Judgment Call (19 page)

Sue Ellen paused and sipped her coffee, which had already gone cold in the heavy china Mickey Mouse mug Joanna had pulled out of the break room dishwasher.

“From then on, that's how it was. She came home to the ranch for holidays and for summer vacations. I worried that with her grandmother gone, she'd have to drop out of school, but she said Granny Dora, short for Isadora, had taken care of her tuition in advance before she died, and that she had set aside money for Debra to go on to college as well. From looking at these, that's evidently the one true thing she told me, by the way,” Sue Ellen added bitterly. “Isadora Creswell is her grandmother's real name.”

“Is?” Joanna asked. “You're saying the grandmother is still alive?”

“She was as of two months ago,” Sue Ellen said. “The last letter from her is dated March eleventh.”

Joanna felt a surge of relief. Sue Ellen had provided exactly what was needed—the name of Debra's next of kin. “Where does she live?”

Sue Ellen shrugged. “I have no idea. Until tonight, I didn't know Debra had any kind of family connections. I thought we were it.”

She paused then. Sensing there had to be more to the story, Joanna waited for Sue Ellen to continue.

“Have you ever seen someone you love walking toward the edge of a cliff and you couldn't do anything to stop it?”

Joanna nodded.

“That's what happened to me our senior year of high school. I could see Debra was headed for trouble and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. Good Shepherd was an all-girls school, but that didn't mean there weren't plenty of boys around. Debra was so pretty, and the guys tended to clump around her like flies to honey. There were good ones and bad ones in the mix. Naturally, she fell for a bad one. I tried to tell her he was just out to make a conquest. We had a big fight about it—the first fight we ever had. She told me I was a queer and didn't know anything about boys. I told her if she went to bed with him, she was a stupid slut. She did sleep with him, though. Maybe we weren't what you could call ‘good' Catholic girls, but we weren't so bad as to use birth control.”

“She got pregnant?”

Sue Ellen nodded. “It turned out the dyke's assessment about the creep was on the money. Once Debra slept with him, he dropped her like a hot potato. We were young and naive. It took a while for her to figure out she was pregnant. She didn't tell me at first, but she finally had to tell someone, and I was it. When she told me what he had done to her, I went looking for the ass-hole. I found him in a bar and beat the living crap out of him with a pair of brass knuckles my dad had given me. Nothing ever came of that. He couldn't very well press charges. After all, he was a big-deal tough guy and I was only a girl. If his buddies had found out I was the one who knocked him for a row of peanuts and took out two of his front teeth in the process, he never would have lived it down. Instead, he stuck to the story that after he and I talked outside the bar, I left and some other guys came along and beat him up.

“By May of that year, Debra was starting to show. Some of the girls may have figured out what was going on, but I don't think anyone let on to the nuns at Good Shepherd. After graduation, Debra came back to the Falling H with me because, again, according to her, she didn't have anyplace else to go. My mother took one look at her and figured out what was going on. Debra and I had spent hours talking about what she should do. Obviously, getting an abortion was out of the question. She never would have done that, no matter what, but she couldn't see how she'd be able to go on to school and take care of a baby at the same time. She talked about giving the baby up for adoption, but we didn't have the first idea about how to arrange something like that.

“That's when my parents stepped in. They're good people. They offered to take the baby and raise him as their own. His name is Mike, by the way,” Sue Ellen added after a pause. “We call him Mikey. He's twenty-six now. He joined the marines fresh out of high school. That was the third fight Debra and I had. He wanted to go. Debra was against it, but she didn't really have any say in the matter, either.

“When he finished his enlistment, he came back home and got his BA degree in a little less than three years. Now he's in his first year of law school at the University of New Mexico. The only condition Debra made was that, under no circumstances, were we to tell him that she was his mother. As far as Mikey is concerned, I'm his big sister and Debra is his Aunty Deb. He loves her to distraction … Loved,” she corrected. “That's why she's spent every holiday and every Christmas vacation on the ranch with us. I taught her how to rope and ride at the same time I was teaching Mikey.”

“What about guns?” Joanna asked. “Did you teach her how to shoot, too?”

“Never,” Sue Ellen said. “Debra hated guns. That was the second fight we had—when she found out I was teaching Mikey how to shoot. I told her he was being raised as a ranch kid, and being able to shoot was part of the deal. When you run into a rattlesnake out on the range, you can't use a spitball. She shut up about it after that. We never discussed it again.”

“Would you be surprised if I told you Debra bought a handgun, had obtained a concealed carry permit, and had the weapon in her purse?”

“Are you kidding?” Sue Ellen demanded. “I don't believe it. Mikey won't, either.” She paused again and shook her head. “Poor Mikey. This is gonna break his heart twice over. My folks always told him he was adopted. They said that they hoped someday he'd be able to meet his birth mother, but I think Mikey stopped believing in that about the same time he stopped believing in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. I'll probably be the one who has to tell him the real story.”

Overcome, she stopped, and sat there for a long time, unable to continue.

“You'll need to do that right away,” Joanna said gently. “There's a particularly vile photo out on the Internet—one that should never have been posted. You don't want him to find out about it that way.”

“What kind of photo?”

“A crime scene photo.”

Sue Ellen swallowed and nodded. “I'll tell him,” she said. “I'll call him once we're finished here.”

“I could probably get someone from the Albuquerque police department to go by and talk to him in person,” Joanna offered.

“No,” Sue Ellen said, shaking her head. “I need to be the one. I need to tell him all of it, not just that she's dead.”

“You said earlier that you came here because she asked you to,” Joanna said. “What's that all about?”

“Debra told me a few weeks ago that if anything happened to her, I should go in her closet and find a case with some packets of letters in it. She said I should take the letters to the cops—actually, to you specifically. She said you'd know what to do with them. Here they are.”

She picked the case up off the floor, put it on the table, and pushed it toward Joanna.

“So she believed she was in some kind of danger?”

Sue Ellen shrugged. “I guess so. I asked her at the time if there was something wrong. She said it was no big deal. I believed her about that like I believed her about everything else. So tonight I got down the case, opened it, and read what was inside. It broke my heart,” she said, tapping the top of the case. “She lied to me the whole time—lied to me about everything. What I can't figure out is why.”

IT WAS AFTER ONE WHEN JOANNA ESCORTED SUE ELLEN HIRALES
into the conference room so she could place a call to her adopted brother in private. Once she was gone, Joanna opened the train case. What she found there were packets of letters, held together by rubber bands and labeled by year, dating back as far as thirty years. Unfortunately, the letters had been stored sans envelopes. That meant there were no return addresses visible.

The letters themselves were handwritten, not typed. They were composed in a spidery cursive that became shakier as the years went by, as if the hand that wrote them was developing an increasingly serious tremor. That as well as the fact that the correspondence was entirely of the snail-mail variety suggested that this was an older person who hadn't quite gotten a handle on the digital age.

Over the years, several different generations of upscale stationery had been used to write the multipage missives, including several changes of colors and styles, but always, the top of the first page was embossed with the sender's name, Isadora Creswell. The typeface on that had changed some over the years, but it was usually some variation of a font that resembled calligraphy. Unfortunately, beyond the woman's name, the stationery revealed no additional information.

After turning the problem of tracking down Isadora Creswell over to Margaret Mendoza, her nighttime records clerk, Joanna began thumbing through the letters. The brittle rubber bands holding the packets together splintered at the slightest touch. As she scanned through them, Joanna noticed that some of them began with the words “My Darling Debra” or “My Sweet Girl” or “Dearest Debra,” but the signature never varied. “Love and kisses, Granny D.”

The contents of the letters were utterly commonplace, offering a window on Isadora's life in a small town. Her cat, Mr. Rufus, had taken ill and she'd had to put him down. The garden club was holding their next meeting at her house. Isadora had collected her second grand slam in a lifetime of playing bridge. Fall was coming. She loved fall but dreaded winter. There were comments about things Debra had told Isadora in letters she wrote—tales about school and teachers and classes, but nowhere were there any references to phone calls in either direction. Nowhere was there any mention that Debra had given birth to an out-of-wedlock child.

Joanna had always marveled at the inherent beauty and strength of spiderwebs, and it occurred to her that these letters were like that—an unbreakable filament of love that linked Isadora to her granddaughter across miles of distance and an expanse of years.

Joanna's door opened. Sue Ellen came back into the room. “Did you reach him?” Joanna asked.

Sue Ellen nodded. “I told him,” she said.

“All of it?”

“All of it. Not surprisingly, he's broken up about it. He had only one question. Why didn't she tell him? I told him I didn't know, but that she must have had a good reason. I do know that she loved him with her whole heart. He's coming down, by the way. He said he'll leave first thing in the morning. He'll stop by the ranch to see the folks, then he wants to come by and see you.”

Joanna nodded.

“I was planning to drive straight back home tonight, but Mikey made me promise that I'd get a hotel room and spend the night here. He's a smart kid. He's been out on hunts with me, and he knows how wearing they can be. He's right, of course. I was bone tired before I got into the car to drive here. So I've got a room at the Copper Queen. If you need me, that's where I'll be, although I'll probably head out early, too. I didn't call my parents after I talked to Mikey. I didn't want to wake them, so I want to get home before he turns up.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“Do you need anything else?” Sue Ellen asked.

“Not right now. Do we have your contact information in case we need to reach you?”

“I thought I gave my cell phone number when I called in earlier, but here it is again.”

Joanna jotted it down. When her phone rang, she saw Sue Ellen out the door before she answered.

“Got it,” Margaret Mendoza said. “Clara Isadora Creswell, 450 Spruce Street, Altoona, Pennsylvania.”

Once Joanna had written down both the address and the phone number, she looked at her watch. It was half past one, Arizona time. With the East Coast on daylight saving time, it was three hours later than that in Altoona. Should she wait a few hours before making the phone call? Ultimately she decided that the best thing to do was to go ahead and contact the Altoona Police Department. When they agreed to send out a uniformed officer to make the notification, Joanna gave them her cell phone as the preferred contact number. She packed the letters—the ones she had read as well as the ones she hadn't—back into the train case and left it locked in the evidence room for safekeeping.

Then, mindful of her early-morning task force meeting, she headed home. The house was quiet when she let herself into the laundry room from the garage. She crept into the bedroom and slipped into bed. Now that Lady had deserted Joanna's bedside to sleep in Dennis's room, Joanna could come and go in the dark without having to worry about stumbling over a dog.

Butch acknowledged her presence by turning over in bed and flopping his arm across her waist. She was tired enough that she should have been sleepy, but the encounter with Sue Ellen Hirales left her awake and wondering what it was that had caused Debra Highsmith to strike out on her own so far from what must have been her home. Joanna's first guess went to the possibility of some kind of child abuse. More often than not, that was the reason runaways took off.

The collection of letters from Isadora, literally decades' worth of letters, made this an unlikely runaway situation. Most kids who disappeared did so completely. They cut all ties, either because their home situation was so bad that they wanted to or because something in their new life—often a homicide—made it impossible for them to return.