“Do you think your election combined with what happened to the previous sheriff will make for a continuing morale problem in the department?”
Joanna Brady wasn’t eager to discuss Walter V McFadden or the role she herself had played in his death.
“Any change of administration or supervision always comes with the potential for ‘morale’ problems. That goes for the private sector every bit as much as it does for governmental agencies. I didn’t come in here expecting to do a wholesale house cleaning. My intention is to give officers under me a fair crack at showing me what they can do. I assume they will grant me the same courtesy.”
“You know about Martin Sanders’ resignation then?”
Martin Sanders, deputy for administration, was Dick Voland’s counterpart on the administrative side. He had always been a background player.
While Dick had been out actively campaigning for Al Freeman, Martin Sanders had been at work minding the store. He was someone Joanna naturally would have expected to meet during the course of her first full day in office had two separate homicides not taken precedence.
“He resigned?” Joanna demanded in surprise. “Since when?”
Sue Rolles looked startled as well. “I thought you knew all about that. My understanding was that he turned in his letter of resignation sometime early this morning. I wonder if it would be fair to characterize his action as a vote of no confidence.”
Joanna could barely contain her irritation. “Since I haven’t seen the letter yet,” she snapped, “I don’t believe it’s fair to characterize it one way or the other. My answer on that issue is no comment. Period!”
“What about Chief Deputy Richard Voland?”
“What about him?”
“Do you have anyone in mind as his replacement?”
“Replacement? Who says he’s leaving?”
Sue Rolles shrugged. “Well,” she said disingenuously, “both he and Martin are political appointees, patronage workers who serve at the discretion of the sheriff. And since Voland actively supported your opponent…”
Joanna cut the reporter off in mid-sentence. “Ms Rolles,” she said, “did you attend Dick Voland’s press conference earlier this afternoon?”
“Yes, but…”
“Then you are well aware that this agency is currently in the midst of coping with not one but two separate homicides in addition to handling the regular workload of calls.”
“Yes.”
“From the tenor of your questions, it appears to me this interview is heading in a direction I don’t especially like. I believe it’s designed to undermine my new administration, to create ill-will and disharmony at a time when we all need to pull together to get the job done. With that in mind I have nothing more to say at this time.”
“But…”
Impatiently, Joanna punched a button on the intercom. Luckily, it was the right one, and Kristin answered. “Yes?”
“Miss Marsten,” Joanna said. “Ms. Rolles is just leaving. Would you please show her out? And would you mind bringing in my mail? I’ve been told there are some items lurking in there that require my immediate attention.”
While she waited for Sue Rolles to leave and for Kristin to bring in the mail, Joanna turned and looked out her window. Not that many offices in the building boasted private windows.
It was after four. Already the late fall sun was fast disappearing behind the Mule Mountains to the west. The hillside outside her window was spiked with gray sticks of spindly, thorny ocohllo branches. At first glance, the ghostly dumps of twigs seemed dead or dying, but the slanting after noon sunlight revealed a faint tinge of green out lining the stalks. Even though winter weather was fast approaching, pale new leaves sprouted among the spiny thorns.
In order to survive in the harsh desert climate, ocohllos spend most of the year looking parched and barren. But whenever the shallow roots are blessed with rain, short-lived leaves appear on seemingly dead branches. New crops of leaves can come and go several times in the course of a single year.
Why couldn’t people be more like ocotillos? Joanna wondered, envying the hardy desert candle wood its natural resilience. Humans didn’t necessarily have that same kind of toughness, the same ability to withstand and recover from terrible dry spells.
Holly Patterson had gone off to Hollywood and created a career for herself, but the pain of what had happened to her as a child had somehow robbed her of all ability to enjoy it. She sat in a darkened room, rocking back and forth, hating her father and yet blaming herself for his death.
Ivy Patterson, too, had been damaged by the family troubles. Her once seemingly placid existence of faithful daughterly duty had erupted in a geyser of anger that made murder possible. Her late-blooming rebellion against her father made even the natural and mundane acts of falling in love and getting married take on sinister and un natural overtones.
And before you go throwing too many stones, Joanna Brady thought to herself, what about you?
With Andy gone, she didn’t expect the branches of her own heart ever again to leaf out in full springtime glory.
Toward evening, Isabel Gonzales went into the darkened bedroom to collect the dinner tray and straighten the tangled covers on the bed. Holly Patterson was back in her chair, rocking back and forth and staring out through a space between the curtains at the towering black shadow of the dump. “What’s up there?” she asked.
Isabel almost jumped out of her skin. For days she had come to this room, dropping off food trays, taking them away, making the bed while the room’s sole occupant seldom spoke or even acknowledged her existence.
