others and came after him, hand ex tended, lips arranged in a phony but welcoming smile.
“Why, Harold Patterson!” she exclaimed. “How are you managing to hold up through all this, you poor thing?”
Fifty years after leaving high school, Marliss had yet to outgrow the gushiness she had learned as a local cheerleader. She had devoted twenty-five years to her life’s work-writing “Bisbee Buzzings,” a weekly piece that passed for a society column in the Bisbee Bee, the town’s barely extant daily newspaper. Marliss Shackleford’s enthusiasm at being a large fish in a very small pond remained undimmed.
“Fine, Marliss,” Harold reassured her. If he couldn’t avoid her altogether the best tactic was to get Marliss talking about something else. “I’m doing just fine,” he said. “How are the grand kids?”
“Oh, the twins are just fine.” She beamed. “So nice of you to ask. Care for some coffee?”
“No, thanks. I only stopped by to vote. You know how it is-too much to do and not enough time.”
Marliss nodded as she fell in step beside him.
“Isn’t that the truth? Hardly enough time to turn around. But I wanted to talk to you all the same, Harold, just to let you know that a lot of us here in town think it’s a crying shame what Holly is doing. And to her own father yet. It’s a crime, if you ask me.”
“Thank you, Marliss,” Harold said, still hoping to shut her up. “I surely do appreciate that.” But Marliss continued undeterred, without even acknowledging the interruption.
“For her to go away all those years and come back now just to raise all kinds of fuss, I don’t understand it at all. Not for a minute! Do you?”
“No, ma’am,” Harold agreed, edging away, trying to reach the relative safety of the table where a stern-faced Barbara Wentworth presided over the list of registered voters. Marliss stuck to him like glue.
“I read that whole article in People magazine,” she continued. “I surely did. I don’t see how they can get away with printing such terrible stuff. We used to call it yellow journalism in my day, and that’s exactly what it is. After all that wild publicity, where in the world is Judge Moore going to find an impartial jury? I mean, doesn’t everybody read People? And as for all the awful things they said about Bisbee in that article… My goodness, if I were Judge Moore, I’d give that girl a swift spanking and send her right back home to California where she belongs.”
Marliss seemed able to talk without ever having to pause long enough to draw breath. About the time Harold decided there would be no escape, that he was destined to stand there trapped for ever, the Reverend Marianne Macula, pastor of Canyon Methodist Church, came to his rescue.
Deftly insinuating herself between Marliss and her hapless victim, Marianne took Harold’s hand and shook it firmly.
“Why, hello there, Harold,” Marianne said with a polite, dismissive nod in Marliss Shackleford’s direction. “Is Ivy here, too?”
For a moment, Harold seemed unable to answer.
“N-no,” he stammered finally. “I came by myself.
I don’t know where she is.”
And he didn’t, either, not for sure. Most likely she was still at the house, but the usually steady Ivy had become unpredictable of late. In fact, she had left the house the night before right after chores, and she hadn’t returned until just before sun-up. That was something else that was bugging Harold, another bone of contention, and some thing she had never done before.
Since the big blowup over Holly, Ivy had suddenly taken to coming and going without bothering to tell him where she was going or when she’d be back. Of course, since they weren’t speaking, how could she?
This new situation with Ivy reminded Harold of Holly, back when she’d been an errant teenager. But Ivy was no teenager. At forty years of age, she hardly needed to ask her father’s permission to do any damn-fool thing she pleased. He saw this latest incident as one more thing to lay at Holly’s door.
“I see,” Marianne said.
Harold’s mind had wandered briefly. When he came back to himself, Marianne Macula was examining his face so closely that he wondered what she saw there. And when she said, “I see,” what exactly did she mean? Did this Reverend Macula somehow know more about what was really going on out at the Rocking P than Harold wanted her to?
“All this trial business must be almost as hard on her as it is on you,” Marianne continued. Her voice was kind: sincere and caring where Marliss Shackleford’s had been sharp and self-serving.
Harold dropped his gaze and examined his mud-spattered boots. “Yes,” he allowed reluctantly. “I reckon it is.”
Marianne reached out and took the old man’s hand. “You take care of yourself now, Harold.”
She turned to Marliss and engaged her in some kind of small talk that finally set Harold free to go vote. He quickly planted himself front of Barbara Wentworth’s table and gratefully dived into the election process.
In other times, he and Barb Wentworth would have shot the breeze while she found his name in the voter- registration list, showed him where to sign, and gave him his ballot. This time, Barbara seemed disinclined to talk. Did even the no-non sense Barbara Wentworth read People? he wondered.
Minutes later, breathing a sigh of relief, Harold escaped to the relative privacy of a voting booth.
He read each page of the ballot carefully. It wasn’t a very exciting election. The usual people were running for the usual offices, and no one would be particularly surprised when the incumbents were reelected to their traditional positions in the state legislature or on the board of supervisors. As far as county races were concerned, the only one of any special interest to Harold Patterson was the wide-open contest for the office of sheriff.
Two months earlier, right after the primary and when the general-election ballots had already been printed, all hell had broken loose in Cochise County. Both candidates for sheriff, the two men whose names even now were listed on the pre printed ballots, had perished the previous September in a series of harrowing events that had stunned the entire state. The previous sheriff, Walter V. McFadden, and his opponent, Deputy Andrew Brady, had
