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. “Any thing else?”
“No,” Harold Patterson said, shaking his head. “That’s all.”
Holly PATTERSON sat in the back upstairs bedroom 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 arched 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 play sitting in her aged 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 Cosa Viejo.
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 Cosa Viejo, 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 Cosa Viejo 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-dear spring after noon.
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 Cadillac. Maybe Amy would
