With that, Lila Winters excused herself and walked away. A few minutes later, Butch showed up at Joanna’s table. “Is everything all right?” he asked, a concerned frown wrinkling his forehead. “I mean, I noticed the two of you were ...”
Looking at him, the last vestiges of Joanna’s earlier anger melted away. “We were talking,” she said, smiling. “Comparing notes, actually”
Butch looked thunderstruck. His obvious consternation made Joanna laugh. “We both think you’re a pretty good listener,” she added. “For a boy.”
“Whew,” he said, mopping his brow in relief. “So I’m still alive then?”
“So far.”
The reception included a buffet dinner followed by cake and dancing to a swing band that lasted far into the night. Joanna surprised herself by having a delightful time. Rather than rushing out early to drive back to Bisbee, she and Butch stayed until eleven, when the party finally began to wind down. When they at last went back upstairs to their room, Butch stopped short at the mound of manuscript pages scattered across the bed.
“It came,” he said.
“And I opened it,” Joanna said. “I also started reading it.”
“How far did you get?” he asked.
“The first hundred pages or so,” she said.
“And?” he asked. “What do you think?”
“It’s funny.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you write it that way?”
He came across the room to her and gathered her into his arms. “I had to,” he said. “Because, if I wrote it the way things really are, it would be too hard.”
Joanna frowned and pushed him away. “What do you mean?”
“Because the truth of the matter is, the real job scares the hell out of me. Look at yesterday. You walked into a house to tell someone her sister died, and the woman at that kitchen table was sitting there drunk and with a fully loaded weapon within easy reach. If that isn’t scary, I don’t know what is. I decided to make it funny to preserve my own mental health.”
“I don’t mean to worry you,” Joanna said, nestling against his chest and staying there.
“But you do.”
Had Joanna had this same conversation with Deputy Andrew Brady before he was shot and killed? How many nights had she lain awake in her bed at High Lonesome Ranch worrying about whether or not he would make it home safely after his shift? And how often had Eleanor done exactly the same thing when Big Hank Lathrop had been sheriff?
Once again, she was struck by the sense of history repeating itself, but with the lines mysteriously crossed and with her some-how walking both sides of the street at the same time.
While Butch went to change out of his tux, Joanna retrieved the cell phone she had deliberately left upstairs when she went down to the wedding. There were five missed calls, two from the department and three from Frank Montoya’s cell phone. When she listened to the three messages, they were all from Frank—all of them asking that she call him back regardless of what time she got in.
“What’s up?” she asked when Frank came on the line.
“We’ve got a problem in Paradise,” he said.
“That sounds like the title of a bad novel.”
“I wish,” he said. “That place I told you about, `Pathway to,’ could blow up in our faces.”
“How so?”
“Ernie and Jaime went over there this morning and were met at the gate by an armed guard who wouldn’t let them inside to see anybody. In other words, if Ron Haskell is inside—which we don’t know for sure at this time—nobody’s going to be talking to him anytime soon.”
“Have them call up Cameron Moore and get a court order.”
“We tried. Judge Moore and his family are down in Guaymas, fishing. It’s Memorial Day Weekend, you know. He won’t be back from Mexico until late Tuesday.”
“Great,” Joanna said. “Did you say armed guard?”
“That’s right.”
“Shades of Waco?”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Frank said.
Joanna sighed. “Well, there’s not much we can do about it tonight. Anything else happening that I should know about? I here were a couple of other calls from the department.”
“No. They called me after they called you. Everything is under control.”
“Any word on Dora’s mom?”
“Not so far.”
“She’s bound to surface eventually,” Joanna said.
“Who?” Butch said, coming out of the bathroom.
“Dora Matthews’s mother,” Joanna said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone. “We still haven’t found her.” She uncovered the mouthpiece and spoke to Frank once more. “Tomorrow morning we’ll have to stay in Peoria long enough to drop off Butch’s tux, then we’ll head home.”
“Have you heard that Yolanda Cañedo is back in University Medical Center?” Frank asked.
“I did,” Joanna told him. “Her mother called out to the house and left a message with Eva Lou. If we have time, Butch and I will stop by the hospital on the way down. Do you have any idea how bad it is?”
“Pretty bad, I think.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Talk to you tomorrow.” She signed off.
“What’s pretty bad?” Butch asked.
“Yolanda Cañedo is back in the hospital in Tucson.”
“She’s the jail matron with cervical cancer?”
Joanna nodded. “Her mother wants us to stop by the hospital to see her if we can.”
“I don’t see why not,” Butch said.
Joanna slipped out of her dress and took off her makeup. By the time she came to bed, Butch was sitting with the first pages of the manuscript on his lap. He was reading and making notations on the pages as he went. She slipped into bed and found her spot in the manuscript. She began reading with the best of intentions, but a combination of too much champagne and not enough sleep soon overwhelmed her. She fell asleep sitting up, with the lamp still on, and with the manuscript laid out across her lap. When she awakened, it was daylight. Butch was carefully retrieving pages of the manuscript, which had slipped off both her lap and the bed and lay in a scattered heap on the carpeted floor.
Joanna stirred and groaned. Her back was stiff. Her neck felt as though it had been held in a hammerlock all night long.
“It must have been exciting, all right,” Butch said as he sorted through the jumbled pages. “It put you out like a light.”
“Not until midnight,” she said. “I loved every minute of it, right up until I fell asleep.”
“Really?” he asked. “You really do like it?”
“I didn’t say I liked it,” she corrected. “I said I loved it. In my book, love is better than like.”
“Oh,” Butch said. “I see. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
After breakfast, Joanna and Butch had to hang around Peoria until the tux shop opened at ten, then they headed for Bisbee. With Joanna driving, Butch sat in the passenger seat and read his manuscript aloud, pausing now and then while he changed a word or scribbled a note. Joanna continued to be intrigued by the fact that the story was funny—really funny. There were some incidents that seemed vaguely familiar and no doubt had their origins in events in and around the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, but just when she would be ready to point out that something was too close to the mark, the story would veer off in some zany and totally unpredictable fashion that would leave her giggling.
“This is hilarious,” Joanna said after one particularly laughable scene. “I can’t get over how funny it is—how funny you are.”
Butch looked thoughtful. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I was usually the smallest boy in my class. So I had a choice. I could either get the crap beaten out of me on a regular basis or I could be a clown and make everybody laugh. I picked the latter. Once I grew up and went into business, it was the same thing, I could let things get to me or have fun. I don’t like serious, Joey. I prefer off-the-wall.”