?”

  “There’s no way to tell who it is until we can raise it out of the hole,” Joanna said. “From the looks of it, it’s not so much a body as it is a skeleton. It’s been down there a long time.”

  “Do you hear that, Burtie?” Ivy demanded. “Don’t you remember? Mother made us both promise never to go near that place. She even made me swear that, on the family Bible.”

  Burton Kimball nodded. “Until after your father was dead,” he added. “I do remember that much. At the time, I thought it was just more of her ranting and raving. In fact, it was one of the things that helped convince me Uncle Harold was right, that Aunt Emily was really completely around the bend. She would go on and on about that glory hole for hours on end, insisting it would be the death of your father someday.”