“What I told you before-Dr. Buckwalter’s horse. Kiddo. Daddy said I could have a horse someday. He promised. Besides, Kiddo will be lonely without someone to love him. What if he gets sold for dog food or something?”
“Jenny,” Joanna said firmly. “Nobody’s going to sell Kiddo for dog food. But you have to understand what’s going on here. I’m all alone now-alone and overloaded. Between work and home, I can’t take on one more thing without falling apart. There’s a whole lot more to taking care of a horse than scratching him on the nose when you feel like it and giving him a carrot once in a while.”
“That’s not true!” Jenny spat hack at her.
“It is true,” Joanna insisted. “Horses require a lot of hart work.”
“Not that,” Jenny said. “What you said before. About being alone. You are not alone. You have me, don’t you?”
Moving as far away from her mother as possible, Jena scrunched up against the passenger’s door and stared wordlessly out the window. Joanna sighed. Another night; another firefight.
Parenting, Joanna thought to herself, sure as hell isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Aloud she said to her daughter, “I didn’t mean that-the alone part. All I’m saying is that there are already too many chores…
“I want a horse,” Jenny said. “You’re just being mean. If Daddy were alive, he’d let me have Kiddo. I know he would.”
By then they were coming down High Lonesome Roar and slowing for the turnoff that led off into the ranch itself. There was nothing Joanna could say. She had already learned, just as Eleanor Lathrop had before her, that it’s impossible to win an argument with a dead parent. From Jenny’s perspective, Andrew Roy Brady was perfection itself. By comparison, Joanna was drab, ordinary, and desperately flawed by the responsibility of sometimes having to say no.
Joanna slowed to a stop. “Just go get the mail, Jenny,” she said wearily. “We’ll talk about this again in the morning when we’re both not so tired.”
Without a word, Jenny shoved open the door, leaped down to the ground, and then darted back across High Lonesome to the wagon-wheel mounted mailbox Andy had been so proud of. Joanna sat wailing in the idling Blazer. She could have been watching Jenny in the rearview mirror. Instead, she was looking up the road and waiting to see if the dogs would come galloping out of the darkness into the glow of her headlights and wondering whether or not they’d be side-tracked by the lanky jackrabbit that usually set the pace for an evening race through the valley.
Joanna was just beginning to notice how long Jenny was taking when the car door opened. “Mom?” Jenny said. Her voice was so tentative, so unlike her, that Joanna realized at once something was wrong.
“Jenny!” she demanded. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
“Somebody’s here,” Jenny said, her voice still strangely uncertain. “She’s got me by the arm, Mom. She’s hurting me.”
Alarmed, Joanna spun in her seat. Across from her, out-side the car door and just beyond the dim orange glow cast by the overhead light, stood Jenny. Beside her was the huge hulk of an oversized human being. Had Jenny not used the word “she,” Joanna would have had no way of knowing whether or not the apparition was male or female.
“Get in the car, Jenny,” Joanna ordered.
“I can’t.” Jenny whispered back. “She’s got me by the arm.”
“Who are you?” Joanna demanded of the stranger. “What do you want?”
“I don’t mean you nor your little girl no harm,” a woman’s voice said. Her words had the slow, soft cadence of someone who, at some time in her life, had lived in the hill country of east Texas. “I got to talk to you, Sheriff Brady,” the woman continued. “I got to talk to somebody.”
Despite the curiously cull-spoken speech, Joanna sensed very real menace lurking in the barely whispered words. There was a peculiar intensity- a hopeless urgency-in the voice that came from that ghastly mound of flesh. It was the voice of someone with nothing left to lose. That realization caused the skin to prickle on the backs of Joanna’s arms. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Everything about the woman screamed, “Danger! Danger! Danger!”
Twisting and turning, Jenny tried ineffectively to escape the woman’s grasp, but she held on tight.
“Who are you?” Joanna asked again, knowing even before the woman spoke exactly what her answer would be-what it had to be.
“My name’s Hannah Green,” she said. “I believe some of your people are looking for me, Sheriff Brady. They all think I kilt my daddy.”
“And did you?” Joanna asked.
That instinctive question shot out of Joanna’s mouth long before she considered the consequences of the question or the implications of any possible answers. Hannah Green was, after all, a homicide suspect. She was a person who should have been read her rights before there was any exchange of information. But Hannah Green also posed a very real threat to both Joanna and Jenny. In those circumstances, the Miranda ruling went straight out the window.
Still squirming, Jenny started to whimper. “Let go. You’re hurting me.”
II she heard her, Hannah Green gave no sign. Her whole being was focused on Joanna. “Of course I kilt him,” she said “I kilt him because he deserved it. And you woulda done the same thing if’n he’d treated you the way he treated me. Daddy was mean, you know. Just as mean as he could be.”
Joanna’s heart fluttered in her throat. In those first few moments of rising panic, dozens of conflicting thoughts whirled through her brain. This was exactly what had happened to Andy. He, too, had been accosted on this same road, less than a mile from home. For some unknown reason, he had let down his guard long enough to give his killer a fatal opening. Now it looked as though Joanna had made the same mistake. She, too, had fallen prey to that false sense of security-a kind of phony King’s X-that comes from being “almost home.”
What would all those textbooks she had read up at the Arizona Police Officers’ Academy have to say about this kind of situation? Call for backup? Of course, but how? And who? What backup would she find, way out here, five miles from town? Joanna’s closest neighbor was Clayton Rhodes, her handyman. But he would already have come to the High Lonesome, done his evening chores, and gone back to his own place a mile farther up the road.
Joanna was unable to tell whether or not the woman was armed or what, if any, harm she intended to do Jenny. Trying to grapple with how to respond, Joanna found herself in an impossible situation-one with no clear-cut choices, no absolute right or wrong.
She was still fighting panic and searching for direction when Hannah Green spoke again.
“Me an’ the little girl here is gonna catch our deaths if we don’t get inside real soon, ma’am.”
The woman sounded calm enough. Afraid of doing something that would provoke her, Joanna swallowed her fear and tried to brazen it out.
“Get in, then,” she ordered. “Both of you.”
Without having to be urged a second time, Jenny scrambled into the middle of the front seat while Hannah Green heaved herself up onto the steep running hoard. For a moment, Joanna considered floor-hoarding the accelerator, but with the woman’s iron grip still fastened to Jenny’s upper arm, that wasn’t an option. A jackrabbit start would have thrown the woman to the ground, but she might have pulled Jenny out of the truck with her.
The pungent stench of body odor filled the Blazer as Hannah Green sank heavily onto the seat. She was a wide load of a woman, wearing a lightweight quilted flannel jacket that didn’t quite fasten around her expansive middle. Under that was a dress-the gored skirt of a housedress of some kind. Her feet were clad in worn loafers and sagging white anklets. Her right hand-the one that wasn’t inexorably attached to Penny’s arm-was buried deep in the pocket of her jacket. Joanna wondered whether there was a weapon concealed in the folds of that enormous jacket. In the end, she simply assumed there was one. There had to be.