Once and for all time, he would finally tell both of them the truth.
Surely, once they both knew the truth, he might be able to find some common ground, some avenue for reconciliation. Once he came up with the plan, he had allowed himself to hope it would work. Perhaps if Holly knew all of it, she’d call off the trial and her hired attack dogs. Harold Patterson could imagine nothing worse than having to endure the humiliation of a public trial. He could imagine how it would feel to sit in one of those overheated Cochise County courtrooms. The place would be packed with friends and neighbors, people who had known him all his life. He would have to sit there and be stripped bare; would be forced to listen while his daughter recounted the exact nature of his alleged crimes and the horrible things he had supposedly done to her.
The possibility that Holly might really remembered her caused Harold to squirm on the Scout’s sway backed front seat. Just thinking about it set off a severe ache that started in Harold’s breastbone, spread across both shoulders, and arched down his tense forearms.
What if she really did remember? What then?
Harold remembered hearing someone say that the truth would set you free. Could it do that for him? Harold doubted it. In this case, truth seemed like some kind of evil genie. Harold worried that once he rubbed the bottled past and set the genie loose in the world, things would never be the same. Telling the truth meant that long-made promises would have to be broken, that the lives of innocent people would be forever changed. But then, innocent people were always being hurt.
That was the way the world worked.
WEARING ONLY her bathrobe and with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, Joanna Brady stood in the kitchen doorway observing her daughter, Jenny. The nine-year-old was halfheartedly trailing a spoon through the cold, partially eaten contents of her cereal bowl.
“I thought you said you wanted oatmeal,” Joanna snapped irritably.
“If you don’t, fine. Give it to the dogs, but stop playing with it.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before Joanna wished she could take them back. Jennifer was eating next to nothing these days, giving her mother yet another cause for worry, something else to add to Joanna’s own considerable pain.
“I’m sorry,” Joanna apologized quickly, trying to make light of it. “I sound just like Grandma Lathrop, don’t I?”
And it was true. Those were exactly the kinds of things Eleanor Lathrop would have said-had said, in fact, especially when she herself was hurting.
Criticism had always been Eleanor’s trump card, but why did Joanna have to replay those old tapes now, with her own daughter, when all she really wanted to do was take Jenny in her arms, hold her, and comfort her? Instead of harping, Joanna needed to share her own hurt with Jenny.
After all, Joanna Lathrop Brady understood all too well how it felt for a daughter to lose a father.
The very same thing had happened to her.
But the pain of being a newly made widow somehow got in the way of consoling her daughter, the newly made orphan.
Joanna had always prided herself on the special relationship she shared with Jenny, but in the six short weeks since a drug-cartel hit man had gunned down Joanna’s husband, Cochise County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Brady, an unfamiliar wall of silence and misunderstanding seemed to have grown up in the Brady household. The once open give-and-take between mother and daughter was now full of uneasy silences punctuated by angry words and occasional bouts of tears.
Without glancing at Joanna, Jenny took her bowl and slipped wordlessly out of the breakfast nook, heading for the back porch. Always interested in a handout, both dogs, the recently adopted Tigger, a comical-looking golden retriever/pit bull mix, and Sadie, a rangy bluetick hound sprang from their usual resting places near the door and rushed to follow.
Joanna removed the towel and shook her red hair loose. She was pouring herself a cup of coffee when Jenny returned to the kitchen sink to rinse her bowl. The child’s troubled blue eyes were downcast; she seemed near tears. Long after all trace of food was gone, Jenny continued to rinse her dish. Joanna resisted the urge to tell her to turn off the faucet and not waste water. Once again she attempted to put things right.
“I’m sorry to be so impatient,” she said. “The election is today. I guess I’m nervous and in a hurry. We need to leave here early enough so I can vote on the way to work.”
Jenny turned from the sink to face her mother.
“Are you going to vote for yourself?” she asked.
“Vote for myself? Of course. Why do you ask?”
Jenny dropped her eyes and shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I thought a good sport always votes for the other guy. In games and stuff.”
Joanna stepped over to Jenny, held her by the shoulders for a moment, then lifted the child’s chin and looked directly into her eyes.
“This is something I have to do, Jenny,” Joanna said. “For us and for your dad. It isn’t a game. What if I didn’t vote for myself and then ended up losing by a single vote? It wouldn’t make sense for me to vote for one of my opponents, now would it?”
“I guess not,” Jenny mumbled, then dodged out of her mother’s grasp. “I’ve got to go get dressed.” As Jenny darted away, Joanna blinked back tears of her own. How could it still be less than two months since Andy died? It seemed much longer, more like a lifetime. How could her entire world have been turned so upside down in so short a time? Ostensibly, not that much had changed. They still lived in the same home, the same cozy Sears bungalow she and Andy had purchased from his parents years earlier. But the house was no longer the same place. Without Andy’s presence, it was far too quiet, and so was Jenny.
The cheerful, laughing, loving child who had eagerly marched off to tackle third grade the first of September… was no more. Two months later she had been transformed into a subdued, pale husk of her former self. She had turned into a somber miniature adult, living her life inside a hard, brittle shell.
