Isabel Gonzales had cared for a number of invalids in her life who were ill enough to require looking after, but not sick enough to need a nurse. She knew that after even a few days of bed rest, the transition from bed to walking around is a tricky one that requires careful negotiation.
“You should sit down,” she said, hurrying to Holly’s side. “You shouldn’t be up walking like this.”
Holly waved her away. “I’m fine,” she announced. “I’m really fine.” Nevertheless, she did totter over to the table and chairs just inside the door.
While Isabel hurried to pour a cup of coffee from a fresh pot, Holly sank down at the kitchen table. Her eyes were drawn at once to the pictures on the front page of the paper that was lying there in front of her.
The moment she saw the picture, a lifetime’s worth of forgotten memories boiled to the surface, threatening to drown her in a head-crushing wave.
- The hours of careful probing sessions with Amy, the hazy, hypnotic, dreamlike questions and answers, had never come near this terrible, searing pain, had never cast a light on Holly Patterson’s interior darkness. Or her horror.
She grabbed the newspaper and stuffed it into the pocket of her robe, thinking that perhaps if she could no longer see that smiling face, the pain would diminish enough so she could at least breathe. But even with his visage squashed in her hand like an unwary cockroach, she could still see his face. She could still remember.
And then, in a moment of terrifying clarity, she caught a single glimpse of her own danger. Bolting upright, she knocked over the kitchen chair behind her.
Isabel started at the sound of the falling chair.
Thinking Holly had fainted, she spun around, almost spilled the full cup of coffee she had just poured. When she caught sight of Holly’s stricken face, she nearly dropped it altogether.
Was the woman having some kind of seizure? a heart attack perhaps? Her mouth gaped open.
She seemed to be trying to speak, or maybe even scream, but no sound came out of her open mouth.
Slamming the cup back down on the counter, Isabel hurried to Holly’s side. “Miss Patterson,” she said. She pulled out one of the remaining chairs and pushed it in Holly’s direction. “What’s the matter? Sit down. Sit down right here. You look like you’re going to faint.”
“She’s going to kill me!” Holly whispered hoarsely.
“Miss Patterson, please. No one’s going to kill anybody. You’re imagining things. Please sit down.”
With surprising agility, Holly Patterson dodged out of Isabel’s reach and made for the stairway.
Isabel stood there listening as heavy feet pounded down the long overhead corridor that led back to her room.
Isabel’s first impulse was to follow the woman.
It was clearer to her now than ever before that Miss Baxter was right. In Isabel’s world, Holly Patterson’s “emotional problems” meant the woman was crazy as she could be.
Upstairs, the bedroom door slammed shut, and Isabel breathed a sigh of relief. If Miss Patterson had tried to go outside or run away, she would have been far more worried.
Instead, she had gone back to her room, back to where she was supposed to be.
As soon as Miss Baxter and Mr. Rogers came back from their ride, Isabel would have to report the incident, although she still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened.
Miss Patterson had been looking at the paper. Whatever she saw there, it had upset her terribly at a time when she had already been through too much. Remembering the look on the fleeing woman’s face, Isabel knew she had gone over the edge.
Isabel stood waiting, expecting to hear the sound of the rocking chair resume, and finally it did. Isabel crossed herself and breathed a small prayer. “Let the poor soul alone,” she said to her self ‘Just let her be.”
Burton was less surprised by the fact that Maxine had been able to locate Ivy and Yuri Malakov than he was by where they were found. They had stayed at the Lodge, a grade-B motel on the far side of Tombstone.
The very look of the place offended him. Certainly, Ivy deserved a better honeymoon suite than this. He called their room from a house phone in the lobby. It was almost noon, but when Ivy answered, she sounded as though the phone had awakened her out of a sound sleep.
“You’re where?” Ivy demanded, finally coming to her senses.
“i’m in the lobby. I’ve got to talk to you, to both you and… Yuri. It’s important.”
“Burt, I’m on my honeymoon. I’ve waited for it for forty years, and this is the only one I’ll ever have. Whatever you need, it can wait until tonight. We have to come back to the ranch then to do the chores. We’ll take on the funeral arrangements this evening.”
“This isn’t about your father,” Burton said. “It’s about Holly.”
“What about her?”
“Her attorney called my office just a little while ago.”
“Why?”
“She intends to continue to fight you, Ivy, to file against the estate unless you want to negotiate now. Her lawyer will go to Judge Moore and amend the suit.”
There was a long pause. “Holly can’t do that, can she?”
“Yes.”
“What do we do about it?”
“That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
There was a pause. “All right,” Ivy said finally.
“Wait there in the coffee shop. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Burton went into the coffee shop, sank into a booth, and ordered himself a cup of coffee. He noticed Dave Hollicker come in a few minutes later, and Burton casually waved at the deputy as he went by.
It didn’t occur to Burton Kimball that Dave’s appearance had anything to do with him, or that by interrupting his cousin’s honeymoon, he might be adding fuel to the fire of Ernie Carpenter’s growing conspiracy theory. Because by then, the Cochise County homicide detective was hot on the trail of the possibility that Burton Kimball, Ivy Patterson, and Yuri Malakov might all be in it together.
Detective Carpenter was growing more and more convinced that the three of them, acting in concert, had murdered Harold Lamm Patterson.
FOR A while after she went back up to her room, Holly sat on the bed barely allowing herself to breathe. No wonder people thought she was crazy. She really was crazy. In her mind’s eye, it was as though two parallel videotapes were running in tandem, the one from long ago and the other from Tuesday. The old one was horrifying and real. Although the colors had turned to sepia like the rusty shades of old pictures in a museum collection, the faces were still recognizable. Holly knew now who those people were. All of them.
The other was in living color, although the clouds overhead had covered the dark red cliffs of Juniper Flats in a misty gray wool blanket. First there was her father telling her the real story, while from deep inside her came the first faint rustlings of recognition and remembrance. And then the tape ended, abruptly, as though cut off in mid-sentence. After that vivid mountaintop scene there was nothing but the warm, sweet, comfortable oblivion of forgetting. After that came an unreasoning anger that her father hadn’t come as he had said he would, that he had once again betrayed her.
But that was silly. This time, she realized he hadn’t let her down at all. He had been there in the library, just as he had said he would be. He had offered to make amends, to make things right.
And she had forgotten it somehow. That was the part that didn’t make any sense, unless she had been made to forget it.
As she sat there, she tried her best to convince herself that she was wrong, that the sudden shock of panic that had overwhelmed her in the kitchen had to be some kind of horrible mistake. But it wasn’t. As much as it hurt, it was no mistake.
She knew now that no chance meeting had caused Holly and hypnotherapist Amy Baxter to stumble across one another’s paths months earlier.
Amy must have targeted her, come looking for her deliberately.