Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

“The security guard said it would be okay if I waited for you,” she said, standing. I gave her a hug and we both sat down. “I also brought that in, it was in front of your door.” I opened the FedEx box and loose files cascaded out across my increasingly messy desk. It was from a graduate school friend who now taught environmental law at the University of Arizona, and he had promised to send me copies of his files on the battle over the Yarnell mine in Superior.

“Sorry this place is kind of a mess,” I said. “I’m behind.”

“It has real charm,” she smiled. “I do love the big windows.”

“I bought you a Christmas present,” I said. “But I have to wrap it.”

We sat enveloped in the long silence of high-ceilinged rooms. I hadn’t seen Sharon since Thanksgiving. Today, she was turned out smartly in a charcoal pinstripe pant suit, set off with a simple, crew-neck white blouse. Phoenicians don’t know how to dress. Sharon is an exception.

“So how is he?”

I leaned back in my chair and told her he was all right. How could you tell with Peralta?

“I assumed he’d come to you,” she said, clasping her hands over a slender knee.

That silence again. I started to say something about not wanting to be caught in the middle of a battle between my two oldest friends in the world. But she beat me to the verbal draw.

“So how’s your mystery?”

Was this how she relaxed her patients? “Getting better,” I lied. “We know now those skeletons we found were Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell.”

“Seems like a long time ago,” she said, her voice different, losing a little of its high sheen. She sighed. “How’s Lindsey?”

“She left me,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. Overshare.

“Maybe it’s the season. She was probably a transitional affair, anyway, David. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you know.”

I looked into the desktop. “How are you?”

She made a stretching move with her head, making her lustrous black hair wave about. Sharon never touched her hair when she was nervous.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with him?” she said, speaking quickly. “I mean, really live with him. It’s not like he beats me or is really emotionally abusive. But he’s just like this supernova of a personality, and underneath it’s really needy, incredibly needy. But it’s not like the need can ever be met.”

Then she suddenly stopped. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’m not trying to involve you in our troubles.”

“It’s delicate. I care about you both.”

She watched me with large, dark eyes. “I’m not seeking your approval.”

Bam! That one landed in my lap. Later, I would think of all sorts of witty comebacks for this conversation, but for now all I could manage was a mute awkwardness.

“Do you know how long we’ve known each other?” she asked. “You and I?”

“Twenty years?”

“Twenty years, David Mapstone. In that time, I put myself through school, raised two daughters, who turned into people I admire. I built a practice, learned to appreciate jazz from you, taught myself Navajo sand painting. I wrote a book. I faced down my fears.”

She was off on the kind of riff that marital discord breeds; I’d been there. But it’s true that Sharon had made the most amazing transformation from the first time I met her as Mike’s shy, working-class wife to the role model she is today.

She stopped, then added. “He hasn’t changed at all.”

I let it lie in the silence between us like a wounded soldier in no-man’s land. It was true.

Then she said, in a voice merry with ironic self-knowledge, “How does it feel to be ad hoc counselor to Dr. Sharon?”

“I wouldn’t presume,” I ventured gallantly, failing.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t.” She looked at me with something unreadable and incendiary in the large, dark eyes.

So I told her about the Yarnells, the family curse and the secret covenant. Then I told her about Max Yarnell. I told her about the attempt on James Yarnell. I told her about Jack Talbott’s death row statement that never made it into the newspapers.

“This family is hiding so much,” Sharon said. “From you, from each other.”

“Is that a professional opinion?”

“It’s my opinion,” she said. “There’s something dangerous, something treacherous hiding in all this.”

“I know,” I said, but I didn’t know. “Why would somebody leave a doll at a murder scene, with his hands bloody?”

“The message isn’t subtle. The killer thinks the victim has bloody hands. It’s vengeance. Or maybe it’s a childhood issue out of the killer’s life. I’m not a criminal psychologist.”

“And an identical doll was left here in my office, without the bloody hands.”

“David, good lord. This is a disturbed person, if the murder itself wasn’t enough to tell you that.”

I asked her not to tell anyone about the dolls, which was information held back from the press. Then I realized I might be sounding like her husband.

“So tell me how David is doing. Just working?”

“I’m fine, Sharon. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Everything is kind of chaotic right now.”

“New love interest?”

“I don’t know.” Why was I hedging? Was I afraid she would tell Lindsey? Why would I be afraid of that? She never would even run into Lindsey. What did it matter if Lindsey found out?

“So is this the life you’re going to live?” she asked, in another tone of voice, higher, more detached. “David among his old paper records and his old cases, living his life between his ears.”

“Between my ears?”

“You have your nice house in Willo, and your little twenty-something sex machine-or you’ll find another one. You’ll cruise through your forties having affairs and witty friendships, reading books and working for the sheriff as a media celebrity.”

“I’m not…” I protested, but the words didn’t follow.

“You don’t want to venture anything,” she said. “Not after Patty. And you think you’ve found a little island of emotional safety where you won’t have to.”

“What is this about?”

“What do you want?”

I stammered the stammer of the invaded.

“No, dammit,” she said. “Don’t give some politically correct answer. What do you, David Mapstone, want? David Mapstone who has no family, no offspring, and is all alone in the world?”

We stared at each other. She went on, “You’re at the age where if you don’t know that answer, you’re going to ruin the lives of a lot of women.” The last word echoed through the old sheriff’s office and dissipated in the ceiling.

Then, she said, “Sorry, David. I’m all wound up. Mike always found me too intense, so he worked all the time so he wouldn’t have to deal with me.”

“God, I don’t know, Sharon,” I said finally. “I want to keep you both in my life. You know very well I can’t fix whatever’s wrong between you…”

“Like the fact that he hasn’t touched me in five years.”

“I don’t need to know this,” I said reflexively.

“What are you afraid of?”

I thought about that, wrestled down the words flying through my mind, then, “I’m afraid I’ll lose you both.”

She looked at me a long time in silence, an expression on her face I had never seen before.

“I hope that doesn’t happen,” she said quietly and rose to leave. “Please make sure he takes his medicine,” she went on. “He has diabetes, you know.”

I didn’t know.

“He controls it orally,” she said. “Don’t let him cook too much. He cooks bad things for himself.”

I followed her as she walked to the office door, her heels snapping precisely against the old hardwood floor.