AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, GARTH CLIMBED INTO THE Tahoe and sat with the heater running while he ate the last of the ham sandwiches Grandma Juanita had packed and sent with him for this long, overnight shift. When the sandwich was gone, he polished off the last thermos of coffee, thinking about his grandmother with every sip. She had been the one unwavering presence in his life from the time he was eleven, and she still was.
On that first hunting trip, Garth and Grandpa Jeb never got a deer, but they did the second year, and the year after that, and the one after that as well. There was a guy in town who did the butchering for them, and Grandma Juanita always found ways to cook the venison they brought home, doing so without a word of complaint. Her rule of thumb was as follows: if you aren’t going to eat it, you sure as hell shouldn’t shoot it.
That was one of the interesting things about Grandma Juanita. She went to church every Sunday, but her pewmates would have been surprised to learn that at home she was the one who sometimes dished out the salty language.
When Christmas rolled around that year, Garth’s dad, Cooper Raymond, came to fetch him and take him home to Paradise Valley, except as far as Garth was concerned, Paradise Valley wasn’t home. The friends he’d had before still lived in Tempe, and even when he was able to connect with them, it wasn’t the same. They’d all moved on, and he was an outsider. As for the few kids living in Cooper and Laurie’s new neighborhood? They showed no interest in hooking up with someone who was there visiting for Christmas, especially not a hick who spent most of his time living on a farm in Elfrida.
“Where the hell is Elfrida?” one of the boys had asked him sneeringly. “Is that even in Arizona?”
Well, yes it was.
Being in Paradise Valley and under Laurie’s thumb for two whole weeks felt like being in prison. She treated Garth like he was six instead of twelve. She expected him to be in bed by eight o’clock every night—in bed with no TV—while she and his father did whatever they usually did at night, which obviously included a lot of drinking and partying. At home with Grandpa and Grandma Raymond, everybody went to bed at nine. Laurie fixed him microwavable dinners to eat alone in the kitchen while she and his father ate their dinner at the dining-room table after Garth was tucked away in the “guest” room, and that’s clearly what it was—a guest room. Boxes with his stuff in them, including the clothing he’d outgrown, were stored in the garage. There was no place in the house that had been designated as belonging to him. This was their house—Laurie’s and his father’s house—not his.
During his visit the only time Garth wasn’t under her control was when he woke up in the morning. He was used to getting up early because that’s when Grandpa and Grandma got up. The first time he went downstairs and found his dad drinking coffee at the kitchen counter, Garth had poured a cup for himself.
“Hey,” his father said. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Garth returned. “Grandma Juanita lets me have coffee in the mornings.”
“Yeah,” Cooper Raymond replied with a chuckle. “I suppose she does. She let me start drinking coffee when I was about your age.”
Garth slipped onto the barstool next to his father’s. “How come Laurie doesn’t like me?”
“She’s never had any kids of her own. I don’t think she knows what to do.”
They were quiet for a time. “I don’t like this house,” Garth said. “It’s too big. I liked our old house better.”
“That was Mom’s house,” his father said. “This is Laurie’s.”
“How come there’s no carpet? There’s carpet in Grandma’s house.”
“Laurie likes tile. I like tile.”
But you don’t like me, Garth remembered thinking.
For the next two weeks, he savored those early-morning hours when he was alone—after his dad left for work and before Laurie finally came out of the bedroom and started bossing him around. He walked the hilly, winding streets of Paradise Valley. They were all paved. The streets back home in Elfrida were mostly dirt. And that’s where he wanted to be—back home with Grandpa and Grandma.
That was the only year Garth went to Paradise Valley for Christmas. Although his father was conscientious about sending monthly checks to cover Garth’s upkeep, he came to Elfrida to visit on increasingly rare occasions, and when he stopped by, he never stayed long. From more than two hundred miles away, Laurie was still running the show, because, Garth realized now, his father had been pussy-whipped—he had always been pussy-whipped.
“I don’t know why he never takes Garth home with him,” Grandma Juanita grumbled to her husband one night after their son left Elfrida to drive back to Phoenix. “That’s where he belongs.”
“He says Laurie doesn’t like kids and she isn’t good with them,” Grandpa Jeb had replied.
“That’s a bunch of bull crap,” Grandma Juanita snapped. “Since Coop already had a son when he met her, he should have figured that out before he ever married that awful woman.”
Of course, Grandma Juanita never said anything like that directly to Garth. She and Grandpa had been having a quiet conversation in the privacy of their bedroom. Garth, sitting in the room next door, had overheard the remark and couldn’t have agreed more. Obviously, Garth didn’t like Laurie, either. That made them even, he supposed, and he was grateful for being able to stay on with his grandparents, with people who actually did like him.
He had graduated from Elfrida Elementary and gone on to Valley Union High School. Grandpa Jeb doted on his grandson, and Garth returned the favor. More than simply loving the older man, Garth respected him. His grandfather was a farmer, someone who lived close to the earth, and it was hardly surprising that Garth had planned on following in Grandpa Jeb’s footsteps.
Garth got involved in 4-H his first year at Elfrida Elementary. By the time he was a senior at Valley Union High, he was president of Future Farmers of America. As far as academics were concerned, Garth was an excellent student, if not the top one. A Mormon girl named Anna Lee Smith beat him out as valedictorian, but being named salutatorian was enough to win him a full-ride scholarship to the University of Arizona. Garth’s father had majored in business and become a CPA. Wanting a major as far away from his father’s as possible, Garth signed on to study agriculture.
All that changed at the end of his sophomore year. Grandpa Jeb was out repairing a fence line one afternoon late in May when he’d been attacked by a marauding pair of UDAs, border crossers from Mexico, who had beaten him to a bloody pulp and left him to die before driving off in the old man’s pickup. When her husband failed to come home at dinnertime, Juanita went looking for him. She found him lying near death and summoned help. He was airlifted to University Hospital in Tucson, where doctors worked feverishly to save him.
Grandpa Jeb was hospitalized in the ICU for the better part of three weeks, but he never fully recovered. When it came time to release him from the ICU, the doctors had given Juanita two grim choices, suggesting that she transfer him either to a nursing home or else to a brick-and-mortar hospice facility. Disregarding their advice, Grandma Juanita had elected to take her Jebbie home.
Back in the Sulphur Springs Valley, neighbors and friends from church had rallied around the Raymonds, taking turns bringing food and taking care of chores while Grandma Juanita and Garth, out of school on summer break, looked after Grandpa. Cooper and Laurie had made several brief appearances, staying long enough to murmur a few trite words of compassion, but without lifting a hand or offering to do any of the hard work that goes with actual caregiving.
Over the years Grandma Juanita had never knowingly said anything disparaging about either her son or his wife in Garth’s presence. Coop and Laurie had enough good sense to stay in a motel in Douglas when they came to visit, but when they dropped by the house, they expected to be treated as honored guests, showing up at mealtimes and never seeing a need to do any of the cleanup afterward.
One day by the time they finally departed for Paradise Valley, Grandma Juanita had been pushed to the end of her endurance. She’d been washing the lunchtime dishes with Garth wiping them dry when she finally lost it.
“That no-good son of mine is worthless as teats on a boar hog,” she had muttered fiercely, “and that wife of his is even worse. How dare she come around here sneering because we don’t have a dishwasher!”
Then, much to Garth’s surprise, Grandma Juanita burst into tears. It was the first and only time he’d ever seen her cry. Putting down his towel, he gathered her into his arms and held her while she sobbed against his chest.
“I didn’t raise your father to be like that,” she said at last, straightening up. “I raised him to be a good boy, and look how he turned out.”
“How Cooper Raymond turned out is his fault not yours,” Garth had told her. “Definitely not yours!”
Once back at home, Jebediah required round-the-clock care. The double bed the couple had shared during most of their married life was banished to a shed outside and replaced by a more functional hospital bed. Grandma Juanita had decamped to the bedroom that had always been Garth’s, while he was reduced to bunking on the sofa in the living room.
One night when Grandma Juanita was taking the night shift, Garth ventured into the room to see how she was doing. He found her sitting next to her husband’s bed with an open volume of the World Book resting on her lap—volume A, as it turned out. Afraid the book might fall off her lap and land on her foot, Garth attempted to remove it without disturbing her. Naturally, that didn’t work. She jerked awake and then held the book to her breast as though fearing that he might tear it away from her.
“Have you started reading this, too?” he asked.
“I’m reading it to him aloud,” Grandma Juanita said. “I’m not sure if he can hear me. I hope so.”
Garth had hoped so, too. After that, whenever it was his turn to stand watch, he located Grandma’s bookmark and he read aloud, too. These days after he got off shift, that tradition continued. Not every night, but often, when it was time to go to bed, he’d read a page or two as well, reading silently now rather than aloud. He was currently halfway through volume C.
When it came time to schedule Grandpa Jeb’s funeral, there was no question that it would be held at Elfrida’s First Baptist Church, where Jeb and Juanita had both been lifelong members, and on the day of Jebediah Raymond’s funeral everybody in town turned out, packing the small white church to overflowing.
Cooper and Laurie were in attendance, of course, but when the service was over, Garth was the one Grandma Juanita asked to escort her down the aisle and outside to the waiting hearse. They were standing there in an unofficial receiving line, greeting people and waiting for the pallbearers to bring out the casket, when a tiny red-haired woman wearing a khaki uniform with a badge on the shirt appeared in front of them. A name tag identified her as Sheriff Joanna Brady.
Garth recognized the name, if not the person. In the aftermath of Grandpa Jeb’s death and while working on his grandmother’s behalf, he had dealt with any number of people from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department—with deputies and detectives—but not with the sheriff herself.
“Why, Sheriff Brady,” Grandma Juanita said, extending her hand in welcome. “I didn’t see you inside. It’s very kind of you to come.”
“I came to tell you that we got them,” Sheriff Brady announced. “Our BOLO on your husband’s pickup got a hit on a vehicle parked at a motel in DeKalb County, Georgia, yesterday afternoon. This morning an arrest team of U.S. Marshals picked them up. The killers are being held in the county lockup in Decatur, Georgia. Arlee Jones, the county attorney, is currently initiating extradition procedures. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thank you for coming to tell us in person,” Grandma Juanita said. “That was very kind.”
“It’s my job,” Sheriff Brady had said. “It’s what the people of this county trust me to do.”
That small act of kindness on Joanna Brady’s part had stayed with Garth Raymond from then on, and it was one of the reasons, when school started back up in the fall, he changed his major over from the College of Agriculture to criminal justice. The other reason was the relatively swift and successful outcome of the case.
Because Grandpa Jeb had died during the commission of a felony—grand theft auto—the county attorney had charged both assailants with first-degree homicide. Faced with the possibility of a death-sentence conviction, they had seen fit to accept plea bargains of life without the possibility of parole. The agreement took lethal injection off the table, but it also denied them the right to initiate any future appeals of their respective sentences.
Originally, since the stolen pickup had been regarded as evidence in a possible homicide trial, it had been transported from Georgia back to the county impound lot at the Justice Center near Bisbee. Once Grandpa Jeb’s killers were shipped off to the state prison in Florence, and with all further criminal proceedings canceled, the county attorney determined there was no longer any reason to continue holding the vehicle. The pickup was returned to Grandma Juanita, who promptly handed it over to Garth.
Given all that, it was hardly surprising that Grandpa Jeb’s murder had changed the course of Garth’s life and set him on his current path, one that had him spending this bitterly cold night out in the wilds, pacing up and down the roadway beside a field of bones. And because of that long-ago hunting trip, he spent most of that night thinking about Jebediah and Juanita Raymond, the people who’d raised him and nurtured him when his own father had turned away.
The traumatic events of that summer had forced Garth to grow up fast. In a matter of days, he was transformed from a carefree college kid without a care in the world to the man in his grandmother’s household. Between then and the time school started, Garth did most of the chores around the place. In advance of going off to school, he helped his grandmother look for and find a suitable hired hand. And once school started back up, he came home almost every weekend to help out and make sure things stayed on track.
Within three months of Grandpa Jeb’s death, Garth’s father turned up with a ready buyer for Juanita’s farm and a plan to move her out of her home and into an assisted-living facility in Mesa, where, as Coop assured her, he and Laurie would be able to keep an eye on her. Not wanting to be bullied, Grandma Juanita had turned to Garth for help. Garth, too, could see that running the farm on her own was too much for Grandma Juanita, but he also discerned that his stepmother’s money-grubbing ways were behind his father’s scheme to move Grandma to Mesa. Not only did Garth want to keep his grandmother from being dumped in among a bunch of strangers, he also wanted to help preserve her nest egg and maintain her independence.
To that end, although Garth might have changed his major over to criminal justice, he still had a few connections inside the College of Agriculture. One of his former professors was intimately involved with the burgeoning winemaking industry developing in southeastern Arizona. The professor put Garth in touch with an ambitious young vintner who was willing to pay almost double the lowball offer from the buyer Coop had located.
It wasn’t until the day of the scheduled closing that Cooper Raymond learned of his son’s successful end run around him. Furious, he had shown up uninvited at the title company’s office, barging into the meeting fully intent on getting Juanita to back out of the deal. When Coop started berating his mother in public, Garth grabbed his father by the arm and bodily escorted him from the office.
“You’re behind all this, aren’t you!” Cooper snarled accusingly, bristling with anger. “You’re the one who got her to go with this deal instead of the one I found for her. How dare you pull an underhanded stunt like that?”
Standing under a warm October sun, staring into each other’s eyes, Garth suddenly saw his father in an entirely new light. They’d never been close, not even when Garth’s mother was alive. As a child Garth had regarded his somewhat distant father with a certain amount of awe. Cooper Raymond was a smooth operator, a sophisticated businessman who presented himself as the ultimate professional. Now Garth realized that entire persona was a fraud designed to smooth over who and what his father really was—a small-minded, weak-willed man who leaped to do his grasping wife’s bidding.
For a long time, father and son stood there in a silent eyeball to eyeball stalemate. Back when Garth was a kid and his father had lit into him for some infraction or another, he remembered thinking, Just wait until I get big and you get little. And now that very thing had happened. Garth was a good two inches taller than his father, and years of hefting bales of hay and helping on the farm had made all the difference. He was taller and heavier than his father now and could easily have whipped his ass.
For a time it seemed likely that the situation might deteriorate into a physical confrontation. Instead, after several tense moments, Garth took a careful backward step. “You know what, Coop?” he said. “It was easy.” With that he turned and walked away.
“Don’t you turn your back on me!” Cooper raged after him. “And don’t you go calling me by my first name, either. I’m your father, damn it. Show a little respect!”
Just outside the door to the office, Garth’s forward progress came to an abrupt stop.
“Respect?” he demanded, spinning back around. “Are you kidding me? If I’d had a shred of respect left for you, it would have evaporated the moment you charged into this office and started yelling at your mother. And as far as being my father is concerned? Forget about it. That ended about the same time you brought me down here and dumped me off on your parents’ doorstep. So good-bye, Cooper. May you rot in hell, and don’t let the car door hit you in the ass.”
With Cooper Raymond no longer the middle of it, the real-estate transaction had moved forward without a hitch. Proceeds from the sale of the farm had paid off the remainder of the medical bills from Jebediah’s three-week stay in the ICU with enough left over to allow Juanita to pay cash for a small two-bedroom home inside Elfrida proper, where she could live out her days in the same community that had always been her home.
The sun was well up, and Garth was back in the Tahoe warming his feet again when a marked patrol car, another SUV, pulled up behind his and flashed the light bar. Moments later a uniformed deputy tapped on the window, and Garth rolled it down.
“Deputy Hernandez,” the new arrival announced. “You about ready to head home? I’m your relief.”
“Thanks,” Garth said, handing over the satphone “Nothing much happened overnight.”
“That’ll change,” Hernandez said. “I’ve heard there’s going to be a big push today. Everybody will be canvassing the area looking for leads. If you want more overtime, I’d go home, get myself some shut-eye, and then turn up later to help out. According to the lieutenant, it’s gonna be all hands on deck.”
“Good advice,” Garth told him. “I’m on my way.”