Once again Linda Kimball reached for her purse.
This time she extracted a small white envelope.
“This is the part that’s so embarrassing,” she said, “I still can’t believe I did it. Promise me you won’t tell Burton. He’d have a fit.”
“Tell him what?”
“While I was down in the basement that day, the day of the sale, I was rummaging around looking for antiques when I came across a huge stack of Dr. Luther’s old files that had been dumped out of a file cabinet. I knew he was the dentist Burton had gone to as a young child. I thought it might be fun to have his earliest dental records, just as sort of a keepsake. But while I was looking, I found this-and I stole it.”
With visibly trembling fingers, Linda Kimball handed the envelope over to Joanna, who hesitated only a second before ripping it open. Inside was a yellowed three-by-five card. The cardboard was stiff and brittle and turning brown around the edges. Printed on both sides were old-fashioned dental records, complete with predrawn diagrams of human teeth. Handwritten comments as well as arrows pointing to fillings and cavities had been added to the margins.
As she looked at the diagram, it was a moment before Joanna noticed the name written at the top of the card.
“Thornton W. Kimball’s dental records!” Joanna exclaimed.
“I know it’s not like modern X rays or any thing,” Linda Kimball was saying, almost apologetically, “but I thought it might help.”
“It’ll help, all right. If you don’t mind, I’ll go to work on it right away.” Joanna reached out and punched the button on her intercom.
“Yes?” Kristin was still all ice.
“Have Dispatch raise Ernie Carpenter on the radio. Find out where he is and tell him to stay there. Tell him I’m bringing him something important.”
Even though Joanna considered the interview over, when she looked back at Linda Kimball, the other woman had not yet moved.
“Is there something else?” Joanna asked.
Linda nodded. “I’ve tried all afternoon to put myself in Burton’s shoes. Which do you think is worse?” she asked.
“Which what?” Joanna returned.
“Knowing or not knowing? Is he better off thinking his father is still alive somewhere and that he deserted his wife and his unborn son? Or is he better off knowing for sure his father is dead? That he left and didn’t come back because he didn’t have a choice, because he was lying dead in a glory hole on Harold Patterson’s ranch?”
Joanna pondered carefully before she answered. “That’s a tough call,” she said finally, “but I think most people would rather know the truth, how ever painful it might be.”
Linda Kimball groped for her purse and hefted it into her lap. “That’s what I decided, too,” she said. “This afternoon. But that’s why I wanted to bring the envelope today. I wanted someone else to have it, before I had a chance to change my mind.”
As Linda left the room, the intercom buzzed.
“Ernie’s down working in the glory hole on the Patterson ranch. He wants to know can it wait?”
“It can’t wait. Tell him to keep on doing what he’s doing. I’ll come find him. What about a car, Kristin? Did you get one for me?”
“All that’s available today is a five-year-old Blazer. Body’s good; engine’s a little rough. That’s what Danny from Motor Pool says.”
“I only want to know two things. Does it run, and is it equipped with a working radio?”
“Danny says yes.”
“Good. Tell him to bring it around as soon as he can. I’d like to have it here in under five minutes, with the engine running and a full tank of gas. And, Kristin?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for taking care of the car,” Joanna said. “Good job.”
WHEN Joanna rushed out of the office in search of Ernie Carpenter, she grabbed the stack of un opened mail and took it along with her.
The Blazer with the Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door was a long way from new, but that didn’t bother her After all, it was several years newer than her old Eagle.
Once on the Rocking P, she drove straight to the glory hole without turning off at the house.
As she went past, though, she caught a glimpse of Ivy’s truck parked by the front gate. Seeing it made her wonder if Ivy would really go through with her hasty wedding plans. By getting married within days of her father’s death, Ivy would be committing one of those breaches of small-town etiquette that would expand into legend with countless retellings.
Where hasty marriages were concerned, Joanna Brady was one of the few people in town prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to Yuri Malakov and Ivy Patterson’s late-blooming, whirlwind romance. After all, Joanna and Andy had raised eyebrows years earlier with their own rushed wedding. That union had certainly worked out fine in the long run.
A rushed marriage was probably fine, but the possibility of murder was not. Personally, Joanna wanted to believe in the idea of two people living happily ever after, but a determination on whether or not the newlyweds would ride off into the sun set on a honeymoon or end up in prison at florence would have to be left in Ernie Carpenter’s capable hands. It was up to him and to a judge and jury.
This time when Joanna arrived at the glory hole, there was a whole collection of vehicles parked around it. She had to leave the Blazer a fair distance away and then tiptoe over the rocky ground in her city-slicker black pumps. High heels that were only marginally safe on flat sidewalk surfaces were downright dangerous on the splintery shale.
Three young deputies lounged around the hole. Ostensibly, they were running spotlights and lugging equipment, but mostly they leaned on fence posts with their hands in their pockets and chewed the fat. As soon as Joanna drove up, they all made an obvious pretense of looking busy.
“Hey, Detective Carpenter,” one of them called down into the hole. “Sheriff Brady’s here.”
“What are you waiting for then?” Ernie grumbled back. “Winch me up so I can talk to her and get it over with.”
While Joanna watched, a filthy, mud-caked specter rose up out of the glory hole. The bandbox detective who had sat taking notes in her office only hours earlier now looked and smelled like a battle weary infantryman in night camouflage.
Once out of the harness, he strode over to the van where a makeshift washbasin had been set up on the tailgate. Cursing her wretched shoes, Joanna tripped after him.
“How do you do it?” she asked irritably.
“Do what?” he asked, bending over and care fully soaping his hands, then sloshing the dirt off his grubby face.
“One minute you look like you just stepped out of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. The next you look like you haven’t changed clothes in years.”
“Oh, that,” Ernie Carpenter said with a short laugh. “It’s a trick I learned from my wife. When ever she was expecting, she always kept a packed suitcase by the front door. I keep two changes of clothes in my car at all times, because in this line of work, you never know what’s going to turn up. Speaking of which, I take it something did.”
Joanna nodded and pulled the white envelope out of her pocket. “Look what someone brought to my office earlier this afternoon. I thought you’d want to see it.”
Drying his hands on a paper towel, Ernie took the offered envelope, opened it, and removed the three-by-five card. He read it without comment, then slipped the card back in the envelope.
“That’s fine,” he said without showing more than minimal interest. “It’s bound to make the coroner’s identification job that much easier.”
“You think it’s him then?” Joanna asked, disappointed that Ernie’s level of excitement didn’t match her own.