“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.
“I’m sure it’ll be very interesting,” she said, sidling away. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Marliss, I need to catch up with Jenny before she fills up on cookies and punch and makes herself sick.”
CHAPTER 10
When it came time to park at Daisy’s Café, Joanna was dismayed to see that the lot was full to overflowing. “Great,” she grumbled. “If it’s already this crowded, it’ll take forever to get a table.”
“Maybe not,” Butch said cheerfully. “There’s Jeff and Marianne’s VW. If they’re here ahead of us, maybe they’ve already snagged one. If nothing else, they’ll have put our names on the list.”
Jenny let herself out of the backseat and scampered into the restaurant. Meanwhile, Joanna studied some of the vehicles in the unpaved lot. A surprisingly large number of them looked familiar. In addition to Jeff Daniels’ sea-foam green Bug, Joanna recognized Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady’s Honda and Angie Kellogg’s aging Omega, along with Eleanor Lathrop’s brand-new Buick. She also caught sight of the fire-engine-red Geo Metro driven by her secretary, Kristin Marsten.
Joanna looked back at Butch. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Something’s fishy here. Bisbee may be a small town, but it’s a little too much of a coincidence for everyone I know to turn up at the same place at the same time. What’s going on?”
“Why don’t we go in and see,” he said.
As soon as Butch held open the door, Joanna caught a glimpse of a bank of balloons lined up down the middle of the dining room. Once she saw the balloons, she knew she’d been had. A burst of applause, accompanied by shouts of “Surprise!” erupted from half the room, which had been screened off to create a semi-private banquet room.
Joanna turned on Butch. “It’s a shower,” she said accusingly. “Butch Dixon, you tricked me.”
He tried his best to look contrite, but it didn’t work very well. “I told you I hate cleaning ovens,” he said. “I’ll do almost anything to avoid it.”
Accompanied by gales of laughter, Marianne Maculyea stepped forward, grabbed Joanna by the arm, and led her toward the far end of the room, where a mound of gifts had been stacked on one table. A grinning, self-satisfied Jenny stood next to the table.
“You were in on this, too, weren’t you!” Joanna said accusingly.
Jenny nodded. “But I didn’t tell.”
“No, you certainly didn’t.”
“So we pulled it off?” Marianne asked.
“Completely.”
“Good.”
Just then, Joanna found herself enveloped in the warm embrace of her former mother-in-law, Eva Lou Brady. Eva Lou’s exuberant greeting was followed by a reserved hug and a dignified peck on the cheek from Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, Joanna’s own mother. Joanna pulled away from Eleanor in time to see Butch and Jim Bob Brady sidling toward the door.
“Wait a minute,” she demanded. “Where do you two think you’re going?”
“This is a shower,” Butch said. “Girls’ stuff,” he added with a wink in Jenny’s direction. “You can’t expect us men to hang around here.”
“But when will you be back? How will Jenny and I get home?”
He grinned. “I’m sure someone here will give you a ride. In the meantime, we’re going up the street for a guy lunch. No girls allowed. Except for Ruth, of course, who already left with Jeff. But since she’s just a baby, she doesn’t count.”
Butch followed Jim Bob out the door before Joanna could lob a rejoinder in his direction. By then an apron-clad Junior Dowdle had walked up behind her, grinning broadly and carrying a black baseball cap with the word bride embroidered on the front.
“Put on!” he demanded urgently, handing Joanna the cap. “Put on now.”
Knowing the cap would give her a terrible case of hat-hair, Joanna tried to weasel out of it. “Do I have to?” she asked.
“Put on!” Junior ordered again. Amid another burst of general laughter, Joanna did as she was told.
Within minutes, Joanna lost herself in the carefree mood of a wedding shower. Daisy Maxwell, owner of Daisy’s Café, had provided platters of nachos, tacos, and mini burritos. For a change, instead of hustling around with a pencil in her beehive hairdo and taking orders, Daisy herself was seated among the guests while a wait staff that included her husband, Moe, took care of the shower guests as well as the other Sunday diners on the far side of the balloon barricade.
After lunch and pieces of a wonderful lemon chiffon cake, it was time for Joanna to tackle the mountain of gifts. She was assisted in the unwrapping process by Angie Kellogg, who had finagled a day off from her relief bartending job at the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge up in Old Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch. Angie, a former L.A. hooker, was someone whose rehabilitation Joanna and Marianne Maculyea had taken on as a joint project. Together they had helped her exit her previous line of work and had eased her way into a far more settled existence in Bisbee. Her new life came complete with a boyfriend named Dennis Hacker, an English biologist who specialized in reintroducing parrots into the wild forest lands of southern Arizona.
Angie’s newfound happiness was a testimony to the fact that Joanna Brady was making a contribution with her own life-that her efforts were accomplishing some good. That afternoon it was especially gratifying for Joanna to see Angie laughing, talking, and seemingly completely at ease among a group of women in whose presence she would have been petrified and/or self-conscious only a few years earlier. It was also fun to see Angie, as designated maid of honor, set about the mundane task of stringing colorful package-wrapping ribbon through a paper plate in order to make the traditional shower ribbon bouquet.