She nodded. “Detective Carpenter seems to have found another body, a skeleton, under Harold Patterson. He had fallen directly on top of it.”
“Who?” Yuri asked.
“We don’t know that,” Joanna answered. “The other victim has been dead for a long time, most likely. Until they can search the glory hole for evidence, there’s no way to tell.”
Yuri Malakov lurched to his feet. “Ivy must know about this,” he declared.
“No,” Joanna objected. “That kind of news should come from one of the investigating officers, from someone official.”
Yuri shook his shaggy head impatiently. “Investigators busy. I am not busy. I tell her.”
With that, Yuri stomped away toward the Scout, leaving Joanna no choice but to trail along after him. He was a huge man. The idea of her physically restraining someone his size was laughable.
Joanna glanced back toward Dick Voland, who was still talking on the radio. He would be of no help. Besides, she didn’t want to tell him about this. She didn’t want to admit to blabbing out of turn.
“Wait,” Joanna said. “If you’ll give me a ride back down to my car, I’ll come with you and tell Ivy myself.”
Yuri stopped next to the Scout with one hand possessively on the door latch. “Okay,” he agreed readily. “I drive. You tell.”
As they maneuvered past the spot in the road where Ernie Carpenter was working on the plaster casts, Joanna directed Yuri to stop. “I need to tell Detective Carpenter where I’m going.”
As if that was necessary, she thought afterward.
Ernie barely glanced up when she spoke to him, acknowledging their departure with an inattentive frown. By then the homicide detective was totally focused on the solitary pursuit of obtaining evidence. Anything that removed distracting onlookers was to be regarded as a help, not a hindrance.
“That’s fine,” he said, waving them away. “Tell the people down at the house to stay out of Harold’s room. That goes for everyone there. Tell them to leave it alone until I have a chance to go through it.”
“Right,” Joanna said. “I’ll tell them.”
At the point in the road where Dick Voland’s Blazer still blocked the way, they had to abandon the Scout in favor of Joanna’s Eagle. The hulking Russian had to scrunch his broad shoulders and duck his head in order to cram himself into the passenger’s seat, but he did so without complaint.
While Joanna drove, he sat with his arms folded stubbornly across his massive chest, frowning and looking straight ahead, saying nothing. She looked at him from time to time and tried to decipher the troubled expression on his face.
She was surprised at the complete change in Yuri Malakov’s demeanor. His appearance now was a complete 180 degrees from the way he had looked earlier, sitting relaxed and supposedly dozing on the running board of the pumper. And the change had been instantaneous rather than gradual. It happened the moment she had mentioned existence of that second body. The news had seemed to distress him in a way that went far beyond his supposedly slight connection to the Patterson clan and their troubles. “What’s the matter?” Joanna asked. “Is some thing bothering you?”
Yuri glanced at her suspiciously. “What means ‘bother’?”
“Bother is like worry,” Joanna explained. “Is something worrying you?”
“Nyet,” he answered. “Nothing.”
But Yuri Malakov, silent and brooding, certainly didn’t look worry-free.
Thinking about his situation, Joanna realized it had to be dismaying to be thrown into a crisis especially a crisis involving a murder investigation-in a place where the entire legal system was completely foreign. Not only that, he was having to sort through all the strange customs through a veil of stilted, inflexible classroom English.
Joanna’s own four years of classroom Spanish, two in high school and two in college had been difficult enough and barely qualified her to speak “menu Spanish” in unfamiliar Stateside Mexican restaurants. Had she been foolish enough to head for Spain or the interior of Mexico with only that rudimentary background, she could probably survive-order food and make her most basic needs known-but she had no illusions about her ability to communicate or to be understood. Complex ideas would have been far beyond her.
But here was Yuri Malakov, a grown man able to communicate only basic messages. No doubt he had taken a good deal of classroom instruction in English years earlier-his formal, nonidiomatic way of speaking indicated as much. But still, it -had to be terribly difficult to be living and coping with complex day-to-day issues in a foreign country where virtually no one other than perhaps a few second-generation Slavic miners spoke some version of his native tongue.
As someone who had lived in one small Arizona town all her life, Joanna found the very idea of Yuri Malakov fascinating. What would drive a man to turn his back on everything familiar? To leave behind all family and friends? What kind of work had he done before coming here, and what career path had he abandoned in order to work as a hired hand for strangers on an isolated Arizona ranch? And what would possess a man, some where in his mid-forties, to set himself the task of grasping the intricacies of a whole new culture?
Maybe that was it, Joanna theorized. Perhaps Yuri’s concern for Ivy Patterson was based primarily on her helping him make that difficult transition; gratitude for the invaluable role she was playing in his life as his English-language tutor.
For a few moments, Joanna considered asking him, but then she let the idea go. He sat staring out the window, effectively shutting out any more questions. Besides, it didn’t seem worthwhile to fight her way through the difficulties of the communication barrier in order to discuss something simple as motivation. Instead, they drove the rest of the way to the Rocking P ranch house in silence.
As they entered the yard, the place looked typically idyllic. With a plume of inviting smoke curling out the chimney, the house and surrounding ranch seemed an improbable setting for two unexplained deaths. Several loose chickens scratched lazily in the dirt, and a fully adorned watchdog peacock strutted his stuff in the clear November sunlight. Marianne’s VW was still parked beside the gate, as was Ivy Patterson’s Chevy truck.
The ranch house was surrounded by a white picket fence that set off the yard proper with its blanket of winter-yellowed Bermuda grass from the rest of the grounds. The house was an early twentieth-century period single story of even space topped by a steeply pitched tin roof.
The metal roof shone with a coat of freshly applied paint as did the wooden siding, shutters, and trim.
Everything about the place looked neat and properly maintained.
A wide covered porch ran the entire length of each outside wall, creating a good eight feet of extra overhang and shade to help cool the house’s interior from Arizona’s scorching summer heat.
Although the porch had to be close to ninety years old, none of the flooring sagged. Not a single spindly rail was missing or broken from the long span of banister. If some pieces of woodwork were no longer original, it didn’t show. They had been replaced and repaired so carefully that it was impossible to tell old millwork from new.
Two massive wisteria vines, thick-trunked with age, stood guard on either side of the front entrance, sending out a tangle of naked gray branches that clung tenaciously along the front lip and gutters of the overhang. In the spring, the porch would be all but obscured by a curtain of lush greenery and cascading lavender flowers.
Joanna was quick to note that the grounds of the Rocking P were surprisingly clear of junk. The outbuildings were all fully upright and freshly painted. No hulks of dead cars or rusting farm equipment had been left to crumble within sight of the house. Joanna’s High Lonesome suffered terribly in comparison.