Tombstone Courage jb-11 Read online

  Tombstone Courage

  ( JOANNA BRADY - 11 )

  J.A. Jance

  TOMBSTONE COURAGE

  By: Judith A. Jance

  A Joanna BRADY MYSTERY

  AVON BOOKS. A division of The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10019

  Copyright C 1994 by J. A. Jance

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 9340351

  ISBN: 0-38O76546-2

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

  Published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc.;

  for information address Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019.

  First Avon Books Printing: April 1995

  First Avon Books Special printing December 1994

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  10 9 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Prologue

  ROCKS RAINED down on him in a steady, deadly barrage, small ones at first; then, gradually, larger. In the beginning, he managed to crawl out of the way, dodging this way and that, scrabbling on his belly with his hands and arms wrapped around his head, protecting it.

  “Stop,” he begged, his voice strangely muffled the dirt and rocks beneath him. “Please stop. I’ll never do it again. Never.”

  The brutal rocks kept falling. They fell onto his legs, his arms, the small of his back. He screamed in pain, in agony, but there was no escape, no place to hide.

  The attack couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes from beginning to end, but for him-the target-it seemed like forever. And it was, because when it was over, he lay partially buried and lifeless on the rock-strewn floor of the hole, with a ten-pound boulder crushing part of his skull.

  HAROLD Patterson squinted through the rain-blurred windshield. Checking for traffic, he pulled his rattletrap International Scout through the gate of the Rocking P Ranch and onto the highway. Pouring rain made it hard to see. Part of the problem was his eyes. Ivy, his daughter, was constantly nagging him about that, and she was probably right. Thank God his ears still worked all right.

  At eighty-four, even with his new, thick trifocals, the old peepers weren’t nearly as good as they used to be. But Harold figured the real problem was the damn wiper blades. The rubber was old, cracked, and frayed. The blades squawked across the windshield, barely making contact and leaving trails of muddy water on the dusty, bug splattered glass.

  In southern Arizona, it seemed like you never noticed that the wipers weren’t working until you needed them, and when you noticed, you were too busy driving blind to remember. The next time he went into an Auto Parts to drink coffee and shoot the breeze with the counterman, Gene Radovich, Harold still wouldn’t remember, not if it wasn’t raining at the time. It reminded him of the words in that old-time song “Manana” No need to fix a leaky roof on such a sunny day?

  Same difference.

  But that particular day-an unseasonably cold early-November morning-it was raining like hell.

  A pelting winter storm had rolled into the Desert from the Pacific, filling the normally dry creek beds and swathing the Mule Mountains in a dank gray blanket that was almost as chilly as Harold Patterson’s stubborn old heart.

  His daughter’s personal-injury trial was due to start in Cochise County Superior Court first thing tomorrow morning-Wednesday at nine o’clock.

  Unless he could figure out a way to stop it. Unless he could somehow bluff Holly into agreeing to talk to him. Unless he could work a deal and convince her to call it off.

  He had tried to talk to her about it several times since she arrived in town. That ploy hadn’t worked. That damn hotshot lawyer of hers had insisted that until Harold came to see her with his hat in his hand-to say nothing of a settlement it was a straight-out no go. His own daughter refused to see him, wouldn’t even tell him where she was staying.

  His own daughter. Just thinking about it caused Harold’s gnarled, arthritic hands that had wrung the necks of countless Sunday-dinner chicken to tighten into a similar death grip on the smooth surface of the worn steering wheel.

  Harold thought about Holly and her damn lawsuit the whole time he guided the wheezing yellow Scout over the rain-swept pavement of Highway 80, up the mountain pass locals called the Divide and then down the winding trail of Tombstone Canyon into Old Bisbee.

  Holly had been a Fourth of July baby. He had wanted to call her Linda-Indy for short in honor of Independence Day, but Emily wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that if she had daughters, they would be named after their grandmother’s favorite Christmas carol, “The Holly and the Ivy,” regardless of whether or not they arrived any time near December 25. And Holly it was. Would she have been less prickly, Harold sometimes wondered, had she been given a different name?

  Holly Patterson had entered the world sandwiched neatly between Bisbee’s traditional Independence Day Coaster Races and the annual Fourth of July parade down Tombstone Canyon.

  She was born in the Old Copper Queen Hospital, the brick one up in Old Bisbee, not the new apricot-colored one down in Warren. It had been a hot, miserable morning. On that pre-air-conditioning summer day, the nurses had left the delivery room windows wide open in hopes of capturing some faint hint of breeze. Emily had screamed her fool head off. For several hours running. To a poor, anxious, prospective father waiting outside, that’s how it had seemed.

  Harold remembered the whole morning as vividly as if it were yesterday. Left to his own devices in the waiting room, he had been propelled out of the hospital by his wife’s agonized cries. But with the windows open, there was no escape from Emily’s frantic shrieks. No one else in the downtown area-onlookers watching the races or waiting for the parade could escape them, either. The relent less screams echoed off nearby hillsides and reverberated up and down the canyons. People lined up on the sidewalks kept asking each other what in the world were they doing to that poor woman, killing her or what?

  Pacing up and down in the small patch of grassy park between the hospital and the building that housed the Phelps Dodge General Office, Harold had wondered the same thing himself. What were they doing to her? And when old Doc Winters finally slipped Emily the spinal that shut her up, Harold had despaired completely. As soon as she grew quiet, he was convinced it was over, that his wife was dead.

  Of course, that wasn’t the case at all. Emily was fine, and so was the baby. Men don’t forget that kind of agony. Women do. Had it been up to him, one child was all they would have had. Ever.

  Afterward, holding the beautiful baby in her arms, nursing her, Emily had smiled at him and told him Holly was worth it. Harold wasn’t so sure. Not then, not ten years later when Ivy was born, and certainly not now.

  Things change. The delivery room where both Holly and Ivy had been born now housed a Sun day-school classroom for the Presbyterian church across the street. A law firm-the biggest one in town-now occupied the lower floor space where the old dispensary and pharmacy had been located. In fact, Burton Kimball, who was Harold’s nephew as well as his attorney, kept his offices there. And as for the wopish Holly? Harold shook his head and clenched his jaw. Once more the powerful fingers tightened their viselike grip on the Scout’s loosey-goosey steering wheel.

  Holly was Holly. Had it been in Harold’s power to make her life different, certainly he would have.

  She had grown up tough, headstrong, and hard to handle runaway while she was still in high school. Well, she was back in Bisbee now, staying God knows where. He had heard rumors about Holly and that friend of hers tooling around town in somebody’s bright red Cadillac, lording it over
whoever saw her. Harold wondered about the car.

  It might possibly be hers, but Harold doubted it.

  If Holly had enough money to buy a car like that, why was she back home, trying to take his ranch away from him? No, if she wasn’t dead broke, she had to be close to it. After thirty-four years with no letters, no phone calls, why else would she suddenly come back home to a place she despised? As a precocious sixteen-year-old, Holly had found life on the Rocking P worse than prison. What else but abject poverty could bring her home as a fifty-year-old demanding her fair share of the family fortunes?

  Holly was Harold’s firstborn daughter. If she had needed help and asked for it, he would have given it to her gladly, regardless of the heartaches and disagreements that might have gone before.

  But Holly’s reappearance had come in the form of a legal attack, mounted by some big-time California attorney who expected Harold to just lie down and play dead. And the attack had been aimed, with pinpoint accuracy, at the one place in Harold’s life where he was most vulnerable. And guilty.

  Of course, he had denied Holly’s allegations.

  And when the People magazine reporter had shown up at the Rocking P and told him she was doing an article on “forgotten memories,” Harold had tried to throw her off track without having to tell his side of the story. But the woman was one of those sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued little city women. He couldn’t remember now exactly how it was she had phrased the critical question.

  He may have mentally misplaced the exact text, but he recalled the reporter’s meaning well enough. He had wondered if that particular line of questioning had come directly from Holly or from that so-called hypnotherapist of hers, Amy Baxter. The assumption behind the question was the idea that since one daughter had been forced to run away from home in order to avoid sexual abuse, what about the daughter who didn’t leave?

  Was Ivy-the stay-at-home, old-maid daughter-a willing participant?

  The reporter had made a big deal about the fact that Harold and Ivy lived alone together on the Rocking P, as though that in itself was enough to raise suspicions. Harold had exercised incredible restraint in not throwing the woman bodily out of his house. It was no surprise that the resulting article had made Harold sound like some kind of sex-crazed monster whose incestuous relations with his daughters had no doubt ruined both their lives.

  The usually even-tempered Ivy had been livid when the article came out, and she had blamed Holly for it. Ivy had wanted Harold to sue, wanted him to have Burton Kimball go after the magazine for defamation of character. Harold had his own good reasons for refusing, but when he did, there had been a huge blowup between him and Ivy.

  For weeks now, they had barely spoken, doing their chores together around the ranch, but with none of their customary camaraderie. By attempting not to fight with one daughter, Harold had inevitably quarreled with the other.

  Determined to solve the problem with the least amount of damage to everyone concerned, Harold had put all his hopes in what would happen once Holly came home for the trial. He had thought that somehow he would be able to get his two daughters together in the same room where he would finally, once and for all, put the past to rest.

  But that hadn’t happened.

  For the entire week since Holly had been back home in Bisbee, she had insisted that all contact be conducted on a lawyer-to-lawyer basis. Harold hadn’t been allowed access to her by telephone, and no one would tell him where she was staying.

  Well, that was changing today. He had figured out a way to make it happen, a way to bring her around.

  Harold was coming to town with what, on the surface, would appear to be an enticing carrot. He was prepared to offer Holly the ultimate prize, total capitulation. Everything she wanted. For someone like Holly, that should prove irresistible, but there was a stick as well. And when it came to those two things, both carrot and stick, what he had to say would not be discussed on a lawyer to-lawyer basis.

  Those were private matters to be discussed with his daughters alone. No one else.

  Once and for all time, he would finally tell both of them the truth.

  Surely, once they both knew the truth, he might be able to find some common ground, some avenue for reconciliation. Once he came up with the plan, he had allowed himself to hope it would work. Perhaps if Holly knew all of it, she’d call off the trial and her hired attack dogs. Harold Patterson could imagine nothing worse than having to endure the humiliation of a public trial. He could imagine how it would feel to sit in one of those overheated Cochise County courtrooms. The place would be packed with friends and neighbors, people who had known him all his life. He would have to sit there and be stripped bare; would be forced to listen while his daughter recounted the exact nature of his alleged crimes and the horrible things he had supposedly done to her.

  The possibility that Holly might really remembered her caused Harold to squirm on the Scout’s sway backed front seat. Just thinking about it set off a severe ache that started in Harold’s breastbone, spread across both shoulders, and arched down his tense forearms.

  What if she really did remember? What then?

  Harold remembered hearing someone say that the truth would set you free. Could it do that for him? Harold doubted it. In this case, truth seemed like some kind of evil genie. Harold worried that once he rubbed the bottled past and set the genie loose in the world, things would never be the same. Telling the truth meant that long-made promises would have to be broken, that the lives of innocent people would be forever changed. But then, innocent people were always being hurt.

  That was the way the world worked.

  WEARING ONLY her bathrobe and with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, Joanna Brady stood in the kitchen doorway observing her daughter, Jenny. The nine-year-old was halfheartedly trailing a spoon through the cold, partially eaten contents of her cereal bowl.

  “I thought you said you wanted oatmeal,” Joanna snapped irritably.

  “If you don’t, fine. Give it to the dogs, but stop playing with it.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth before Joanna wished she could take them back. Jennifer was eating next to nothing these days, giving her mother yet another cause for worry, something else to add to Joanna’s own considerable pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Joanna apologized quickly, trying to make light of it. “I sound just like Grandma Lathrop, don’t I?”

  And it was true. Those were exactly the kinds of things Eleanor Lathrop would have said-had said, in fact, especially when she herself was hurting.

  Criticism had always been Eleanor’s trump card, but why did Joanna have to replay those old tapes now, with her own daughter, when all she really wanted to do was take Jenny in her arms, hold her, and comfort her? Instead of harping, Joanna needed to share her own hurt with Jenny.

  After all, Joanna Lathrop Brady understood all too well how it felt for a daughter to lose a father.

  The very same thing had happened to her.

  But the pain of being a newly made widow somehow got in the way of consoling her daughter, the newly made orphan.

  Joanna had always prided herself on the special relationship she shared with Jenny, but in the six short weeks since a drug-cartel hit man had gunned down Joanna’s husband, Cochise County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Brady, an unfamiliar wall of silence and misunderstanding seemed to have grown up in the Brady household. The once open give-and-take between mother and daughter was now full of uneasy silences punctuated by angry words and occasional bouts of tears.

  Without glancing at Joanna, Jenny took her bowl and slipped wordlessly out of the breakfast nook, heading for the back porch. Always interested in a handout, both dogs, the recently adopted Tigger, a comical-looking golden retriever/pit bull mix, and Sadie, a rangy bluetick hound sprang from their usual resting places near the door and rushed to follow.

  Joanna removed the towel and shook her red hair loose. She was pouring herself a cup of coffee when Jenny returned to the kitchen sink to rin
se her bowl. The child’s troubled blue eyes were downcast; she seemed near tears. Long after all trace of food was gone, Jenny continued to rinse her dish. Joanna resisted the urge to tell her to turn off the faucet and not waste water. Once again she attempted to put things right.

  “I’m sorry to be so impatient,” she said. “The election is today. I guess I’m nervous and in a hurry. We need to leave here early enough so I can vote on the way to work.”

  Jenny turned from the sink to face her mother.

  “Are you going to vote for yourself?” she asked.

  “Vote for myself? Of course. Why do you ask?”

  Jenny dropped her eyes and shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I thought a good sport always votes for the other guy. In games and stuff.”

  Joanna stepped over to Jenny, held her by the shoulders for a moment, then lifted the child’s chin and looked directly into her eyes.

  “This is something I have to do, Jenny,” Joanna said. “For us and for your dad. It isn’t a game. What if I didn’t vote for myself and then ended up losing by a single vote? It wouldn’t make sense for me to vote for one of my opponents, now would it?”

  “I guess not,” Jenny mumbled, then dodged out of her mother’s grasp. “I’ve got to go get dressed.” As Jenny darted away, Joanna blinked back tears of her own. How could it still be less than two months since Andy died? It seemed much longer, more like a lifetime. How could her entire world have been turned so upside down in so short a time? Ostensibly, not that much had changed. They still lived in the same home, the same cozy Sears bungalow she and Andy had purchased from his parents years earlier. But the house was no longer the same place. Without Andy’s presence, it was far too quiet, and so was Jenny.

  The cheerful, laughing, loving child who had eagerly marched off to tackle third grade the first of September… was no more. Two months later she had been transformed into a subdued, pale husk of her former self. She had turned into a somber miniature adult, living her life inside a hard, brittle shell.