Chapter One
HAROLD LAMM Patterson squinted through the rain-blurred
windshield. Checking for traffic, he pulled his rattletrap
International Scout through the gate of the Rocking P
Ranch and onto the highway. Pouring rain made it hard to
see. Part of the problem was his eyes. Ivy, his daughter,
was constantly nagging him about that, and she was
probably right. Thank God his ears still worked all right.
At eighty-four, even with his new, thick trifocals, the
old peepers weren't nearly as good as they used to be. But
Harold figured the real problem was the damn wiper blades.
The rubber was old, cracked, and frayed. The blades
squawked across the windshield, barely making contact and
leaving trails of muddy water on the dusty, bugsplattered
glass.
In southern Arizona, it seemed like you never noticed that
the wipers weren't working until you needed them, and when
you noticed, you were too busy driving blind to remember.
The next time he went into A & A Auto Parts to drink
coffee and shoot the breeze with the counterman, Gene
Radovich, Harold still wouldn't remember, not if it wasn't
raining at the time. it reminded him of the words in that
old-tune song "Manana." No need to fix a leaky roof on
such a sunny day? Same difference.
But that particular day-an unseasonably cold early-
November morning-it was raining like bell. A pelting
winter storm had rolled into the Sonoran Desert from the
Pacific, filling the normally dry creek beds and swathing
the Mule Mountains in a dank gray blanket that was almost
as chill as the pall around Harold Patterson's stubborn
old heart.
His daughter's personal-injury trial was due to start in
Cochise County Superior Court first thing tomorrow
morning -- Wednesday at nine o'clock. Unless he could
figure out a way to stop it. Unless he could somehow bluff
Holly into agreeing to talk to him. Unless he could work a
deal and canvince her to call it off.
He had tried to talk to her about it several times since
she arrived in town. That ploy hadn't worked. That darmn
hotshot lawyer of hers had insisted that until Harold came
to see her with his hat in his hand-to say nothing of a
settlementit was a straight-out no go. His own daughter
refused to see him, wouldn't even tell him where she was
staying.
His own daughter. Just thinking about it caused Harold's
gnarled, arthritic hands -- hands that had wrung the necks
of countless Sunday-dinner chickens -- to tighten into a
similar death grip on the smooth surface of the worn
steering wheel. Harold thought about Holly and her damn
lawsuit the whole time he guided the wheezing yellow Scout
over the rain-swept pavement of Highway 80, up the
mountain pass locals called the Divide and then down the
winding trail of Tombstone Canyon into Old Bisbee.
Holly had been a Fourth of July baby. He had wanted to
call her Linda -- Indy for short in honor of Independence
Day, but Emily wouldn't hear of it. She insisted that if
she had daughters, they would be named after their
grandmother's favorite Christmas carol, "The Holly and the
Ivy," regardless of whether or not they arrived any time
near December 25. And Holly it was. Would she have been
less prickly, Harold sometimes wondered, had she been
given a different name?
Holly Patterson had entered the world sandwiched neatly
between Bisbee's traditional Independence Day Coaster
Races and the annual Fourth of July parade down Tombstone
Canyon. She was born in the Old Copper Queen Hospitalthe
brick one up in Old Bisbee, not the new apricot-colored
one down in Warren. It had been a hot, miserable morning.
On that pre-air-conditioning summer day, the nurses had
left the deliveryroom windows wide open in hopes of
capturing some faint hint of breeze. Emily had screamed
her fool head off. For several hours running. To a poor,
anxious, prospective father waiting outside, that's how it
had seemed.
Harold remembered the whole morning as vividly as if it
were yesterday. Left to his own devices in the waiting
room, he had been propelled out of the hospital by his
wife's agonized cries. But with the windows open, there
was no escape from Emily's frantic shrieks. No one else in
the downtown area-onlookers watching the races or waiting
for the parade-could escape them, either. The relentless
screams echoed off nearby hillsides and reverberated up
and down the canyons. People lined up on the sidewalks
kept asking each other what in the world were they doing
to that poor woman, killing her or what?
Pacing up and down in the small patch of grassy park
between the hospital and the building that housed the
Phelps Dodge General Office, Harold had wondered the same
thing himself. What were they doing to her? And when old
Doc Winters finally slipped Emily the spinal that shut her
up, Harold had despaired completely. As soon as she grew
quiet, he was convinced it was over, that his wife was
dead.
Of course, that wasn't the case at all. Emily was fine,
and so was the baby. Men don't forget that kind of agony.
Women do. Had it been up to him, one child was all they
would have had. Ever.
Afterward, holding the beautiful baby in her arms, nursing
her, Emily had smiled at him and told him Holly was worth
it. Harold wasn't so sure. Not then, not ten years later
when Ivy was born, and certainly not now.
Things change. The delivery room where both Holly and Ivy
had been born now housed a Sunday-school classroom for the
Presbyterian church across the street. A law firm-the
biggest one in town-now occupied the lower floor space
where the old dispensary and pharmacy had been located. In
fact, Burton...
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