Holly Patterson had gone off to Hollywood and created a career for herself, but the pain of what had happened to her as a child had somehow robbed her of all ability to enjoy it. She sat in a darkened room, rocking back and forth, hating her father and yet blaming herself for his death.
Ivy Patterson, too, had been damaged by the family troubles. Her once seemingly placid existence of faithful daughterly duty had erupted in a geyser of anger that made murder possible. Her late-blooming rebellion against her father made even the natural and mundane acts of falling in love and getting married take on sinister and un natural overtones.
And before you go throwing too many stones, Joanna Brady thought to herself, what about you?
With Andy gone, she didn’t expect the branches of her own heart ever again to leaf out in full springtime glory.
Toward evening, Isabel Gonzales went into the darkened bedroom to collect the dinner tray and straighten the tangled covers on the bed. Holly Patterson was back in her chair, rocking back and forth and staring out through a space between the curtains at the towering black shadow of the dump. “What’s up there?” she asked.
Isabel almost jumped out of her skin. For days she had come to this room, dropping off food trays, taking them away, making the bed while the room’s sole occupant seldom spoke or even acknowledged her existence.
“Up where?” Isabel asked.
“On the dump. Is it smooth? Is it lumpy?”
Isabel walked over to the window and held the curtain aside. Eventually, the moon would come up, and the few hardy mesquite and scrub oak that had managed to scrabble up through the barren waste would show up as shadows against the lighter shades of rock and dirt. For now the whole thing was still an ink-black man-made mesa.
“That’s funny,” Isabel said. “For years, when we were first married, my husband, Jaime, drove a dump truck out there. I always worried about him driving down into the pit, loading up the back of the truck with all those huge boulders, and then driving out here on the dump. I was always afraid he’d back up too close to the edge and fall off. He never did, though. He drove a truck like that for years, but I never asked him what was up there. Maybe I didn’t want to know.”
Holly turned her gaunt face away from the window for once and studied the older woman’s sturdy features. “Wouldn’t you like to know what’s up there now?” she asked.
Isabel Gonzales smiled wisely and shook her head. “Jaime doesn’t drive dump trucks any more,” she said. “And if it wasn’t so important to me back then, it sure isn’t now. Are you done with your tray? You must not like my cooking. You’ve barely touched it.”
“I’m done with it,” Holly Patterson said. “Your cooking’s fine. I’m just not hungry.”
The receptionist DUMPED Joanna’s mail unceremoniously on her desk. “There’s someone else here to see you,” she said.
With all these interruptions, how the hell did anyone ever get any work done? Joanna wondered. “Who is it this time?” she asked.
“Linda Somebody-or-other,” Kristin answered. Obviously still offended by the bra-and-panties discussion, Kristin was doing her best to get even. Joanna knew how that game worked. In office politics, passing along incomplete or inaccurate information to the boss constitutes one of the milder forms of a surly receptionist’s catalog of revenge.
“Linda who?” Joanna pressed.
“I don’t know.” Kristin shrugged petulantly. “She didn’t say.”
Joanna counted to ten. “Kristin,” she said, “regardless of whether or not the visitor volunteers the information, it’s the receptionist’s job to find out who wants to be admitted to my office. You’re to tell me who’s waiting out there in the lobby and I decide whether or not I want to see them. Is that clear?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go find out who it is. Ask her.”
The testy Kristin dragged her feet leaving Joanna’s office. The intercom buzzed angrily moments later. “Linda Kimball to see you, Sheriff Brady,” Kristin announced with ice crystals dripping from every word.
“Thank you very much, Kristin. Send her right in.
The door opened seconds later, and a plain-Jane Linda Kimball bustled into the room. Heavyset and not worried about it, Burton Kimball’s wife had a comfortable, down-home, no-nonsense way about her from her ironclad support panty hose to her naturally graying French twist. Some of the other legal-beagle wives in town tended to dress in designer jeans and play endless games of bondage, all the while holding themselves apart from those they considered lesser beings. Inelegant Linda Kimball, on the other hand, was known and appreciated throughout the community for her boundless energy and tireless work on behalf of those less fortunate than herself.
She routinely volunteered as an aide at the community hospital, and she had served as the money-raising spark plug to keep the local Meals on-Wheels program under way while daily serving her own family well-balanced, home-cooked meals. Her two children were well mannered and smart. And each fall the vegetables Linda Kimball raised in her backyard garden walked away with a collection of red and blue ribbons from the Cochise County Fair in Douglas.
In addition to all that, Burton Kimball’s wife had a reputation for being virtually unflappable. As she hurried into Joanna’s office that afternoon, however, her arm was in a sling and distress was written large across her troubled face. But Linda wasn’t there to discuss her injured arm.
“I wanted to talk to Ernie Carpenter, but they told me he’s been called out of the office. I hope you don’t mind my dropping in like this.”
“Not at all, Linda. What can I do for you?”
“I’m in sort of a rush because I left the kids up in Old Bisbee for their piano lessons. I have to be back uptown to pick them up in another half hour, but I needed to talk to someone about what happened out on the ranch today.”
“What’s that?”
Linda Kimball dropped heavily into one of the visitor chairs and took a deep breath. “Burton called me at lunchtime to tell me all about it. I suppose I should have told him what I thought right then, but he was so upset, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“What you thought about what?” Joanna asked.
Linda’s double chin quivered. “What I thought about the skeleton,” she answered doggedly “About who I think it is. Or, rather, who it was”
“You mean you know?” Joanna demanded, leaning forward in her chair.
Linda nodded miserably. “Yes, I do,” she answered. “At least I have a theory about it.”
“Tell me,” Joanna urged.
Linda sighed as if not knowing where to start. “Burton said the body has been there for a very long time.”
“That’s right. Skeletal remains only.”
“Do you know anything at all about my husband?” Linda Kimball asked. “About his history, I mean?”
Joanna considered for a moment. With only six thousand people in town, residents of Bisbee tended to have some knowledge of one another’s general histories, even for those people they didn’t necessarily know well.
“Some, I guess,” she answered. “Wasn’t he raised by the Pattersons? I seem to remember something about that.”
Linda nodded. “Harold Patterson was Burt’s uncle, his mother’s older brother. When Thornton, Burt’s dad, was discharged from the service after World War II, he and his wife, Bonnie, stayed out on the Rocking P for a while. When Bonnie turned up pregnant, Thornton left her with her brother while he went off to California looking for work. He was supposed to send for her as soon as he found a job and a place to live, but he never did. No one ever heard from him again, and Bonnie Patterson Kimball died in childbirth a few months later. Aunt Emily and Uncle Harold took care of Burton from the time he was born.” Linda broke off, as though just relating her husband’s painful history hurt her as well.