That’s easy, Joanna thought. To point a finger at someone else. At Hal Morgan.

One terrible injustice had already been visited on the man. He had lost his wife to a senseless, tragic death. Now another blow was about to fall if he ended up being charged with murder in the death of Bonnie Morgan’s killer.

That hadn’t happened yet, not officially, but only because Ernie Carpenter had so far been too busy to get around to crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. At this point, Morgan was still only a suspect-some would have said prime suspect-in the case.

With her heart quickening in her breast, Joanna realized that Bucky Buckwalter’s killer had counted on that. Whoever the perpetrator or perpetrators were, they had killed the man with some confidence that the homicide investigation would go no deeper than the obvious: Hal Morgan had come to Bisbee with a clear motive for wanting to harm his wife’s killer. If that man was now dead, it naturally followed that Hal Morgan had killed him.

What came over Joanna then wasn’t exactly a chill. It was more like a vibration-a telling, steady thrum that came to her from the inside out, letting her know that she had stumbled onto something-something important. She had never experienced any sensation quite like it, but she knew at once what it was. Without understanding how, she knew-beyond a doubt-that Hal Morgan was innocent. He hadn’t killed Bucky Buckwalter. Somebody else had, someone who had cynically exploited Hal Morgan’s lingering grief and had used it to further his or her own deadly purposes.

The moment of realization rang so true that Joanna felt almost giddy. She was suddenly so excited-so energized and focused-that she had to concentrate on lifting her foot off the accelerator to keep from mashing it all the way to the floor.

And then, in that peculiar way minds work, a long-buried memory surfaced in her head. She was twelve years old again and sitting at the breakfast table in her parents’ home of Campbell Avenue. Eleanor had been cooking breakfast am was just then slamming the frying pan into the sink, whet Big Hank Lathrop came into the room and poured himself a cup of coffee.

Sheriff D. H. Lathrop had been out all night investigating a homicide crime scene. He had come home at sunup to shower, change clothes, and eat breakfast before heading back to the office.

“I don’t know why you had to be out there all night like that,” Eleanor complained as she slid a loaded plate in iron of him. “You’re not as young as you used to be, Hank. You can’t expect to work around the clock without having it affect you.”

“But Ellie…” he objected. Big Hank Lathrop was the only person in the world Eleanor Lathrop ever allowed to call her by a nickname. “You just don’t understand how great it feels. I knew from the beginning, from the moment we go there, that George Hammond was lying through his teeth when he said that him and his buddy-”

“He and his buddy.” Eleanor’s habitual corrections of her husband’s grammar were so much business as usual that Big Hank barely missed the beat of his story. “… he and his good buddy, Lionel Dexter, were out hunting. Hammond claimed that he stumbled and that his thirty-ought-six went off by accident. All of a sudden, right while he’s in the middle of telling this long, complicated story, I realize it’s a crock. Ol’ George is making it up as he goes along. I can’t tell you how I knew; I just did. As soon as I caught on to him, I couldn’t stand to walk away without managing to trip him up.”

The whole time Big Hank had been speaking, ostensibly he had been telling the story to his wile. But ever so often, as he spoke, his eyes would stray to Joanna, including her in the conversation, saying to her-in that quiet, unspoken way of his-that she, too, was included in the storytelling. The message behind his words came through to his daughter loud and clear. He was letting her know that it was all right to love something-to care passionately about it-even if some-one else in your life, someone you loved, didn’t necessarily share your enthusiasm.

Sitting down across from him, Eleanor’s disapproval was as plain as the permanently etched frown that furrowed her forehead. “Did you?” she asked. “Trip him up, I mean.”

Big Hank’s face had lit up like a Christmas tree as he continued. “You bet. All night long Georgie had been telling us about tripping over something-a rock, or maybe even a branch or a root. He claimed that’s how come the gun discharged. So come sunup, I tell him, ‘Okay, Mr. Hammond, all’s we need now is to have you show us whatever it was you tripped over.’ So he leads us to this big of rock and tries to pass that one off as being it, except anybody who knows a thing about guns and trajectories and all that can see it isn’t true. From where the rock is and where and how we found the body, you can tell those two things just don’t add up.

“ ‘Look here, Georgie,’ I said. ‘This whole thing’s a bunch of B.S. It couldn’t have happened this way, and you know it. How about if you just haul off and tell us the truth?’ And you know what happened? He did. Just like that. Broke down in tears and started spilling his guts. The thing is, if I hadn’t nailed him on it, George Hammond might have gotten away with murder.”

Eleanor, listening in silence, refused to be swayed by either her husband’s story or by his enthusiasm in telling it. “You still shouldn’t have stayed out all night,” she responder at last when he finished. “You’ll be paying for this foolishness the whole rest of the week.”

It was amazing to Joanna how everything about that whole scene had lingered in her memory. It was all there, it full living color and sense-around sound. She could hear and smell the frying bacon. She cringed at the enamel-chipping latter when her mother pitched the frying pan into the sink and avoided the soul-shriveling frown that etched her mother’s forehead.

Even at age twelve, Joanna had known there was more a stake in that small kitchen than the loss of one night’s sleep. Although she was years away from being able to sort it out, she understood there were other, more weighty issues hidden in the dark undercurrents of the words being bandied back and forth across that kitchen table. And now, some seventeen years later, Joanna finally did see.

After years of enduring her mother’s unremitting criticism, she realized that D. H. Lathrop had been Eleanor’s target long before his daughter was. When he was no longer there to bear the brunt of it, Joanna had been forced to take his place. The constant arguments between mother and daughter-disagreements that lingered to this day-were and had always been nothing more than extensions of the original conflict. It was a natural outgrowth of who Joanna’s parents were and what made them tick.

Big Hank Lathrop had thrown himself into living without reservation. He had grabbed hold of everything life had to offer. Eleanor had clung to the sidelines. Unable to compete with her husband out in the world, she had cut away at him at home, constantly trying to whittle him down to her size. She was smart enough not to reveal her hand by directly belittling his triumph in the Hammond case. That would have exposed her own jealousy of his devotion to duty. Instead, she cloaked her rebuke in the socially acceptable guise of wifely concern-of Big Hank’s needing his rest-rather than saying what she really meant. Never once did she admit that anything that took her husband’s attention away from her-Big Hank’s job included-was a rival to be attacked on all possible fronts.

Suddenly, as clearly as Joanna sensed Hal Morgan’s innocence, she could see that her mother had spent her whole lifetime claiming the high moral ground, all the while cutting everyone else down to size. In negating other people’s accomplishments, she magnified her own.

The things that had driven Big Hank-the same needs and desires that had sent him out on a nightlong mission to match wits with a killer-were the ones that motivated Joanna as well. Those were the very ingredients lacking in Eleanor’s own makeup. She had lived her life vicariously, first through her husband’s work, and later through Joanna’s work and her happiness with Andy as well. No wonder Eleanor Lathrop was angry and drowning in self-pity. Only by diminishing others could she maintain her own fragile self-worth.