143
When Joanna switched on a lamp, she was astonished to discover it was almost nine o’clock. She had slept for nearly three hours.
The door from Butch’s garage opened, and all three dogs careened into the family room. Lady sidled up on the couch, where she cuddled next to Joanna.
“There you are,” Butch said as he and Jenny walked into the room. “When we didn’t see any lights, Jenny and I decided you still weren’t home.”
“I was tired and fell asleep,” Joanna said. “Did you get some boots?”
“We’re booted,” Butch replied. “What about dinner? We ate, did you?”
“Haven’t, but I will,” Joanna told him, heading for the kitchen. “I’m famished.”
“You’re feeling all right, then?” Butch asked.
She paused long enough to give him a kiss. “It’s called ‘morning sickness’ for good reason,” she told him.
He studied her face. “You look upset.”
“I suppose I am,” she agreed. ‘At least four people are dead so far. On three of them, we’re making very little progress.”
i43
I
144
Early the next morning, the smell of Butch’s coffee brewing in the kitchen sent Joanna scrambling out Of bed and into the bathroom. A miserable half hour later, when she finally dragged her body into the kitchen, Butch took one look at her pale face and shook his head. “You look like hell,” he told her.
“Gee, thanks,” she muttered. “I can tell you how much better that makes me feel.”
“Do you think it’s worth it?” he asked.
“Being pregnant?” she returned. “Ask me that again in a month or so when I’m no longer barfing my guts out.”
Butch came across the room to give her a gentle squeeze. “I have water on for tea.
Want some?
“This morning, tea doesn’t sound any better than coffee.” “If you’re not careful,”
he warned, “you’ll go into caffeine withdrawal, and then you’ll really be in trouble-headaches, mood swings …”
145
Joanna hitched her way up onto one of the barstools at the kitchen counter and then glowered at him. “I’m not having mood swings,” she retorted.
“Oh, really?” Butch said with a grin. “In the meantime, as requested, here are your English muffins, madame.”
After delivering her breakfast, Butch turned back to the cook top Using only one hand, he expertly cracked two eggs at a time into a heated frying pan. While Joanna watched, he deftly flipped the eggs in midair and then, after a few more seconds over the heat, slid the over-easy result, with yolks perfectly intact, onto a waiting plate. A former short-order cook, Butch Dixon was disturbingly adept in the kitchen, enough so that watching him at work made Joanna feel inadequate. She herself had attempted that midair egg-flipping trick on only one occasion-with disastrous results for both egg and cook top
“I wish I could come with you today,” Butch said thoughtfully, placing his own plate on the counter and settling on the stool next to Joanna’s. Worried about the state of her innards, Joanna kept a close eye on her remaining muffin.
“The problem is,” Butch continued, “I promised Faye that I’d help out at the booth.
She’s concerned that the girls will need some male-type extra muscle while they’re setting up.”
Faye Lambert was the leader of Jenny’s Girl Scout troop. The girls, working on raising money for their second annual end-of-summer trip to southern California, had made arrangements to sell sodas and candy bars during Bisbee’s Fourth of July parade and at the field-day events to be held later in the afternoon at Warren Ballpark.
“Jenny’s shift in the booth ends at noon,” Butch added. “That’ll give us plenty of time to come home, have lunch,
146
change clothes, load Kiddo into his trailer, and head for the fairgrounds in Douglas.”
“You don’t mind doing all this?” Joanna asked. “The booth, horse wrangling, and all that?”
Butch shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a cowboy and a dad. Now I’m getting some practice in both with Jenny. Sort of like a preview of coming attractions,” he added with a smile. “But tell me, Joey, are you sure you’ll be okay, driving all over hell and gone by yourself?”
Part of Joanna relished Butch’s husbandly concern, and part of her resented it. “I’ll be fine,” she reassured him. “I’m scheduled to be one of the lead vehicles in both parades. That means I’ll be done with each of those events with enough time to get to the next one. I may be a little squeezed hustling between the two picnics, but I should make it with no problem.”
“Did you say ‘squeezed’?” Butch asked. “I don’t think that quite covers it.”
When she went out to get in the Civvie, she discovered Butch had left an unopened package of saltine crackers on the roof of the car.
Smiling at his thoughtfulness, Joanna settled into the driver’s seat. As she drove toward the department in her dress uniform, she wondered how long she’d be able to fit into it. She stopped by the Motor Pool garage long enough to have her Crown Victoria gassed up and washed to get rid of the layer of fine red dust that was the natural shade of any vehicle making daily trips up and down the pavement-free road to High Lonesome Ranch.
She stopped by her office and checked with Dispatch to make sure nothing out of the ordinary needed her attention. Well before eleven she took her place as the second vehicle in Bisbee’s
147
Fourth of July parade, positioned directly behind the Bisbee High School marching band. The parade started fifteen minutes late and then took another forty-five minutes to make a leisurely circuit of Warren’s onlooker-lined streets. Immediately after reaching the Cole Avenue starting point, Joanna headed out of Bisbee. The fifteen-minute delay in the first parade’s starting time caused her to arrive in Sierra Vista too late to be at the front of the parade there. That meant she was even further behind schedule as she drove the twenty-plus miles from Sierra Vista to the first community picnic in Benson.
Driving with complete concentration, she was startled when her cell phone rang just shy of the junction at 1-10. The out-of-area number on the phone’s readout wasn’t one Joanna recognized.
“Sheriff Brady here,” she answered.
“Happy Fourth of July,” her brother’s cheerful voice boomed at her. “What are you up to?”
“On my way from a parade to the first of two picnics,” she told Bob Brundage. “From the second of two parades, actually. How about you?”
For most of her life, Joanna Brady had thought of herself as an only child. Slightly less than four years earlier, Joanna had discovered that her parents had had an earlier and previously unmentioned, out-of-wedlock child. The infant boy had been given up for adoption long before D. . Lathrop and Eleanor Matthews’s eventual marriage, and years before Joanna’s subsequent birth. Bob Brundage had come searching for his birth mother only after the deaths of both his adoptive parents. A career military man, Bob had arrived in Joanna’s life as a full bird colonel in the United States Army.
For some people, learning about a parent’s youthful 148
indiscretions can serve as a unifying experience between parent and child. It hadn’t worked that way for Joanna Brady and Eleanor Lathrop Winfield. Finding out about Bob Brundage’s existence had left Joanna feeling betrayed, and her lingering resentment stemmed from far more than Eleanor’s long silence about her own history.
For years Eleanor Lathrop had berated her daughter for being pregnant with Jenny at the time Joanna and Andy had married. The circumstances surrounding their shotgun wedding had given rise to years of never-ending criticism from Eleanor. Never once in all that time had Eleanor mentioned that there were similar skeletons in her own closet. That was what bothered Joanna the most-her mother’s blatant hypocrisy. Despite Joanna’s best efforts, she had yet to come to terms with the situation, and because she had not yet taken that first important step, forgiveness remained impossible.