Paradise Lost (2 page)

“So you see, Constance,” Claudia had cautioned her daughter over and over, “you must keep some money set aside, and not just in banks, either, because many of the banks were forced to close back then, too. The only people who were all right were the ones who had cold, hard cash put away under their mattresses or hidden in a sock. You have to keep the money someplace where you can get your hands on it when you need it.”

Over the years, long after Claudia had married Stephen Richardson and long after there was no longer any valid need for her to be concerned about such things, Claudia Armstrong Richardson had continued to put money in the Bible, right up until her death, insisting that Connie put the money there for her once Claudia herself was no longer able to do so.

There were times Connie had argued with her mother about it. “Wouldn’t it be safer in a bank?”

she had asked.

“No!” Claudia had declared heatedly. “Absolutely not.”

“What if the house burns down?”

“Then I’ll get a new Bible and start over,” Claudia had retorted.

After her mother’s death, Connie had left Claudia’s Bible as it was and where it was—in the bottom drawer of the desk. It had seemed disrespectful to her mother’s memory to do anything else. Now, as Connie counted some of those carefully hoarded bills into a neat pile, she was glad she had abided by her mother’s wishes. She had told no one of her mother’s private stash—not her father, not her sis-ter, and not even her new husband.

When Connie had counted out enough money to cover her debt, she started to put the Bible back in the drawer. Then, thinking better of it, she took it with her. In the kitchen, she stuffed the Bible into her capacious purse. After hurriedly drying her hair and slathering on some makeup, she dressed and headed off for her meeting with Ken Wilson. Twenty minutes later she was standing in the foyer of the private banking offices of First Bank of the Southwest. At that point, Connie had her involuntary quaking pretty well under control.

Ken Wilson himself came out to greet her and take her back to his private office. “I hope this hasn’t troubled you too much, Con-nie,” he said kindly.

She gave her banker what she hoped passed as a supremely con-fident smile as he showed her to a chair. “Oh, no,” she said, willing her face not to reveal the depth of her humiliation. “It’s no trouble at all. I’m sure this is nothing more than an oversight on Ron’s part. He was called out of town on business and ended up being gone longer than either of us intended. I expect to speak to him later on today, and we’ll get this whole thing straightened out. In the meantime, I brought
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along enough cash to dig us out of the hole.”

Carefully she counted out thirty-seven hundred-dollar bills. As she pushed them across the smooth surface of Ken’s desk, the banker cleared his throat. “I took the liberty of looking at your account again,” he said. “There’s another four hundred dollars’ worth of life insurance premiums that will be deducted within the next two days. Do you want to deposit enough to cover those as well?”

Grateful she had brought along the Bible, Connie extracted four more bills and shoved them over to Ken Wilson. “Good,” he said. “Very good.” He stood up. “If you’ll wait just a moment, I’ll be right back with your change and a receipt.”

Connie nodded and then sat staring out the window at traffic rushing by until he returned. He handed her the receipt and tale hilly counted out the change.

“If you’ll forgive my saying so,” he said hesitantly, “it sounded as though you had no idea these monies were being transferred from First Bank. I trust there isn’t some kind of problem. I mean, your family—you and your parents—have been good customers for a very long time—since long before First Bank became First Bank, as a matter of fact. I’d hate to think we had allowed something untoward to happen, although, since the accounts were all joint accounts—”

“Oh no,” Connie interrupted, answering too quickly and too brightly. She wanted to ask where the funds had gone, but she fought that one down. She didn’t want to admit to Ken Wilson that she had been kept totally in the dark. She didn’t want to admit to being that irresponsibly stupid.

“If Ron decided to move the funds, I’m sure he must have had a good reason,” she continued.

“As soon as I talk to him, we’ll have the whole thing ironed out.”

“Good, then,” Ken Wilson said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

Connie grabbed her purse and fled Ken Wilson’s office. She dashed through the marble-floored bank lobby and sank gratefully into the overheated leather of her mother’s oversized Lincoln Town Car. Although it was not yet the end of May, the Valley of the Sun had been sweltering in triple-digit temperatures for almost two weeks. Even so, Connie felt chilled. When she switched on the engine, she quickly turned off the air conditioner and opened the window, letting in a blast of broiling outside air.

Joint accounts!she chided herself. She had done that on purpose, too. In a fit of defiance, Connie had put Ron on as a signatory to all her accounts just to spite people like her sister Maggie and the other naysayers who had told her Ron was only after her money. Had she listened? Had she paid any of them the slightest bit of heed? No. Her father had been right after all. She was stupid—unbelievably stupid. She had taken everything Ron Haskell told her as gospel, and he had betrayed her. Other women might have railed and cried and blamed their betrayers. Driving back home, her eyes dry and gritty with unshed tears, Constance Marie Richardson Haskell blamed only herself.

Once in the house, Connie saw the blinking light on the answering machine as soon as she put her car keys and purse down on the kitchen counter. Hurrying to the machine, she punched the play button. First came Ken Wilson’s message, which she had already heard but had failed to erase. She fast-forwarded through that one. Then, after a click, she heard Ron’s voice, and her heart leaped in her throat.

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“Connie,” he said. “It’s Ron. I don’t know if you’re there or not. If you are, please pick up.”

There was a pause, then he contin-ued. “I guess you’re not. I don’t know where to start, Connie, honey. I’m so sorry. About everything. I’m at a place called Pathway to Paradise. I thought these people could help me, and they are—helping me, that is. It’s going to take time, and I want to talk to you about it, Connie. I want to explain. Maybe you’ll be able to forgive me, or maybe not. I don’t know.

“I can’t leave here, because I’ve made a commitment to stay for the full two months, but it would mean so much to me if you would come here to see me. That way I can be the one to tell you what happened instead of your having to hear it from somebody else. Please come, Connie.

Please, preferably this evening. Pathway to Paradise is at the far end of the Chiricahua Mountains, just out-side Portal on the road to Paradise. It’s north of town on the right-hand side of the road. You’ll see the sign. Wait for me along the road, sometime between nine and ten, and—”

At that point an operator’s voice cut in on Ron’s. “If you wish to speak longer you’ll have to deposit an additional one dollar and sixty-five cents.”

“Please,” Ron added.

And then the answering machine clicked off. For almost a minute afterward, Connie stood staring blankly at the machine, then she began to quake once more.

Connie Richardson Haskell was a woman who had always prided herself on keeping her emotions under control. Her father had expected it of her. After all those years under her father’s tute-lage, Connie had come to expect it of herself. The whole time she had cared for her aging and at times entirely unreasonable parents, she had never once allowed herself to become angry.

But now anger roared through her system with a ferocity that left her shaken. It filled her whole being like an avalanche plunging down the throat of some narrow, rock-lined gorge.How dare he! After disappearing for two weeks without a word, after taking my money without permission, now he calls and expects me to come running the moment he crooks his finger and says he’s sorry?

Finally she nodded. “I’ll be happy to join you in Paradise, you son of a bitch,” she muttered grimly. “But I’m going to bring along a little surprise.”

With that, she turned and walked into the bedroom. There, behind one of her mother’s vivid watercolors, was Stephen Richardson’s hidden wall safe. Inside the safe was her father’s well-oiled .357 Magnum. Connie didn’t need to check to see if the gun was loaded. Stephen Richardson had always maintained that hav-ing an unloaded weapon in the house was as useless as having a plumber’s helper with no handle.

Not taking the time to shut the safe or rehang the painting, Connie walked back to the kitchen, where she stuffed the pistol into her purse right next to her mother’s Bible. Then, without a backward glance and without bothering to lock up the house, turn on the alarm, or even make sure the door was firmly closed, Con-nie went back out to Claudia’s Town Car. Her father had always insisted on keeping a Rand McNallyRoad Atlas in the pocket behind the seat. Connie pulled out the atlas and studied the map of Arizona until she located the tiny dots that indicated Portal and Paradise. After charting a route, she put the atlas back in its spot and climbed into
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the driver’s seat.

This time, when she switched on the engine, she turned on the air conditioner as well. Until that moment, Connie Richardson Haskell had thought the term “heat of anger” was only a figure of speech.

Now she knew better.

Slamming the big car into reverse, she tore out of the garage and headed for Pathway to Paradise to find her husband. As she drove down the citrus- and palm-tree-lined street and away from the house that had been her home her whole life, Connie didn’t bother to look back, and she didn’t notice that the garage door had tidied to close. There was no reason to look back. It was almost as though she knew she was finished with the house and the neigh-borhood, and they were finished with her. No matter what hap-pened, Connie Richardson Haskell wouldn’t be returning. Ever.

At one o’clock Friday morning, Sheriff Joanna Brady let herself back into the two-room suite at the Marriott Hotel in Page, Arizona. Butch Dixon, her husband of a month and a little bit, lay sound asleep on the bed with his laptop computer sitting open in front of him. The laptop was evidently sleeping every bit as soundly as Butch.

Joanna kicked off her high heels and then stood still, gratefully wiggling her cramped toes in the plush carpet. Butch had the room’s air conditioner turned down as low as it could go, and the room was pleasantly cool. Joanna took off her jacket and sniffed it. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, she tossed it over the back of the desk chair. It reeked so of cigar and cigarette smoke that she’d need to dry-clean the suit before she could wear it again. But, after an evening spent playing cutthroat poker with fellow members of the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association, what else could she expect?

Peeling off her skirt and blouse, she draped those over the chair as well, hoping that hanging out in the air-conditioned room overnight would remove at least some of the stale-smelling smoke. Then, going over to the dresser, she peered at herself in the mirror. There was an impish gleam in her green eyes that even the lateness of the hour failed to dim. Reaching into her bra, she plucked a wad of bills, along with some change, from one of the cups. After counting the money, she found the total amounted to a little over two hundred dollars. Those were her winnings culled from all but one of her poker-playing opponents and fellow Arizona sheriffs.

Leaving that money on the dresser, she removed a much larger wad from the other cup of her bra. That was the money she had won from one poker player in particular, Pima County Sheriff William Forsythe. That sum came to just under five hundred dollars, $488.50, to be exact. Over the course of the evening, the other players had dropped out one by one until finally it had been just the two of them, Joanna Brady and Bill Forsythe, squaring off. It had done Joanna’s heart good to clean the man’s clock.

For the first two years of her administration, Joanna had kept a low profile in the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association. She had come to the annual meetings, but she had stayed away from the
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camaraderie of the association’s traditional poker party. This year, though, fresh from yet another slight at the hands of the obnoxious Sheriff Forsythe and his department, she had gone to the meeting intent on duking it out with the man over beer, cards, and poker chips.

Joanna Lathrop Brady had learned to play poker at her father’s knee. Cochise County Sheriff D.

H. “Big Hank” Lathrop had been a skilled player. Lacking a son with whom to share his poker-playing knowledge, he had decided to pass that legacy on to his daughter. To begin with, Joanna hadn’t been all that interested. Once her mother, Eleanor, began voicing strenuous objections, however, Joanna had become far more enthusiastic. She had, infact, turned into an apt pupil and an avid devotee. Now, years alter Big Hank’s death, his patiently taught lessons were still paying off.

Quietly casing the door shut behind her, Joanna hurried into the bathroom, stripped off the remainder of her clothing, and then stepped into a steaming shower. When she returned from the bath room with a towel wrapped around her head and clad in one of the hotel’s terry-cloth robes, Butch had closed the laptop, stripped off his own clothes, and was back in bed.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I wasn’t really asleep. So how’s my redheaded dynamo, and what time is it?”

“Your redhead is great, thank you,” she told him crisply. “And the time is just past one.”

“How’d you do?”

Smiling smugly, Joanna walked over to the dresser and retrieved both wads of money. She handed Butch the smaller of the two, giv-ing him a brief peck on his clean-shaven head in the process. “Whoa,” he said, thumbing through the money. “There must be two hundred bucks here.”

“Two hundred eleven and some change,” Joanna replied with a grin.

“Not bad for a girl.” Butch Dixon smiled back at her. He had been only too aware of the grudge-match status behind his wife’s determination to join the poker game. “How much of this used to belong to Sheriff Forsythe?” Butch added.