All the way home, Joanna had dreaded having to answer that question. She was already so mind-numbingly weary, she had hoped to dodge the subject of Hannah Green entirely, but now Jenny’s questioning stare made avoiding the issue impossible.
“Mrs. Green died last night,” Joanna said carefully, mincing around the word “suicide.” “She died at the jail after the guards put her in her cell.”
Jenny’s eyes widened momentarily, then she turned to Angie. “Mrs. Green is the one I was telling you about,” Jenny explained. “She was waiting by the mailbox when we came come last night.” The child turned back to her mother. “What happened? Was she sick?”
Maybe Andy would have been brutally honest at that Joint, but Joanna simply wasn’t up to it. “Yes,” she answered. “She was very sick.” Which isn’t a complete lie, she thought. But it’s a long way from the truth.
“Couldn’t a doctor have saved her?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t think so,” Joanna said. “A doctor did come to the jail afterward, but he was too late.”
Jenny seemed to consider that for a moment. Then, abruptly and with childlike unconcern, she simply changed the subject. “The quail were here just a little while ago,” she said. “We used to have roadrunners out here, too,” she added in an aside to Angie. “But that was before we got Tigger.”
Angie Kellogg, newly come to the wonders of birding, both feeding and watching, looked horrified. “You mean your dog chases them?” she asked.
“Of course,” Jenny said with a shrug. “He chases everything, but the only thing he ever catches is porcupines.”
“Can’t you make him stop?” Angie asked.
“Not so far,” Jenny said.
The jarring juxtaposition of Hannah Green’s death and Tigger’s senseless antics cast Joanna adrift from the spoken words. Looking around the kitchen, she realized that the place was spotless. When she had left the house, dirty dishes and pots and pans from last night’s long delayed dinner had still been stacked on the counter and in the sink. Between then and now, someone-Angie, no doubt-had rinsed them, loaded and run the dishwasher, and emptied it as well. The unspoken kindness and concern behind that simple act made Joanna’s eyes fill with fears of gratitude.
“I love roadrunners,” Angie Kellogg was saying when Joanna tuned back into the conversation. “Growing up back in Michigan, I used to think they weren’t real, that the people who made the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons had just made them up.”
“I like those cartoons, too,” Jenny said, scrambling out of the breakfast nook. “But I always feel sorry for the coyote.”
Without having to be told, she took her dishes as far as the sink, rinsed them, and loaded them into the dishwasher. Then she headed for the bathroom to brush her teeth.
“Thanks for doing the dishes,” Joanna said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I didn’t mind,” Angie answered with a laugh. “It was fun-almost like playing house. And it’s so peaceful here. I never knew there were homes like this.”
Over the months, Joanna had heard bits and pieces about Angie Kellogg’s past, about the sexually abusive father who had driven his daughter out of the house. For Angie, life on the streets in the harsh world of teenaged prostitution had been preferable to living at home. Only now, living in her own little house, was she beginning to learn about how the rest of the world lived. Joanna looked around her clean but familiar kitchen and tried to see it through Angie’s eyes. The place didn’t seem peaceful to her. There was still a hole in it, a void that Andy’s presence used to fill.
“I didn’t know where all the dishes went,” Angie continued. “I told Jenny that if she’d put them away for me, I’d give her a ride to school.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Joanna said.
“Why not?” Angie returned. “Greenway School is just a little out of the way. It won’t take more than a couple of minutes for me to drop her oil. That way you can go to bed. You look like you need it.”
Unable to argue, Joanna stood up. “If anything,” she said, “I feel worse than I look.”
She staggered into the bedroom and dropped fully clothed onto the bedspread. Jenny stopped by on her way to her own room. “Aren’t you going to get undressed?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Joanna said, pulling the bedspread up and over her. “I’m too tired.”
Sound asleep, she didn’t stir when Jenny and Angie left the house a few minutes later. The phone awakened her at eleven. “Sheriff Brady?” Kristin Marsten asked uncertainly.
Joanna cleared her throat. Her voice was still thick with sleep. “It’s me, Kristin,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Dick Voland asked me to call you. There’s going to be a telephone conference call with someone from the governor’s office at eleven-thirty. Can you make it?”
“I’ll be there,” Joanna mumbled as she staggered out of bed. Showering and dressing in record time, she headed for the office. The governor’s office, she thought along the way. Why would Governor Wallace Hickman be calling me?
As Joanna drove into the Justice Center compound, she saw that the front parking lot was once again littered with media vehicles, including at least one mobile television van from a station in Tucson. Fortunately, out-of-town reporters, unlike Kevin Dawson of the Bisbee Bee, had no idea about the sheriff’s private backdoor entrance. Joanna took full advantage of that lack of knowledge. Without having had the benefit of a single cup of coffee, she wasn’t ready to face shouted questions from a ravening horde of reporters. For them, Hannah Green’s life and death meant nothing more than a day’s headline or lead story. For the police officers involved, Joanna Brady included, Hannah Green’s death meant failure.
Climbing out of the Blazer, Joanna heaved out her briefcase as well. She had dragged it back and forth from the office without ever unloading it or touching what was inside. No doubt today’s batch of correspondence was already waiting for her. Any other day, the thought of all that paperwork would have been overwhelming. Today, Joanna welcomed it. By burying herself in it, perhaps she’d be able to forget the sight of a massive, lifeless Hannah Green slumped at the end of her jailhouse bunk, the air choked out of her by the tautly stretched elastic of a grimy bra that had been wrapped around and around her neck and finally around the foot rail of her upper bunk.
As soon as Joanna was inside, Kristin Marsten brought her both the mail and a much-needed cup of coffee.
“What’s happening?” Joanna asked. “And who all is here?”
“Mr. Voland, of course,” Kristin answered. “He was here when I arrived. Detective Carpenter showed up a few minutes ago, along with Tom Hadlock.” Tom Hadlock was the jail commander. “Deputy Montoya is here, but he probably won’t be included in the conference call. He’s out front dealing with the reporters.”
“Better him than me,” Joanna said grimly.
Cup in hand, feigning a briskness she didn’t feel, Joanna marched into the conference room with five minutes to spare. Ernie Carpenter, Dick Voland, and Tom Hadlock were al-ready there. Grim-faced and red-eyed, none of them seemed any better off than Joanna felt.
Joanna looked questioningly at Dick Voland. “What’s this ill about?”
Voland shrugged. “Politics as usual,” he said. “It’s no big thing. Whenever something off the wall happens, Governor Hickman wants to be in on it. He probably wants to be reassured that this isn’t something that’s going to come back and bite him in the butt during the next election.”
“What’s going to bite him?”
“Hannah Green’s death.”
“How could what happened to Hannah Green hurt Governor Hickman?”
Voland shrugged. “You know. Allegations of possible police brutality. Violations of constitutional rights. That sort of thing.”