Desert Heat

Joa

She looked like a refugee from some nearby war. The oversized denim jacket was an ill match for a torn and tattered, silk-looking blue skirt. The skirt’s hem barely skimmed the top of a pair of scruffy men’s work boots. There were dark stains on both the jacket and skirt, stains Walter McFadden surmised would turn out to be splotches of Andrew Brady’s blood. He wondered if Joa

“At times like this, I miss my father,” she said softly. “Even after all these years, I still miss him.”

The sheriff turned the paper to a different page and then shook it sharply to smooth it out. “D. H. Lathrop was a good old boy,” Walter McFadden observed solemnly. “It was crazy for him to die like that, changing a tire for a lady with a carload of kids and a spare so bad that it didn’t even get her into town.”

Joa

“Little Hank?” McFadden repeated.

Joa

Walter McFadden understood that it was easier right then for Joa

“Your dad was smart to get out of the mines when he did, Joa

Joa

“You paid that debt in full,” she said quietly. “Andy wouldn’t have been hired if it hadn’t been for you. I know that. His grades were okay, but they weren’t that good.”

“I didn’t do him that big a favor,” Mc-Fadden returned. “Andy was a good deputy.”

Joa

The sheriff smiled. “Your daddy, Old D. H. Lathrop, was one damn stubborn hombre in his time. Is that where you get it?”

Even Joa

She picked up a ragged People magazine and made some pretense of reading it, but the words wouldn’t jell in her mind. She ended up flipping randomly through the pages without even bothering to read the captions under the pictures. When she finished with that one, she didn’t bother to pick up another. Instead, she stared fixedly at the clock. It seemed to take forever for the minute hand to move from one small black dot to the next.

Twenty minutes later, a swinging door burst open and the Reverend Maria

This unusual arrangement inevitably caused Bisbee’s old-timers to be somewhat suspicious. Scandalized was more like it. Five years after Maria

“I figured I’d find you here,” Maria

“We still haven’t heard anything,” Joa

“I was already in Tucson,” she said. “I came up to meet with Deena O’Toole to help her plan the memorial service. Jeff caught me at her house out in the foothills just as I was leaving.”

“Memorial service?” Joa

Maria

Wayne O’Toole had graduated from Bisbee High School in the early sixties and had gone on to receive a degree from the University of Arizona before falling prey to the draft. After a stint in Vietnam he had returned to Bisbee to teach only to leave the district in disgrace three years later when he was found to be growing a healthy crop of marijuana in his Mother’s backyard up in Winwood Addition. It was years since Joa

“1 didn’t know him,” she said, “not personally. But Andy did. Mr. O’Toole was the line coach the whole time Andy played football, JV and Varsity both. He got fired the year I was a freshman. What happened?”

“Murder, evidently,” Maria

Joa

“Tell me again what happened to Lefty O’Toole?” Walter McFadden interrupted.

Maria

“Oh, hi there, Walter. I didn’t see you when I came in. The story we’re getting is still pretty muddled. It happened down near Guaymas. When they found him, he was thirty miles from nowhere, out in the middle of the desert. It’s a miracle anyone found him at all. His car turned up abandoned by an old airstrip, so chances are it was robbery. At least that’s what the Mexican authorities are saying so far.”