“Was there someone else involved?” Joanna asked.
“You mean like did Lisa have someone on the side? No way. She loved Bradley to distraction. I can’t say the same about him. I suppose Bradley could have had a girlfriend. I’ve wondered about that over the years, but I don’t know for sure.”
“They seemed happy together?”
“As happy as newlyweds are when they’re young and not making enough money. But Lisa was excited about being pregnant. She was never very interested in school. She did all right in high school, but she wasn’t the least bit interested in going off to college. She told me once that all she wanted to do was meet a nice man, get married, and raise lots of babies.”
“Did Bradley want the baby?”
“Who knows? I sure as hell didn’t ask him,” Anna Marie put in. “I mean, in those days, with the pill and all, if people got pregnant and it was after they got married, you assumed it was because they wanted to, but Bradley was a real good-time boy. On Saturdays, when he was off work and Lisa was at the dry cleaner’s, he’d go hang out at the bar and play pool until it was time for them to go home. He had a company car during the week, so they only had the one car-his pickup truck-on the weekends. So he’d take her to work and then he’d come back and pick her up when she got off in the afternoon.
“The last time I talked to her was that Saturday morning, the day she was killed. Lisa loved fried chicken, especially my fried chicken. I called her at work to see if she and Brad wanted to come over for a chicken dinner on Sunday. Fried chicken and pecan pie-Lisa’s two all-time favorites. She said she’d talk to Brad and let me know. I never heard her voice again. Sunday morning, about nine o’clock, a deputy sheriff showed up. He told me that they’d found Brad drunk out of his gourd somewhere up by Bisbee. He told me that they hadn’t found a body, but there was enough evidence of foul play that they were afraid something had happened to Lisa. And they never did find her. Brad went to prison without ever letting on what he had done to Lisa and her baby. Claimed he was drunk and didn’t remember.”
Joanna heard the words and wondered if that “deputy sheriff” had been her father.
“They never did find her,” Anna Marie repeated, grinding out the stub of her cigarette and looking off into the distance somewhere over Joanna’s and Jaime’s shoulders. “I always thought it would have been better if they had. If we could have found Lisa and the baby and buried them, maybe that would have made things better. ”Closure‘ is what they call it. These last few years, TV has been full of pictures of that awful Scott Peterson and that Hacker guy from Salt Lake, but at least those poor families found their daughters’ bodies. At least they had something to bury. Two months after Brad went to prison, my husband, Kenny, drove his pickup truck out to the San Pedro, parked alongside the river, drank a bottle of bourbon, and then put a bullet through his head. Left a note. Said that with Lisa gone, he just couldn’t see any point in going on. I didn’t blame him, either. I would have done the same thing, if I’d had guts enough. The cops even kept Kenny’s gun. Said they needed it for evidence.“
There was a plaintive whimper from behind the kitchen door, followed by a persistent scratching. Without another word, Anna Marie got up and rescued Fritz from his prison. When the old woman returned, she collapsed into her chair as deflated as if she’d been a balloon suddenly devoid of air. She seemed utterly exhausted.
Quickly Joanna rose to her feet. “We’ll be going then, Mrs. Crystal. I can see this has been very hard on you.”
“Thank you for letting me talk about Lisa,” Anna Marie said. “Most of my friends don’t have the patience for it. Talking helps me remember her. Otherwise she’d be forgotten completely.”
On an impulse, Joanna reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. “Lisa must have been a wonderful daughter,” she said. “Anytime you want to talk about her, feel free to give me a call.”
Anna Marie studied the card for a moment and then looked at Joanna. There were tears in her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.
As Joanna stepped off the porch and into the crisp, clear night air, she breathed in deeply, cleansing the cigarette smoke from her lungs.
Twenty-seven years earlier her father had probably come to this very house to make a next-of-kin notification. Despite the long slow passage of time since then, the grief that had filled the little clapboard house remained as palpable and overwhelming as it must have been that fateful Sunday morning in 1978. Through all the intervening years, none of the hurt had disappeared. It was still trapped inside the house right along with Anna Marie Crystal’s collection of decades-old cigarette smoke.
Chapter 4
“Whoa,” Jaime said, once they were back in his Tahoe. “I didn’t see that one coming.” The conversation with Anna Marie Crystal had struck Joanna as a fairly normal next-of-kin notification. “Which one is that?” she asked.
“You heard what the woman said-that if Bradley Evans had shown up on her doorstep she would have plugged him full of lead herself. She’s an old lady, all right, but it still sounds like possible motive to me. Having a gun and knowing how to use it can do a lot to equalize differences in age and sex.”
“She said plug, not stab,” Joanna corrected. “There’s a big difference.”
“Still,” Jaime objected. “According to Ernie, Doc Winfield theorized that our perpetrator could very well be a female.”
Joanna wasn’t convinced. “I don’t see it that way,” she said. “Even after all these years, Anna Marie Crystal is still heartbroken over her daughter’s loss-and why wouldn’t she be? She lost her daughter, her grandchild, and her husband all within a matter of months, but to her it must have seemed like it happened in one fell swoop. Given those circumstances, I think I would have hated Bradley Evans’s guts, too, but the woman doesn’t strike me as a killer. Still, it won’t hurt to check her out,” Joanna conceded. “Let’s see what if any kind of an alibi she had for when Bradley Evans was murdered.”
“Good,” Jaime said. “I’m glad you agree, because that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
They were still in Sierra Vista when Joanna’s phone rang. “It’s Maggie,” the Records clerk said. She sounded annoyed and out of breath. “I’m still up here at the courthouse pawing through boxes. This place is a mess. I’m sure the file must be here somewhere, but I don’t know where. It’s like the movers just jammed things in wherever there was room with absolutely no rhyme or reason. I know you wanted it by tonight, but I’m due to get off at eleven…”
“It’s fine, Maggie,” Joanna said at once. “Who’s working graveyard?”
“I think it’s Cindy Hall. The problem is, there’s only one clerk on that shift. If she comes up here to take over where I leave off, there won’t be anyone in Records to support the guys in the cars.”
“Never mind,” Joanna said. “You’ve done the best you can, Maggie. It’ll have to wait until morning.”
When they got back to the Justice Center, it was after eleven. Joanna didn’t even bother stepping inside the office to retrieve her briefcase. Instead, she transferred directly to her Crown Victoria and headed for High Lonesome Ranch. With all the dogs closeted inside the house with Jenny, it was unnaturally quiet when she drove up the road to the U-shaped ranch house with its two separate wings and parked in her designated garage at the end of the far wing. When she let herself into the family room, however, Lady was at the door waiting to greet her.
After kicking off her shoes and giving her grateful toes a relaxing wiggle, Joanna did a barefoot inspection of the house. Jenny was asleep in her room with the television set booming away and with both Tigger and Lucky curled up on the bed with her, one dog per side. In the kitchen Joanna found a collection of dirty dishes, along with evidence both of the noodle soup Jenny had eaten for dinner as well as the microwave popcorn she had snacked on later. There were two popcorn bags in the trash. One was empty. The other, clearly overcooked, was full of black cinders. Why the bag hadn’t set the microwave on fire was nothing short of a miracle. Out in the laundry room Joanna found that the dogs had been well taken care of. The water dishes were full of water. The food dishes were empty. In other words, everything was fine.