Tombstone Courage (31 page)

And to her amazement, Holly Patterson miraculously began to climb once more.

By then Joanna was slightly in the lead, and by then the top of the dump was only a few feet away. Joanna was first over the top, pulling herself up over a steep lip and then falling down the far side into what was evidently a rough roadway. On the other side of the road was a raised ridge, a berm, that formed an inner boundary along the entire length of road as far as the eye could see.

Staying low and slipping her automatic out of the shoulder holster, Joanna belly-crawled back to the edge and looked down. Holly had stopped again, cowering in an eroded dip behind a precariously perched boulder only inches from the top. Below them Amy Baxter was climbing steadily.

“Come on down, Holly,” Amy was grunting between breaths. “I won't hurt you.”

“She's lying,” Joanna yelled. “Don't listen to her. Come on! Up here!”

But once more Holly seemed frozen, unable to move.

“Give me your hand!” Joanna ordered. “Now!”

When Holly failed to budge, Joanna reached down and grasped Holly's wrist. With a surge of strength Joanna had no idea she possessed, she hauled Holly up and over the edge. She tumbled down the lip and landed with a breathless thump. Joanna tumbled after her and lifted the fallen woman to her feet.

“Go,” Joanna urged, pointing toward the ridge and drawing the Colt. She wasn't sure whether or not Amy was armed but if there was a possibility weapons would be involved, Joanna wanted Holly behind her, out of the line of fire. The ridge on the other side of the road seemed to offer the only possible cover. But Holly seemed incapable of independent action. She stared at Joanna uncomprehendingly and didn't move.

“Come on, then,” Joanna said, grabbing Holly's hand again and dragging her forward. As they started up and over the side of the berm, there was a clatter of dislodged rock from the side of the dump. At that critical instant, Joanna glanced back over her shoulder.

Rather than being just a berm, the ridge was actually the outside of a retaining wall for one of the series of rectangular copper leaching ponds that covered most of the surface of the dump. On the outside, the retaining wall was simply a rocky
ridge, but the inside was covered with a slick layer of slimy, greaselike silt.

In desperation to reach safety and to protect the seemingly helpless woman who was now in her charge, Joanna had been moving as fast as possible. Now, as they topped the berm, there was nothing at all to break their forward momentum. Staggering like a pair of inept skiers, they skidded down the slippery bank and into the water, where they landed, floundering and sputtering, in the chemically saturated water of a Phelps Dodge leaching pond.

T
HE FIRST
shock of landing in frigid water took Joanna's breath away. For a moment, she was too stunned to move. When she tried, her hands and knees slipped and slid on the oozy, slime-covered bottom. Finally, though, she managed to pull herself out of the evil-smelling water and back up onto the berm.

Grabbing Holly's arm, she dragged her out as well and up onto the bank where they both lay, gasping and spent. As soon as her head cleared, she realized her gun was gone. Her brand-new First Edition Colt 2000 was lost somewhere in the whitish slime at the bottom of the coppery-colored pool.

If Joanna had paused long enough to think about how cold the water was or how filled with God-knows-what kinds of chemicals, she never would have plunged back into the pond. But the semi-automatic was essential. Without a backup coming, she had to have a weapon.

Holding her breath against the assault of cold, Joanna plowed back into the icy water, splashing through the mud in her numbed bare feet, using them to dredge through the thick sludge on the
murky bottom. The harsh leaching chemicals burned fiercely in the lacerations on the bottoms of her bleeding feet, but she was grateful for the burning sensation. At least she could feel her feet again, and she used them to good advantage—dragging them through the water.

Although it seemed much longer, it was only a matter of seconds before she smashed the end of her big toe on the grip of the missing weapon, and once she had it in her hand, it was all she could do to hold on to the slippery, slime-covered metal. With fingers stiff and awkward with cold, she pulled the relatively clean tail of her blouse free of her skirt and used that to wipe off the muck from the Colt.

Her hands were shaking violently with the cold. How long before hypothermia sets in? she wondered.

“Where are you, Holly?” Amy Baxter's voice came again, calling from much closer now, from somewhere on the other side of the berm.

At the sound of her voice, Holly moaned like someone in desperate pain. She dropped to the ground and didn't move.

“Come here,” Amy continued. “I only want to talk to you.”

“What's going on?” Joanna demanded, falling down on the berm beside Holly, forcing the woman to lower her head so it would be out of sight. “Why was she keeping you locked up? Why doesn't she want you to get away?”

But Holly didn't answer. She huddled next to Joanna, quaking with cold and saying nothing.

“Holly,” Joanna snapped. “Answer the damn question!”

“This has to be where it was,” Holly muttered through chattering teeth. “Right here. Below where we are right now.”

“What was here?” Joanna asked, raising her head an inch or so, trying to peer over the top of the berm without being seen herself.

“His house,” Holly answered. “Not a house really. Just a Quonset hut with a bare concrete floor. I remember that now. I remember seeing the green trees of
Casa Vieja
from there, the trees and the terraces.”

“Holly,” Amy's disembodied voice called. “Where are you? Come out so I can see you, so we can talk.” She spoke her words slowly, putting a peculiar weight behind each and every syllable. “Come here.”

At once Holly's eyes began to glaze, and she started to rise to her feet. With a grunt of effort, Joanna jerked her back down.

“I've got to go,” Holly said. “Amy wants me.”

“Why?” Joanna demanded. “Just tell me why.”

“I don't know.” Holly began sobbing. “She sounds mad at me. I must have done something wrong.”

It was becoming more and more clear to Joanna that the sound of Amy's voice exerted some kind of hypnotic mental hold on Holly, and the only way to counter it was to keep her too occupied to fall under Amy's spell. Joanna moved closer to the weeping woman, until their faces were mere inches apart.

“You haven't done anything wrong, Holly. They had you locked in your room. Getting away from people like that isn't bad, believe me. Why didn't they want you to come up here?”

“They were afraid I'd remember.”

“Remember what?”

“His face,” Holly whispered. “I saw it for a while. I think I saw it on a piece of paper, but it went away again, and now I can't remember.”

“Holly,” Amy Baxter said. “Where are you? We have to talk.”

“Whose face?” Joanna asked. “I don't understand.”

“The man's face…the man who…” Holly's voice faded into nothing.

“The man who what?” Joanna demanded.

“The man who hurt me. A long time ago.”

Joanna remembered Isobel talking about Holly looking at the paper, the
Bisbee Bee
. She had seen a copy of the paper that morning herself. There had been two pictures on the front page: Harold Lamm Patterson's and Thornton Kimball's.

“You saw the man's face in the newspaper?”

“Yes.”

“Your father?”

“No, not him. The other one.”

“It was, too, your father,” Amy Baxter said, appearing over the ridge of the berm. “You're confused, Holly. You're making things up.”

There was no sign of a weapon on Amy's person, but with that voice of hers, she was nonetheless armed. Joanna held up the Colt. “Stay where
you are, Amy. Don't come any closer. This is loaded. I'll use it if I have to.”

“Don't threaten me. You can see I'm not armed. I came to get Holly and take her back to bed before she freezes to death. You had no business bringing an invalid out into weather like this. You're soaked, Holly. Come along.”

“She's staying with me until I get to the bottom of all this,” Joanna countered. “Why did you have her locked in her room?”

“Isn't that obvious?” Amy asked. “Twice, now, so far today, she's taken off on her own and run to this dump. She could fall and hurt herself. Or worse.”

“What's here on the dump?” Joanna demanded. “Or else under it. She said something about a house, a Quonset hut.”

“There's nothing here.”

“Yes, there was.” Holly insisted suddenly. “Don't you remember, Amy? My father told us all about it. About where Uncle Thorny and Aunt Bonnie were staying when it happened. When it happened the first time.”

“Be quiet, Holly,” Amy ordered sharply. “You're confused and making things up. He didn't say any such thing.”

Slowly, the picture was beginning to shift into focus. Of course. Uncle Thorny. Thornton Kimball. The other picture in the paper along with Harold Patterson's.

“Is Uncle Thorny the one who hurt you when you were little?”

Holly didn't answer. Instead she collapsed facedown on the berm, weeping.

“Look what you've done,” Amy Baxter said, taking a step toward them.

“I said don't move, and I meant it!” Joanna ordered through chattering teeth. She was so cold now, she wasn't sure she could pull the trigger if she had to, but Amy Baxter took her at her word and stayed where she was.

“That's it, isn't it?” Joanna said. “You fingered the wrong man.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Amy returned.

“Yes, you do. I know about you and your forgotten-memory program. I read the article in
People
. You correctly identified Holly as someone who had been molested as a child, but when you went through the forgotten-memory process, you dredged up the wrong man, didn't you?”

Amy Baxter's face grew stony. “Come on, Holly. It's time to go. We'll go back down to the house and put you to bed.”

“Why?” Joanna taunted. “So you can make her remember what you want her to remember and forget what you want her to forget?”

“Holly, come!”

But the cord had frayed too much. The choke chain of Amy's voice didn't work as it must have in the past. Holly Patterson didn't move.

“She's not a dog, Amy,” Joanna said. “She doesn't have to obey you just because you issue an order. What else have you made her forget?”

“I remember the rocks,” Holly said softly, al
most to herself. “Rocks that were so big, I could barely lift them.”

“Holly!” Amy warned, but her voice had no effect.

“I carried them for her one at a time. Carried the rocks over to the hole. I could hear him the whole time. He was down there in the hole, crying and begging her to stop, please stop. But she wouldn't. Mother kept right on throwing the rocks down there…”

“Holly…”

The tears had stopped. Holly's voice had taken on a strange, dreamlike quality. It was as though she wasn't telling a story that had happened almost half a century ago but reporting something she was watching right then, the action being replayed on the indelible screen of a much younger mind.

“…and crying and saying he'd never do it again. He'd never hurt anyone ever, ever again. And then Father was there. He grabbed her by the arms. He held her and made her stop. I remember now. He held us both. And he said it was going to be okay.”

The whole time Holly was speaking, Joanna never took her eyes off Amy. For some time after Holly finished, they were all three quiet.

“You're finished, aren't you?” Joanna said at last to Amy Baxter. “This shoots your credibility right down the toilet.”

“You think someone's going to believe her?” Amy said contemptuously. “If she remembered one thing wrong, the rest of it may be wrong as well. People will just call her a liar.”

“I'm not lying!” Holly said. “I'm telling the truth. Why did you do it?”

Amy shook her head. “This is stupid. It's too cold to stand outside arguing like this. I'm leaving.”

She turned and started back toward the edge of the dump. If she was walking away with no further threat, it seemed as though the confrontation was over. In the sudden quiet, Joanna could hear sirens now. A whole flock of them, so perhaps backup help was on its way.

Meanwhile Holly was pulling herself up onto her hands and knees. “Why did you?” she said again. “Why did you make me throw those rocks again, just like I did before. You said it was Uncle Thorny and that I was finally going to get rid of him. But it wasn't. It was my father. My God, Amy! I killed him, didn't I? You made me kill my own father!”

As she spoke, Holly's voice keened up in pitch, rising on the cold air like the howl of a wounded wild thing. And the sound of that desperate voice acted like a string on her body, pulling her collapsed form up from the ground the way a puppeteer gives life to a limp marionette.

Amy didn't pause or look back. Holly, on her feet now, lurched after Amy.

Joanna, watching Amy over the top of the berm, making sure she intended no further harm, saw too late that Holly was flailing after Amy.

Afterward, there was never any clear way to tell exactly what happened—whether Holly Patterson reached out for Amy to grab her and stop her or
whether she pushed her over the edge. For a moment, the two of them grappled there together—tottering on the brink, hanging in space. And then they both disappeared.

Two separate and distinct screams floated back up to the top of the dump. Joanna Brady heard them both, heard the clatter of falling rocks and boulders that were jarred loose as they fell. And then there was silence.

A moment later, Dick Voland's voice floated up to her. “Sheriff Brady,” he shouted. “Sheriff Joanna Brady! Where the hell are you?”

“Here,” she called back. “Up here on top!”

Huffing and puffing, out of breath from a mad scramble up the side of the dump, Chief Deputy Dick Voland was the first person to reach Joanna's side.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, throwing his own jacket around her quaking shoulders.

“I'm okay.”

“The hell you are.” He stomped away from her to the top of the berm. “We need another ambulance up here,” he shouted. “Now! And blankets. On the double!”

Voland came back. Somehow Joanna's legs gave way, and she sank back to the ground. Dick Voland knelt beside her. “The city ambulance is down below. I've got cars and an ambulance coming here, but they'll have to come by way of the main gate with a P.D. watchman escort.”

Joanna nodded through chattering teeth that made speech impossible.

“Lie down,” Dick Voland urged. “Lie down before you fall down!”

Joanna did her best to obey. The two hands that eased her down to the ground were both strong and amazingly gentle.

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “Just…co…co…cold!”

Two deputies and a pair of emergency medical technicians scrambled over the top of the berm. Blankets appeared out of nowhere. One of the EMTs slapped a blood-pressure cuff around Joanna's arm, while the other helped wrap her in the blanket. “How are the other two?” Voland asked. The EMT shook his head and didn't answer. Which, in itself, was answer enough.

Voland knelt in front of Joanna and examined her stained and bleeding feet, watching her face anxiously while the medics went to work. As it became clear Joanna wasn't badly injured his anxiety turned to anger.

“If you were one of my deputies,” he growled, “I'd fire your ass in a minute! What the hell do you mean trying to pull some kind of rescue stunt without a damn word? If that lawyer hadn't lost his nerve and yelled for help, it could have been much worse.”

Joanna tried to answer but couldn't. Right then talking was out of the question.

“Forget it!” Voland barked. “And by the way, forget about that letter I gave you. If you want to fire me, fine. But if you're going to pull this kind of damn-fool stunt, you need me too damned bad for me to quit.”