Tombstone Courage (4 page)

“Most of the time,” Joanna said quietly, “you
do it because you have to, because God doesn't give you a choice.”

And, she added silently to herself, because you never know how much the people you love are going to hurt you until it's far too late.

A
LL HIS
life, Harold Patterson had been the kind of man who, when faced with a particularly onerous task, would lay out the entire job in a very orderly fashion. Then he would set about doing each separate part of the chore, carrying each one through to completion before going on to the next.

Today was like that. He had mentally organized each separate part of his scheme before ever coming to town. Having gathered insurance forms, he headed straight for the bank.

When Sandra Rose Henning had graduated from high school, her scholastic standing should have made her a shoo-in to receive scholarship help. She was offered some, but not enough to make a difference. Faced with the grim reality of two disabled parents to support, she had chucked the idea of going on to college. In June, while her classmates were busily planning their fall school wardrobes, Sandy hustled down to the local First Merchant's Bank and wangled herself a job as a teller.

Thirty-two years and fifty-five pounds later, she was still there, only now she was the manager of the Warren Branch. First Merchant's had changed
some over the years, and rumor had it that the bank was about to be gobbled up by an out-of-state conglomerate.

Local scuttlebutt said that all of Bisbee's neighborhood branches, strung like so many pop-beads along what had formerly been a ten-mile bus route, would soon be consolidated into a single large branch at the new shopping center in Don Luis. That rundown area, once a primarily Mexican enclave, was now the unlikely location of a new shopping area that boasted the town's only Safeway, and soon, perhaps, the town's only bank.

Sandy Henning wasn't particularly worried about the coming merger. Regardless of what happened, she was sure she would still have a job. If it meant being demoted to “personal banker” or even going back on the teller line, that hardly mattered. Sandy liked people, and people liked her.

She was seated at her desk when Harold Patterson marched into the bank. She had been Harold's “personal banker” since long before a worried banking industry had invented the term. When she had been promoted and moved from the downtown branch to Warren, Harold's accounts and business had followed her, even though, from a geographical standpoint, the bank in Old Bisbee was seven miles closer to the Rocking P which should have made it more convenient. But the uptown branch didn't have Sandy.

Sandy's heart went out to Harold as soon as she saw him. Despite his advancing years, he had always stood ramrod straight. Now, though, his shoulders drooped, as if the weight he carried on
them was more than even his tough old spine could bear. And his step, while certainly not faltering, seemed somewhat slower, more hesitant.

Sandy rose to greet him. “Good morning, Mr. Patterson. How are you today?”

“Fair to middling,” he answered. “Can't complain.”

Although he could have complained, Sandy thought, and probably should have.

She and Holly Patterson would have graduated from high school the same year—if Holly had stayed around long enough to bother, that is. During their junior year, Holly had eloped with some high-flying, fast-talking real-estate developer from California. The marriage hadn't lasted more than three months, but when it was over, Holly Patterson didn't come home to what she had often called “backward Bisbee.” Sandy Henning had always considered Holly's abrupt departure a case of good riddance. A week after Holly's much-publicized return, a single glance at Harold Patterson's haggard face did nothing to change the banker's mind.

“What can I do for you today, Mr. Patterson?” she asked.

He fumbled in his pocket for a key ring and removed a small key. “I'd like to take a look at my box,” he said. “There are some items in there that I need to go over.”

Settling himself at a partially screened table, he removed his glasses and rubbed his bleary eyes while he waited for Sandy to bring his safety deposit box from the vault.

Holly's demands were so outrageous that they should have been laughable. She wanted a full public confession of Harold Patterson's alleged misdeeds. In addition, she demanded as damages title to half the Rocking P. That was what bothered him most, rumors that with this so-called therapist as a partner, Holly expected to build a recovery center, a place for people who realized late in life that they too had been abused by members of their own families.

Those were the terms of settlement. If the case went to trial, her lawyer had told Burton that he intended to go for blood—for everything they could get, for title to the whole shooting match if they could get it.

That wouldn't happen because the case wasn't going to trial. Because Harold Patterson himself was going to see to it.

It was easy for Ivy and Burton Kimball to tell him what to do. They weren't caught between a rock and a hard place, and they didn't know the whole story. In addition, they didn't have Harold's two prime pieces of motivation, either. For one, he wanted to live long enough to see his daughters together and reconciled for once in their lives.

And the other? With one major exception, he had lived his whole life as an honest, upright, law-abiding man. Before Norm Higgins planted him down in Evergreen Cemetery, Harold Patterson wanted his reputation back.

He had weighed all the risks. If he fought Holly in court and lost, he risked losing everything. If he settled, he handed over half the ranch to Holly—to
the prodigal daughter who had turned her back on all of them for thirty-some-odd years—while dispossessing Ivy, the nonprodigal daughter, who had stayed home to help him with the ranch, who had cared for her invalid mother through years of steady decline that led inevitably into helpless insanity, who had always put other people's needs and wants before her own.

What would happen to Ivy if the Rocking P was cut in half or disappeared altogether? Like the baby King Solomon threatened to divide in the Bible, a ranch the size of the Patterson spread was of no more use cut in half than half a child would be. It took the whole ranch to make a living, to make a life.

Returning to the table with the box, Sandra Henning easily turned her key in the lock. Harold's hand trembled as he attempted to insert his own. It took three separate tries before the key clicked home. The long metal drawer flipped open, and the old man slumped back into his chair.

By eleven o'clock, Harold had sorted through all the papers in the drawer. In one stack, he put the papers that would stay in the safety-deposit box—the insurance policies he didn't need in order to change the beneficiaries, the few ribbon-wrapped letters he and Emily had exchanged during those rare times when he was actually away from home. In the other stack were the things Harold would need to take with him to Burton Kimball's office—his will and the deed to the Rocking P.

At the very bottom of the drawer, Harold found
the last item, the single yellowed envelope that he and Emily had together solemnly sealed away years earlier. Emily was the one who had insisted on a greasy candle-wax seal that now allowed some of the loopy, old-fashioned writing from the letter itself to bleed through onto the outside surface of the envelope. It was almost as if the words themselves were eager to escape their paper-bound prison.

Harold could have broken the seal and opened it, but he didn't. There was no need. The faded pencil-written words were committed to memory, seared into his heart even more clearly than they were into his brain. He remembered them all; was incapable of forgetting even one.

He sat holding the envelope and wondering what he should do with it now. He had kept it all these years because he had promised Emily he would; because she had begged him to, and because he had been afraid he might someday need it. Now, though, if his gamble paid off, if he could go to Holly and get her to listen to reason, maybe he could finally destroy the letter and be done with it. Maybe he could go to his grave taking the letter's ugly secret with him.

Finally, after many agonizing moments of indecision, he placed the fragile, unopened envelope in the stack with the insurance policies and placed the whole pile back in the drawer. If Holly and Ivy didn't take his word for it, didn't accept his version of what had happened, then it would be time to remove the letter from the safety of its hiding place. By then he would know if he was
taking the letter out to show it to his daughters or to burn it once and for all.

Pushing back his chair, Harold stood and signaled to Sandy Henning. “I'm ready to go now,” he said.

When she came to retrieve Harold's safety-deposit box, Sandy peered closely at Harold through her red-framed bifocals. “Are you sure you're all right, Mr. Patterson? Your color's not all that good.”

Harold stood and picked up his hat. “I'm fine, Miz Henning,” he said, carefully replacing the tiny key in the narrow pocket of his jeans. “I'm just a little wore out is all. Don't go getting all pistol-sprung about me.”

Leaving the bank, Harold drove straight to Evergreen Cemetery. For a long time, Evergreen had been the only burial game in town. During the first half of the twentieth century, it had been a lush, green, and well-tended place, irrigated for free with the mineral-rich effluent pumped from the underground mines. Then, in the late fifties, when Phelps Dodge started a leaching operation on the new open-pit tailings dump, the circulation of free mine water was removed from the community and returned to industrial use.

Bisbee's would-be gardeners had been left literally high and dry. They could use the city's drinking water pumped from a deep underground well down near Naco. But the clear well water, although fine for drinking, didn't do a thing for the garden growers, because it came with two distinct disadvantages. Not only was it outrageously ex
pensive, it also lacked the abundant minerals that had once made Bisbee's lawns, trees, and gardens flourish. And cemeteries, too, for that matter.

During the next decades, Evergreen Cemetery fell into such a dusty or muddy deterioration that the name “Evergreen” seemed little more than a cruel joke. When Emily Patterson had died five years earlier, the place was in such disrepair, Harold had been ashamed to bury her there, but the other cemetery in town, a relatively new one dating from the sixties, wasn't much better. So Harold had bitten the bullet, bought a double plot in Evergreen—he got a better deal that way—and a double headstone as well.

Driving to Emily's plot, Harold was surprised to see that the place appeared to be in somewhat better shape. The thinly paved drive still had potholes here and there, but the grounds themselves were much improved. Maybe a new manager was on the job, a person who actually cared about the families of the people who were buried there.

Harold parked the Scout. The rain finally was letting up as he climbed stiffly down out of the truck and hiked over to the familiar plot. He took off his Stetson and stood bareheaded, staring down at the red granite headstone. Both his and Emily's names and birth dates were already chiseled into the stone in elegant, graceful letters and numbers. Emily's date of death was there as well. The only date left to be filled in was that of Harold's own death, whenever that might be.

Looking at the stone always made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Not because he
was afraid of dying, but because seeing the two names linked together like that made him feel that he was still married to the old Emily; as though the woman he loved had just gone on ahead. With any kind of luck, he'd have a chance to catch up with her sooner rather than later, and things between them would finally be set right as well.

“The shit's really hit the fan on this one, Em,” he said, addressing her aloud as he usually did when he came to visit.

Years earlier, he might have looked around to make sure no one was watching or listening when he spoke to her like that. He no longer bothered. After all, he was an old man. If people saw him talking to himself or acting funny, they'd think he was crazy, or senile, or both, and let it go at that.

“We still may be able to make it through,” he continued. “You know I've kept my promise all these years, but the price keeps going up, getting higher all the time. Maybe we were wrong trying to keep it a secret in the first place. Maybe that's why God seems to have it in for me now. I've got this one last chance to do something about it, one more wild card to turn up. I hope to God that one'll do the trick. If not, I figure it's time I stood up and took my punishment like a man. I just wanted you to know about it in advance. That's all.”

He closed his eyes tightly and bowed his head for a moment, murmuring a silent prayer. Afterward, he slammed the battered Stetson back on his head, turned on his heel, and hobbled back to the Scout with a real sense of purpose. Talking
things over with Emily always gave him comfort and direction.

At the cemetery's gate, he paused long enough for old Norm Higgins from Higgins Funeral Chapel and Mortuary to make a left-hand turn through the entrance. No doubt Norm was on an errand to scope out the location of some soon-to-be-used burial site. Harold supposed Norm and his boys had some poor old coot stashed in the cooler up at their place, waiting long enough for the deceased's far-flung, out-of-town relatives to arrive on the scene before setting about the grim ceremonies of putting him in the ground.

Well, Harold thought, as Norm's shiny gray Cadillac limo squeezed past the disreputable Scout on Evergreen Cemetery's narrow main track, at least it isn't me they're burying. He had his casket all picked out and paid for, same as his plot, but it wasn't time to use it. Not yet.

Norm Higgins and Harold Lamm Patterson had known each other for sixty-some-odd years. In passing, they exchanged the kind of casual half-wave/half-salute with which men of long acquaintance greet one another if they want to say hello but don't want to make much of an issue of it. Both men waved and nodded and went on by.

Harold headed uptown, past the Lowell Traffic Circle and on up to Old Bisbee. Talking it over with Em really had helped prepare him for what he knew would be a knock-down, drag-out confrontation with Burton Kimball—his nephew as well as his attorney.