“Where did he go? I’ve got to see him now It’s important.”
“As soon as he gets back, I’ll have him call you.”
“Don’t do that. He can’t call here.”
“How can he get back in touch with you then?
“I don’t think he can,” Holly Patterson said “because by then it’ll be too late. By then I’ll be dead.”
With that, she hung up the phone. She looked up and down the hall. The house was still unnaturally silent, but even then she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive outside.
Panicked, Holly knew she had to get out. Now.
That was the only way to save herself. Holding her breath, she crept back down the stairs, grateful for the strip of carpeting that covered the hard wood risers.
Pausing on the ground floor, she heard Isabel working industriously in the kitchen, chopping something, singing under her breath, but there were voices outside. Rex and Amy were walking up to the back door from the garage. They’d be there any moment.
Still wearing her nightgown, robe, and fur-lined bedroom slippers, Holly tiptoed across the slate entryway and let herself out the front door. She walked bent over, hoping that, by staying close to the ground, she could avoid being seen by anyone, including Isabel’s gardener husband. She crept around the far side of the building and made for the ivy-covered terraces at the back of the house where she had once tried to seduce poor Bobby Corbett.
Without looking back, she scrambled down the four-foot drops between levels of terrace. At every step, the thick, straggly vines reached out to entangle her feet and send her tumbling, but she kept on. At last she came to the far end of the property, where a barbed-wire fence barred her way. Beyond that lay the first few far-flung boulder massive hunks of rock waste that had bounced high and fallen wide as they tumbled down the steeply angled flanks of the dump.
As Holly tried to wiggle through the fence, sharp wire barbs caught on threads of her terry cloth robe. Unable to free it at once and intent only on reaching the dump, Holly slipped out of the robe and went on, leaving the white cloth dangling on the fence behind her like a June bug’s discarded shell.
It was desperately cold that day, but even with nothing on but her nightgown, Holly didn’t notice.
She had eyes only for the massive multicolored dump with the achingly blue sky arching far above it. All her life, that dump had exerted a strange, inexplicable pull on Holly Patterson.
When she reached the bottom, she hesitated, but only for a moment. For all her life, she had wondered what was on top of that dump. Today, to save her life, she was going to find out.
She was halfway up when Amy’s voice found her. “Holly! What are you doing? Come down! Come down right now before you hurt yourself!”
Holly closed her eyes, trying to resist the inescapable pull of that beckoning voice.
“Come… down… right… now!”
Holly wanted desperately not to hear that voice, not to respond, but she did. Without even having to leave the bottom level of the terrace, Amy began to count.
“Ten,” her voice called out in that powerfully soothing cadence. “Nine, eight, seven…
Slowly, the numbers worked their inevitable way down to zero. They burrowed their way deep into Holly’s consciousness like so many writhing worms, devouring both her will and her new found memories.
When Amy’s commanding voice stopped Holly’s ascent, she had been near the lip of the two hundred-foot-high dump, climbing fearlessly Halfway down, she happened to glance at the desert floor one hundred feet below her. She gasped with shock to see how high she was, how far she had climbed. Trembling with fear in every limb, she had all she could do to continue down.
Somehow, for a few moments at least, Holly Patterson had forgotten that she was desperately afraid of heights.
Joanna came back from lunch to a world of pandemonium. The two brothers from Kansas Settlement who had tried to murder one another with baseball bats the night before were once again on a friendly basis. Despite the fact that one of the two was still hospitalized with injuries, they were ready to be ruled by brotherly love. Their mother, who had not attended the birthday fracas, had negotiated a peace treaty and hired a lawyer.
When Joanna picked up her messages, one was from a Wilcox attorney letting her know that his Kansas Settlement clients were prepared to sue the county and the two deputies who had arrested them with false arrest and police brutality. A second message, from the county attorney, related to that same issue.
“What am I supposed to do about this?” Joanna asked.
Kristin shrugged.
“Who usually handles this kind of thing?”
“Mr. Sanders, usually. But he’s on vacation,” Kristin added with only the smallest of smirks.
“Who takes care of those problems when Mr. Sanders isn’t available?”
“Nobody else that I know of. He’s been doing it ever since I got here. He also usually attends the Multi- Jurisdictional meetings, and there’s one of those starting at two. Are you going?”
“There isn’t a note about that MJ meeting on my calendar,” Joanna said, pointing to the noted wall calendar she had posted in order to keep track of where she was supposed to be and when. There was no Magic Marker notation in the afternoon slot.
“I must’ve forgotten,” Kristin said. “Sorry.”
“Like hell you did,” Joanna muttered to herself after the door closed. It was going to take time to either shape Kristin up or get rid of her, but Joanna couldn’t afford to launch into something like that when she was already up to her neck in current-crisis management.
