Desert Heat (23 page)

“Whoa, down, Joanna. Let me tell you something. You’re hurting. We all understand that. As Andy’s widow and as D. H.’s daughter, everybody’s trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but ...”

“Benefit of the doubt?” Joanna exploded. “What does that mean?”

“Joanna, no matter who you are, you can’t go around the system. I don’t know how you laid hands on those preliminary autopsy results—that’s Pima County’s problem not mine—but you’ve got no business interfering with this investigation. You’re going to have to step back and let people like Ernie Carpenter do his job.”

“Ernie Carpenter isn’t investigating Andy’s death nearly as much as he’s investigating what he believes Andy did wrong. There’s a big difference.”

“See there?” McFadden pointed out. “You’re doing it again.”

“And what about Adam York? What’s his game?”

“Federal drug enforcement’s no game,” McFadden reasoned seriously. “If you think it is, you’re crazy.”

“Right, but if Adam York’s busy waging a war on drugs, why’s he nosing around town asking questions about me? This morning when I tackled him about it, he gave me some lame song and dance about possible insurance fraud, but as you just told me, that’s not his job. So what’s going on? There must be some reason he’s after me specifically, and I want to know what it is.”

McFadden shook his head. “Look, Joanna, theoretically, York and I are on the same side of the fence, but the Feds are under no obligation to share their information with us, and they usually don’t. If York’s asking questions, he must have some good reason for doing so, but if you personally have done nothing wrong—and I can’t imagine you have—then I’m sure it’ll all get straightened out eventually.”

“Me personally,” she repeated, plucking the two most significant words out of McFadden’s sentence and focusing in on those. “You said if I personally have done nothing wrong. What about Andy?”

McFadden raised the can of Coors and finished it. He dropped the empty can into a paper bag beside his chair while his somber gaze met and held hers. “I don’t want to break your heart, Joanna,” he answered quietly. “That’s the last thing I want to do, but I’m not so sure about Andy.”

Joanna’s chest constricted. “And you won’t tell me anything more than that?”

“Can’t, Joanna. Sorry.”

“There’s a big difference between can’t and won’t, Sheriff McFadden,” she said, standing up abruptly. “Come on, Jenny. We’ve got to go.

Jennifer dashed up onto the porch and handed the Frisbee over to Walter McFadden. “Tigger’s one neat dog,” she said. “Hey, Mom. Can we get a Frisbee so I can teach Sadie to catch like that?”

“We can try,” Joanna said. With a curt nod over her shoulder to Walter McFadden, she led Jennifer back to the car. The sheriff watched them go, shaking his head as he did so.

“Come on, Tigger,” McFadden said to the dog. “Let’s go see about rustling us up some dinner.” The two of them, man and dog, walked into the house together.

Joanna headed home. Jennifer, who had been laughing and running with the dog, was suddenly quiet and subdued. “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“Mad? Why would I be mad at you?”

“I was having so much fun, I almost forgot,” Jenny said.

Joanna shook her head. “No. If I’m mad at anybody, I’m angry with myself.”

“Why?”

“For not taking my own advice. I told you not to let what people say bother you, but I’m letting it bother me.”

“Sheriff McFadden said something?”

“Everybody’s entitled to his opinion,” Joanna said tightly.

When they pulled into the yard at the ranch, with Sadie running laps around the Eagle, Eleanor Lathrop’s Chrysler was parked by the gate, and Clayton Rhodes’ Ford pickup was down near the barn.

“You go on inside and let Grandma Lathrop know we’re home,” Joanna said. “I’ll go see if Mr. Rhodes needs any help.”

As she opened the car door, she heard the troublesome pump in the corral stock tank cough, wheeze, and finally catch. When she reached the corral, she found the ten head of cattle were already munching hay, while a steady stream of water flowed into the metal stock tank. Clayton Rhodes was standing then watching the tank fill when she came up behind him. He jumped when she spoke.

“You and Jim Bob don’t have to do this, you know,” Joanna said.

Clayton Rhodes turned around to face her, cupping one hand to his ear. “What’s that?” he asked. Without teeth he spoke with a decided lisp.

“You don’t have to do this,” Joanna repeated loudly enough to compensate for both the old man’s deafness and the noisy rattle of the pump’s motor. “You and Jim Bob are doing way too much. Jenny and I can handle the chores ourselves, really.”

Clayton shrugged his bony, stooped shoulders. “It’s no trouble,” he said. “I figure I could just as well be doing something useful of an evening.”

He turned back to the pump and studied the flow of water into the metal tank. “Didn’t put in much gas,” he added. “Should fill up the tank without running over. You won’t have to come back out and turn it off. I started the pump out in the back pasture on my way over.”

“Thank you,” Joanna said. “I had forgotten about that one completely.”

“Other people haven’t,” Clayton Rhodes observed with a frown. “From the footprints and tire tracks around it, I’d say somebody’s been having a regular convention.”

“Hunters?” Joanna asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe, but why hunters would be out tramping around in street shoes is more than I can figure.”

Street shoes? Joanna wondered.

Finished with the chores, Clayton Rhodes wiped his hands on his worn overalls and started toward his truck with Joanna and Sadie both trailing along behind.

“I don’t understand,” Joanna said. “Why would someone in street shoes be out in the middle of my back pasture?”

“Kinda makes you wonder, don’t it,” Clayton nodded.

Suddenly Joanna remembered to mind her manners. “Won’t you come on up to the house for coffee. If there isn’t any ready, it’ll only take a few minutes.”

“Nope, but thank you just the same,” he said, as they reached Clayton’s ancient Ford with its much-replaced wooden bed. “Think I’ll head on home.” For a moment he stood with one hand on the door handle as if trying to reach some decision. “You know,” he said finally, “I worry about you and Jenny being out here all by yourselves.”

“We’re all right,” Joanna said. “For right now, there are plenty of people in and out. Besides, we’ve got the dog.”

Clayton looked down at the hound and shook his head. “This worthless old thing?” he said disparagingly, ruffling the dog’s floppy ears. “Why, she’d as soon lick somebody to death as bite ‘em. She didn’t even bother to bark at me when I showed up here a while ago.

“I’m serious as hell about this, Joanna. With that there new prison down at Douglas and with wetbacks coming across the line the way they do nowadays, a person needs to be ready to defend himself. Maybe some folks are buying off on that suicide story, but it seems to me as if somebody was mad enough at Andy to take a shot at him. And now we’ve got a pack of strangers hanging out in your back pasture. Nosiree, I don’t like this a-tall. You got yourself a gun there in the house?”

Joanna shook her head. “Andy had guns, two of them, but we don’t have either one of them anymore.”

The old man nodded sagely. “That’s about what I figured. You do know how to use one, don’t you?”

She nodded. “My dad taught me when I was a girl. It’s like riding a bicycle, you never really forget the basics, but maintaining any kind of accuracy takes constant practice, and I haven’t fired a gun in years.”

“Then I’d get myself some practice if I were you.”

With that, Clayton Rhodes wrenched open the creaking door and reached across the truck’s threadbare seat. He opened the glove box and pulled out a small bundle which he handed over to Joanna. From the feel and the shape of the surprisingly heavy package, Joanna knew she was holding a gun wrapped In an old pillowcase.

“Here,” he said. “This here used to be Molly’s before she up and died on me. I never I liked leaving her out here all by herself, either, so she kept this in her apron pocket just in case. Never had to use it, thank God, but we had some good laughs about her bein’ a pistol packin’ mama.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a box of ammunition. “You’ll need this along with it.”

Joanna started to object, to say that she couldn’t possibly accept it, but the old man silenced her with a wave of his hand. “Humor a butt-sprung old man, will you?” he said, climbing up into the truck. “You hang onto it as a personal favor to me.”

He turned the key in the ignition and the old engine coughed to life, then he looked back at Joanna. “Deal?” he said through the permanently opened window.

She nodded. “Deal,” she said, “but only as a personal favor.”

As he drove out of the yard, Joanna realized that in all the years she had known Clayton Rhodes, this was the most she had ever heard him say. Only heartfelt concern for her and for Jenny had propelled him beyond his usual reticence. She headed for the house both humbled and grateful.

Joanna Brady was riding an emotional roller coaster. Inside the house her gratitude toward Clayton Rhodes quickly turned to irritation with her mother. Just inside the back door she stumbled and almost fell over Eleanor Lathrop’s pride and joy, her Rainbow Water Vacuum, which was parked there in the dark. The kitchen was a shambles. Every inch of countertop was covered with the contents of Joanna’s kitchen cupboards. Eleanor herself, perched precariously on a stepladder, was busily scrubbing down the topmost shelf directly over the sink.

“Mother, what in the world are you doing?” Joanna demanded.

“Cleaning the cupboards,” Eleanor replied. “You know as well as I do that the ladies from the church are going to be all over this house for the next few days, and I don’t believe this kitchen has been properly cleaned in years.”

The phone rang just then and Jenny leaped to answer it. “Brady residence,” she said. “Jennifer speaking.” After that she said nothing, and a moment later, she hung up the phone.

“Who was that?” Joanna asked.

“I dunno,” Jenny answered with a shrug. “Whoever it was hung up.”

“Don’t pay any attention to the phone,” Eleanor said. “It’s been ringing all day. Come over here now, Jenny, and start handing up things from that stack over there. That way I won’t have to climb up and down so much.”

Jenny hurried to help. Shaking her head, Joanna headed for the bedroom, still holding Clayton Rhodes’s pillowcase-wrapped gift.

“Where are you going?” Eleanor asked after her.

“I think I’ll go to bed,” Joanna answered. “As far as I’m concerned, if the ladies from church want to come to my house and examine the kitchen cupboards with a fine-toothed comb, they deserve whatever they find.”

SEVENTEEN

Still cradling Clayton’s unexpected package as well as her purse, Joanna slammed the bedroom door shut behind her and then stood leaning against it, hoping to cool off. She was amazed by the intensity of the anger she felt toward her mother. She wanted to go back out into the kitchen and scream at Eleanor to get down off the damn ladder and leave her kitchen the hell alone. But that had never been her way where Eleanor was concerned. Instead, following her father’s lead, Joanna had always avoided direct confrontation, going around her mother rather than through her.

To be fair, the rules of the game were somehow changing, and Eleanor had yet to figure it out. In the past, right or wrong, Joanna would have swallowed her anger, returned to the kitchen, and helped her mother put things right. But tonight she didn’t. If she had wanted the kitchen cleaned right then, she would have done it herself. Instead, Joanna Brady had other concerns.

Like coming to terms with this room, for in-stance. Twice now, she had raced through it as though the space was full of demons. Now, she needed to find a way to stand here and look around at the familiar furniture, seeing it as a stranger might and trying to decide if it was, indeed, still the same place it had been two days earlier. Now, with Andy gone and the rest of the world conspiring to rob her of his memory, she wondered if there would ever again be a time when she could be comfortable in this room. Or would she forever feel as alien in this place as she did in this instant?

Walking haltingly, like someone uncertain of footing on rough terrain, she made her way to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. Gingerly she began unwrapping the layers of faded pillow case surrounding the gun until at last a Colt .44, naked and deadly, lay in her hand. Remembering Molly Rhodes’s voluminous aprons, Joanna could see how the gun would easily have fit into one of her pockets. And living out on the Rhodes place through the years, Joanna could see how Molly might have needed to take a shot at an occasional chicken-stealing coyote or at a rattlesnake that might choose a spot under the clothesline to sun itself.

But Clayton Rhodes wasn’t thinking about either rattlesnakes or coyotes when he gave the gun to Joanna. And now that she was holding the weapon in her hand, Joanna wasn’t either.

For a few moments it was almost as though Joanna’s father himself was standing there in the room with her, reminding her of all the old lessons—how she should never handle a gun of any kind without knowing for sure whether or not it was clean and loaded. She checked. The answer was yes as far as the cleaning was concerned, but the weapon wasn’t loaded.

Joanna loaded it herself, taking bullets from the box Clayton Rhodes had given her, then she hefted the .44 in her hand, gauging the weight of it, fingering the grip, remembering the importance of balance and the necessity of the two-handed, spread-footed stance her father had taught her. And she recalled how he’d patiently worked with her, teaching her how to handle recoils—to expect them and flow with them rather than fighting against them.

In remembering D. H. Lathrop’s lessons, Joanna missed him anew with almost the same force as she missed Andy. A wave of grief that was also physical pain washed over her.

Resolutely, she stood up and tried to think of something else. Clayton was right. She would have to practice in order to regain some of her former proficiency, and that wouldn’t be tonight. Probably not in the next few days, either. In the meantime, she needed a safe place to keep the weapon, a place where Jenny wouldn’t accidentally stumble across it.