ONCE MORE Harold awakened, caught in a disorienting spin-the turbulence between real and dream, between known and unknown. He had no sense of how much time had passed, but the sky far overhead was dark now. Blackness surrounded him like some all-enveloping, evil shroud.
Harold was so desperately cold that he wondered for a moment if maybe he was already dead, already put away in that cut-rate casket he had taken off Norm Higgins’ hands. Eventually though, he sorted it out-remembered where he was if not how he’d come to be there. Remembered that his body was broken; that he was trapped and unable to move.
Harold was lying there trying to think of a way to escape his prison when he heard the familiar wheeze and throb of his old Scout’s much overhauled engine. He heard it laboring up the steep dirt track toward the basin, toward the glory hole. It must be Ivy, he thought at once. Had to be Ivy, come to search for him. Who else would bother? And who else would know to come here. Sudden tears filled his eyes-not tears of selfpity but tears for his daughter, for Ivy. What would happen to her now? After taking care of her mother all those years, would she have to spend the next ones taking care of him as well?
He wished suddenly, fervently, that he had died in the fall. He upbraided himself for not trying harder to die. He should have concentrated on that rather than on trying to find some way out.
Now, with Ivy approaching ever nearer, Harold was filled with a desperate need to escape his broken body quickly-to do it now, before Ivy found him. Before she had a chance to call for help. Before she could turn him over to the care of doctors who would try valiantly to patch the shattered pieces back together.
He already knew that wouldn’t work. Broken backs didn’t magically heal themselves. Once the doctors finished screwing around with their casts and braces and astronomical bills, Ivy Patterson’s worst nightmare would materialize and she would be handed yet another cripple to care for.
if Ivy calls to me, Harold thought wildly, I won’t answer. I’ll pretend I’m already dead.
Maybe she’ll go away and leave me alone. Over night, he would simply will himself to die. He had seen his own father do it after he was hurt in the mining accident. He knew it was possible. And the cold would help.
But even as Harold toyed with the idea, the Scout’s engine grumbled closer, climbing steadily, grinding up over the final incline. As the Scout came closer, a flash of light splashed across the small pile of wood-chip-sized rock that made up the mound of tailings around the mouth of the glory hole. Almost directly overhead, the engine coughed once and backfired as the ignition was switched off. Harold heard the driver’s door creak open on familiar rusty hinges; heard leather shoe soles scrape across loose shale, pausing long enough to climb over or through the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the glory hole. Then there was another sound of something heavy, cardboard perhaps, scraping along the ground.
Harold pressed his lips together, and forced himself to keep quiet. He was determined not to answer, no matter what. He waited for Ivy to speak to him and was surprised when she didn’t.
Instead, a flashlight switched on. A powerful beam of yellow light slid down the darkened walls of the shaft, searching here and there, to the right -;and then the left, before finally settling on his body. Still nothing was said, nothing at all.
He was tempted to speak then, but abruptly the light switched off. In the sudden jet-black darkness, everything was still until the first five-pound river rock plunged toward Harold with accidental, —but still deadly, accuracy.
Long before it hit him, he heard it bouncing off the walls and knew what it was. And in that split second, he remembered everything. But by then it was much too late.
The rock hit him full on the chest, sending a long splinter of broken rib deep into his heart. Harold Patterson died instantly, died in exactly the nightmarish way he had always dreamed he would, with the rocks of retribution raining down around him.
The barrage continued uninterrupted for some time as the rocks plunged through the darkness.
Some of them hit him. Most didn’t, careening -harmlessly off the walls of the shaft. At last, when all the ammunition was gone, the flashlight came back on. This time, the hand that held it trembled violently, and the wavering beam jerked crazily as it zigzagged down the rocky walls, panning through the darkness in search of a body.
When the light finally settled on Harold’s inert - body, on his open and unblinking eyes, there was a single, sharp intake of breath, a sigh of relief.
And then the flashlight fell, plunging-still lit through the eerie, enveloping silence. It slammed into Harold’s shattered chest, bounced once, then rolled off into the water.
Soon after that, the Scout’s engine choked and coughed back to life. It shuddered once, then caught and kept on running. As the International rumbled away toward Juniper Flats and Bisbee beyond that, the flashlight one of Harold’s best, continued to cast a flickering light that lingered in the darkness of the glory hole. Even totally submerged, it still glowed through the murky - water, long after the Scout had disappeared into the overcast night.
JIM BOB and Eva Lou Brady weren’t exactly social butterflies. It took some serious persuasion to convince them that they should attend the post-election party at all. They agreed, finally, only on the condition that Jenny ride with them. Joanna suspected it was a ploy giving them a convenient excuse to leave early, pleading the necessity of getting Jenny home and in bed because of school the next day.
Jenny opted to ride with the Bradys. Eleanor Lathrop went with friends. That meant Joanna Brady drove to the post-election party at the convention center alone.
Brave words to Jenny notwithstanding, Joanna was filled with grave misgivings as she made her way uptown. In her only previous attempt at elected office, she had run for student-body treasurer of Bisbee High School. She still remembered sitting in Miss Applewhite’s biology room (which doubled as Joanna’s homeroom) while Mr. Bailes the principal, read the winners’ names over the intercom. With the sharp smell of formaldehyde filling her nostrils, she had listened intently, holding her breath the whole while, as he droned through the congratulatory list.
After what seemed forever, when he finally reached the position of treasurer, the name he read wasn’t Joanna Lathrop’s.
Joanna no longer remembered which of her classmates actually did win. Someone else’s victory wasn’t nearly as important as her own personal loss. The memory of that defeat came to her as clearly and painfully now as if it had happened yesterday.
She remembered how her face had flushed hot with embarrassment, how she had fought back tears of disappointment while well-meaning class mates told her, sympathetically, “better luck next time.”
There’ll never be a next time, Joanna had vowed back then. It turned out she was wrong about that.
Here she was, twelve years later, running for office after all.
“Whatever you do, don’t cry,” she lectured her self sternly, repeating words Marianne had been uttering for weeks. “Win, lose, or draw not to cry.”
There were two readily available parking spaces directly across the street from the convention center entrance, but Joanna ignored them both.
Instead, she drove farther up the street, parking at the upper end of the lot near the post office. She locked the car and started toward the plaza, where she counted three different vans bearing the logos of Tucson television stations, as well as one more from a station in Phoenix.
Cochise County elections didn’t usually garner that much interest from out of town, but this year’s race for sheriff was different. The earlier deaths of both declared candidates had spurred uncommon statewide and national media attention. The fact that Joanna was both a candidate and the widow of one of the slain men had contributed to keeping the hotly contested election in the human-interest spotlight. Not only that, but pundits continued to dwell on the idea that if Joanna Brady won, she would be the first female county sheriff in the state of Arizona.