Clayton shrugged his bony, stooped shoulders. “It’s no trouble,” he said. “I figure I could just as well be doing something useful of an evening.”
He turned back to the pump and studied the flow of water into the metal tank. “Didn’t put in much gas,” he added. “Should fill up the tank without running over. You won’t have to come back out and turn it off. I started the pump out in the back pasture on my way over.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said. “I had forgotten about that one completely.”
“Other people haven’t,” Clayton Rhodes observed with a frown. “From the footprints and tire tracks around it, I’d say somebody’s been having a regular convention.”
“Hunters?” Joanna asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe, but why hunters would be out tramping around in street shoes is more than I can figure.”
Street shoes? Joanna wondered.
Finished with the chores, Clayton Rhodes wiped his hands on his worn overalls and started toward his truck with Joanna and Sadie both trailing along behind.
“I don’t understand,” Joanna said. “Why would someone in street shoes be out in the middle of my back pasture?”
“Kinda makes you wonder, don’t it,” Clayton nodded.
Suddenly Joanna remembered to mind her manners. “Won’t you come on up to the house for coffee. If there isn’t any ready, it’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Nope, but thank you just the same,” he said, as they reached Clayton’s ancient Ford with its much-replaced wooden bed. “Think I’ll head on home.” For a moment he stood with one hand on the door handle as if trying to reach some decision. “You know,” he said finally, “I worry about you and Jenny being out here all by yourselves.”
“We’re all right,” Joanna said. “For right now, there are plenty of people in and out. Besides, we’ve got the dog.”
Clayton looked down at the hound and shook his head. “This worthless old thing?” he said disparagingly, ruffling the dog’s floppy ears. “Why, she’d as soon lick somebody to death as bite ‘em. She didn’t even bother to bark at me when I showed up here a while ago.
“I’m serious as hell about this, Joanna. With that there new prison down at Douglas and with wetbacks coming across the line the way they do nowadays, a person needs to be ready to defend himself. Maybe some folks are buying off on that suicide story, but it seems to me as if somebody was mad enough at Andy to take a shot at him. And now we’ve got a pack of strangers hanging out in your back pasture. Nosiree, I don’t like this a-tall. You got yourself a gun there in the house?”
Joanna shook her head. “Andy had guns, two of them, but we don’t have either one of them anymore.”
The old man nodded sagely. “That’s about what I figured. You do know how to use one, don’t you?”
She nodded. “My dad taught me when I was a girl. It’s like riding a bicycle, you never really forget the basics, but maintaining any kind of accuracy takes constant practice, and I haven’t fired a gun in years.”
“Then I’d get myself some practice if I were you.”
With that, Clayton Rhodes wrenched open the creaking door and reached across the truck’s threadbare seat. He opened the glove box and pulled out a small bundle which he handed over to Joanna. From the feel and the shape of the surprisingly heavy package, Joanna knew she was holding a gun wrapped In an old pillowcase.
“Here,” he said. “This here used to be Molly’s before she up and died on me. I never I liked leaving her out here all by herself, either, so she kept this in her apron pocket just in case. Never had to use it, thank God, but we had some good laughs about her bein’ a pistol packin’ mama.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a box of ammunition. “You’ll need this along with it.”
Joanna started to object, to say that she couldn’t possibly accept it, but the old man silenced her with a wave of his hand. “Humor a butt-sprung old man, will you?” he said, climbing up into the truck. “You hang onto it as a personal favor to me.”
He turned the key in the ignition and the old engine coughed to life, then he looked back at Joanna. “Deal?” he said through the permanently opened window.
She nodded. “Deal,” she said, “but only as a personal favor.”
As he drove out of the yard, Joanna realized that in all the years she had known Clayton Rhodes, this was the most she had ever heard him say. Only heartfelt concern for her and for Jenny had propelled him beyond his usual reticence. She headed for the house both humbled and grateful.
Joanna Brady was riding an emotional roller coaster. Inside the house her gratitude toward Clayton Rhodes quickly turned to irritation with her mother. Just inside the back door she stumbled and almost fell over Eleanor Lathrop’s pride and joy, her Rainbow Water Vacuum, which was parked there in the dark. The kitchen was a shambles. Every inch of countertop was covered with the contents of Joanna’s kitchen cupboards. Eleanor herself, perched precariously on a stepladder, was busily scrubbing down the topmost shelf directly over the sink.
“Mother, what in the world are you doing?” Joanna demanded.
“Cleaning the cupboards,” Eleanor replied. “You know as well as I do that the ladies from the church are going to be all over this house for the next few days, and I don’t believe this kitchen has been properly cleaned in years.”
The phone rang just then and Jenny leaped to answer it. “Brady residence,” she said. “Jennifer speaking.” After that she said nothing, and a moment later, she hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Joanna asked.
“I dunno,” Jenny answered with a shrug. “Whoever it was hung up.”
“Don’t pay any attention to the phone,” Eleanor said. “It’s been ringing all day. Come over here now, Jenny, and start handing up things from that stack over there. That way I won’t have to climb up and down so much.”
Jenny hurried to help. Shaking her head, Joanna headed for the bedroom, still holding Clayton Rhodes’s pillowcase-wrapped gift.
“Where are you going?” Eleanor asked after her.
“I think I’ll go to bed,” Joanna answered. “As far as I’m concerned, if the ladies from church want to come to my house and examine the kitchen cupboards with a fine-toothed comb, they deserve whatever they find.”
SEVENTEEN
Still cradling Clayton’s unexpected package as well as her purse, Joanna slammed the bedroom door shut behind her and then stood leaning against it, hoping to cool off. She was amazed by the intensity of the anger she felt toward her mother. She wanted to go back out into the kitchen and scream at Eleanor to get down off the damn ladder and leave her kitchen the hell alone. But that had never been her way where Eleanor was concerned. Instead, following her father’s lead, Joanna had always avoided direct confrontation, going around her mother rather than through her.
To be fair, the rules of the game were somehow changing, and Eleanor had yet to figure it out. In the past, right or wrong, Joanna would have swallowed her anger, returned to the kitchen, and helped her mother put things right. But tonight she didn’t. If she had wanted the kitchen cleaned right then, she would have done it herself. Instead, Joanna Brady had other concerns.
Like coming to terms with this room, for in-stance. Twice now, she had raced through it as though the space was full of demons. Now, she needed to find a way to stand here and look around at the familiar furniture, seeing it as a stranger might and trying to decide if it was, indeed, still the same place it had been two days earlier. Now, with Andy gone and the rest of the world conspiring to rob her of his memory, she wondered if there would ever again be a time when she could be comfortable in this room. Or would she forever feel as alien in this place as she did in this instant?