"Write," Butch answered. "Mysteries, I think. I was an English Lit major. I always wanted to write. In fact, I've been writing some over the years-scribbling away for my own amusement and pleasure, even though I've never had anything published. But I always said that if I ever had the opportunity, I was going to do it full-time. Now I have all the time I need. I'm retired at age thirty-four, and if I play my cards right, I won't ever need to have a regular job again. So I bought myself a little laptop computer, and I'm in the process of getting started."
"How wonderful," Joanna said. "You'll get to live your dream. But speaking of living, what about that? If you don't have the building anymore, you don't have your upstairs apartment, either. Where are you going to live?"
Butch looked at her and grinned. "Bisbee," he said.
Joanna could barely believe her ears. "Bisbee?" she echoed hoarsely. "No!"
"Bisbee, yes," he returned smoothly. "There are seventy thousand people in Peoria these days. That's about sixty thousand people too many for me. So I've bought a house out in Saginaw, Bisbee's neighborhood. One of those old-fashioned Victorian places with a tin roof, a wraparound front porch, and a stamped tin ceiling. This fall when school starts, if you're busy and Jenny needs somewhere to go after school, she can just walk up the block and come visit me. I promise to have plenty of milk and cookies on hand with very limited amounts of television viewing."
"You've already bought a house?" Joanna demanded. "How could you?"
"To quote an old friend of mine named Mike Hammer," Butch told her, " 'it was easy.' I called up a lady at Copper Queen Real Estate and told her what I wanted. By the time I showed up in town day before yesterday, she had narrowed the held down to three possibilities. The one in Saginaw is the one I chose. It's vacant. Since I'm paying cash and there won't be a mortgage involved, the closing should "be pretty fast. But still, I won't be able to move in for several weeks. There's some work I want to do on it first-plumbing, painting, cabinetry. That kind of thing is always easier to do if the house is empty. So I plan to stay in the hotel until it's all finished."
Listening to him, Joanna was so astonished that she could barely comprehend the words. "You're moving to Bisbee?"
"I have moved to Bisbee," he said.
Joanna was thunderstruck. "But why didn't you tell me in advance? Why didn't you let me know?"
"Because then I would have been asking you for permission and you might have said no. I decided to present it as a fait accompli." His face darkened, "From the looks of things, it's probably a good thing I did."
"Your dinner, senorita," the waiter said, appearing at Joanna's elbow. Then he set another plate in front of Butch. "The plate is very hot, senor. Now, will there be anything else?"
Joanna shook her head wordlessly.
"I don't think so," Butch told him. "This will be fine."
The waiter walked away and Butch turned back to Joanna. "You're looking at me like I'm an invader from outer space."
"Why did you do it?" she asked. "Why did you go be-hind my back like that?"
"Because I care about you," he said simply. "I know what my feelings are for you and I hope, given time, you might feel the same way about me."
Joanna opened her mouth to speak, but he stifled her with a wave of his hand. "I'm not asking for any kind of promises from you," he added. "I know you need time, but I also don't think that with me in Peoria and you in Bisbee, you're going to know me well enough to make a wise decision one way or the other. My mother told me years ago, 'Distance is to love as wind is to fire. It blows out the little ones and fans the big ones.' That sounded good to me at the time when the young woman I thought was the love of my life had taken off with somebody else. I thought she'd come to her senses and come back to me. She didn't. And now that I'm older, it doesn't sound smart."
He paused, then sighed. Again Joanna started to speak, but he waved her off and continued. "You're so busy down here, Joanna. There's your work and your friends and there's Jenny to take care of. I was afraid I'd get lost in the shuffle. That if I was always two hundred miles away, you'd put me out of your mind and never give me a second thought. Now that I think about it, after living through the last two days, it may not be all that easy catching up with you with both of us living in the same town.
"But I want to give it a chance, Joanna," he murmured. His eyes darkened in the soft glow of the candle on the table. "I'm a two-time loser in the love-and-war department. I want to get it right this time. I promise not to rush you, not to push you, but please, let me be here. We'll be friends to begin with. We'll have an opportunity to get to know one another. I've already met some of the people in your life, but this will give me a chance to get to know them better. Like Jeff Daniels and Marianne Maculyea, for instance. They both seem like very nice people, and today is the first time I've ever been able to talk to Jeff one-on-one. That's what we need to do, Joanna. We'll let some time pass, and then we'll see where things go from there. Fair enough?"
When Butch stopped talking, a sudden wave of silence washed across their table and swallowed it whole. He was right, of course, and Joanna knew it. Had he broached his plan to her in advance, she never would have agreed to it. She had liked the status quo and wouldn't have minded if things had gone on that way indefinitely. She had enjoyed the idea of having a boyfriend, but she had wanted to dodge the complications that would have arisen from having him too close by. She could talk to Butch-she loved talking to him about anything and everything-but because he had been safely out of sight most of the time, she hadn't had to examine her own heart and feelings too closely. She had felt she could be friends with Butch Dixon without being disloyal to Andy-to Andy's memory.
"Well," Butch said finally, "can't you say something?"
"I don't know what to say."
"Try," he said. The eyes he turned on her were bleak and almost devoid of hope. He had the forlorn look of a convicted felon waiting for the judge to issue an order of execution.
"It's just that… well… I'm surprised, is all."
"But you don't hate me for doing it?"
"No, of course I don't hate you. I'm glad for you."
He settled back in his chair with a sigh of relief. "That's all I need to know for right now," he said. "Don't say another word. Give yourself some time to get used to the idea. In the meantime, let's eat some of this food before it gets cold. It's been a long time since Daisy's."
Joanna picked up her fork, but she didn't touch her food. "Speaking of Daisy's, there are people around, like Marliss Shackleford, for example, who are going to make a huge deal of this. You just don't know what it's like to live in a small town…"
"That's all right. I have a pretty thick skin, and I suspect Sheriff Joanna Brady does, too."
“Maybe,” she said. "I hope so." The waiter walked by. Joanna raised her hand enough to catch his eye. "I've changed my mind. I think I'm going to have a margarita after all. Blended," she added. "No salt."
"1 believe I'll have one, too," Butch Dixon told the waiter. "Make mine the same way."
Despite a somewhat rocky start, Joanna and Butch went, on to have a good dinner. Maybe that one margarita did make a difference. They talked about Jenny and her visit to her creepy cousins in Oklahoma. They talked about Eleanor and George Winfield and postcards Joanna had received from the pair of honeymoon cruisers. They talked, too, about Joanna's late-afternoon run-in with Marliss Shackleford.
They followed dinner and that one margarita apiece with several cups of coffee. By eleven o'clock, they were on their way back to University Medical Center when Joanna's cell phone rang.