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, 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 expensive, 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 Ever green-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 pot holes 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, trying to keep it a secret in the first place. Maybe that’s higher all the time. Maybe we were wrong trying to hide it. 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 will 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
