She figured the town was small enough that she’d be able to find a homicide crime scene there on her own.
38
11:30 A.M., Monday, April 12
Patagonia, Arizona
Aside from the delivery guys, the Patagonia post office itself was a one-woman operation. Patty Patton might have made a pitch to the higher-ups, asking to have some part-time help to cover the windows during lunchtime and breaks, but she didn’t want to rock the boat. There was a lot of talk these days about shutting down “underperforming” post offices, and she didn’t want hers to be one of them.
As a consequence, between eleven and twelve each day, Patty closed the window and then sat at the sorting table to eat her peanut better and jelly sandwich and to down the remains of her thermos of coffee. Once upon a time, she had imagined her life would be different, that she and Roland would travel around the world and dine in all kinds of exotic places. She hadn’t expected to live her whole life without venturing outside the confines of Patagonia. But those were the choices she’d made and the way she’d lived her life, and most of the time she had few regrets.
It was quiet in the back room. Over the bank of mailboxes, she could hear people chatting and greeting each other. At some point, while she was eating dessert-a container of banana yogurt-she heard a siren or two. She wondered about them, but not that much. She was a lot more perturbed by the fact that Jimmy Carson hadn’t bothered to come back by to let her know what was going on with Phil. That seemed odd-out of character. Jimmy was usually far more dependable than that; his mother, Eunice, had seen to that long ago.
At twelve sharp, Patty downed the last slurp of coffee and put away the remains of her lunch. She didn’t want people from out front looking through the service window and thinking she used the sorting table as a cafeteria.
Patty was not a tall woman. In order to reach the window and conduct business, she had to spend most of the workday perched on a three-step stool hidden behind the counter. When Patty opened the window after lunch, Maxine Browning, Patagonia’s ace gossip, was waiting outside the window, drumming her fingers on the counter and looking pointedly at her watch.
“It’s not like you to be even a minute late,” Maxine complained. “But I suppose with what’s going on over at Phil’s, we’re lucky you’re open at all. I’d like a sheet of those breast cancer stamps, please.”
“What is going on over at Phil’s?” Patty asked, trying not to sound too concerned or alarmed as she retrieved the page of stamps.
“Something bad, I guess,” Maxine said. “There are cops all over the place. I wouldn’t be surprised if that woman finally got around to putting a bullet in her head. Christine Tewksbury has been crazy as a loon for all these years. I’m surprised Phil didn’t place her in some kind of home long ago. I probably would have. Having that ugly Christmas tree around year after year would have driven me batty.”
Patty felt a clutch in her stomach. If it had been something wrong with Christine, Phil would have called. This had to be something else, maybe something far worse.
“And what about Deputy Reyes?” Maxine continued. “I’m hearing that the reason he got shot is that he was dealing drugs on the side. With his poor wife pregnant and everything. I swear, if the cops are crooked, who are you supposed to trust these days?”
At that point, the woman behind Maxine, Annie Davis-who was head volunteer in the all-volunteer town library-jumped into the conversation. “That’s right,” she said. “I heard they found drugs galore when they searched Jose Reyes’s house. The sheriff’s department isn’t releasing squat about it-they’re claiming that the Department of Public Safety has taken over the case, but all that’s doing is giving Sheriff Renteria a chance to save face. If he’s got a bunch of crooked drug-dealing cops working in his department, that man is history. There’s no way in hell he’ll be able to weather that kind of scandal and get reelected.”
Patty knew Jose and Teresa Reyes because she knew most everyone in town, but she was far less concerned about them than she was about Phil and Christine Tewksbury.
“What can I do for you, Annie?” Patty asked, trying to maintain her focus and move the process along. She needed to get the customers out of the way so she could think.
“My cousin in Fargo asked me to send her eight pints of my prickly pear jelly,” Annie replied. “She wants to give a jar to each of the members of her bridge club. Flat rate is the way to go, right?”
“Medium or large?” Patty asked.
“I don’t know,” Annie said. “What do you think would hold eight pints of jelly?”
“Large, most likely,” Patty said. “You’ll want to put in plenty of packing. You don’t want jars of sticky jelly knocking together and getting broken.”
Patty had to scramble down off her stool to go over to her box bin. That morning, when she’d been helping Jess do the mail load-in before running Phil’s route, Patty had discovered that Phil had squirreled away a dozen of the large flat-rate boxes in the back of his truck. No doubt someone on the route had asked for them, but since Patty’s inventory of flat-rate boxes was getting dangerously low, she’d dragged the boxes back inside. If someone on the route needed them, they’d have to come to the post office and pick them up.
“Since this is where Phil works, it seems to me as though someone would have the simple courtesy to come tell you what’s going on,” Annie complained. “It’s not fair to leave you in the dark like this.”
That was Patty’s opinion as well. Another twenty minutes crawled by. Patty collected box rent. She made arrangements for several return-receipt-requested items that were being sent to the IRS. She sold a roll of Forever stamps. When the phone rang behind her, she leaped off the stool and raced to answer it. Eunice Carson, Deputy Carson’s mother, was on the line.
“When I saw they had Jimmy outside Phil and Christine Tewksbury’s house directing traffic, I couldn’t stand it any longer,” Eunice said breathlessly. “I had to go check. You’re not going to believe it. He told me Phil is dead. When they dragged Christine out of the house, she was screaming like a banshee.”
Patty was glad she wasn’t standing on her stool when she heard the news. For a moment the room seemed to spin around her. “Phil is dead?” she repeated. “You mean like a heart attack or something? I know he went to see his doctor a few weeks ago, but according to him, it was just a routine physical. I didn’t think there was anything seriously wrong with him.”
“Definitely not a heart attack,” Eunice said. “She evidently beat the crap out of him with a baseball bat.”
“She who?” Patty asked.
“Christine,” Eunice responded. “Who do you think? According to Jimmy, when he got there late this morning, she was sitting in a chair in the living room next to that godforsaken Christmas tree. The bloody bat was right there with her the whole time. She didn’t even bother trying to hide it. I can hardly get my head around the idea that those kinds of things can happen right here in Patagonia.”
“Hello,” Shelley Witherspoon called to Patty from out front. “Is anybody there?”
“Thanks for the call,” Patty said. She put down the phone and returned to the window.
As soon as Shelley saw Patty’s ashen face, her jaw dropped. “Patty, you look terrible. Are you all right?”
“I’m not feeling well,” Patty Patton said. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you today.”
For the first time in her entire career with the United States Postal Service, Patty Patton put the CLOSED sign in place and shut the window for the day shortly after noon. Taking her keys, purse, and lunch bag, she went out the back way and locked the door behind her. Jess hadn’t returned from running the route, but he’d be able to leave the mail truck inside the building’s lockable chain-link fence and drop the keys in through the mail slot.
One of the things Patty had always loved about her job was the commute-a two-block walk along the edge of a busy highway. Today it seemed to take forever, and once she got home, she didn’t stay. Instead, she got in her aging Camaro, one her mother had bought new back in the seventies, and drove out to Phil’s house.
There were half a dozen cop cars in evidence, including one she recognized as being Jimmy Carson’s squad car. Traffic cones had been set up, creating a temporary DO NOT CROSS barrier that Patty made no effort to enter.
