For a moment, Harold seemed unable to answer.
“N-no,” he stammered finally. “I came by myself.
I don’t know where she is.”
And he didn’t, either, not for sure. Most likely she was still at the house, but the usually steady Ivy had become unpredictable of late. In fact, she had left the house the night before right after chores, and she hadn’t returned until just before sun-up. That was something else that was bugging Harold, another bone of contention, and some thing she had never done before.
Since the big blowup over Holly, Ivy had suddenly taken to coming and going without bothering to tell him where she was going or when she’d be back. Of course, since they weren’t speaking, how could she?
This new situation with Ivy reminded Harold of Holly, back when she’d been an errant teenager. But Ivy was no teenager. At forty years of age, she hardly needed to ask her father’s permission to do any damn-fool thing she pleased. He saw this latest incident as one more thing to lay at Holly’s door.
“I see,” Marianne said.
Harold’s mind had wandered briefly. When he came back to himself, Marianne Macula was examining his face so closely that he wondered what she saw there. And when she said, “I see,” what exactly did she mean? Did this Reverend Macula somehow know more about what was really going on out at the Rocking P than Harold wanted her to?
“All this trial business must be almost as hard on her as it is on you,” Marianne continued. Her voice was kind: sincere and caring where Marliss Shackleford’s had been sharp and self-serving.
Harold dropped his gaze and examined his mud-spattered boots. “Yes,” he allowed reluctantly. “I reckon it is.”
Marianne reached out and took the old man’s hand. “You take care of yourself now, Harold.”
She turned to Marliss and engaged her in some kind of small talk that finally set Harold free to go vote. He quickly planted himself front of Barbara Wentworth’s table and gratefully dived into the election process.
In other times, he and Barb Wentworth would have shot the breeze while she found his name in the voter-registration list, showed him where to sign, and gave him his ballot. This time, Barbara seemed disinclined to talk. Did even the no-non sense Barbara Wentworth read People? he wondered.
Minutes later, breathing a sigh of relief, Harold escaped to the relative privacy of a voting booth.
He read each page of the ballot carefully. It wasn’t a very exciting election. The usual people were running for the usual offices, and no one would be particularly surprised when the incumbents were reelected to their traditional positions in the state legislature or on the board of supervisors. As far as county races were concerned, the only one of any special interest to Harold Patterson was the wide-open contest for the office of sheriff.
Two months earlier, right after the primary and when the general-election ballots had already been printed, all hell had broken loose in Cochise County. Both candidates for sheriff, the two men whose names even now were listed on the pre printed ballots, had perished the previous September in a series of harrowing events that had stunned the entire state. The previous sheriff, Walter V. McFadden, and his opponent, Deputy Andrew Brady, had succumbed to gunshot wounds within days of one another.
In the ensuing investigation, the community had been shocked to learn that several long-term members of the Sheriff’s Department had been deeply involved in drug-trafficking. By the time the smoke cleared, Joanna Brady-widow of one of the dead men-had agreed to run for sheriff in her husband’s stead. For the past two months, the murders, the investigation, and the subsequent campaign for sheriff had been front-page news.
Only Holly Patterson’s forthcoming legal battle with her father had finally displaced the Sheriff’s Department from top position on the front pages of the Bisbee Bee.
Joanna Brady was someone Harold Patterson remembered as the feisty daughter of yet another Cochise County sheriff, the long-dead D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop. Big Hank had once played poker with Harold on a fairly regular basis. The other two current candidates from Wilcox and the other from Sierra Vista-weren’t people Harold knew personally. In fact, standing in the voting booth, he barely remembered their names.
What he remembered best about Joanna Lathrop Brady was seeing her as a sprightly little red haired imp in a freshly pressed Brownie uniform standing outside one or the other of the Phelps Dodge Company stores. She had been a capable businesswoman even way back then, selling him Girl Scout cookies and carefully counting back the change. That long-ago child with her two missing front teeth deserved far better cards than the tough ones life had dealt her with disturbing frequency.
When she was a high school sophomore, Joanna’s father had died in a tragic automobile accident. Now, somewhere under thirty years of age, she was already the widow of a gunned-down police officer, but she wasn’t ready to give up and quit. By agreeing to run in her husband’s place, she showed plenty of grit and determination, Qualities Harold Patterson both possessed himself and admired in others.
To Harold’s way of thinking, a vote for Joanna Brady was a vote for continuity, for the way things ought to be.
In the space provided for write-in candidates, Harold used a stubby pencil to write in Joanna Brady’s name. Then, squaring his shoulders, he emerged from the voting booth and dropped his ballot into the box. Voting for Joanna Brady felt good. It almost made the stop at the church worth while; almost balanced the scales for his having to put up with the likes of Tottie Galbraith and Marliss Shackleford.
Almost, but not quite.
Harold left the church before anyone else could corner him into a conversation. He certainly didn’t want to hang around long enough to risk running into Ivy when she came in to vote.
After all, it was bad enough that Harold was forced to undergo public attacks from one of his two daughters. He worried that if Ivy saw him there in the church and simply cut him dead, that would be almost as bad or worse than a noisy row with Holly. That would give the ladies of the United Christian Prayer Fellowship so much to talk about that they wouldn’t shut up for a week.
Harold Lamm Patterson, one tough old bird, could handle just about anything, but the prospect of having Ivy-his favorite spurn him in public was more than he could endure.
BisBEE As it is known now was created in the fifties when several different hamlets, including Old Bisbee, incorporated into a single entity. Forty years later, the old lines of demarcation still persist.
That election morning, seven miles down the road in the Warren business district, not much work was being conducted at the Davis Insurance Agency on Arizona Street. When Joanna arrived, she found two baskets of “good wishes” flowers from clients waiting on her desk. A box of glazed doughnuts and a percolator of coffee covered most of the surface of the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist herself, a young woman named Lisa Connors, fielded an occasional business phone call between serving coffee and doughnuts to the steady parade of drop-by well-wishers.
Milo Davis himself, flushing with good humor from the tip of the resin-imprisoned scorpion on his bob tie to the top of his shiny bald pate, had, shook hands, and told people he wasn’t losing an office manager, he was gaining a sheriff.
Milo’s shoulder-whacking jest was made with the best of intentions, but it bothered Joanna all the same.
From high school on, this building with its single, three-office suite was the only workplace she had ever known, and Milo Davis had been her only boss. If she won the election, all that would change. Joanna felt like a reluctant and uncertain fledgling about to be shoved from the nest, regardless of whether or not she could fly. And yet she did want to win, didn’t she?
At nine, Milo left for a nine-thirty appointment.