“Why? Don’t you trust me?”
I don’t trust myself, she thought. “Something like that.”
Taking a long drink from his beer, LaMar Jenkins showed no sign of leaving. “You never talk about the past,” he said. “Why is that?”
“The past doesn’t matter,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing to talk about.” She tried to sound cold – as though she didn’t care – but, like her body, her voice betrayed her. The past mattered far too much.
“Somebody hurt you, Shelley.” LaMar’s voice was suddenly kind, concerned. “Whoever it was and whatever they did to you, it wasn’t me. Let me help fix it. Talk to me.”
“You can’t fix it,” Rochelle said, shaking her head and fighting back tears. “Just go, please.”
Without another word, LaMar Jenkins carefully put down his beer bottle and stood up. He walked as far as the first wooden screen before he turned back to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “At the show. And afterward, we’re having dinner. No excuses.”
She capitulated. “All right,” she said. “We’ll have dinner.”
“Promise?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
He left then. She followed him as far as the door, made sure the dead bolt was locked, and double-checked the alarm system. Then she returned to the kitchen table. For the next half hour, Rochelle Baxter sat at the gray Formica tabletop and thoughtfully sipped her iced tea while rehashing every word that had been said. She didn’t bother making herself a sandwich. She wasn’t hungry. Instead, she sat and wondered whether or not she would really go to dinner with LaMar after the show. Maybe by then she’d be able to find the resolve to tell him once and for all that she had to break it off.
When her tea was almost gone, Rochelle left the nearly empty glass and half-finished beer bottle sitting on the kitchen table and returned to her eerily denuded studio.
To combat the loneliness left by all the bare walls, Rochelle wrestled a new canvas out of storage and put it on her easel. It sat there staring back at her, waiting for her hands to fill it with color and give it life. Turning away from the empty canvas, she settled down at her drafting table and went through her sketchbooks trying to decide what she would paint next. Finally, around nine or so, she went to bed.
In her dream, she was back in Desert Storm. Oil-well fires, burning all around her, filled the air with evil-smelling smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she were choking; her eyes were tearing. What woke her up, though, wasn’t the dream. It was a terrible cramping in her gut. Writhing in pain, Rochelle attempted to get out of bed, but before her feet touched the floor, her body heaved. The involuntary spasm hurled a spray of vomit halfway across the room. Falling back onto the bed, she grasped blindly for the phone. Somehow she reached it. Her stabbing fingers seemed numb and out of control, almost as though they belonged to someone else. Struggling desperately to manage her limbs, she finally succeeded in dialing.
“Nine one one,” the calm voice of an emergency dispatcher responded. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond answering. Another wild spasm of vomiting hit her and sent her reeling back onto the bed. As she lay there, retching helplessly and unable to move, the phone clattered uselessly to the floor.
“Ma’am?” the operator said more urgently. “Can you hear me? Is there anyone there to help you? Can you tell me your location?”
There was no answer. By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond hearing as well. A few minutes later, medics dispatched by the Cochise County emergency operator arrived at the scene. When no one responded to their repeated knocking, they finally splintered the sturdy front door to gain entry. While a noisy burglar alarm squawked its insistent warning in the background, a young EMT located Rochelle in her vomit-splattered bed. Gingerly, he felt for a pulse, then looked at his supervisor and shook his head.
“We may have already lost her,” he said.
One
AS SHERIFF JOANNA BRADY DROVE through the last thicket of mesquite, the house at High Lonesome Ranch lay dark and still under a rising moon. Usually her daughter Jenny’s two dogs – Sadie, a bluetick hound, and Tigger, a half golden retriever/half pit-bull mutt – would have bounded through the undergrowth to meet her. This time, Joanna surmised, they had chosen to accompany Butch on his appointment with the contractor at the site of the new house they were planning to build a mile or so away.
Butch had bugged out of St. Dominick’s immediately after the service, while he and Joanna waited for the sanctuary to empty. “I’ll stay if you want,” he had whispered. “But I really need to go.”
“Right,” she had told him. “You do what you have to. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll stop by the house and do the chores first,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”
Joanna had simply nodded. “Thanks,” she said.
By then Yolanda Ortiz Cañedo’s grieving husband, her two young sons, her parents, brothers, and sister were walking out of the church through two lines of saluting officers made up of both police and fire department personnel. Joanna could barely stand to watch. It was all too familiar, too close to her own experience. As her green eyes filled with tears, Joanna glanced away, only to catch sight of the prisoners. That forlorn group – eleven county prisoners, freshly barbered and dressed in civilian clothes – stood in respectful silence under the watchful eyes of two jail guards and Ted Chapman, the executive director of the Cochise County Jail Ministry.
Ted had come to Joanna’s office the day after the young jail matron had died of cervical cancer at a hospice facility in Tucson. “Some of the inmates would like to go to the services,” Chapman had said. “Yolanda Cañedo did a lot of good around here. She really cared about the guys she worked with, and it showed. She helped me get the jail literacy program going, and she came in during off-hours to give individual help to prisoners who were going after GEDs. Some of the people she helped – inmates who have already been released – will be there on their own, but the ones who are still in lockup wanted me to ask if they could go, too. The newer prisoners, the ones who came in after Yolanda got sick, aren’t included, of course. They have no idea who she was or what she did.”
“What about security?” Sheriff Brady had asked. “Who’s going to stand guard?”
“I already have two volunteers who will come in on their day off,” Chapman answered. “You have my word of honor, along with that of the prisoners, that there won’t be any trouble.”
Joanna thought about how good some of the jail inmates’ words of honor might be. But then she also had to consider the notebook full of greetings – handmade by jail inmates – that Reverend Chapman had brought to Yolanda and her family as the young woman had lain gravely ill in the Intensive Care Unit at University Medical Center in Tucson. Sheriff Brady had been touched by the heartfelt sincerity in all those clumsily pasted-together cards. Several of them had been made by men able to sign their own names at the bottom of a greeting card for the very first time. Other cards had names printed by someone else under scrawled Xs. Their good wishes had seemed genuine enough back then. Now, so did the Reverend Chapman’s somewhat unorthodox request.
“How many inmates are we talking about?” Joanna had asked.
“Fourteen.”
“Any of them high-risk?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Give me the list,” Joanna had conceded at last. “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll run the proposition by the jail commander and see what he has to say.”