AS THE LONG HOURS TICKED BY, DEPUTY GARTH RAYMOND KNEW that guarding a crime scene in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere was grunt work, but he didn’t mind and was glad to do it. At least he had a job—a real paying job. Some of the guys and gals he’d graduated with last spring were still looking for work, hoping to get hired by one of the bigger departments, where the pay would be better than out in the boondocks. Not Garth. He had wanted to be back home, living and working in Cochise County, and he was happy with the pittance he was earning as a newly hired deputy in Sheriff Joanna Brady’s department.
The money wasn’t good, but Garth didn’t need much. For one thing, as long as he lived at home in Elfrida with his grandmother, he didn’t have to pay rent. After his grandfather’s death, he had inherited Grandpa Jeb’s elderly Silverado pickup, which still ran like a top. That meant Garth didn’t have a car payment, either. When he was on duty and out on patrol, he traveled the county in the department’s oldest and junkiest Tahoe, which he was able to drive home when he went off shift. So even though his take-home pay was low, he was nonetheless making good inroads on paying down his college loans.
Working in Cochise County allowed him to keep an eye on his widowed grandmother. The fact that Juanita Raymond refused to charge him rent was a side benefit, but he was determined to look after her. She was spry and in good health, but that might not always be the case, and since Grandma Juanita had looked after him for the past dozen years, Garth wanted to be there to return the favor should she need the help. None of that would have made sense to his unemployed classmates up in Tucson, but it made sense to him.
It was a cold, clear night, with uncountable stars glittering against a velvet black sky. Chief Deputy Hadlock had left the satphone with him, just in case, but he’d had no occasion to use it because nothing at all had happened. Some other officers might have been tempted to do a half-assed job by spending the night dozing inside the Tahoe. That wasn’t for Garth. Staying awake was easier if he was outside, so he spent most of the time actively patrolling the area, walking back and forth along the shoulder of the road next to the crime scene. He had hand warmers in the pockets of his jacket, and those helped. Only when his feet got too cold did he climb into his vehicle again, fire it up, and leave it idling with the heater on high long enough for his feet to thaw out.
About midnight a double-curved moon peeked out from behind the Peloncillos. As soon as he saw it, he was transported back to the first time he’d ever visited this small mountain range that straddles the Arizona–New Mexico border. It had been during white-tail season, and he had come here with Grandpa Jeb.
They’d camped out near a blazing fire on a late-October night similar to this one but not nearly as cold. Garth was twelve years old at the time, and it had been his first-ever hunting trip. They were curled up in their sleeping bags next to the fire when a moon just like this one made an appearance.
“What you’re seeing right there is what they call a gibbous moon,” Grandpa Jeb had said, pointing.
“A what?” Garth asked.
“Gibbous means more than half the moon is showing. It could be waxing or waning right now—hard to tell. ‘Gibbous’ comes from an old English word that means ‘humpbacked.’ And that’s what they call moons like this in the book I’m reading—gibbous.”
At the time Garth’s mother, Betsy, hadn’t been dead for very long, but what he remembered most about her was that she’d been sick for years and in and out of the hospital more often than he could count. “Cancer” was a word that was mentioned in hushed tones in their household, but only when Garth was thought to be out of earshot. His mother’s mother, Grandma Peggy, had come to live with them early on, taking care of Garth when his mother was in the hospital and looking after both him and her daughter when Betsy was home.
Other kids had mothers who drove them to school and volunteered for the PTA and showed up at soccer games. In Garth’s reality Grandma Peggy did the driving while his mother lived out her days in a hospital bed set up in what should have been the family room of their home in Tempe, Arizona. To Garth’s way of thinking, that was how things were and how they would always be—with his father working, Grandma Peggy looking after the house, and his mother lying in the bed watching TV. Except that didn’t happen. His mother died, and everything changed.
For a while things seemed to be the same. Grandma Peggy stayed on and made sure the household ran smoothly. That only worked until Laurie Magnussen appeared on the scene. Garth’s mother had been ill most of his life, but she had also been naturally quiet and reserved. There was nothing quiet about Laurie. She was younger than his father. She was blond, loud, bossy, and flamboyant—from the tips of her brightly lacquered fingernails to the toes of her very high-heeled shoes. She had walked into his father’s life and assumed total control.
Now that Garth was older, he saw Laurie for what she was—a gold digger who’d been looking for a free ride. Once she was ensconced in her new husband’s house, after a surprisingly hasty courtship, her first order of business had been to get rid of Grandma Peggy. Laurie had declared war on the older woman, and it was only a matter of months before her incessant harping and constant criticism drove his grandmother out of their lives.
On the night of that first hunting trip, it had been five months since Garth’s father and Laurie had effectively exiled him from their lives by shipping him off to his grandparents’ farm near Elfrida. The original plan—at least the stated plan—had been for him to stay there over the summer while Laurie and his father finished remodeling their new place in Paradise Valley and got settled in. Somehow, once summer ended and it was time for school to start, the decision had been made—without any input from Garth himself—that he should stay on in Elfrida. Grandma Juanita had promptly enrolled him in Elfrida Elementary School, and that was that.
When his father drove him down from Phoenix, Garth had fully expected to hate being stuck on the farm. He was sure he’d be bored to death, thinking he would miss his friends, his video games, and his skateboard. Instead he spent the whole summer tagging along after Grandpa Jeb, who in short order taught him how to drive a tractor, plow a straight line, stack hay, and run the irrigation system, all the while feeding the boy little nuggets of wisdom.
Garth’s twelfth birthday came along in mid-July. That evening after supper, once Garth had blown out the candles on his birthday cake, Grandpa Jeb had gone to his gun rack, taken down a polished .22 rifle—an old Remington—and presented it to his grandson.
“My old man gave me this on my twelfth birthday,” Jeb had said, handing it over. “I’m giving it to you on the condition that you promise to take care of it and learn to handle it properly. If you do enough target practice between now and then, once white-tail season rolls around in October, we’ll go hunting.”
“Hunting?” Garth had repeated, barely believing what he’d just heard. “For reals?”
“For reals,” Grandpa Jeb had replied.
Under his grandfather’s supervision, Garth learned how to clean and load the weapon. Over the next couple of months, hours of target practice more than filled the void in Garth’s life created by the absence of both his skateboard and his video games. And now here they were—hunting. The first day out, they’d seen several does but no bucks.
“That’s okay,” Grandpa Jeb had said. “If you’re gonna hunt or fish, you need to pack along plenty of food and a full load of patience.”
That night Garth lay on the hard-packed earth staring up at the rising moon. “How’d you know about gibbous moons?” he asked. “How come you know so much stuff?”
“I read about it,” Grandpa Jeb said. In the months Garth had lived in Elfrida, the only books he’d seen Grandpa Jeb reading out in the living room at night had been the King James Bible and the Farmers’ Almanac. Garth was pretty sure neither one of those had anything to say about gibbous moons.
“I found it in your grandmother’s World Book Encyclopedia,” Grandpa Jeb replied.
“You mean those red-and-gold books on the shelf in your bedroom?”
“That’s right,” Grandpa Jeb said. “Those are the ones. Grandma picked them up at a church rummage sale a year or so ago. I’d always felt stupid because I never graduated from high school, but your grandmother’s a wise woman. ‘Jebbie,’ she says to me, ‘you don’t have to have a high-school diploma in order to get an education. If you read a page or two of this every night, you’ll be more educated than most of those tomfool, hotshot kids graduating from college these days.’ So that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, reading a page or two every night just before bedtime. I do my learning reading then, in hopes some of it will maybe soak into the old gray cells overnight.”
“You read a page a night?”
“Thereabouts—sometimes more, sometimes less.”
“How far are you?”
“I’m at the beginning of the N’s now,” Grandpa Jeb said. “Just finished the M’s a couple of days ago. That’s where I read all about the moon. And gibbous is one of those things that stuck with me.”
Ever since it had stuck with Jebediah Raymond’s grandson as well.