Some of them hit him. Most didn’t, careening -harmlessly off the walls of the shaft. At last, when all the ammunition was gone, the flashlight came back on. This time, the hand that held it trembled violently, and the wavering beam jerked crazily as it zigzagged down the rocky walls, panning through the darkness in search of a body.
When the light finally settled on Harold’s inert - body, on his open and unblinking eyes, there was a single, sharp intake of breath, a sigh of relief.
And then the flashlight fell, plunging-still lit through the eerie, enveloping silence. It slammed into Harold’s shattered chest, bounced once, then rolled off into the water.
Soon after that, the Scout’s engine choked and coughed back to life. It shuddered once, then caught and kept on running. As the International rumbled away toward Juniper Flats and Bisbee beyond that, the flashlight one of Harold’s best, continued to cast a flickering light that lingered in the darkness of the glory hole. Even totally submerged, it still glowed through the murky - water, long after the Scout had disappeared into the overcast night.
JIM BOB and Eva Lou Brady weren’t exactly social butterflies. It took some serious persuasion to convince them that they should attend the post-election party at all. They agreed, finally, only on the condition that Jenny ride with them. Joanna suspected it was a ploy giving them a convenient excuse to leave early, pleading the necessity of getting Jenny home and in bed because of school the next day.
Jenny opted to ride with the Bradys. Eleanor Lathrop went with friends. That meant Joanna Brady drove to the post-election party at the convention center alone.
Brave words to Jenny notwithstanding, Joanna was filled with grave misgivings as she made her way uptown. In her only previous attempt at elected office, she had run for student-body treasurer of Bisbee High School. She still remembered sitting in Miss Applewhite’s biology room (which doubled as Joanna’s homeroom) while Mr. Bailes the principal, read the winners’ names over the intercom. With the sharp smell of formaldehyde filling her nostrils, she had listened intently, holding her breath the whole while, as he droned through the congratulatory list.
After what seemed forever, when he finally reached the position of treasurer, the name he read wasn’t Joanna Lathrop’s.
Joanna no longer remembered which of her classmates actually did win. Someone else’s victory wasn’t nearly as important as her own personal loss. The memory of that defeat came to her as clearly and painfully now as if it had happened yesterday.
She remembered how her face had flushed hot with embarrassment, how she had fought back tears of disappointment while well-meaning class mates told her, sympathetically, “better luck next time.”
There’ll never be a next time, Joanna had vowed back then. It turned out she was wrong about that.
Here she was, twelve years later, running for office after all.
“Whatever you do, don’t cry,” she lectured her self sternly, repeating words Marianne had been uttering for weeks. “Win, lose, or draw not to cry.”
There were two readily available parking spaces directly across the street from the convention center entrance, but Joanna ignored them both.
Instead, she drove farther up the street, parking at the upper end of the lot near the post office. She locked the car and started toward the plaza, where she counted three different vans bearing the logos of Tucson television stations, as well as one more from a station in Phoenix.
Cochise County elections didn’t usually garner that much interest from out of town, but this year’s race for sheriff was different. The earlier deaths of both declared candidates had spurred uncommon statewide and national media attention. The fact that Joanna was both a candidate and the widow of one of the slain men had contributed to keeping the hotly contested election in the human-interest spotlight. Not only that, but pundits continued to dwell on the idea that if Joanna Brady won, she would be the first female county sheriff in the state of Arizona.
Rather than go directly to the convention center and into the glaring lights of the waiting cameras, Joanna delayed her entrance by crossing the street and approaching the building with the wary attention of a battle-weary scout reconnoitering enemy territory. Stopping in the park, she gazed at the pale green building that appeared a ghostly gray in the evening light.
And truly, the convention center was a ghost. The structure that now functioned as the Bisbee Convention Center had once housed Phelps Dodge Mercantile branch of the company store in the days before most of the jobs in the domestic copper-mining industry literally went south-to Mexico and South America.
In their heyday, P.D. stores in a dozen separate mining communities had been true department stores-places where, by signing a chit, company employees could purchase everything from groceries to furniture, from washing machines to ladies fine millinery, and have the cost automatically deducted from future paychecks.
Joanna didn’t actually remember shopping in this particular store, although she must have accompanied her mother there on occasion when she was little. She did have a dim, lingering recollection of being lost on a store elevator once, of searching frantically for her mother, and of being found much later among the glass-walled showcases. Eleanor had been furious with Joanna for wandering away on her own. In the very best of times, Bisbee had boasted a grand total of only three elevators, so the chances were good that Joanna’s vaguely remembered incident had actually occurred in the uptown P.D. store, especially since that had been Eleanor’s favorite place to shop. Before the relatively upscale P.D. closed for good, Eleanor Lathrop wouldn’t have been caught dead shopping at a J.C. Penney.
Since the store had been closed now for twenty some years, Joanna’s knowledge of the building’s faded merchandizing glory came to her primarily secondhand, through her mother’s steady harping back to the once- glorious good old days. Back then the P.D. store in Bisbee had been the place to shop.
In its heyday the store had offered so much, much more than its withered successor humdrum, lowly grocery store that still clung stubbornly to life a few miles away in the Warren business district.
With modest renovation, the building’s interior main floor had been redesigned into a meeting hall configuration. The Bisbee Convention Center hosted each year’s flurry of summer high-school reunions as well as other events. An echo of the store’s retailing glory remained in the thin inner shell of shops that lined the edge of the marbled main floor. There, enterprising merchants hawked turquoise jewelry, curios, and knickknacks to any stray tourists who happened to wander inside. A modestly upscale restaurant occupied one corner of the building and usually catered whatever required catering.
Joanna Brady knew almost all those individual merchants on a first-name basis and had played on the tennis
