by J. A. Jance
Jenny came back into the bedroom and dropped onto the bed. Her eyes were still red, but she was no longer crying. “Can I go with you to drop Tigger off?” she asked.
Joanna shook her head. “I don’t think so, sweetie. Look at the time. If I take you by the clinic and then to school, we’ll both end up being late. If you want to, though, you can ride with me as far as the bus stop.”
Joanna thought her reply was perfectly reasonable. Jenny’s response was not. “I hate school!” she lashed out with an unexpected vehemence that took Joanna by surprise. “And I hate meetings, too! You always have to go to meetings. You’re always in a hurry!”
With that, Jenny turned and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Joanna hurried after her. “Jenny…”
“I don’t want to ride with you!” Jenny yelled angrily from the laundry-room door. “I’ll ride my bike to the bus stop, and I don’t care if you take Tigger to the vet or not. Just leave him here if you want to. That way you won’t be late.”
Stunned by her daughter’s angry outburst, Joanna started with a conciliatory “Jenny,” but by then the child was beyond hearing. She had slammed the outside door as well, rattling the window, and was already halfway across the yard on her way to the old farm equipment shed that served as a garage.
Fighting back tears herself, Joanna followed Jenny as far as the door, but she didn’t open it. Through the windowpane she watched her daughter push her bike out of the garage, mount it at a run, and then go charging up the road, disappearing finally as the road meandered off through a forest of bleak, winter-weary mesquite. Watching the speeding bike, it seemed to Joanna as though all of Jenny’s pent-up anger and grief were localized in those stiffly set shoulders and in the furiously pumping little legs.
No doubt, Jennifer Ann Brady had every right to be angry. Her father was dead. Andrew Roy Brady had fallen victim to a drug lord’s hit man some four months earlier. For a nine-year-old, this was a heavy burden to bear. In the past few months, Joanna had done some serious reading on the subject of children and the grief process. The experts had all warned that children often coped with their pain by doing a certain amount of “acting out.” The problem was that Joanna felt as though she was always the target of that acting out. She had searched the reading material for possible suggestions in dealing with her troubled daughter. The difficulty lay in the fact that helpful suggestions from experts seldom took into consideration the fact that the parents were grieving too. Had Joanna been at the top of her own form, Jenny’s periodic outbursts might not have been that bad. As things stood, Joanna’s own grieving process was far from over.
“Damn you anyway, Andy,” Joanna mumbled as she hurried back to the bedroom to stuff her feet into a pair of shoes that had somehow migrated under the bed. “Why did you have to go and die and leave me holding the bag?”
Joanna was glad there was no one to hear when she talked aloud to Andy that way. He had been a Cochise County deputy and a candidate for sheriff at the time of his death back in September. After his death, Joanna had been persuaded to run for the office of sheriff in his stead. The campaign and the election had happened while she was still in such a fog of grief that Joanna barely remembered them. Now, though, as she tried to cope with both the complexities of her new job and the difficulties of being a newly single parent, there were times when she found herself taking Andy to task for leaving her to manage alone in the face of such daunting responsibilities.
Outside, the late-January chill of Arizona’s high desert country had put a thin layer of frost over the Blazer’s windshield. It scraped off easily enough with one or two swipes of the wipers. A steady wind was blowing up out of the Gulf of Mexico, with the wind-chill factor making it seem far colder than the forty-five degrees the thermometer indicated. The sky up over the Mule Mountains behind High Lonesome Ranch was a deep, cloudless blue.
As the Blazer started down the rutted dirt road, Sadie was coming back from accompanying Jenny on the ride down to the end of the road, where a school bus would pick her up sometime within the next ten minutes. Without the challenge of a race with Tigger, Sadie made only a halfhearted attempt to follow the Blazer, giving up the chase long before Joanna reached High Lonesome Road. Usually Joanna would stop half a mile down the road and order the dogs back into the yard, but for Sadie, alone that morning, all joy seemed to have gone out of the game.
Even the dogs are having a bad day, Joanna thought with a grim smile.
At the intersection where High Lonesome Ranch’s mile-long private road met up with the county-maintained High Lonesome Road, Joanna spotted Jenny. She had chained her bike to one of the uprights on the cattle guard and was standing, with her arms crossed tightly across her chest, facing into the blowing wind.
She looked so small, lost, and lonely standing there all by herself that Joanna’s arms ached with the need to comfort her, to heal the hurt somehow. Tigger seemed to have the same inclination. As they drove up to where Jenny stood, the dog sat up in the backseat and whined forlornly.
Joanna pulled over next to the child and rolled down the window. Jenny stared down at her feet and began kicking rocks.
“Don’t forget, you’re supposed to go to Grandma Brady’s after Brownies this afternoon,” Joanna said. “I’ll pick you up from there as soon as I get off work.”
“Okay,” Jenny acknowledged without looking up.
“Aren’t you going to come kiss me good-bye?” Joanna asked.
Jenny shook her head and continued to kick pebbles.
“I’m sorry we had a disagreement,” Joanna ventured, hoping an apology would put things right for both of them. Jenny relented, but only a little.
“It’s okay,” she mumbled. “You’d better go. You’ll be late.”
“I love you,” Joanna said.
But Jenny wasn’t ready to unbend enough to respond in kind. “Here comes the bus,” she said. “I’d better go, too. Take good care of Tigger.” With that she was gone, turning from her mother with her frizzy disaster of a permanent standing almost straight up in the stiff breeze.
“Have a nice day,” Joanna murmured behind her out the open window of the truck. It seemed to her that the rocks and windblown ocotillo paid more attention to her words than Jenny did. Joanna waited long enough to see Jenny safely on the school bus before she drove off.
As Joanna put the Blazer back in gear and started down the road in a moving cloud of red dust kicked up by the big yellow school bus, she had a prickly sense of déjà vu, although it wasn’t exactly the same. Joanna had been far older than Jenny when her own father died—fifteen to Jenny’s nine, but the situation had been eerily similar. It had been a chill winter evening and she had been walking home from the ballpark along Arizona Street in a driving rainstorm. Her mother, Eleanor, had come looking for her. Eleanor had driven along beside Joanna, pleading with her to get in the car.
For the first time, Joanna remembered that Eleanor had been crying as she begged her daughter to please just get in the car.
Fourteen years later, Joanna had no idea what the exact origins of the quarrel had been that night or what had driven Joanna out into the awful weather. She was sure, though, that it had happened within a few months of Big Hank Lathrop’s death. Now she found herself wondering if she and her mother hadn’t been locked in the same kind of battle she and Jenny were dealing with now. Maybe part of the wedge between Eleanor and Joanna, the thing that had kept them at loggerheads for years, was the sudden violent death of a husband and father. D.H. Lathrop and Andy Brady had both been wiped out of existence without a moment’s warning, leaving behind an awful void, to be filled by years of shed tears and hurt feelings.
For the first time in all those years, Joanna Brady felt a twinge of guilt as she wondered if it was possible that she had been as hard on Eleanor as Jenny was being on her.
As the school bus turned left and started down Double Adobe Road, Tigger whined and began pacing back and forth in the seat, wanting to fol
low the bus. The sound of his whine burst through Joanna’s bubble of introspection and brought her abruptly back to the present.
“Sit,” Joanna ordered. Obediently, the dog sat and then, with a sigh, finally settled back down on the blanket.
Off High Lonesome and heading west on Highway 80, Joanna drove straight past the sheriff’s office in the Cochise County Justice Complex and on toward town. The Buckwalter Animal Clinic, located in a converted gas station/garage, sat just outside of town, across Highway 80 from the 350-foot-high tailings dump that contained most of the waste left over when Phelps Dodge removed a mountain and turned it into an open-pit mine called Lavender Pit.
When Bisbee native Dr. Amos Buckwalter returned to Bisbee as a newly minted vet with a teenaged bride some twenty years after the beginnings of Lavender Pit, he had established his clinic facility on property that had been developed as an indirect outgrowth of that early-fifty’s era of expanding mining operations. In order to connect Lavender Pit with the original Copper Queen, it had been necessary to take out some of the neighborhoods that had grown up in nearby canyons. Johnson’s Addition, Upper Lowell, and Jiggerville all had gone the way of the dodo bird. The existing turn of the century buildings in those neighborhoods, many of them framed Victorian wanna-bes with modest gingerbreading and tin roofs, were loaded onto wheeled axles and then relocated. Company-paid movers trucked them three or four miles south and east of their original locations, where they were reinstalled on company land in newly created neighborhoods called Bakerville and Saginaw.
All her life Joanna had heard stories about one of the Jiggerville old-timers, Melvin Kitteridge. Local legend had it that Kitteridge, a mean-spirited, wily old codger, had nursed a long-standing grudge against the then duly-elected mayor of Bisbee. Offended by the idea of having his residence transplanted inside the city limits, Kitteridge had raised such a furor that the company had finally agreed to place his house on company property just outside the city limits. To this day, some forty years later, that property remained under the county’s jurisdiction.
According to local gossip, Kitteridge had gone on to devil the city fathers by having the remains of both a gas station and another garage transported to the same site. For years the two not-quite-connected buildings functioned as a lowbrow antique store, with Kitteridge living in his relocated house which, although on the same property, faced another street farther off the highway.
When Melvin Kitteridge died at age ninety-one, his heirs had been only too happy to unload the whole shebang at bargain-basement prices. Dr. Amos Buckwalter was the purchaser. Bucky Buckwalter had worked construction for years before earning enough money to attend college. He and his energetic but exceedingly young wife, Terry, had hauled out four truckloads of junk and then remodeled what was left, transforming the separate shells of garage and service station into a single building to serve as a clinic for small animals. Thirty yards away, across an expanse of red-graveled parking lot, they added a barn and corral for use with some of their larger patients.
Joanna remembered Bucky telling her once that if he’d had any inkling the mines would close down for good in the early seventies, he would have chosen somewhere else to set up his fledgling practice rather than coming back home. By the time the shutdown ax fell, however, Bucky and Terry Buckwalter were already committed, and they stayed on.
As Joanna approached the Buckwalter Animal Clinic, she saw several cars parked along the shoulder on either side of the road, including one of her department’s newly acquired Crown Victorias. Switching on the flashers on her Blazer, Joanna pulled in behind the other vehicles. Once parked, she noticed someone—a man—carrying a protest sign of some kind and marching back and forth in front of the cattle guard that led to the clinic’s grounds. One of the cars parked across the highway carried a magnetic sign that said “Bisbee Bee.” Kevin Dawson, a journalism-school dropout who happened to be the son of the publisher and who doubled as both reporter and photographer, was down on one knee in the gravel busily snapping one picture after another through the lens of an automatic camera.
Kevin’s presence meant that whatever was happening in front of the Buckwalter Animal Clinic had been deemed newsworthy. That was worrisome to Joanna Brady, since one of her younger and most inexperienced deputies, Lance Pakin, was standing in the center of the camera’s range, along with the unidentified protester. Unfortunately, Frank Montoya, Chief Deputy for Administration—the guy who doubled as Joanna’s official public information officer—was nowhere in sight.
Stepping out of the stopped Blazer, Joanna walked toward the action just in time to see Dr. Bucky Buckwalter himself erupt out the door to the clinic and storm across the parking lot. His face was livid with anger.
“I want this man off my property,” he shouted, waving a fist in the protester’s direction. “He’s been here two days in a row now, and I want him gone.”
All the while Kevin Dawson’s camera finger continued to click away.
Still unable to see the sign the unidentified man held over his shoulder, Joanna’s first thought was that he was most likely one of those radical vegetarian/animal rights activists, some of whom found Dr. Buckwalter’s involvement in the beef industry offensive. In the past few years, Bucky’s modestly lucrative specialization in performing artificial insemination procedures on beef cattle had been the subject of more than one “cows-are-people-too” type of protest.
Bucky didn’t stop his advance until he and the other man were almost face-to-face, although the guy with the sign stood a good head taller than the diminutive vet. To compensate for his size, Doc Buckwalter customarily wore a pair of Tony Lama boots complete with two-inch heels, but even they didn’t help very much in this instance. Had the two men squared off physically right then, Joanna doubted it would have been much of a contest. Dr. Buckwalter, however, appeared not to notice the disparity in their relative sizes. Or, if he did, it had no muting impact on his seething anger.
“This is private property,” he raged. “Like I said on the phone,” he added, turning to Deputy Pakin. “Either get him out of here or arrest him for trespassing.”
“I’m on the right-of-way side of the fence,” the other man returned calmly, gesturing with his sign in a way that, depending on your point of view, might have been considered brandishing. “I’m here exercising my right of free speech and passing out some literature, Dr. Buckwalter. You can’t stop me from doing that.”
“I’m afraid that’s true, Doc,” Deputy Pakin said, speaking respectfully and sounding genuinely conciliatory toward both sides. “As long as Mr. Morgan here stays on this side of the cattle guard and fence, he’s on public property. Since he isn’t disrupting traffic, there’s not much we can do. Why don’t you just go on inside and let him be?”
“He may not be disrupting traffic, but he’s certainly disrupting my business,” Amos Buckwalter complained. “He was here half the night with his damned candlelight vigil. Now he’s interfering with my customers.”
“I haven’t done anything to your customers,” the other man returned. “All I’ve done is offer them one of my brochures.”
“Like hell,” Bucky replied.
Not wanting the potentially volatile situation to deteriorate any further, Joanna chose that moment to step into the fray. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said calmly. “What seems to be the problem here?”
“Sheriff Brady.” Deputy Pakin’s face brightened considerably with the arrival of some backup. “Mr. Morgan, here, and Doc Buckwalter seem to be having a little disagreement…”
“It’s hardly a little disagreement,” the man with the sign interrupted. “Dr. Amos Buckwalter killed my wife. He could just as well have murdered her in cold blood. Now he’s back home with his life and his business intact, while Bonnie’s life is over. Mine, too, for that matter.”
That was when Joanna finally caught sight of the sign. “Point 28,” it said. “A license to kill.” From there it took only a second to realize what was going o
n. Joanna wasn’t entirely sure of the date, but she did remember the incident.
Early the previous year—maybe as far back as January or February—Bucky Buckwalter had gone off to an annual veterinarians’ gathering being held at the convention center in downtown Phoenix. Smashed to the gills after partying too much, he had smashed his pickup into a woman crossing a street at an intersection. She had been killed on impact. Point two-eight was what he’d blown into the Breathalyzer two hours after the incident. That long after the incident, his blood alcohol level had still been almost three times the .10 that Arizona law deems legally drunk.
“Look, Morgan,” Bucky said. “I’m sorry as hell about your wife. But I’ve paid my debt to society—spent my two months baking in an unairconditioned tent at the Maricopa County Jail. I went through six weeks of court-ordered inpatient treatment. Now I’m attending court-ordered AA meetings and doing my community service. My new truck had to go back and I’ve had to mortgage my clinic just to pay the fine, the lawyers, and the treatment. What else do you want from me?”
“Bucky,” Terry Buckwalter called from the door to the clinic. “What’s going on out there?”
If Doc Buckwalter heard his wife call to him, he didn’t acknowledge it. He and the other man had eyes and ears solely for one another.
“I’ll tell you what I want,” Morgan returned. “You may have paid the state, but you haven’t paid me. Bonnie’s gone. What about her? What about me? What about our life together?”
