For the first time in all those years, Joanna Brady felt a twinge of guilt as she wondered if it was possible that she had been as hard on Eleanor as Jenny was being on her.
As the school bus turned left and started down Double Adobe Road, Tigger whined and began pacing back and forth in the seat, wanting to follow the bus. The sound of his whine burst through Joanna’s bubble of introspection and brought her abruptly hack to the present.
“Sit,” Joanna ordered. Obediently, the dog sat and then, with a sigh, finally settled back down on the blanket.
Off High Lonesome and heading west on Highway 80, Joanna drove straight past the sheriff’s office in the Cochise County Justice Complex and on toward town. The Buckwalter Animal Clinic, located in a converted gas station/garage, sat just outside of town, across Highway 80 from the 350-foot-high tailings dump that contained most of the waste left over when Phelps Dodge removed a mountain and turned it into an open-pit mine called Lavender Pit.
When Bisbee native Dr. Amos Buckwalter returned to Bisbee as a newly minted vet with a teenaged bride some twenty years after the beginnings of Lavender Pit, he had established his clinic facility on property that had been developed as an indirect outgrowth of that early-fifty’s era of expanding mining operations. In order to connect Lavender Pit with the original Copper Queen, it had been necessary to take out some of the neighborhoods that had grown up in nearby canyons. Johnson’s Addition, Upper Lowell, and Jiggerville all had gone the way of the dodo bird. The existing turn of the century buildings in those neighborhoods, many of them framed Victorian wanna-bes with modest gingerbreading and tin roofs, were loaded onto wheeled axles and then relocated. Company-paid movers trucked them three or four miles south and east of their original locations, where they were reinstalled on company land in newly created neighborhoods called Bakerville and Saginaw.
All her life Joanna had heard stories about one of the Jiggerville old-timers, Melvin Kitteridge. Local legend had it that Kitteridge, a mean-spirited, wily old codger, had nursed a long-standing grudge against the then duly-elected mayor of Bisbee. Offended by the idea of having his residence trans-planted inside the city limits, Kitteridge had raised such a furor that the company had finally agreed to place his house on company property just outside the city limits. To this day, some forty years later, that property remained under the county’s jurisdiction.
According to local gossip, Kitteridge had gone on to devil the city fathers by having the remains of both a gas station and another garage transported to the same site. For years the two not-quite-connected buildings functioned as a low-brow antique store, with Kitteridge living in his relocated house which, although on the same property, faced another street farther off the highway.
When Melvin Kitteridge died at age ninety-one, his heirs had been only too happy to unload the whole shebang at bargain-basement prices. Dr. Amos Buckwalter was the purchaser. Bucky Buckwalter had worked construction for years before earning enough money to attend college. He and his energetic but exceedingly young wife, Terry, had hauled out our truckloads of junk and then remodeled what was left, transforming the separate shells of garage and service station into a single building to serve as a clinic for small animals. Thirty yards away, across an expanse of red-graveled parking lot, they added a barn and corral for use with some of their larger patients.
Joanna remembered Bucky telling her once that if he’d had any inkling the mines would close down for good in the early seventies, he would have chosen somewhere else to set up his fledgling practice rather than coming back home. By the time the shutdown ax fell, however, Bucky and Terry Buckwalter were already committed, and they stayed on.
As Joanna approached the Buckwalter Animal Clinic, she saw several cars parked along the shoulder on either side of the road, including one of her department’s newly acquired Crown Victorias. Switching on the flashers on her Blazer, Joanna pulled in behind the other vehicles. Once parked, she noticed someone-a man-carrying a protest sign of some kind and marching back and forth in front of the cattle guard that led to the clinic’s grounds. One of the cars parked across the highway carried a magnetic sign that said “Bisbee Bee.” Kevin Dawson, a journalism-school dropout who happened to be the son of the publisher and who doubled as both re-porter and photographer, was down on one knee in the gravel busily snapping one picture after another through the lens of an automatic camera.
Kevin’s presence meant that whatever was happening in front of the Buckwalter Animal Clinic had been deemed newsworthy. That was worrisome to Joanna Brady, since one of her younger and most inexperienced deputies, Lance Pakin, was standing in the center of the camera’s range, along with the unidentified protester. Unfortunately, Frank Montoya, Chief Deputy for Administration-the guy who doubled as Joanna’s official public information officer-was nowhere in sight.
Stepping out of the stopped Blazer, Joanna walked toward the action just in time to see Dr. Bucky Buckwalter himself erupt out the door to the clinic and storm across the parking lot. His face was livid with anger.
“I want this man off my property,” he shouted, waving a fist in the protester’s direction. “He’s been here two days in a row now, and I want him gone.”
All the while Kevin Dawson’s camera finger continued to click away.
Still unable to see the sign the unidentified man held over his shoulder, Joanna’s first thought was that he was most likely one of those radical vegetarian/animal rights activists, some of whom found Dr. Buckwalter’s involvement in the beef industry offensive. In the past few years, Bucky’s modestly lucrative specialization in performing artificial insemination procedures on beef cattle had been the subject of more than one “cows-are-people-too” type of protest.
Bucky didn’t stop his advance until he and the other man were almost face-to-face, although the guy with the sign stood a good head taller than the diminutive vet. To compensate for his size, Doc Buckwalter customarily wore a pair of Tony Lama boots complete with two-inch heels, but even they didn’t help very much in this instance. Had the two men squared off physically right then, Joanna doubted it would have been much of a contest. Dr. Buckwalter, however, appeared not to notice the disparity in their relative sizes. Or, if he did, it had no muting impact on his seething anger.
“This is private property,” he raged. “Like I said on the phone,” he added, turning to Deputy Pakin. “Either get him out of here or arrest him for trespassing.”
“I’m on the right-of-way side of the fence,” the other man returned calmly, gesturing with his sign in a way that, de-pending on your point of view, might have been considered brandishing. “I’m here exercising my right of free speech and passing out some literature, Dr. Buckwalter. You can’t stop me from doing that.”
“I’m afraid that’s true, Doc,” Deputy Pakin said, speaking respectfully and sounding genuinely conciliatory toward both sides. “As long as Mr. Morgan here stays on this side of the cattle guard and fence, he’s on public property. Since he isn’t disrupting traffic, there’s not much we can do. Why don’t you just go on inside and let him be?”
“He may not be disrupting traffic, but he’s certainly disturbing my business,” Anus Buckwalter complained. “He was here half the night with his damned candlelight vigil. Now he’s interfering with my customers.”
“I haven’t done anything to your customers,” the other man returned. “All I’ve done is offer them one of my brochures.”
“Like hell,” Bucky replied.
Not wanting the potentially volatile situation to deteriorate any further, Joanna chose that moment to step into the fray. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said calmly. “What seems to be the problem here?”