“What can I do for you today, Mr. Patterson?” she asked.
He fumbled in his pocket for a key ring and removed a small key. “I’d like to take a look at my box,” he said. “There are some items in there that I need to go over.”
Settling himself at a partially screened table, he removed his glasses and rubbed his bleary eyes while he waited for Sandy to bring his safety deposit box from the vault.
Holly’s demands were so outrageous that they should have been laughable. She wanted a full public confession of Harold Patterson’s alleged deeds. In addition, she demanded as damages to half the Rocking P. That was what bothered him most, rumors that with this so-called therapist as a partner, Holly expected to build a recovery center, a place for people who realized late in life that they too had been abused by members of their own families.
Those were the terms of settlement. If the case went to trial, her lawyer had told Burton that he - intended to go for blood-for everything they could get, for title to the whole shooting match if they could get it.
That wouldn’t happen because the case wasn’t going to trial. Because Harold Patterson himself was going to see to it.
It was easy for Ivy and Burton Kimball to tell him what to do. They weren’t caught between a rock and a hard place, and they didn’t know the whole story. In addition, they didn’t have Harold’s two prime pieces of motivation, either. For one, he wanted to live long enough to see his daughters together and reconciled for once in their lives.
And the other? With one major exception, he had lived his whole life as an honest, upright, law abiding man.
Before Norm Higgins planted him down in Evergreen Cemetery, Harold Patterson wanted his reputation back.
He had weighed all the risks. If he fought Holly in court and lost, he risked losing everything. If he settled, he handed over half the ranch to Holly-to the prodigal daughter who had turned her back on all of them for thirty-some-odd years-while dispossessing Ivy, the nonprodigal with the ranch, who had cared for her invalid mother through years of steady decline that led inevitably into helpless insanity, who had always put other people’s needs and wants before her own.
What would happen to Ivy if the Rocking P was cut in half or disappeared altogether? Like the baby King Solomon threatened to divide in the Bible, a ranch the size of the Patterson spread was of no more use cut in half than half a child would be. It took the whole ranch to make a living, to make a life.
Returning to the table with the box, Sandra Henning easily turned her key in the lock. Harold’s hand trembled as he attempted to insert his own.
It took three separate tries before the key clicked home. The long metal drawer flipped open, and the old man slumped back into his chair.
By eleven o’clock, Harold had sorted through all the papers in the drawer. In one stack, he put the papers that would stay in the safety-deposit box-the insurance policies he didn’t need in order to change the beneficiaries, the few ribbon wrapped letters he and Emily had exchanged during those rare times when he was actually away from home.
In the other stack were the things Harold would need to take with him to Burton Kimball’s office, will and the deed to the Rocking P.
At the very bottom of the drawer, Harold found the last item, the single yellowed envelope that he and Emily had together solemnly sealed away years earlier. Emily was the one who had insisted on a greasy candle-wax seal that now allowed some of the loopy, old-fashioned writing from the letter itself to bleed through onto the outside surface of the envelope. It was almost as if the words themselves were eager to escape their paper bound prison.
Harold could have broken the seal and opened it, but he didn’t. There was no need. The faded pencil-written words were committed to memory, seared into his heart even more clearly than they were into his brain. He remembered them all; was incapable of forgetting even one.
He sat holding the envelope and wondering what he should do with it now. He had kept it all these years because he had promised Emily he would; because she had begged him to, and because he had been afraid he might someday need it. Now, though, if his gamble paid off, if he could go to Holly and get her to listen to reason, maybe he could finally destroy the letter and be done with it. Maybe he could go to his grave taking the letter’s ugly secret with him.
Finally, after many agonizing moments of indecision, he placed the fragile, unopened envelope in the stack with the insurance policies and placed the whole pile back in the drawer. If Holly and Ivy didn’t take his word for it, didn’t accept his version of what had happened, then it would be time to remove the letter from the safety of its hiding place. By then he would know if he was taking the letter out to show it to his daughters or to burn it once and for all.
Pushing back his chair, Harold stood and signaled to Sandy Henning. “I’m ready to go now he said.
When she came to retrieve Harold’s safety deposit box, Sandy peered closely at Harold through her red-framed bifocals. “Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Patterson? Your color’s not all that good.”
Harold stood and picked up his hat. “I’m fine, Miz Henning,” he said, carefully replacing the tiny key in the narrow pocket of his jeans. ”I’m just a little wore out is all. Don’t go getting all pistol sprung about me.”
Leaving the bank, Harold drove straight to Evergreen Cemetery. For a long time, Evergreen had been the only burial game in town. During the first half of the twentieth century, it had been a lush, green, and well-tended place, irrigated for free with the mineral-rich effluent pumped from the underground mines. Then, in the late fifties, when Phelps Dodge started a leaching operation on the new open-pit tailings dump, the circulation of free mine water was removed from the community and returned to industrial use.
Bisbee’s would-be gardeners had been left literally high and dry. They could use the city’s drinking water pumped from a deep underground well down near Naco. But the clear well water, although fine for drinking, didn’t do a thing for the garden growers, because it came with two distinct disadvantages.
Not only was it outrageously expensive, it also lacked the abundant minerals that had once made Bisbee’s lawns, trees, and gardens flourish. And cemeteries, too, for that matter.
During the next decades, Evergreen Cemetery fell into such a dusty or muddy deterioration that the name “Evergreen” seemed little more than a cruel joke. When Emily Patterson had died five years earlier, the place was in such disrepair, Harold had been ashamed to bury her there, but the other cemetery in town, a relatively new one dating from the sixties, wasn’t much better. So Harold had bitten the bullet, bought a double plot in Ever green-he got a better deal that way-and a double headstone as well.
Driving to Emily’s plot, Harold was surprised to see that the place appeared to be in somewhat better shape.
The thinly paved drive still had pot holes here and there, but the grounds themselves were much improved. Maybe a new manager was on the job, a person who actually cared about the families of the people who were buried there.
Harold parked the Scout. The rain finally was letting up as he climbed stiffly down out of the truck and hiked over to the familiar plot. He took off his Stetson and stood bareheaded, staring down at the red granite headstone. Both his and Emily’s names and birth dates were already chiseled into the stone in elegant, graceful letters and numbers. Emily’s date of death was there as well.