Joanna Brady was riding an emotional roller coaster. Inside the house her gratitude toward Clayton Rhodes quickly turned to irritation with her mother. Just inside the back door she stumbled and almost fell over Eleanor Lathrop’s pride and joy, her Rainbow Water Vacuum, which was parked there in the dark. The kitchen was a shambles. Every inch of countertop was covered with the contents of Joanna’s kitchen cupboards. Eleanor herself, perched precariously on a stepladder, was busily scrubbing down the topmost shelf directly over the sink.
“Mother, what in the world are you doing?” Joanna demanded.
“Cleaning the cupboards,” Eleanor replied. “You know as well as I do that the ladies from the church are going to be all over this house for the next few days, and I don’t believe this kitchen has been properly cleaned in years.”
The phone rang just then and Jenny leaped to answer it. “Brady residence,” she said. “Jennifer speaking.” After that she said nothing, and a moment later, she hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Joanna asked.
“I dunno,” Jenny answered with a shrug. “Whoever it was hung up.”
“Don’t pay any attention to the phone,” Eleanor said. “It’s been ringing all day. Come over here now, Jenny, and start handing up things from that stack over there. That way I won’t have to climb up and down so much.”
Jenny hurried to help. Shaking her head, Joanna headed for the bedroom, still holding Clayton Rhodes’s pillowcase-wrapped gift.
“Where are you going?” Eleanor asked after her.
“I think I’ll go to bed,” Joanna answered. “As far as I’m concerned, if the ladies from church want to come to my house and examine the kitchen cupboards with a fine-toothed comb, they deserve whatever they find.”
SEVENTEEN
Still cradling Clayton’s unexpected package as well as her purse, Joanna slammed the bedroom door shut behind her and then stood leaning against it, hoping to cool off. She was amazed by the intensity of the anger she felt toward her mother. She wanted to go back out into the kitchen and scream at Eleanor to get down off the damn ladder and leave her kitchen the hell alone. But that had never been her way where Eleanor was concerned. Instead, following her father’s lead, Joanna had always avoided direct confrontation, going around her mother rather than through her.
To be fair, the rules of the game were somehow changing, and Eleanor had yet to figure it out. In the past, right or wrong, Joanna would have swallowed her anger, returned to the kitchen, and helped her mother put things right. But tonight she didn’t. If she had wanted the kitchen cleaned right then, she would have done it herself. Instead, Joanna Brady had other concerns.
Like coming to terms with this room, for in-stance. Twice now, she had raced through it as though the space was full of demons. Now, she needed to find a way to stand here and look around at the familiar furniture, seeing it as a stranger might and trying to decide if it was, indeed, still the same place it had been two days earlier. Now, with Andy gone and the rest of the world conspiring to rob her of his memory, she wondered if there would ever again be a time when she could be comfortable in this room. Or would she forever feel as alien in this place as she did in this instant?
Walking haltingly, like someone uncertain of footing on rough terrain, she made her way to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. Gingerly she began unwrapping the layers of faded pillow case surrounding the gun until at last a Colt.44, naked and deadly, lay in her hand. Remembering Molly Rhodes’s voluminous aprons, Joanna could see how the gun would easily have fit into one of her pockets. And living out on the Rhodes place through the years, Joanna could see how Molly might have needed to take a shot at an occasional chicken-stealing coyote or at a rattlesnake that might choose a spot under the clothesline to sun itself.
But Clayton Rhodes wasn’t thinking about either rattlesnakes or coyotes when he gave the gun to Joanna. And now that she was holding the weapon in her hand, Joanna wasn’t either.
For a few moments it was almost as though Joanna’s father himself was standing there in the room with her, reminding her of all the old lessons-how she should never handle a gun of any kind without knowing for sure whether or not it was clean and loaded. She checked. The answer was yes as far as the cleaning was concerned, but the weapon wasn’t loaded.
Joanna loaded it herself, taking bullets from the box Clayton Rhodes had given her, then she hefted the.44 in her hand, gauging the weight of it, fingering the grip, remembering the importance of balance and the necessity of the two-handed, spread-footed stance her father had taught her. And she recalled how he’d patiently worked with her, teaching her how to handle recoils-to expect them and flow with them rather than fighting against them.
In remembering D. H. Lathrop’s lessons, Joanna missed him anew with almost the same force as she missed Andy. A wave of grief that was also physical pain washed over her.
Resolutely, she stood up and tried to think of something else. Clayton was right. She would have to practice in order to regain some of her former proficiency, and that wouldn’t be tonight. Probably not in the next few days, either. In the meantime, she needed a safe place to keep the weapon, a place where Jenny wouldn’t accidentally stumble across it.
Kicking off her shoes, Joanna got up and padded over to Andy’s rolltop desk. It was locked, but the key was in its usual place in the pencil cup on top. Joanna turned the key in the lock and shoved up the lid, thinking the small drawer at the back of the desk would be a good place to keep the gun, but when she opened the drawer and tried to put the gun inside, it wouldn’t fit. Something else was in the way.
Exploring the drawer with her fingers, she drew out a small address book. It was Andy’s-she recognized it instantly-but she was surprised to find it there. He usually kept it with him, and she would have expected it to be with the packet of personal effects she had been given in the hospital.
She put the gun and the extra ammunition in the drawer in place of the address book, closed the top of the desk, locked it, and put the key in the pocket of her jeans. Then, taking the book with her, she started to return to the bed.
On the way, a piece of paper slipped out from between the leaves and fluttered to the floor. Joanna scooped it up and unfolded a piece of rich, creamy white stationery with the
Ritz Carlton logo emblazoned across the top. In the upper right-hand corner the date was listed as September 10.
Dear Andy,
I’ve been thinking about your offer. It’s hard to get to be my age and realize you’ve been a first-class asshole all your life. Thanks for giving me a chance to make the world a better place, if not for me, than maybe for my kids and yours.
There are a few things I need to straighten out before I can leave here. When I get those cleared up, I can meet you in Nogales or Tijuana, wherever, and we’ll go to York then. Together we ought to be able to make it stick. I guess I don’t need to tell you that if anybody finds out about this I’m a dead man. And so are you.
Be careful, Lefty
Joanna read the note through several times in rapid succession. Each time another little piece of understanding slipped into place. Without telling her, Andy had been in touch with Lefty O’Toole. Why had he been so secretive? She had thought that she and Andy had a good marriage, that they had shared almost every-thing, yet here was another proof, almost as damning as Sandra Henning’s, that Andrew Brady’s sharing with his wife had been woefully incomplete.