Devil's Claw (16 page)

“Briefly,” Joanna said. “She was out here at the ranch yesterday afternoon. When we came home from Tucson. Her limo was stuck in my wash. The driver had to call Triple A to come pull it out.”

“Did she say anything to you?” Burton Kimball asked.

“She seemed upset. She said something to the effect that I had killed her father by working him into the grave. She asked me about the status of the investigation. I told her that since Dr. Winfield had ruled Clayton dead of natural causes, there wasn’t going to be any investigation. As soon as she heard that, she went off on a wild tirade about George Winfield having a conflict of interest in the case, but I didn’t think anything of it. I chalked it up to her being overwrought. In situations like that, people end up saying all kinds of things they don’t really mean.”

“I believe she meant it, all right,” Burton Kimball said softly. “She meant every word. After the will was read, she threw a fit. She ranted and raged and said that she’d had her suspicions, but now she was sure you had murdered her father and that George Winfield was helping you by covering it up.”

“Mom,” Jenny insisted. “What’s going on?”

Joanna waved her to silence. “You don’t think she’s serious, do you?”

“Unfortunately, I do,” Burton replied. “Now how can I get you that letter? You need to know what’s in it. Should I bring it out to the house?”

“No,” Joanna said quickly. “We’ll be coming to town in a little while. We can stop by and pick it up on our way to church. Where will you be?”

“Linda and the kids are going off to church themselves,” Burton said. “How about if I meet you uptown at my office. Say, forty-five minutes?”

Joanna looked down at her untouched bowlful of Malt-o-Meal that, without the benefit of milk and brown sugar, had now cooled and congealed into a hard gray lump. “Give us an hour,” she said. “That’s the soonest we can be there.”

Two hours later, Joanna was sitting in a pew in Canyon United Methodist Church, while her pastor and best friend, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, read the morning’s scripture. Pregnant women are supposed to glow. That was especially true for Marianne, who was in the last stages of a long-sought but unexpected pregnancy. Her face was alight as she read the passage from Deuteronomy 30:19. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.”

For years Joanna had sung in the church choir, but the countervailing pressures of work and single-motherhood had eventually made regular attendance at weekly practice sessions an impossibility. Sitting in the choir loft behind the minister, it had been necessary to remain both awake and properly attentive.

Now, though, seated discreetly in the fifth pew back, Joanna paid scant attention to Marianne’s sermon for the day, “Choose Life!” Instead, she was preoccupied with her own set of issues. Most of Joanna’s wool-gathering focused on the letter in her purse, one Clayton Rhodes had laboriously written in ink in a spidery, old-fashioned scrawl. The letter had been dated barely two months earlier.

Joanna’s eyes had blurred with tears as she finished reading the text of the letter. After that, Burton Kimball had read aloud the applicable passages in Clayton Rhodes’ will. Since being given the letter, Joanna had read it through only twice—once in Burton Kimball’s office and presence, and again, aloud, when she returned to the Outback, where Butch and Jenny were waiting. Even so, sitting there in the church pew, Joanna could have recited the entire letter from memory. The words were etched on her heart.

“He can’t mean this” was the first thing Joanna had said to Burton.

“He meant it all right,” the attorney had returned calmly.

“But what about Reba? She’s his daughter, after all.”

“She’s also a complete bitch, if you’ll pardon the expression,” Burton said. “The will was properly drawn and witnessed a year and a half ago. And, as I told you on the phone, it isn’t as though she’ll be left with nothing. After taxes, she’ll still have a fair chunk of cash which, as far as I can tell, is all she’s interested in anyway.”

“A year and a half,” Joanna echoed. “But the letter is dated . . .”

“There was another letter,” Burton Kimball said kindly. “One that was written at the time we drew up the will. Clayton threw that one away and wrote this one after you and Butch Dixon announced your engagement. He told me he didn’t want Butch to feel left out. This isn’t in the letter, but Clayton told me he thought Butch was a fine young man. I guess the two of them had a long talk about the advisability of removing mesquite and trying to reintroduce native grasses.”

Joanna nodded. “It is something we’ve talked about, but there didn’t seem to be much point to doing it on a paltry little forty acres.”

Burton Kimball smiled. “Now you’ll have three hundred and sixty. That’ll be a lot more work.” The lawyer paused and smiled. “By the way,” he added, “congratulations from Linda, and me as well. On your engagement, that is. When’s the big day?”

“Next Saturday.”

“Well, then. I’m sure Clayton would be happy to know that he’s giving the two of you a terrific wedding present. The place will have to be appraised. The IRS will want us to establish current market value for estate-tax purposes. And, of course, that valuation will give you an official basis in the property should you later decide to sell it.”

“What about the will?” Joanna asked. “Is it contestable?”

Burton’s smile disappeared abruptly. “Every will is contestable if someone wants to go to the trouble, that is. However, Clayton stipulated that all costs related to contesting the will are to be deducted from the cash portion of the proceeds. In other words, if Reba tries to go against the will, she’ll have to pay her attorney’s expenses and mine as well. That’s assuming, of course, that you want me to handle it. That would also apply to the expenses of any other attorney you might choose to represent you.”

“Is that why Reba thinks I murdered her father?” Joanna asked. “State law dictates that people found guilty of killing someone aren’t allowed to profit from their actions. If she can somehow cast enough suspicion on me, she’ll be able to destroy the will without actually having to contest it.”

Burton Kimball sighed and nodded. “Let me remind you that I’m also a damned fine defense attorney, but that is what I meant when I warned you that she might make trouble.”

And now, as Joanna sat in church not listening to the sermon, that was what she was worried about, too. Clayton Rhodes had probably been dead for several hours when she had found him in his exhaust-filled garage, but she had had no way of knowing that at the time. She hadn’t been worried about preserving evidence when she smashed a hole in the door to get inside. She hadn’t been wearing gloves or worrying about leaving a trail of fingerprints when she reached in through the driver’s window to turn off the ignition key. She had been intent on saving the man’s life.

Unfortunately, her fingerprints would be found there, and they wouldn’t be wear-dated. If Reba set out to do so, she might be able to make the case that the prints had been placed on Clayton Rhodes’ ignition key long before he died rather than after. The idea that Sheriff Joanna Brady herself could turn into a homicide suspect should have been laughable. It might have been, if it hadn’t been so scary.

“Therefore choose life,” Marianne was saying from the pulpit. “Choose it for yourself and for your children. Choose it with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. Because it’s how you choose life now that determines both the now and the hereafter. If you can’t choose this simple living and breathing life, how will you choose eternal life? Because they go hand in hand, you see. It’s like what that old fifties song says about love and marriage,” she added, aiming a beaming smile in Joanna and Butch’s direction. “You can’t have one without the other. Therefore choose life. Let us bow our heads in prayer.”

With his shaven head glowing deep-red, Butch reached over and folded Joanna’s hand in his. “I told you we should have sat in the back row,” he muttered under his breath.

After the closing hymn, Butch and Joanna went hand in hand as they worked their way down the center aisle to where the Reverend Marianne Maculyea and her husband, Jeff Daniels, stood greeting attendees. Wanting to have a private word with her best friend, Joanna stalled long enough to be last in line.

Once Marianne’s early bouts of pregnancy-related nausea had finally subsided, she had gone on to have an uneventful and so-far uncomplicated pregnancy. Because Marianne would be officiating at the wedding, Butch and Joanna had set the ceremony for early April so as not to conflict with the baby’s due date. The wedding was now less than a week away. According to Dr. Thomas Lee, Marianne’s attending physician, the baby was expected in three.

Finished with shaking hands at the door, Marianne stood with one hand massaging her sore back and with the other resting on a belly so swollen that it left a telltale shelf protruding beneath her clerical vestments. With a squeal of joy, Jeff and Marianne’s adopted three-year-old daughter, Ruth, escaped the nursery attendant and slipped under her mother’s robe for a game of peekaboo with whoever happened to be nearby. As the last of the congregation headed for the fellowship hall and coffee hour, Jeff captured Ruth, scooped the squirming child into his arms, and carried her downstairs. Butch and Jenny followed, leaving Joanna and Marianne with a rare moment of relative peace and privacy.

Always attuned to what was going on with other people, Marianne gave Joanna a searching look. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You seemed pretty distracted during the service.”

“What makes you say that?” Joanna countered.

Marianne smiled. “Because you missed not one but two of the in-crowd jokes I put in the sermon especially for you. What’s going on?”

“Clayton Rhodes died and left me his place in his will,” Joanna blurted.

Surprise washed over Marianne’s face. “The whole thing?”

Joanna nodded.

“What about his daughter?” Marianne asked.

“I talked to Burton Kimball on the way to church this morning. According to him, she’s not a happy camper. She may go so far as to try to accuse me of murdering her father.”

Marianne’s gray eyes turned dark and stormy. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am. Dead serious.”

Marianne took a deep breath. “We need to get together and talk about this. We should also discuss any last-minute hitches or glitches in wedding plans. What are you and Butch and Jenny doing this afternoon?”

“Cleaning house,” Joanna replied. “My new mother-in-law shows up tomorrow, remember? We’re doing the oven, cabinets, closets—the whole bit.”

“I have an idea,” Marianne suggested. “I was supposed to have a steering-committee meeting this afternoon, but it’s been canceled. Before you and Butch go tear into your house, how about if we all meet at Daisy’s for lunch as soon as coffee hour is over? I’ll con Jenny into looking after Ruth, and that way maybe the four of us will have a moment or two to think straight.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Joanna replied with a laugh. “I’m sure Butch will agree to anything that will delay working on the oven that much longer.”

Joanna had barely set foot inside the fellowship hall when she was pounced upon by Marliss Shackleford, who had clearly been waiting just inside the door. It was an unfortunate piece of small-town life that both Sheriff Brady and her fourth-estate nemesis attended the same church—one which both of them refused to leave. Usually Joanna managed to avoid Marliss. This time she was trapped.

“It sounds as though you’ve had a busy few days of it,” Marliss began sweetly enough. “It’s too bad about what happened to Clayton. I know he’s been such a help to you all this time. How are you and Jenny managing without him?”

“We’re doing all right,” Joanna said stiffly.

“And then, of course, you do have Butch. I understand he’s something of a city slicker, but he seems bright enough.”

“He is trainable,” Joanna returned. “Just barely.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that he wasn’t.”

Of course, you didn’t,
Joanna thought. “Of course not,” she said aloud.

“Have you spoken to Reba Singleton yet?” Marliss asked. “Clayton’s daughter? She’s in town, you know.”

“We touched base,” Joanna said. “That’s about all.”

“
The Bee
is trying to set up an interview for me with her. Molly and Clayton Rhodes were such old-timers around here that Clayton should get more than just the standard, run-of-the-mill obituary. It’s a little out of my usual line of work, but I told my editor I’d be glad to write the piece for them. I’m sure Reba will be able to give me all sorts of insights into the kind of person her father was.”

Great,
Joanna thought.
That’s just what I need. The poisoned daughter being interviewed by the original poisoned pen.