By the time Joanna and Marianne entered the living room, Ivy and Yuri were already seated side by side on an old-fashioned, faded leather couch.
They sat close to one another, with Yuri’s long arm sprawled intimately across Ivy’s shoulder. A good-sized woman in her own right, Ivy Patterson seemed dwarfed and diminutive beside the hulking Russian. The fiercely protective look on his face was out of place, he and Ivy knew more about how Harold Patterson had come to be in the glory hole than Yuri had so far admitted.
But still, Joanna’s first order of business was to inform Ivy of the presence of that second body.
The cozy fireplace-warmed living room now seemed as bad a place to deliver that kind of news as the front porch had moments earlier.
“What is it?” Ivy asked.
Feeling every bit the unwelcome interloper, Joanna stumbled her way into a chair. For a few moments, she almost wished she were a man, wearing the lawman’s stereotypical Stetson. At least that way she would have had something to take off and put in her lap, some tangible object to use as a physical buffer between Ivy Patterson’s already significant pain and the news Joanna was about to add to it.
“I’m so sorry about your father,” she began haltingly. “Harold Patterson was a wonderful man, and he’s going to be greatly missed.”
Ivy Patterson nodded. Tears threatened, but she held them in check. “Thank you,” she murmured
“As you know, Yuri and I have just come down from up on the mountain,” Joanna continued “From up at the glory hole. Did he have a chance to tell about what’s going on up there?”
“Just that they wouldn’t let him bring Dad’s Scout back down the mountain.”
Joanna nodded. “There’s a roadblock near the top, and the Scout is stuck on the wrong side of it.”
Ivy shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. I suppose we can go up later and get it back. That’s how we brought it home from the convention center yesterday. Is that what you came to tell me?”
“No,” Joanna said. “There’s something else.” She paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “I was up there with Dick Voland and Ernie Carpenter, the homicide investigator.”
“Homicide,” Ivy repeated. “As in murder? You mean my dad didn’t just fall in? It wasn’t an accident?”
“No,” Joanna said. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look like an accident. In the meantime, that’s not all. There’s something else you need to know.”
“What else?” Ivy demanded impatiently, sitting forward on the couch. “What more could there be?”
Joanna took a deep breath. “Your father’s isn’t the only body down in that hole, Ivy,” she said. “Ernie Carpenter found a human skeleton down there with him, someone who’s been in the glory hole for a very long time. For years.”
Ivy Patterson’s eyes grew wide with shock. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God!” she ex claimed. “It’s true then!”
“What’s true?” Joanna asked.
Suddenly, a fresh torrent of tears coursed down Ivy Patterson’s cheeks. All color drained from her cheeks. She buried her face in her hands, while her whole body convulsed with sobs. For a moment, there was no sound in the room except Ivy’s desperate weeping and the crackles and pops from the mesquite log fire. No one else had anything to say.
Eventually, Ivy drew herself erect, but the look on her face was far more dismayed than grief stricken. “Mother always said there was a body in that hole,” she said softly. “She always said so, and I never believed her.”
Joanna felt her own jolt of shock. “You mean to say your mother knew something about this?”
Ivy nodded. “I’m sure of it.”
“What about your father?”
A strange look washed over Ivy’s face. Her flesh seemed to harden. Her jawline froze with visible anger. “That son of a bitch,” she murmured. “That rotten, low-down son of a bitch. He must have known it was true the whole time.”
“Who must have known what was true?” Joanna asked, confused by the sudden shift in Ivy Patterson’s demeanor.
“My father. That there was a body. When Mother told me that, he insisted she was crazy. Every time she brought it up, he claimed she was talking out of her head. That was about the time he started having someone watch her constantly every minute, day and night. He said that if she was capable of making up such bizarre stories and of getting people to believe her, we’d have to be careful or they’d haul her away to Phoenix and lock her up in the state hospital.”
“Wait a minute,” Marianne said. “If your mother was telling the truth, if the body was really there the whole time, then maybe she wasn’t so crazy after all.”
“That’s right, maybe she wasn’t,” Ivy added grimly, with a ferocity that was chilling to hear.
“At least not at first, but she was later. And why not? Dad started locking her in her room at night. He stopped trusting her, and she went downhill fast. Before long, he wouldn’t even let her out of his sight. Or mine. She did go crazy then, and maybe it happened because he drove her to it. Damn him anyway! How could he do that to her? How could he?”
Ivy collapsed against Yuri’s shoulder, her whole body convulsed by a new paroxysm of broken hearted sobs.
Sitting there, Joanna sensed something odd. Before Ivy Patterson had learned about the second body, her reaction to her father’s death had been completely appropriate and understandable. But this new storm of tears was something else.
