at him. They were somewhat more respectful and envious, both, now that their high-paying copper-mining jobs had disappeared and Alvin’s hadn’t. Not only was he still employed by his original employer, attrition and two key heart attacks had bounced him all the way up to chief.
“Congrats, Joanna,” he enthused. “Welcome aboard and all that shit. Excuse me, all that crap. What can I do for you?”
“I was calling for some information about that hit-and-run incident last night.”
“Ask away. We’ve got letters of mutual aid out the kazoo. What do you need?”
“Can you tell me what’s happening on that case?”
“Sure thing. My guys talked to Holly Patterson’s sleazebag lawyer. He says it’s nothing. That her foot slipped on the accelerator or some such thing, and that by the time Holly had the car back under control, she was too upset to come back.”
“Right.”
“That’s what I say. But we picked up another angle on it from someone else. One of my officers’ aunts, Isabel Gonzales, and her husband work at Cosa Viejo. She’s the cook, and he’s the gardener, for the new owner.
“Isabel told her sister that Holly Patterson has really been going downhill ever since she got back home. Sounds almost like a rerun of what happened to her mother. From what I’ve been able to pick up, Burton expected Harold Patterson to offer Holly some kind of settlement yesterday. Harold stopped by to see her, but when they couldn’t come to terms, Holly went ballistic. She blames her cousin, Burton Kimball, for talking her father out of settling.”
“What does Burton say?”
“He flat out denies it. He says he tried to talk Harold out of it but that he didn’t get to first base. He did succeed in talking old Judge Moore into granting a continuance when Harold didn’t show up in court this morning. I guess the out-of-town lawyer was screaming like a scalded Indian.”
Joanna thought about all that for a minute. “I’ll bet he was. So one person says Harold was going to settle, the other says he wasn’t. Who’s right? What do you think is going on?”
“Well,” Alvin Bernard replied cheerfully, “I’d have to say somebody’s lying through his teeth. It’s just too damned soon to tell which is which. But then, that’s what you and I get paid for, isn’t it-to find out who’s lying?”
“Yes,” Joanna Brady answered. “I suppose it is.”
Joanna Expected to toss and turn after those two disquieting phone calls. Instead, she fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow; her eyes closed, and she fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep. Toward morning, though, she drifted into a dream-an un usually happy one at first, a dream about the old days, about when Andy was still alive.
Joanna and Jenny were sitting in the back of a moving pickup. Jenny was holding an old wicker picnic basket, and the two of them were laughing and singing songs at the top of their lungs.
They were driving down a bumpy dirt road. It took some time before Joanna realized they were in Hank Lathrop’s old Chevrolet pickup the terrible old half-ton truck her father had promised would be Joanna’s someday when she had her license, the truck her mother had sold to a farmer from out in the Sulphur Springs Valley the week after Hank’s funeral.
The time frame of the dream was disjointed and confusing. Details were disturbingly out of synch.
There were two dogs riding along in the pickup, but not Liz and Pearl, Hank Lathrop’s two old black-and-tans, but Joanna’s present-day Sadie and Tigger.
Eventually, Joanna turned around to look in the cab and see who was driving. She was startled to find that the driver was none other than Hank Lathrop himself, while Andrew Brady rode shot gun in the passenger seat. The two of them were talking and laughing, enjoying some private joke.
Like the time-warped dogs, that part of the dream could never have happened in real life, there. D. H. Lathrop might have known Andy Brady as a child by name or reputation, but certainly not as Joanna’s future husband-as Hank Lathrop’s future son-in-law. By the time Andy came home from the service and he and Joanna became a hot item, Joanna’s father was already dead.
But this was a dream. In the dreamscape, those things were possible, and both men were together.
And the Joanna Lathrop Brady who was riding in the back of that silver Cheyenne was overjoyed to see them. She tapped on the window, wanting to catch their attention. Since there was plenty of room in the front, she wanted to ride up there with them, to join in the stories and jokes, but they were too busy laughing and having a good time to hear her. She tapped on the window again and again. Still they didn’t notice.
Suddenly, a cloud seemed to pass in front of the sun, darkening the sky overhead. Joanna looked up and saw a rainstorm marching across the valley toward them. It was one of those fierce summer storms, the kind that kicks up clouds of swirling dirt and sends those out as reconnaissance troops in advance of the driving rain. Not wanting to be soaked, she turned back to the cab and pounded on the window again, only now no one was there.
The truck was still barreling down the road, but the cab was empty. The doors were open. Both her father and Andy had disappeared. No one was holding on to the steering wheel, which twisted wildly from side to side while the truck careened drunkenly down the narrow track, picking up speed as it went.
Joanna woke up slick with sweat. She fought her way out from under the covers and then lay there with her heart hammering in her chest, waiting for the fright to pass.
Gradually, her heartbeat slowed to normal, and a sort of calm numbness spread over her. You don’t need a PhD. in dream interpretation to understand what that one meant, she thought. In the dream-as in life both Andy and her father had bailed out on her, abandoning her to fight the good fight alone, leaving her stuck in the bed of the moving pickup of life with no way for her to reach either the steering wheel or the brakes.
As she knew it would, eventually the clarity of the dream grew fuzzy and disappeared, taking with it both the terrifying end as well as the pleasant, carefree beginning. That was the problem with dreams. In order to shake off the bad parts, you usually had to let go of the good ones as well. Joanna glanced at the bedside clock: 4am, too late to go back to sleep but still far too early to get -up. That’s when she noticed where she was lying.
