Tombstone Courage (5 page)

Some people around town discounted Burtie;
thought of him as your basic pushover. But not Harold Patterson. The man who had raised Burton Kimball from a baby—the kind uncle who had taken an orphaned pup to raise—knew better than to dismiss either the younger man's abilities or his tenacity.

Harold might use Burtie to further his own purposes, yes. But underestimate him? No. The coward's way, of course, would have been for Harold to go ahead and do what he was planning to do without mentioning a word of it to Burtie. But Harold Lamm Patterson had never walked away from a fight in his whole life.

At eighty-four, he decided, it was too damn late to start.

A
S PREDICTED
, Burton Kimball's reaction was nothing short of astonished disbelief. “You're going to do what?”

“You heard me. I'm gonna offer Holly whatever the hell she wants. But she's gotta agree to see me. Alone. No lawyers on either side. Including you.”

Kimball shook his head in disgust. “Uncle Harold, let me point out that you've already paid me a bundle of money on retainer to handle this case for you. Why would you suddenly want to go it alone at the very last minute? And why on earth would you suddenly agree to settle with that unmitigated bitch?

“Let's go to court, Uncle Harold. Please. We'll have the home-court advantage. People in this county know you. How many times have you served on the school board? Five? Six? You've lived here all your life, while Holly left town thirty years ago and only came back now to make trouble. Given a choice, who do you think the jury will believe?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” Harold said. “I don't want a jury.”

But Burton Kimball continued undeterred. “No
one from around here is going to fall for this woo-woo ‘Forgotten Memories' bullshit. It's all going to boil down to her word against yours, and she's not going to win. People like Holly Patterson may be big news in
People
magazine and in New York and California, but Bisbee's a part of the real world. I tell you, Uncle Harold, it isn't going to wash here.

“If you settle, Holly gets whatever you give her, but if you win—if the jury finds in your favor—you won't have to pay that woman one thin dime. Which one of those sounds like the better deal?”

“I still mean it,” Harold said. “You call her up and tell her I want to see her. You know where she is, don't you?”

“I know,” Burton answered, “but as you know, I'm under a court order not to tell. Anyway, my advice still stands. Take your chances in court.”

“You're not very old to be going stone-cold deaf, Burtie,” Harold put in mildly. “You'd better have those ears of yours checked. I told you once, and I'll say it again. I'm not going to court tomorrow, and neither are you. We're going to settle this thing now. Today!”

Burton Kimball prided himself on being a patient, reasonable man. In fact, Linda, his wife, insisted he was far too patient for his own good. She blamed her husband's overly forebearing nature for the fact that their two children, a boy of ten and a girl eleven, were spoiled rotten. Now, though, faced with his uncle's unyielding bull-headedness, Kimball's much-touted patience was beginning to fray.

“Call her attorney. Tell him to have her meet me tonight,” Harold repeated. He paused and frowned. “Wait. Where should we go? I can't have her coming to the house.”

“You could always do it here in my office, I suppose,” Burton allowed grudgingly, pulling out a pen and making a few quick notes on a yellow pad.

But Harold shook his head. “No. That won't do. It should be someplace else, someplace neutral.”

Burton Kimball sighed. “All right then, how about the hotel dining room over here at the Copper Queen? That won't be all that private, though. But what makes you think she'll agree to come, especially on my say-so?”

“I know Holly,” Harold said. “Once she realizes she is going to win, she won't be able to resist. Tell her to meet me there at six.”

Now it was Burton Kimball's turn to shake his head. “Six is too late. If you're serious about settling out of court, then do it early enough in the afternoon so Judge Moore can remove the case from tomorrow's docket.”

“I am serious,” Harold Patterson returned resolutely. The two men's eyes met and held across the younger man's paper-strewn desk. Burton looked away first.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So you're serious. But you'd better give me some idea of what you have in mind. That way, when I call Holly's attorney, he can decide whether or not it's even worthwhile to get together.”

“I already told you. Everything she asked for. Tell the lawyer that.”

“Uncle Harold,” Burt objected, “you're a better businessman than that. You never start negotiating by giving somebody everything they want. Besides, she's demanding half the ranch.”

Harold Patterson seemed suddenly very interested in the cleanliness of his fingernails. “So?” he asked innocently.

“So what about Ivy?” Burton demanded suddenly, his eyes alight with sparks of anger. “What about the daughter who didn't run away from home? What about the one who stayed on and helped you look after the ranch? The one who took good care of her mother? Is this the thanks she gets?”

Angered, Burton let his voice rise in volume. “And what the hell good is half a damn cattle ranch the size of the Rocking P? Half isn't going to be enough for both of you to make a living or even for Ivy by herself, for that matter. And which half does she get? The part with the house and the well so she'll still have a damn roof over her head? Or does Holly expect her sister to pitch a damn tent somewhere up on Juniper Flats?”

One of the few pleasures Harold Patterson found in being old was the ability to abandon an unpleasant current of conversation in favor of drifting back over the years. When the lines of the present became too harsh and glaring, when he tired of the bright colors and loud noises, he sometimes immersed himself in the cool, dim shadows of the past.

He did it again in that moment. When he looked across Burton's desk, he didn't see an angry forty-five-year-old professional lawyer with a loosened silk tie knotted halfheartedly around his neck or the monogrammed cuffs of the stiffly starched white shirt. What he saw instead was a shirtless, towheaded seven-year-old boy—a barefoot child wearing nothing but a pair of Oshkosh coveralls cut off just above the boy's scrawny knees.

Both of those bare knees were scraped raw and bleeding, as was the boy's nose. There was a deep gouge on his chin, a cut Harold suspected was serious enough to require stitches, one that was likely to result in a permanent scar.

It was summer. The boy and his uncle stood in the cool, gloomy barn. They faced each other in silence while a cloud of sunlit dust motes danced gaily around them. Dangling from the man's hand was a thick, supple leather strap. The boy's fists were clenched. His chin trembled, and tears glistened in his eyes, but his head was unbowed.

“Burtie, your aunt Emily says you won't tell Holly you're sorry you hit her with the rock.”

“That's 'cause I'm not,” Burton Kimball declared fiercely, sniffing and wiping away the trickle of blood that had dribbled over the lump of his swollen upper lip. “If she ever does it again, I'll hit her harder next time.”

Harold Patterson took a deep breath. He wanted desperately to impart this needed lesson to the boy, to make it stick. As his Christian duty, he had taken in his dead sister's orphaned and abandoned son, had taken him to raise, but Harold was
determined Burton not grow up to be like his no-good, worthless father.

“Look, son,” Harold explained patiently. “This is important. It's something you got to learn and understand once and for all. Men don't go around hitting women. Ever. No matter what.”

“Holly was tickling Ivy,” Burtie countered. “She was tickling her, and she wouldn't stop, not even when I asked her nice.”

“Tickling's not bad,” Harold said. “She didn't mean anything by it.”

“Yes, she did, too,” Burton insisted. “Holly did it until it hurt, until Ivy cried, until she peed her pants.”

He blushed then, embarrassed that he knew about Ivy wetting her pants, humiliated by having to talk about it to Uncle Harold, and outraged that Holly had laughed at Ivy, pointing at her muddied garments and calling her a stupid crybaby.

Burton sniffed again, but he straightened his shoulders. “Give me my licking, Uncle Harold,” he said, swallowing hard. “But please don't make me say I'm sorry.”

“Ol' Doc Winters sure did a good job of sewing up your chin that time,” Harold said suddenly, shifting with a time-warping jolt back to the present. “Scar hardly shows at all. Looks more like a dimple. Who's that movie actor? The good-looking one with the dimple?”

“Kirk Douglas,” Burton answered mechanically. “But don't change the subject, Uncle Harold. I want to hear you tell me exactly what you think
will happen to Ivy if you go through with this fruitcake idea.”

“Remember that time I had to give you a licking in the barn after you chucked Holly over the head with a rock?”

“I remember,” Burton Kimball answered grimly.

“You were right back then, you know,” Harold said. “Holly was the one who should have had her butt whupped over that one. I used the strap on you because your aunt Emily insisted, but I didn't hit you all that hard, not as hard as I could've. And here you are, all these years later, still sticking up for Ivy.”

“It seems to me,” said Burton Kimball, “that I shouldn't have to. Her father should be the one looking after her instead of her cousin.”

There was another momentary lull in the conversation.

“I reckon this means I'll have to change my will,” Harold ventured. “I already talked to Milo Davis's girl about changing the beneficiary agreements on my life insurance.”

Maybe, in the interim, Burton Kimball, too, had been caught up in a remembered glimpse of that long-ago scene in the barn; of that determined and unrepentant little boy standing his ground in a swirl of spinning dust motes.

“You're changing the life insurance, too? Dear God in heaven. I don't believe it. What's gotten into you?”

“I've got two daughters,” Harold said. “The way it was set up wasn't fair. One was in; one was out. I've thought about it all week. I'm going
to talk to Holly about settling this thing with the understanding that she'll have half the ranch, and Ivy will have the rest. Beyond that, I'm going to treat 'em fifty-fifty. That's fair.”

Rolling his chair away from the desk, Burton Kimball got up and stalked over to the window. He stared silently out through the glass, studying a sudden burst of sunshine that glinted, blinding and silver, off the still-damp pavement of Main Street.

The relationship between Harold Patterson and Burton Kimball was far more complicated than simply nephew and uncle, lawyer and client. Harold was the only father Burton had ever known. He had been raised and put through school by the unwavering kindness of this stubborn old man. Without Harold's financial support, neither college nor law school would have been possible. Everything Burton Kimball was or owned, he owed to the generosity of this supposedly tough and hard-bitten character.

Burton Kimball had spent most of his forty-five years as Ivy Patterson's champion and protector. The Pattersons had raised all three children in a manner that made them more like brother and sisters than cousins. Burton was five years younger than Holly, and Ivy was ten, but the dynamics of their childhood had always been the same. The two younger children had banded together as small but determined allies, united in their mutual resistance to Holly's constant bullying and torment.

From Burton Kimball's earliest memory, Holly
Patterson had been mean as a snake. Now, some forty years later, the bitch was doing it again, in spades.

And so Burton Kimball found himself standing in front of the window, torn by a lifetime's worth of conflicting loyalties, rocked by disappointment and betrayal. How could he condone a father turning on his own daughter? How could he help Harold Patterson rob Ivy of her birthright?

The plain answer for Burton was that he couldn't. He gave it one last try. “There's nothing fair about it,” he said. “Don't do it. Don't cut Ivy out like this. Holly wants the Rocking P. She doesn't need it. She's got her career. Ivy's different. She's spent her whole life working like a dog on the ranch, and you know it. She's never held a regular job, and I know for a fact that you've never paid a dime's worth of wages or Social Security on her.”

“Holly's broke,” Harold Patterson asserted.

Burton stopped in mid-harangue. “You know that for a fact?”

“She hated Bisbee,” the old man answered. “The only reason she'd come back was if she had to.”

“Uncle Harold,” Burton said evenly. “Are you saying I'm supposed to feel sorry for Holly?”

“You don't know what happened to her,” Harold answered softly. “You don't know any of it.”

“No,” Burton agreed. “You're right. I don't know because you haven't told me, even though I'm your attorney. If anyone ought to know, I should. What
did
happen to Holly, Uncle Harold?”
Burton asked, his voice once more controlled. “Tell me the truth. Let me help you.”

But Harold said nothing. For more than a minute no further word passed between them.

“You won't tell me?” Burton said at last.

“There's nothing to tell.”

Burton swung away from the window then, turned and stared down at the old man who continued to examine the backs of his mottled, liver-spotted hands with the utmost concentration and studied unconcern. And as Burton looked down at his uncle, a slow dawning—an awful realization—washed across him. The younger man's face blanched.

“That's not true, is it,” he said coldly.

“What's not true?” Harold asked.

“That there's nothing to tell.”

Harold looked up at Burton. On his face was an expression of feigned innocence, one that even the most inept juror would have seen right through.

“My God!” Burton whispered. “It did happen, didn't it. Holly's telling the truth! That's why you don't want to go to court. That's why you're suddenly willing to settle. You're afraid people around here—your friends and neighbors, the folks who think Harold Patterson is the salt of the earth—will finally see you for what you are.”