Tombstone Courage jb-11 Read online

  Suddenly, sitting there by himself in the booth, Burton Kimball wondered if Ivy knew she was about to be run over by a train; wondered if she had any idea what her father intended to do.

  Ethically, Burton didn’t have a leg to stand on, but it wasn’t fair for her not to have some warning. Burton waved to the bartender. This time, when she approached the booth, he asked her if he could use the phone. At first, he thought she was going to turn him down, but then she relented. Directed to the phone in the back room, Burton dialed the Rocking P. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered.

  Leaving the phone, a slightly tipsy Burton Kimball returned to the table, where a new Bloody Mary was waiting for him. Now that he’d decided to do it, now that he’d decided to tell Ivy, he could hardly contain himself. He gulped that drink and hardly noticed that this one was much hotter than the other two. And much stronger. When it was gone, he tried the phone once more and ordered yet another drink.

  By the end of the fourth drink, Burton Kimball was well on his way to being drunk. He was also more than a little worried. He should never have told Harold he quit. That was dumb. How would he ever be able to lobby on Ivy’s behalf if he was outside the case looking in? He should probably track Uncle Harold down and unresign. Was unresign a word?

  Disresign maybe? There had to be some kind of word that said what he meant, but he couldn’t think of it.

  There may have been more drinks after that.

  Burton seemed to remember singing show tunes with a toothless old miner at the end of the bar.

  By the time he finally reached Ivy by phone, Burton could barely talk. Mumbling incoherently he blurted out the news. The dead silence on the other end of the line sobered him instantly.

  “Ivy,” he said, when the silence persisted. “Say something. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. But she didn’t sound fine. “Do you want me to come out? Can I do something to help?”

  “You’ve done enough,” she said.

  When he put down the phone, a subdued and surprisingly sober Burton Kimball paid his bill.

  The bartender had been very nice, so he left her a sizable tip. Unfortunately, as soon as he stepped outside, as soon as the bright sunlight hit him, he was drunk again.

  Staggering, Burton managed to make it down the street without seeing anyone who knew him.

  He found his car and succeeded in inserting the key in the lock on the fifth try. Settling in the seat with his head against the backrest and telling himself that all he needed was a little nap, Burton Kimball passed out cold.

  For a fleeting moment, when he first awakened in the shadowy gloom, Harold thought it was all a dream-the same one he always had, the terrible nightmare that had haunted his sleep and hounded him out of bed for more years than he cared to remember.

  The dream was forever the same. Harold would find himself trapped in a glory hole, in one of those useless, abandoned exploratory shafts that covered the stony pastures of the Rocking P. And took place in the very same glory hole that was one, the one nearest the summit of the Muleuntairs, high up among the red rock bound, scrub-oak-dotted cliffs called Juniper flats.

  In his sleep, Harold’s nightmare prison was just like this real one, measuring eight feet in diameter by thirty feet deep. Uneven slide-prone sides rose in an almost perpendicular fashion from a dank, ram puddled floor to the rounded lip at the top, left by a pile of excavated tailings. Rocks and other things-foul things he didn’t want to think about-littered the floor and made footing uncertain.

  In real life, a sturdy barbed-wire fence surrounded the tailings mound and separated it and others like it from the Rocking P’s pasture land.

  The fence served as a lifesaving deterrent to thirsty desert-dwelling livestock that might otherwise be drawn to their deaths by the luring smell of water.

  In Harold’s dream, the fence never did any good, because it never kept him from falling in and being trapped.

  Each time the nightmare opened, Harold would find himself on his hands and knees, his desperate fingers groping and clawing along the steep wall, searching for some hold, some purchase, that would allow him to scramble up and out of his rocky cage, But each movement, each tentative touch, would jar loose stones and pebbles that would rain back down on his body, sending dirt and gravel spewing into his watering eyes and mewling mouth, battering him into the ground like some shamed biblical harlot.

  In his terror, he always cried out to Emily “Help me, Em. Please help.”

  Of course, Emily never answered his panic stricken cries, and why would she? She’d been dead for five years now and had been out of reach for many years before that. Emily Patterson was long dead but not forgotten.

  On this day, though, once his brain cleared, Harold realized this waking nightmare was no dream.

  Instead of sopped, sweat-drenched bedsheets beneath him, when he came to himself, there were rocks-real rock that were all too cold and sharp, especially the one that was biting painfully into his shoulder. This time he really was trapped in the dank depths of that very same glory hole, the one he had always avoided whenever possible.

  He lay flat on his back and tried squinting up through the darkness at the distant blue far above him. That had to be sky, although he couldn’t really tell for sure, couldn’t actually see it. His glasses had somehow disappeared in what must have been a fall, although Harold couldn’t remember it. Without his trusty spectacles, Harold Patterson was as good as blind.

  Blind, he thought grimly, but maybe not helpless. He tried to shift his weight then, to dislodge whatever it was that was digging into his shoulder. But even that slight motion was too much. A crushing wave of pain washed over him-a pain so intense that it flattened him, robbed him of breath, and rolled his eyes back into his head.

  Ribs, he thought to himself when he struggled back to wavering consciousness. Shattered ribs. No telling what damage they might do if he tried to move again, if they poked into something vital, a lung perhaps, or maybe even his wildly pounding heart.

  So he lay still and tried to think, tried to imagine what he could do to save himself. The glory hole that had for years tormented his sleep was miles from the house, so there was no point in calling out for help. No one would hear him. Unless someone came out there deliberately. Unless they came looking for him.

  He tried then to remember how it was that he had come to be near the glory hole in the first place. Had he been out doing chores? Feeding cattle? Working fences? Try as he might, he couldn’t corral his memory into any kind of order. What ever had happened earlier in the day, before he fell into the hole, remained a total mystery, as did the days immediately preceding that. It was as though his memory of the last few days prior to this terrible awakening had been wiped out of existence.

  Had he told anyone he’d be working this part of the ranch? Would anyone have an idea of where to start looking once he turned up missing? If he couldn’t remember how or why he had come to be there, would anyone else? Would Ivy realize he was hurt and institute a search, or would she simply shrug her shoulders and forget it, annoyed that her father was once again late for dinner?

  At first, shock helped deaden the pain, but as that natural analgesia disappeared, increasing clarity brought with it excruciating agony. Even lying perfectly still, the shattered ribs still stabbed and poked at him with each ragged breath. He was aware of shards of splintered bone pressing and piercing where no bone should have been.

  In addition to the pain, he grew increasingly aware of a familiar but fetid smell. It was some time before recognition crystallized in his brain.

  The appalling stench - a combination of human excrement and urin - belonged to him. Both bowel and bladder must have let go at once. He had no control whatsoever.

  Harold Lamm Patterson was an experienced stockman who understood the meaning of such things. If he was lying in a pool of his own bodily filth and waste with no muscle control and no sensory awareness from the bottom of his fractured ribs
down, that meant his back was broken. It meant he was going to die.

  That realization was too much for him. Merci fully, he again lost consciousness. For the time being, his physical pain eased, but not the mental torment, for soon the dream came again-the dream this time somehow layered in with nightmarish reality. The part of him that recognized it as a dream welcomed it, even though it was more vivid, more terrifying, than ever before.

  The scene had barely opened-he was still crawling around, looking for a way out-when the rocks began to fall in a horrifyingly accurate barrage. At first, only small pebbles rained down on him, but the sizes of the rocks grew steadily larger and their weights heavier. He tried dodging out of the way, but he couldn’t. There was no place to hide. No place to get away.

  “Em, help me. Please… please.”

  IT TURNED out to be one of the longest days of Joanna Brady’s existence. Once Harold Patterson left her office, the morning seemed to drag. At lunchtime, she drove from Warren up to Old Bisbee for a celebratory, end-of-campaign lunch with Jeff Daniels and Marianne Macula.

  Jeff-a full-time, stay-at-home, minister’s husband-had planned the event, weeks earlier-win, lose, or draw. With the election over, Jeff hoped life with his pastor turned campaign manager wife would return to some semblance of normalcy. Their usually neat parsonage had deteriorated to a shambles while Marianne masterminded the whole campaign and Jeff handled the mass mailings out of the room that usually served as Marianne’s study.

  It was a great lunch, complete with an appropriate set of toasts.

  Later in the afternoon, how ever, the effects of the champagne kicked in, and it was all Joanna could do to keep from falling asleep at her desk. As much as she hated the prospect of going to a beauty salon, she was grateful when it was time to abandon the office in favor of Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty.

  Helene’s looked exactly like what it was - an ill disguised two-car garage that had been hammered-and-longed into a beauty shop by virtue of some very creative do-it-yourself plumbing and electrical work provided by Helen Barco’s retired handyman husband.

  When Joanna sat down in the chair, Helen Barco took one look at her, shook her head, clicked her tongue sadly, and said, “Oh my, no. This will never do. Your mother tells me you’re going to be on the TV news tonight. We don’t want one of our girls looking like something the cat dragged in, now do we?”

  “We certainly don’t!” And an hour and a half later, Joanna didn’t.

  The remodel job on the building might have been amateurish, but the finished-product Joanna Brady who walked out the door of Helene’s at five-thirty that afternoon was strictly professional classic make-over. Her red hair had been cropped off in a short but stylish cut. Her makeup had been professionally applied. Lipstick and un accustomed nail polish matched perfectly. She’d have to remember to use the lip-liner Helen had insisted she take.

  “Good luck,” Helen Barco said as Joanna headed out the door. “I hope you win. Eleanor’s very proud of you, you know.”

  The fact that Eleanor Lathrop might be proud of her for any reason at all was a notion Joanna found somewhat foreign. It didn’t seem the least bit likely. In her whole life, she could count on one hand the other rare instances when Eleanor had been proud of her or had come out and said so.

  Joanna sat in her Eagle, leaned back against the headrest, and closed her eyes. Her neighbor, Clayton Rhodes, was still handling the evening chores, so there was no need for her to rush home. It was a good thing, too. Working round the clock, she had driven herself to the very edge of exhaustion.

  Cochise County measured eighty-five miles by eighty-five miles. In fighting to win the election, Joanna had covered damned near every inch of it. She had worked on the campaign tirelessly and with every ounce of her being. Yet even now, this close to the end, she still didn’t know if she wanted to win. That was crazy, especially now when there was nothing to do but wait. The polls would close at six-in twenty-five more minutes. After that, it was simply a matter of time, of letting the election officials count the ballots and eventually certify a winner-whoever that might be.

  Sometime later, Jim Bob Brady’s knuckles rapped sharply against the window beside her head, jarring Joanna awake. Embarrassed, she sat up straight, pulled her coat around her, and rolled down the window.

  “I just wanted to sit here and think for a while, she said. “I must have dozed off.”

  “You coulda fooled me,” her father-in-law returned, standing with both hands on the window sill. “You were dead to the world, snoring so loud, it’s a wonder the glass didn’t break. And sitting out here in the chill like this, you’re liable to catch your death of cold.”

  Obligingly, Joanna reached over and switched on the engine, but the air that blew through the heater seemed colder than that outside the car.

  What time is it?” she asked.

  Half-past six. Dinner’s on the table and getting cold. That mother of yours is tearing her hair out.”

  “And so they sent you out looking for me. Sorry to cause so much trouble. Let’s go then,” Joanna said, but Jim Bob Brady refused to budge.

  You’re still not sleeping so good, are you?” he said accusingly.

  Joanna yawned and stretched. She was stiff with cold. “Only when I’m not supposed to,” she returned with a disparaging smile. “I have a hard time closing my eyes and keeping them shut when I m in bed at night, but I’ve spent a whole hour sitting out here in a freezing car, sleeping like a baby. Helen Barco’s neighbors must think I’ve lost my mind.”

  “Helen Barco’s neighbors are too damn nosy,” Jim Bob Brady muttered under his breath, finally letting loose of the window and returning to his own vehicle.

  Eleanor Lathrop met them at the front door of the Bradys’ duplex apartment on Oliver Circle.

  “Where in the world have you been?” she demanded. “I tried calling Helen, but she was already closed. All I got was her answering machine.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joanna said. “I fell asleep. In the car.”

  “In the car!” Eleanor echoed. “In this weather? And with dinner already on the table!”

  Eva Lou Brady brushed aside the controversy. “Don’t worry about it, Eleanor. No harm’s done. Go wash up, Joanna. And see if you can drag Jenny away from that TV set long enough to come eat. It won’t take but a minute to warm all this back up in the microwave.”

  The dinner was vintage Eva Lou Brady, what her husband called “old-fashioned comfort food”-meat loaf, mashed potatoes, canned-from the-garden green beans, cherry Jell-o with bananas, and homemade pumpkin pie for dessert. Jim Bob and Eva Lou were still dealing with Andy’s death. Still grieving over their lost son but helping with Joanna’s survival seemed to give purpose to the elder Bradys’ lives. Joanna was only too grateful for their unwavering support.

  Her own mother was another matter entirely.

  While Eleanor sniffed disdainfully and picked at her food, Joanna ate with far more relish than she would have thought possible. Eating food Eleanor disapproved of was one way of continuing the Lathrop family mother/daughter grudge match that had been years in the making. Although hostilities between them boasted occasional periods of relative truce, none of those had ever blossomed into a lasting peace.

  “I thought you were going to wear your winter gray,” Eleanor said, holding tight to her fork while a piece of Jell-O quivered delicately on the tines.

  “It had a spot on it,” Joanna lied. She turned to her father-in-law. “Any word on the turnout?” she asked, daring at last to make some direct reference to the election.

  “Better’n anybody figured,” he replied. “It’s turned into a real horse race.”

  Jennifer made a face. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

  Why don’t you want to talk about the election, Jenn honey?” Eva Brady asked mildly. “Don’t you want your mama to win?”

  “No!” And there it was. The dining room grew quiet while Jennifer’s blurted answer hung in the
air like a dispirited balloon.

  “That can’t be true, Jenny,” Jim Bob Brady said.

  “Of course you want her to win. She’s doing it for all of us-because we need her. She’s doing it for you.”

  Jennifer’s eyes flashed with defiance. “She is not She’s doing it for her.”

  With that, Jennifer flung her crushed paper nap kin into her plate, shoved her chair into the wall behind her, and crashed from the table. “What in the world was that all about?” Eleanor Lathrop demanded. “Whatever’s gotten into her?”

  Joanna carefully folded her own napkin. “I’d better go talk to her,” she said.

  Jennifer had slammed the bedroom door shut behind her. Joanna knocked and waited.

  “Come in,” Jenny said finally, reluctantly.

  Her grandparents had furnished the extra bed room with Jenny specifically in mind, making it a home-away-from-home; a place where she was always welcome. A serviceable secondhand day bed sat in one corner of the room. The coverlet - a homemade quilt - was strewn with a collection of matching pillows. Jennifer lay on the bed sobbing, her head buried beneath the body of a huge brown teddy bear.

  Joanna stood in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, unsure whether or not she should enter the room. A yawning, treacherous gulf seemed to lie between her and her daughter. Had there been a time like this for her own mother? Joanna wondered. A time when Eleanor had stood frozen in a doorway wondering helplessly how to comfort her own grieving child?

  Joanna noticed a shadow on the floor of the room. It looked like a tightrope stretching between the doorway and the bed, between her and her despairing, sobbing child.