Tombstone Courage

by J. A. Jance

  “Not particularly. I’ve addressed that question on numerous occasions during my election campaign. Crime is the problem. Gender is not the problem.”

  “Even though some of your officers might be vocally critical of your…law-enforcement abilities?”

  “The voters of this county didn’t expect me to know everything the first day I walked into this office,” Joanna countered. “You and I both know there’s a learning curve on any new job. I believe the people who elected me were bargaining for a hard worker. They want me to uncover any problems that may exist in this agency and to find solutions to them. That’s what the people wanted, and it’s what I expect to give them.”

  “Do you think your election combined with what happened to the previous sheriff will make for a continuing morale problem in the department?”

  Joanna Brady wasn’t eager to discuss Walter V. McFadden or the role she herself had played in his death.

  “Any change of administration or supervision always comes with the potential for ‘morale’ problems. That goes for the private sector every bit as much as it does for governmental agencies. I didn’t come in here expecting to do a wholesale housecleaning. My intention is to give officers under me a fair crack at showing me what they can do. I assume they will grant me the same courtesy.”

  “You know about Martin Sanders’ resignation then?”

  Martin Sanders, deputy for administration, was Dick Voland’s counterpart on the administrative side. He had always been a background player. While Dick had been out actively campaigning for Al Freeman, Martin Sanders had been at work minding the store. He was someone Joanna naturally would have expected to meet during the course of her first full day in office had two separate homicides not taken precedence.

  “He resigned?” Joanna demanded in surprise. “Since when?”

  Sue Rolles looked startled as well. “I thought you knew all about that. My understanding was that he turned in his letter of resignation sometime early this morning. I wonder if it would be fair to characterize his action as a vote of no confidence.”

  Joanna could barely contain her irritation. “Since I haven’t seen the letter yet,” she snapped, “I don’t believe it’s fair to characterize it one way or the other. My answer on that issue is no comment. Period!”

  “What about Chief Deputy Richard Voland?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you have anyone in mind as his replacement?”

  “Replacement? Who says he’s leaving?”

  Sue Rolles shrugged. “Well,” she said disingenuously, “both he and Martin are political appointees, patronage workers who serve at the discretion of the sheriff. And since Voland actively supported your opponent…”

  Joanna cut the reporter off in midsentence. “Ms. Rolles,” she said, “did you attend Dick Voland’s press conference earlier this afternoon?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Then you are well aware that this agency is currently in the midst of coping with not one but two separate homicides in addition to handling the regular workload of calls.”

  “Yes.”

  “From the tenor of your questions, it appears to me this interview is heading in a direction I don’t especially like. I believe it’s designed to undermine my new administration, to create ill will and disharmony at a time when we all need to pull together to get the job done. With that in mind, I have nothing more to say at this time.”

  “But…”

  Impatiently, Joanna punched a button on the intercom. Luckily, it was the right one, and Kristin answered. “Yes?”

  “Miss Marsten,” Joanna said. “Ms. Rolles is just leaving. Would you please show her out? And would you mind bringing in my mail? I’ve been told there are some items lurking in there that require my immediate attention.”

  While she waited for Sue Rolles to leave and for Kristin to bring in the mail, Joanna turned and looked out her window. Not that many offices in the building boasted private windows.

  It was after four. Already the late fall sun was fast disappearing behind the Mule Mountains to the west. The hillside outside her window was spiked with gray sticks of spindly, thorny ocotillo branches. At first glance, the ghostly clumps of twigs seemed dead or dying, but the slanting afternoon sunlight revealed a faint tinge of green out-lining the stalks. Even though winter weather was fast approaching, pale new leaves sprouted among the spiny thorns.

  In order to survive in the harsh desert climate, ocotillos spend most of the year looking parched and barren. But whenever the shallow roots are blessed with rain, short-lived leaves appear on seemingly dead branches. New crops of leaves can come and go several times in the course of a single year.

  Why couldn’t people be more like ocotillos? Joanna wondered, envying the hardy desert candlewood its natural resilience. Humans didn’t necessarily have that same kind of toughness, the same ability to withstand and recover from terrible dry spells.

  Holly Patterson had gone off to Hollywood and created a career for herself, but the pain of what had happened to her as a child had somehow robbed her of all ability to enjoy it. She sat in a darkened room, rocking back and forth, hating her father and yet blaming herself for his death.

  Ivy Patterson, too, had been damaged by the family troubles. Her once seemingly placid existence of faithful daughterly duty had erupted in a geyser of anger that made murder possible. Her late-blooming rebellion against her father made even the natural and mundane acts of falling in love and getting married take on sinister and unnatural overtones.

  And before you go throwing too many stones, Joanna Brady thought to herself, what about you?

  With Andy gone, she didn’t expect the branches of her own heart ever again to leaf out in full springtime glory.

  Toward evening Isobel Gonzales went into the darkened bedroom to collect the dinner tray and straighten the tangled covers on the bed. Holly Patterson was back in her chair, rocking back and forth and staring out through a space between the curtains at the towering black shadow of the dump.

  “What’s up there?” she asked.

  Isobel almost jumped out of her skin. For days she had come to this room—dropping off food trays, taking them away, making the bed—while the room’s sole occupant seldom spoke or even acknowledged her existence.

  “Up where?” Isobel asked.

  “On the dump. Is it smooth? Is it lumpy?”

  Isobel walked over to the window and held the curtain aside. Eventually, the moon would come up, and the few hardy mesquite and scrub oak that had managed to scrabble up through the barren waste would show up as shadows against the lighter shades of rock and dirt. For now the whole thing was still an ink-black man-made mesa.

  “That’s funny,” Isobel said. “For years, when we were first married, my husband, Jaime, drove a dump truck out there. I always worried about him, driving down into the pit, loading up the back of the truck with all those huge boulders, and then driving out here on the dump. I was always afraid he’d back up too close to the edge and fall off. He never did, though. He drove a truck like that for years, but I never asked him what was up there. Maybe I didn’t want to know.”

  Holly turned her gaunt face away from the window for once and studied the older woman’s sturdy features. “Wouldn’t you like to know what’s up there now?” she asked.

  Isobel Gonzales smiled wisely and shook her head. “Jaime doesn’t drive dump trucks anymore,” she said. “And if it wasn’t so important to me back then, it sure isn’t now. Are you done with your tray? You must not like my cooking. You’ve barely touched it.”

  “I’m done with it,” Holly Patterson said. “Your cooking’s fine. I’m just not hungry.”

  Twenty-Seven

  KRISTIN DUMPED Joanna’s mail unceremoniously on her desk. “There’s someone else here to see you,” she said.

  With all these interruptions, how the hell did anyone ever get any work done? Joanna wondered. “Who is it this time?” she asked.

  “Linda Somebo
dy-or-other,” Kristin answered.

  Obviously still offended by the bra-and-panties discussion, Kristin was doing her best to get even. Joanna knew how that game worked. In office politics, passing along incomplete or inaccurate information to the boss constitutes one of the milder forms of a surly receptionist’s catalog of revenge.

  “Linda who?” Joanna pressed.

  “I don’t know.” Kristin shrugged petulantly. “She didn’t say.”

  Joanna counted to ten. “Kristin,” she said, “regardless of whether or not the visitor volunteers the information, it’s the receptionist’s job to find out who wants to be admitted to my office. You’re to tell me who’s waiting out there in the lobby, and I decide whether or not I want to see them. Is that clear?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Go find out who it is. Ask her.”

  The testy Kristin dragged her feet leaving Joanna’s office. The intercom buzzed angrily moments later. “Linda Kimball to see you, Sheriff Brady,” Kristin announced with ice crystals dripping from every word.

  “Thank you very much, Kristin. Send her right in.”

  The door opened seconds later, and a plain-Jane Linda Kimball bustled into the room. Heavyset and not worried about it, Burton Kimball’s wife had a comfortable, down-home, no-nonsense way about her from her ironclad support panty hose to her naturally graying French twist. Some of the other legal-beagle wives in town tended to dress in designer jeans and play endless games of bridge, all the while holding themselves apart from those they considered lesser beings. Inelegant Linda Kimball, on the other hand, was known and appreciated throughout the community for her boundless energy and tireless work on behalf of those less fortunate than herself.

  She routinely volunteered as an aide at the community hospital, and she had served as the money-raising spark plug to keep the local Meals-on-Wheels program under way while daily serving her own family well-balanced, home-cooked meals. Her two children were well mannered and smart. And each fall the vegetables Linda Kimball raised in her backyard garden walked away with a collection of red and blue ribbons from the Cochise County Fair in Douglas.

  In addition to all that, Burton Kimball’s wife had a reputation for being virtually unflappable. As she hurried into Joanna’s office that afternoon, however, her arm was in a sling and distress was written large across her troubled face. But Linda wasn’t there to discuss her injured arm.

  “I wanted to talk to Ernie Carpenter, but they told me he’s been called out of the office. I hope you don’t mind my dropping in like this.”

  “Not at all, Linda. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m in sort of a rush because I left the kids up in Old Bisbee for their piano lessons. I have to be back uptown to pick them up in another half hour, but I needed to talk to someone about what happened out on the ranch today.”

  “What’s that?”

  Linda Kimball dropped heavily into one of the visitor chairs and took a deep breath. “Burton called me at lunchtime to tell me all about it. I suppose I should have told him what I thought right then, but he was so upset, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  “What you thought about what?” Joanna asked.

  Linda’s double chin quivered. “What I thought about the skeleton,” she answered doggedly. “About who I think it is. Or, rather, who it was.”

  “You mean you know?” Joanna demanded, leaning forward in her chair.

  Linda nodded miserably. “Yes, I do,” she answered. “At least I have a theory about it.”

  “Tell me,” Joanna urged.

  Linda sighed as if not knowing where to start. “Burton said the one body has been there for a very long time.”

  “That’s right. Skeletal remains only.”

  “Do you know anything at all about my husband?” Linda Kimball asked. “About his history, I mean?”

  Joanna considered for a moment. With only six thousand people in town, residents of Bisbee tended to have some knowledge of one another’s general histories, even for those people they didn’t necessarily know well.

  “Some, I guess,” she answered. “Wasn’t he raised by the Pattersons? I seem to remember something about that.”

  Linda nodded. “Harold Patterson was Burt’s uncle, his mother’s older brother. When Thornton, Burt’s dad, was discharged from the service after World War II, he and his wife, Bonnie, stayed out on the Rocking P for a while. When Bonnie turned up pregnant, Thornton left her with her brother while he went off to California looking for work. He was supposed to send for her as soon as he found a job and a place to live, but he never did. No one ever heard from him again, and Bonnie Patterson Kimball died in childbirth a few months later. Aunt Emily and Uncle Harold took care of Burton from the time he was born.”

  Linda broke off, as though just relating her husband’s painful history hurt her as well.

  “It sounds like a pretty rough thing all the way around,” Joanna offered by way of encouragement. “He was lucky there was someone to look after him.”

  Linda nodded and continued. “They were wonderful to him; treated him just like one of their own. All that ancient family history still bothers my husband, even though it isn’t something he talks about. I mean, being abandoned like that does some damage, leaves scars, although, since it happened before he was born, it isn’t something he personally remembers.”

  Joanna was puzzled about where all this was going, but she knew enough to shut up and let Linda tell the story her way.

  “It’s one of the reasons family is so important to him,” Linda continued. “And it’s why that terrible business between Uncle Harold and Holly upset him so. Burton would never say so, but he loved that crotchety old man just as much as if Uncle Harold had been his natural father. It tore him to pieces to think that Holly would come out of nowhere, armed with her high-priced lawyer and her therapist and all those horrendous stories.”

  Linda paused and almost stopped, as though her talking engine were running low on steam. “That’s also why he’s always been so concerned about Ivy,” she added.

  “Burton’s worried about Ivy?” Joanna asked.

  “Wouldn’t you be?” Linda countered. “It sounds to me as though she’s really gone off the deep end. The idea that she’s getting married within hours of her father’s death and without even mentioning it to Burton…It’s breaking his heart. Not that we would have gone, but she didn’t even bother to invite him to the wedding.”

  “Why is Burton so upset?” Joanna asked. “I know Ivy’s timing is a little unorthodox and could raise a few eyebrows, but I’d think he’d be happy that she’s finally found someone after all this time.”

  “You don’t understand,” Linda said. “Back when those three kids were growing up, Burton always considered Ivy his baby sister. All his life, he’s tried to look out for her best interests the way a big brother should. Maybe even more than he should.”

  Linda paused as if uncertain what to say next. Stifling her inclination to rush her, Joanna kept quiet.

  “Getting back to this family stuff. I knew from the beginning that family connections bothered him. I had both my parents—still do—while his natural parents were both gone. For a long time, we didn’t even discuss the subject. Later on, though, when he finally could tell me about it, he admitted that he’d always hoped that someday he’d have a chance to meet his father. He said he wanted to ask Thornton Kimball why he left town. Why he ran away and never came back. Why he never even acknowledged his son’s birth. That dream of someday meeting his father is one he’s carried around in his heart from the time he was just a little kid. When he told me about it, I thought my heart would break just listening to him. It was so sad, so unfair.”

  Linda took another breath. “I love him, you see, and I finally had to do something about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About making that dream come true. I decided to try finding Thornton Kimball on my own, without telling Burt what I was up to. I wan
ted to surprise him. I thought that if he finally had the chance to meet and talk to his natural father, it might help him put some of his own personal demons to rest. He’s spent a lifetime blaming himself, you know, not only for his mother’s death, but also for his father’s desertion.”

  “Any luck finding his father?”

  “No,” Linda answered. “None. I’ve checked everywhere—the Salvation Army, the V.A., the genealogical library up in Salt Lake. Everywhere I go, I keep running into blank walls. It was as though Thornton Kimball left the Rocking P one day and vanished into thin air.”

  Feeling like some dimwitted comic-strip character, Joanna felt the light bulb switch on over her head when she finally made the connection. “You believe the other body in the glory hole might be Thornton Kimball’s?”

  Linda nodded. “As soon as Burt told me about the skeleton, this terrible feeling of certainty washed over me. I can’t explain it. I don’t know where it came from, but as far as I can tell, from the time he left here in 1945, no one ever heard a single word from Thornton Kimball. And maybe that’s why—because he never really left.”

  Joanna felt a swift rush of rising excitement. Linda Kimball’s theory made good sense. She reached for the phone. “I’ll pass this information along to Ernie Carpenter right away.”

  “Wait,” Linda said. “Don’t call him yet.”

  “Why not?” Joanna said. “With this information, maybe we can get some help from the state crime laboratory—utilize some of their new DNA technology.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to do that,” Linda Kimball said quietly.

  Joanna put down the phone. “Why not?”

  Linda shifted uneasily in her chair. “Promise me you won’t tell Burton how you found out. It’s embarrassing. He’d be so angry if he ever found out about it.”

  Joanna thought she had been following all the nuances of the twisting story line, but now she was suddenly lost. “If he found out about what?” she asked.

  Linda Kimball bit her lower lip while a pair of fat tears squeezed out of her eyes and ran down both cheeks, leaving behind twin tracks of dark-brown mascara. One-handed, Linda fumbled in her massive purse long enough to extract a packet of tissues. After dabbing her eyes and blowing her nose, she forged ahead.