Tombstone Courage

by J. A. Jance

  “Yes, please,” Holly Patterson said avidly, staggering to her feet and then swaying back and forth as though about to black out from the sudden effort. “I’d like that very much.”

  “Then we have to move quickly,” Joanna cautioned. “Down the back stairs. I’ll lead the way. Follow me, and stay close to the wall so the stairs don’t creak so much.”

  Once Holly was out of the room, Joanna relocked the door and returned the key to its place on the table while Holly stood in the middle of the hallway, watching her in a state of confused bewilderment.

  “This way,” Joanna said, taking her by the arm. “Hurry.”

  As they started down the stairs, Joanna realized the whole house now echoed with sudden, deafening silence. The ever-present sound of the rocker was stilled. In its absence, the creaking floors, many times amplified, seemed to echo off the walls and ceilings.

  What if we’re caught? Joanna wondered worriedly. It was bad enough to have two of her deputies charged with false arrest in the Kansas Settlement case. It would be far worse to have the new sheriff herself up on similar charges.

  When they stepped outside, Joanna was shocked by how cold it seemed. Running up and down the stairs had left her overheated and winded, but she at least had the wool blazer. Holly had been sitting in a very warm room, and she was wearing nothing but loose-fitting sweats and a pair of bedroom slippers. They were barely out the door when Holly shivered and hunched her thin shoulders against the cold.

  “Here,” Joanna said, shrugging off her blazer. “Put this on. The car’s this way.”

  But instead of heading in the way Joanna pointed, Holly Patterson set off determinedly in the other direction, winding her way down through the terrace, heading toward the towering dump, gliding along like a sleepwalker, drawn forward by some invisible and inexplicable force. Joanna darted after her. “The car’s over here,” she insisted.

  When Holly still ignored her, Joanna grasped her arm and tried to turn her bodily in the right direction. It was no use. Holly Patterson, headed straight for the dump, was as unstoppable as a loaded freight train on rails. She shook off Joanna’s grasp and continued forward with single-minded focus.

  “Where are you going?” Joanna asked.

  “I’ve got to see if he’s up there,” Holly answered with surprising animation. “I’ve got to know.”

  “If who’s up there?” Joanna demanded.

  Behind them, a door to the house slammed open, then closed. “Hey!” Amy Baxter shouted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Come back.”

  The sound of that distinctive voice seemed to galvanize Holly Patterson. Her eyes widened. She leaped forward like a startled hare. Joanna was momentarily left behind by Holly’s first sudden burst of speed.

  Part of Joanna’s difficulty lay in her bare feet. Holly Patterson’s house slippers, poor as they were, gave her somewhat better mobility and traction. Joanna’s feet were cold and bleeding. The rough surface of every bit of gravel cut painfully into her soles. She whimpered with every step. She considered stopping and giving up, but Holly Patterson was still hurrying forward, and Amy Baxter was coming across the backyard toward them at a dead run.

  Joanna turned and limped after Holly. She caught her when they reached the tightly strung fence at the bottom of the dump. Holly stood there, tugging desperately on what seemed to be a bathrobe that had somehow become entangled in the tightly strung wire.

  “Go on through,” Joanna urged. “Hurry. If you want the robe, I’ll bring it.”

  With the familiarity of a country-raised child, Holly wiggled through the fence. Naturally, one barb caught on Joanna’s blazer and left a jagged rip down the center of the back, but that barely slowed Holly’s forward motion. And as Joanna wormed her way through the fence, she tore her own blouse in the process. As promised, she wrenched the robe loose from the fence and pulled it on over her shoulders, grateful for some covering to ward off the bone-chilling cold.

  By the time Joanna reached the bottom of the dump, Holly was already scrambling up the steep incline. Conscious once more of her painful, bleeding feet, Joanna paused, but only for a moment before she, too, began the difficult ascent.

  “Holly!” Amy Baxter’s voice commanded from behind them, from the other side of the fence. “Come back!”

  Joanna saw it happen. It was as though an invisible choke chain were being pulled taut around Holly’s neck. She slowed her desperate flight. Slowed first, and then stopped.

  “Come back down!”

  Joanna had been scrabbling along behind Holly, picking her way as best she could over and around the huge boulders, trying not to dislodge anything, and trying not to think about what would happen if one of those huge stones came loose and rolled back down the steeply angled incline.

  They were only a third of the way up the slope now. Joanna had seen no sign of a weapon on Amy Baxter’s person, but Holly’s fear was palpable—absolutely real and overwhelmingly contagious. Joanna didn’t have to see a gun to understand they were both in terrible danger, that they had to get away.

  “Come on, Holly,” Joanna urged, overtaking the no-longer-moving woman. “Don’t stop now.” But Holly was already making the first hesitant motions toward retracing her steps.

  “Don’t you want to see what’s up here?” Joanna taunted, trying her best to counter the almost magnetic effect Amy Baxter’s voice seemed to have on Holly Patterson.

  “She already kept you from doing this once,” Joanna continued. “You’re not going to let her take it away from you again, are you? Not when you’re this close.”

  Holly looked at Joanna, as though trying to make sense of what she was saying, but now she stopped and didn’t move in either direction. Joanna dared to look back down, wondering why Amy’s shouting had suddenly stopped. On the far side of the fence, Amy Baxter and Rex Rogers seemed to be standing and arguing.

  “Come on, Holly,” Joanna urged again, knowing the respite wouldn’t last long. “Why won’t she let you climb up here? What’s Amy Baxter afraid of?”

  And then, miraculously, Holly was moving in the right direction again, climbing slowly uphill with Joanna scrambling along at her side. Off in the distance, she could hear the sound of a wailing siren, of some siren, but Joanna didn’t know the sounds well enough to differentiate between one emergency vehicle and another. She couldn’t tell whether what was coming was a police car of some kind or one of Bisbee’s fire trucks.

  And even if it was a police vehicle, Joanna thought despairingly, it wouldn’t be coming for her. How could it? She had told Kristin where she was going, but she hadn’t expected this kind of difficulty.

  “Holly!” Amy was shouting again. “Are you listening to me?”

  Joanna looked down. Rex Rogers was no longer visible, but Amy was. She had crawled through the fence and even now was at the base of the dump and starting to climb.

  “Holly,” she ordered. “I told you to stop! Come back! I want to talk to you.”

  Holly slowed once more. “Don’t listen to her,” Joanna urged. “Shut her out! Sing something.”

  Already, Holly’s eyes were starting to glaze over. The pull of Amy Baxter’s voice was so strong as to be almost irresistible. In desperation, Joanna Brady began to sing the only song she could remember at a moment’s notice. A hiking song, from her days in the Girl Scouts. She sang it at the top of her panting, air-starved lungs.

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,

  Ninety-nine bottles of beer.

  You take one down and pass it around,

  Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.”

  And to her amazement, Holly Patterson miraculously began to climb once more.

  By then Joanna was slightly in the lead, and by then the top of the dump was only a few feet away. Joanna was first over the top, pulling herself up over a steep lip and then falling down the far side into what was evidently a rough roadway. On the other side of the road was a raised ridge, a berm, that formed an inn
er boundary along the entire length of road as far as the eye could see.

  Staying low and slipping her automatic out of the shoulder holster, Joanna belly-crawled back to the edge and looked down. Holly had stopped again, cowering in an eroded dip behind a precariously perched boulder only inches from the top. Below them Amy Baxter was climbing steadily.

  “Come on down, Holly,” Amy was grunting between breaths. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “She’s lying,” Joanna yelled. “Don’t listen to her. Come on! Up here!”

  But once more Holly seemed frozen, unable to move.

  “Give me your hand!” Joanna ordered. “Now!”

  When Holly failed to budge, Joanna reached down and grasped Holly’s wrist. With a surge of strength Joanna had no idea she possessed, she hauled Holly up and over the edge. She tumbled down the lip and landed with a breathless thump. Joanna tumbled after her and lifted the fallen woman to her feet.

  “Go,” Joanna urged, pointing toward the ridge and drawing the Colt. She wasn’t sure whether or not Amy was armed but if there was a possibility weapons would be involved, Joanna wanted Holly behind her, out of the line of fire. The ridge on the other side of the road seemed to offer the only possible cover. But Holly seemed incapable of independent action. She stared at Joanna uncomprehendingly and didn’t move.

  “Come on, then,” Joanna said, grabbing Holly’s hand again and dragging her forward. As they started up and over the side of the berm, there was a clatter of dislodged rock from the side of the dump. At that critical instant, Joanna glanced back over her shoulder.

  Rather than being just a berm, the ridge was actually the outside of a retaining wall for one of the series of rectangular copper leaching ponds that covered most of the surface of the dump. On the outside, the retaining wall was simply a rocky ridge, but the inside was covered with a slick layer of slimy, greaselike silt.

  In desperation to reach safety and to protect the seemingly helpless woman who was now in her charge, Joanna had been moving as fast as possible. Now, as they topped the berm, there was nothing at all to break their forward momentum. Staggering like a pair of inept skiers, they skidded down the slippery bank and into the water, where they landed, floundering and sputtering, in the chemically saturated water of a Phelps Dodge leaching pond.

  Thirty-Six

  THE FIRST shock of landing in frigid water took Joanna’s breath away. For a moment, she was too stunned to move. When she tried, her hands and knees slipped and slid on the oozy, slime-covered bottom. Finally, though, she managed to pull herself out of the evil-smelling water and back up onto the berm.

  Grabbing Holly’s arm, she dragged her out as well and up onto the bank where they both lay, gasping and spent. As soon as her head cleared, she realized her gun was gone. Her brand-new First Edition Colt 2000 was lost somewhere in the whitish slime at the bottom of the coppery-colored pool.

  If Joanna had paused long enough to think about how cold the water was or how filled with God-knows-what kinds of chemicals, she never would have plunged back into the pond. But the semi-automatic was essential. Without a backup coming, she had to have a weapon.

  Holding her breath against the assault of cold, Joanna plowed back into the icy water, splashing through the mud in her numbed bare feet, using them to dredge through the thick sludge on the murky bottom. The harsh leaching chemicals burned fiercely in the lacerations on the bottoms of her bleeding feet, but she was grateful for the burning sensation. At least she could feel her feet again, and she used them to good advantage—dragging them through the water.

  Although it seemed much longer, it was only a matter of seconds before she smashed the end of her big toe on the grip of the missing weapon, and once she had it in her hand, it was all she could do to hold on to the slippery, slime-covered metal. With fingers stiff and awkward with cold, she pulled the relatively clean tail of her blouse free of her skirt and used that to wipe off the muck from the Colt.

  Her hands were shaking violently with the cold. How long before hypothermia sets in? she wondered.

  “Where are you, Holly?” Amy Baxter’s voice came again, calling from much closer now, from somewhere on the other side of the berm.

  At the sound of her voice, Holly moaned like someone in desperate pain. She dropped to the ground and didn’t move.

  “Come here,” Amy continued. “I only want to talk to you.”

  “What’s going on?” Joanna demanded, falling down on the berm beside Holly, forcing the woman to lower her head so it would be out of sight. “Why was she keeping you locked up? Why doesn’t she want you to get away?”

  But Holly didn’t answer. She huddled next to Joanna, quaking with cold and saying nothing.

  “Holly,” Joanna snapped. “Answer the damn question!”

  “This has to be where it was,” Holly muttered through chattering teeth. “Right here. Below where we are right now.”

  “What was here?” Joanna asked, raising her head an inch or so, trying to peer over the top of the berm without being seen herself.

  “His house,” Holly answered. “Not a house really. Just a Quonset hut with a bare concrete floor. I remember that now. I remember seeing the green trees of Casa Vieja from there, the trees and the terraces.”

  “Holly,” Amy’s disembodied voice called. “Where are you? Come out so I can see you, so we can talk.” She spoke her words slowly, putting a peculiar weight behind each and every syllable. “Come here.”

  At once Holly’s eyes began to glaze, and she started to rise to her feet. With a grunt of effort, Joanna jerked her back down.

  “I’ve got to go,” Holly said. “Amy wants me.”

  “Why?” Joanna demanded. “Just tell me why.”

  “I don’t know.” Holly began sobbing. “She sounds mad at me. I must have done something wrong.”

  It was becoming more and more clear to Joanna that the sound of Amy’s voice exerted some kind of hypnotic mental hold on Holly, and the only way to counter it was to keep her too occupied to fall under Amy’s spell. Joanna moved closer to the weeping woman, until their faces were mere inches apart.

  “You haven’t done anything wrong, Holly. They had you locked in your room. Getting away from people like that isn’t bad, believe me. Why didn’t they want you to come up here?”

  “They were afraid I’d remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “His face,” Holly whispered. “I saw it for a while. I think I saw it on a piece of paper, but it went away again, and now I can’t remember.”

  “Holly,” Amy Baxter said. “Where are you? We have to talk.”

  “Whose face?” Joanna asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “The man’s face…the man who…” Holly’s voice faded into nothing.

  “The man who what?” Joanna demanded.

  “The man who hurt me. A long time ago.”

  Joanna remembered Isobel talking about Holly looking at the paper, the Bisbee Bee. She had seen a copy of the paper that morning herself. There had been two pictures on the front page: Harold Lamm Patterson’s and Thornton Kimball’s.

  “You saw the man’s face in the newspaper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father?”

  “No, not him. The other one.”

  “It was, too, your father,” Amy Baxter said, appearing over the ridge of the berm. “You’re confused, Holly. You’re making things up.”

  There was no sign of a weapon on Amy’s person, but with that voice of hers, she was nonetheless armed. Joanna held up the Colt. “Stay where you are, Amy. Don’t come any closer. This is loaded. I’ll use it if I have to.”

  “Don’t threaten me. You can see I’m not armed. I came to get Holly and take her back to bed before she freezes to death. You had no business bringing an invalid out into weather like this. You’re soaked, Holly. Come along.”

  “She’s staying with me until I get to the bottom of all this,” Joanna countered. “Why did you have her locked in her room?�
��

  “Isn’t that obvious?” Amy asked. “Twice, now, so far today, she’s taken off on her own and run to this dump. She could fall and hurt herself. Or worse.”

  “What’s here on the dump?” Joanna demanded. “Or else under it. She said something about a house, a Quonset hut.”

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “Yes, there was.” Holly insisted suddenly. “Don’t you remember, Amy? My father told us all about it. About where Uncle Thorny and Aunt Bonnie were staying when it happened. When it happened the first time.”

  “Be quiet, Holly,” Amy ordered sharply. “You’re confused and making things up. He didn’t say any such thing.”

  Slowly, the picture was beginning to shift into focus. Of course. Uncle Thorny. Thornton Kimball. The other picture in the paper along with Harold Patterson’s.

  “Is Uncle Thorny the one who hurt you when you were little?”

  Holly didn’t answer. Instead she collapsed facedown on the berm, weeping.

  “Look what you’ve done,” Amy Baxter said, taking a step toward them.

  “I said don’t move, and I meant it!” Joanna ordered through chattering teeth. She was so cold now, she wasn’t sure she could pull the trigger if she had to, but Amy Baxter took her at her word and stayed where she was.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Joanna said. “You fingered the wrong man.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amy returned.

  “Yes, you do. I know about you and your forgotten-memory program. I read the article in People. You correctly identified Holly as someone who had been molested as a child, but when you went through the forgotten-memory process, you dredged up the wrong man, didn’t you?”

  Amy Baxter’s face grew stony. “Come on, Holly. It’s time to go. We’ll go back down to the house and put you to bed.”

  “Why?” Joanna taunted. “So you can make her remember what you want her to remember and forget what you want her to forget?”