When talking on the telephone, Eleanor Lathrop was in her natural element-a situation Joanna’s campaign manager had wisely utilized to the campaign’s very best advantage.
“I won’t forget,” Joanna assured her mother.
“And thanks for the appointment with Helen. That was very thoughtful of you.
After putting down the phone, Joanna returned to the closet. The gray blazer and blouse were promptly returned to their respective positions on the clothes rod. Out came a navy-blue coat-dress, double-breasted with two rows of large gold buttons. She would have preferred the gray blazer, but since that was her mother’s first choice, she’d be damned if she’d wear it.
Joanna was finishing drying her hair when Jenny tapped on the bedroom door. Jenny, already fully dressed and followed by the two dogs, flopped dejectedly on her mother’s bed, while the dogs settled on the floor nearby.
“That was Grandma Lathrop on the phone,” Joanna said.
“She wanted to know if you’re coming to the party tonight, the one uptown.”
“Do I have to?”
Looking past the reflection of her own blue dress in the mirror, Joanna saw that Jenny resembled her blond, blue-eyed father in looks, but in the personality department she definitely took after her mother.
“Of course you don’t have to,” Joanna returned.
“But you are my daughter, and I’d like you to be there.”
“Even if you lose?”
Joanna sat down on the bed to put on her shoes.
“I don’t think we’ll lose,” she said, trying to sound far more confident than she felt. Her two opponents, Frank Montoya, the Wilcox city marshal, and Al Freeman, the assistant chief of police from Sierra Vista, hadn’t cut her any slack. The results of the election were by no means guaranteed.
“And even if we do lose,” she continued, “we have to go to the party anyway. No matter what, we should go there to thank our supporters.”
But then, in the brief silence that followed, something from Jenny’s voice perhaps a quaver of doubt in the way she spoke registered tardily on Joanna’s brain. She turned to her daughter “You do want us to win, don’t you, Jenny?”
“I guess,” Jenny whispered.
“Good.”
Joanna rose to her feet, pulling the child along with her. For a long moment, they stood there next to the bed in Joanna’s small bedroom, clinging together in a fierce and mutually protective hug.
Eleanor Lathrop had always claimed to have eyes in the back of her head. Her daughter made no such assertions, so while she and Jenny hugged each other, Joanna didn’t see that, behind the child’s back, Jennifer Ann Brady’s fingers were tightly crossed.
On both hands.
Traveling DOWN Tombstone Canyon, Harold was tempted to drive right by the Canyon Methodist Church. At the last minute he swung into the parking lot. This was, after all, Election Day. From the time he first became eligible, Harold’s voting record had been absolutely perfect. He had never missed a single election.
Now, though, with the trial due to start the next day and with Bisbee’s gossip mills churning out stories about his family troubles on an overtime basis, Harold actually wanted to skip it, to let this relatively unimportant election pass by without his vote. But that would have been perceived as cowardly. Harold Lamm Patterson was no coward.
He doffed his rain-stained Stetson and shook the water off it as he stepped inside the basement social hall of Canyon Methodist Church, the place where his precinct had voted for the last thirty two years. He had hoped the hall would be fairly empty except for the usual band of election-board workers, but that wasn’t the case.
The enterprising ladies of the United Christian Women’s Prayer Fellowship were holding a bake sale. Several of the town’s leading female citizens were clustered around a huge coffee urn, chatting and laughing.
None of the women were strangers to Harold, and he did his best to stay out of their way. One - in particular, Tottie Galbraith, had cut him dead the last time Harold had encountered her in the post-office lobby. That had been right after the People article.
Tottie had almost broken her neck, crashing into the revolving door in her haste to avoid him.
This time, her behavior was somewhat more subtle but no less disapproving. Although she must have glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, she gave no hint of recognition. Instead, she raised one eyebrow and shifted her position so she could continue standing with her back turned in his direction. Meanwhile, the previously energetic hum of the women’s voices dropped to the merest of whispers.
Harold didn’t have to hear what they were saying to know they were talking about him. His ears flamed red, but he didn’t cut and run. In fact, he thought wryly, anything that kept him from having to speak to Tottie Galbraith couldn’t be all bad.
Harold was almost safely past the group when, at the last moment, Marliss Shackleford broke free from the others and came after him, hand ex tended, lips arranged in a phony but welcoming smile.
“Why, Harold Patterson!” she exclaimed. “How are you managing to hold up through all this, you poor thing?”
Fifty years after leaving high school, Marliss had yet to outgrow the gushiness she had learned as a local cheerleader. She had devoted twenty-five years to her life’s work-writing “Bisbee Buzzings,” a weekly piece that passed for a society column in the Bisbee Bee, the town’s barely extant daily newspaper. Marliss Shackleford’s enthusiasm at being a large fish in a very small pond remained undimmed.
“Fine, Marliss,” Harold reassured her. If he couldn’t avoid her altogether the best tactic was to get Marliss talking about something else. “I’m doing just fine,” he said. “How are the grand kids?”
“Oh, the twins are just fine.” She beamed. “So nice of you to ask. Care for some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I only stopped by to vote. You know how it is-too much to do and not enough time.”
Marliss nodded as she fell in step beside him.
“Isn’t that the truth? Hardly enough time to turn around. But I wanted to talk to you all the same, Harold, just to let you know that a lot of us here in town think it’s a crying shame what Holly is doing. And to her own father yet. It’s a crime, if you ask me.”
“Thank you, Marliss,” Harold said, still hoping to shut her up. “I surely do appreciate that.” But Marliss continued undeterred, without even acknowledging the interruption.
“For her to go away all those years and come back now just to raise all kinds of fuss, I don’t understand it at all. Not for a minute! Do you?”
“No, ma’am,” Harold agreed, edging away, trying to reach the relative safety of the table where a stern-faced Barbara Wentworth presided over the list of registered voters. Marliss stuck to him like glue.
“I read that whole article in People magazine,” she continued. “I surely did. I don’t see how they can get away with printing such terrible stuff. We used to call it yellow journalism in my day, and that’s exactly what it is. After all that wild publicity, where in the world is Judge Moore going to find an impartial jury? I mean, doesn’t everybody read People? And as for all the awful things they said about Bisbee in that article… My goodness, if I were Judge Moore, I’d give that girl a swift spanking and send her right back home to California where she belongs.”
Marliss seemed able to talk without ever having to pause long enough to draw breath. About the time Harold decided there would be no escape, that he was destined to stand there trapped for ever, the Reverend Marianne Macula, pastor of Canyon Methodist Church, came to his rescue.
Deftly insinuating herself between Marliss and her hapless victim, Marianne took Harold’s hand and shook it firmly.
“Why, hello there, Harold,” Marianne said with a polite, dismissive nod in Marliss Shackleford’s direction. “Is Ivy here, too?”