Tombstone Courage (6 page)

With no warning, Harold Patterson's eyes betrayed him. Once again, as they had several times that day, they brimmed over with unexpected and unwelcome tears. He tried to brush the telling dampness away, but he wasn't able to, not before Burtie saw the tears and surmised what they
meant. With a clutch in his gut, Burton Kimball stumbled into the realization that Holly Patterson was telling the truth.

“If that's the case,” the lawyer said carefully, “then maybe you'd better go ahead and settle. But I won't help you. I won't have any part of it. Because you disgust me, Uncle Harold. I can't even stand to be in the same room with you.”

He started toward the door.

“Does that mean you quit?” Harold asked.

Burton paused at the door. He answered without looking back or raising his voice. “Yes, that's what it means,” he answered slowly. “Given the way I feel at this moment, I don't think I could adequately represent you. You'll be better off with someone else, maybe with one of my partners.”

“Please, Burtie,” Harold begged. “Your partners don't know anything at all about this case. Don't walk out on me now, not when I need you to help me get in touch with Holly or with her attorney. Nobody else could do that. Only you.”

Burton felt the wave of cold fury begin to rise in his chest, threatening to drown him, to rob him of breath and speech both. It was all he could do to summon what could pass for a normal voice, but with a supreme act of self-control, he managed.

“Holly's staying at
Casa Vieja
,” he said, “court order be damned! You'll have to do your own dirty work, Uncle Harold, because I'm a son of a bitch if I'll help you!”

With that Burton Kimball stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Harold sat
for several minutes, alone in the empty room, regaining his composure; coming to terms with the idea that he now had what he wanted, but not the way he wanted, not at this high a price. He had never thought he'd lose Burtie as well. Never.

Shriveled by this latest penalty, it took some time for Harold to gather his strength and make his way out of Burtie's private office. In the reception area, he paused in front of the desk that belonged to Maxine Smith, Burton's secretary.

“When Burtie gets back,” Harold said, “give him a message for me, would you? Tell him I'm sorry, and tell him thank you.”

“Why certainly, Mr. Patterson,” Maxine said, jotting a quick note on a message pad. “Anything else?”

“No,” Harold Patterson said, shaking his head. “That's all.”

H
OLLY
P
ATTERSON
sat in the back upstairs bedroom at
Casa Vieja
and stared out the window at the tawny wall of rock and tailings that rose two hundred feet in the air. Nothing green grew on the dump. It was dead, empty earth that reminded Holly of the moon. And of herself.

The Stickley rocker with its stiff leather back and broad, flat arms groaned each time it arced across the hardwood floor. The sound reminded her of a door creaking shut. The door to her heart.

She rocked and rocked. A cheerful fire crackled in the little stone fireplace, but nothing warmed her. Not the fire and not the two layers of woolen sweaters she was wearing, either. She was cold, and she was frightened. She had warned Rex Rogers, her lawyer, that it would be bad for her to come here, but Amy had insisted that they had to do it on her father's home turf, and Rex had backed her up. They said there'd be a much better settlement if they bearded the lion in his own den.

Amy Baxter, her hypnotherapist, had told Holly that coming back to Bisbee wouldn't be that big a deal, had assured her that she'd be perfectly fine.

Maybe for publicity and legal reasons, Rex and
Amy were right, and Bisbee
was
the correct place to be. After all, they were the experts who had handled similar cases in towns and cities all over the country. But for Holly, being here was wrong. Bisbee and all the people in it were what she had spent thirty years trying to drink and drug out of her memory. Now that she was back, so were all the old bad feelings.

No one here gave a damn that she had gone out into the world and made a success of her life for a while. If anyone in Bisbee knew or cared that she had a screenwriting Oscar sitting in her storage unit back in Studio City, no one mentioned it. And if anyone knew that she had reached the pinnacle of success only to fall off and land in a series of mental and drug-rehab institutions, no one mentioned that, either. They didn't care if she was a success or a failure. That didn't matter. The people of Bisbee hated her anyway. They hated her because she was Holly Patterson. That was reason enough.

Holly pulled the sweater tighter across her chest and looked down toward the base of the house. Amy, dressed in sweats, was down on the terrace working out on a trampoline. Catching sight of Holly peering out the window, Amy smiled and waved. Holly didn't wave back. Now that the rain was gone and a fitful November sun was peeking through the cloud cover, Amy Baxter was far too energetic for Holly to tolerate. Too energetic and too positive.

Holly, on the other hand, was more like that gaunt, brown-needled pine tree thirsting to death
at the top of the once-lush gardens, remnants of which still lingered on the grounds of
Casa Vieja
. Holly knew about the gardens because she and Billy Corbett had ditched school there once during sixth grade. They had taken off their clothes and lain naked in the ivy until they were both itchy and covered with aphids.

Billy had bragged to classmates at school that he had already done it. Twice. Holly had called him a liar and had dared him to prove he wasn't. They agreed to meet in the covered garden behind
Casa Vieja
, a wonderful turn-of-the-century mansion at the top of Vista Park. In an earlier life and under a different name, the brown stuccoed mansion, with its mission-style and molded-plaster details, was a place one of Bisbee's original copper barons had once proudly called home.

By the late fifties, the mansion had been renamed
Casa Vieja
and the huge dump was already inching slowly across the desert toward the lush backyard, although the tailings weren't nearly as close then as they were now, nor as tall. Fueled by grumbling trucks and noisy ore trains, the dump grew larger day by day. And the steady round-the-clock barrage of dust and noise began having serious detrimental repercussions on the fine old house.

The wealthy widow lady who owned it and had lived there for twenty years sold out to a sharp-eyed investor who carved it up into low-cost apartments for oversexed newlyweds who didn't mind being awakened at all hours of the day and
night by the roar of heavily laden trucks and the thunder of cascading boulders.

At the new landlord's direction, the gardens out back that had long been nurtured by a loving full-time gardener were ignored. Left to their own devices, the covered arbors dried up and went to seed. For a while, without human intervention, only the ivy and one tall tree were tough enough to hold out against the dry realities of the arid Southwest. Now Jaime Gonzales, the new gardener, was starting the slow process of reclaiming the gardens and the upper terraces, but on that far lower level, all that remained was that one old tree, brown-needled and dying.

Holly remembered how tall and alive it had been, green against a warm blue sky that spring afternoon. The precocious eleven-year-old Holly Patterson had been flat on her naked back, waiting for poor, hapless Billy Corbett to figure out how to make his dinky, useless “thing” stand up. It finally did, after Holly showed him how to rub her stiff little nipples with his groping fingers, but even then it didn't work. When Holly had taunted him, laughed at him because he didn't even know where to put it, Billy had slapped her hard across the face. His blow had left a bright red handprint on her cheek, one she had been hard-pressed to explain to Mama that afternoon when she came home from school.

Remembering that time, Holly rocked even harder and pulled the sweater closer around her body. Billy Corbett had died in Vietnam. His was
one of the first names on the memorial plaque over by the new high school.

It served him right, Holly Patterson thought, thirty-nine years after that jewel-clear spring afternoon. Whatever Billy Corbett got, it served him right.

There was a knock on the door. Holly jumped, surprised by her own nervousness. She would have to remember to tell Amy how she was feeling and ask her what it meant. Ask her to put her under and calm her, make the bad feelings go away. Maybe, later on, they could go for a ride in Rex Rogers' bright red Allanté. Maybe Amy would even let Holly drive.

She had read in the paper that Marliss Somebody, the old battle-ax who wrote a weekly column for the
Bisbee Bee
, actually thought the car belonged to Holly. That was a laugh. When she was evicted from her last roach-plagued apartment, Holly Patterson had scarcely anything left to call her own. Amy had helped her salvage the few paltry possessions that remained in storage back in California. And what she had she could keep only so long as she continued to pay the month-to-month storage rental.

The knock came again, and Holly realized she hadn't answered. “Who is it?”

“It's me. Isobel.”

“Come in.”

Isobel Gonzales, the gardener's wife who served as both cook and housekeeper, bustled into the room. She stopped short when she saw Holly's untouched lunch tray.

“You don't like what I cook for you?”

“I'm not hungry.”

Isobel shook her head and clucked her tongue. “Not eating is bad for you. It will make you sick.”

This place is making me sick, Holly thought. And it wasn't just Billy Corbett, either, although at first she had thought it was, hoped it was. No, it was something else, something much more than that, something about the dump itself, perhaps. Whatever it was, it remained just out of reach, beyond the grasp of her conscious mind.

She had felt it the first day, as soon as she had set foot in the house. Of course, it was nice of Paul Enders—Pauli to his friends—to lend his “cabin by the lake” to his friends when he found out they were going to Bisbee on business. Of course, there was no lake anywhere near Bisbee. But for someone who lived in the high-pressure world of Hollywood costume design, it was important to have a hideaway where he could go to let the creative juices flow. Besides,
Casa Vieja
had been such a wonderful period-piece bargain that he simply couldn't afford to turn it down.

Paul Enders was only the latest in the long series of
Casa Vieja
's would-be rescuers. The exodus of miners in the late seventies along with a real estate glut had left even low-cost rentals sitting empty and in even worse decay. Into that economic slump came an unexpected sum of remodeling money that most likely had its source somewhere in Colombia's drug cartel. Cocaine paid the bills for returning
Casa Vieja
to a single-family residence.

Alleged drug money repaired the dry rot, renewed the plumbing, fixed the wiring, and cleaned up and replanted a few of the gardens. The job was only partially finished, however, when the feds moved in to take over. That was how Pauli Enders had picked the place up in the late eighties at a bargain-basement price.

Paul Enders said he found
Casa Vieja
to be a homey place where he could work on a project and not have his creative bursts interrupted by unexpected visitors. He claimed that working in a room that overlooked that wild brown dump made him feel that he was perched somewhere just below the rim of the Grand Canyon. But what was good for Pauli was bad for Holly, although why it was bad for her she couldn't quite fathom. What was it about the dump? Why did it call to her so? Why did its looming nearness keep her from sleeping or eating or thinking?

“Well,” Isobel was saying, “are you coming or not?” She sounded impatient, as though she'd said much more than that, only Holly had heard none of it.

“Coming?” Holly repeated stupidly. “Coming where?”

“Downstairs. To see your father. He's waiting to see you.”

“My father? Here?” She quailed and pulled back into the chair, rocking desperately. “I don't want to see him. I can't.”

“Mrs. Baxter says you should come on down.”

“No. Tell her I won't come.”

“All right,” Isobel said. She went out and closed
the door. Moments later the door opened, and Amy bounded in. “What do you mean you won't come?”

“I don't want to see him. I can't.”

Amy came over to Holly's rocker and knelt in front of it. “Yes, you can, Holly. You've got to. He wants to settle. He's willing to make a deal, but you have to talk to him in person.”

“No. Please.”

“Come on, Holly, after all this, don't back down now.”

“Why not?”

“Because you've already come this far and done so damned much hard work to get here,” Amy insisted. “This is the one last thing you have to do to regain your self-respect and take control of your life. Now's your chance to hold your father's feet to the fire. He's managed to get away with what he did to you all these years. Don't let him do it again. He owes you. And you owe it to yourself.”

“Can't Rex talk to him?”

“Rex is in California today, remember? He'll be back tonight, in time to be in court tomorrow if he has to. It's up to you, Holly. I know you can do it. Take a deep breath now. Relax.”

Holly nodded, then distractedly ran her fingers through her sweat-matted hair. “But I'm a mess,” she said. “I can't see him like this. I've got to shower, wash my hair, put on makeup.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake!”

“Please.”

At last Amy relented. “All right,” she said with
a smile. “Get in the shower. I'll tell him to come back a little later.”

“You're sure I can do it?”

Amy came over to Holly's rocker and knelt in front of it.

“Do you remember what I told you when you first came to me for help? After we met at that screening?”

Holly nodded. Her spoken answer was almost like a recited catechism. “That I'd have to trust you, but that the only way to learn to trust others was to trust myself.”

“Think how far you've come since then, Holly. Think how much you've accomplished. Child molesters are basically cowards, and you've called his bluff. That's why he's come to offer you a settlement. You don't have to be scared of him anymore. The tables are turned. Now he's scared of you.”

“That doesn't seem possible.”

“But it is. Go get in the shower. I'll tell him to come back in an hour.”

“Not an hour,” Holly said flatly. “That's too soon. It makes me sound too eager. Tell him to come back at four.”

“All right,” Amy said. “Four it is.”

Long after the door closed, Holly lingered in the chair without moving. If this was what she wanted; if this was what was supposed to happen; how come she felt so awful? If this was victory, why was she shivering and sweating at the same time? Why was the prospect of seeing her father again after all these years so terrifying?

Finally, though, after half an hour or so, she managed to pull herself together enough to rise up out of the chair and head for the shower. If Amy still believed in her, maybe Holly Patterson could somehow find a way to believe in herself.

She had to. Amy had said it was the only way she was going to win. And winning was supposed to be worth it.