Long after Jenny’s bedroom light went out, Joanna lay sleepless in her own room. Over the months since Andy’s death, she had learned to sleep in the dead middle of the bed. It blurred the lines between his side and hers, making the bed seem smaller and not quite so lonely.
For a change, Sheriff Brady wasn’t worried about something at work. For the past two weeks all of Cochise County had been amazingly quiet. Other than rounding up the usual quota of undocumented aliens there had been no murders, no ugly domestic violence cases, no fatal traffic accidents, and only a few drunk drivers. The lack of new incidents had allowed her two detectives, Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal, to go back over a few old and still-unsolved cases to see if there was anything new that could be brought to bear.
For one thing, the county had recently installed an Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Usually the AFIS technician was so busy entering new prints into the system that there was no opportunity to do anything about cold cases. Already the extra effort was paying off. A perpetrator in a two-year-old Huachuca Mountains burglary case had been found in the Pima County jail in Tucson.
So, instead of worrying about work, Joanna was anticipating the next two weeks with a certain amount of dread. Jenny would be away at Camp Whispering Pines all that time. Although Joanna was confident Jenny would be fine, she wasn’t so sure how she herself would fare. High Lonesome Ranch had seemed decidedly well-named in the months since Andy’s death. With both Jenny and Andy gone, Joanna wasn’t convinced she’d be able to handle it.
Turning over on her side, trying to find a more comfortable position, Joanna forced herself to think about something else-about the solo shopping trip she had planned for herself in Tucson after she dropped Jenny off up on Mount Lemmon.
It was summer, and the simmering heat required a change of wardrobe. She needed some lightweight work clothes, ones that would be reasonably cool, look professional, and also be built in a fashion that would accommodate the soft body armor she wore each day when she went to work. There were times when she looked at some of her female officers and felt almost envious of their uniforms. At least they didn’t have to go to their closets every morning and decide what to wear.
Joanna wasn’t wild about shopping. She didn’t usually look forward to fighting her way in and out of malls jammed to the gills with mothers out shopping for early back-to-school bargains. Nonetheless, buying clothes was something that had to be done-a necessary evil. Then, when she came back from Tucson Saturday evening, she needed to see her mother.
Lately, both Joanna and her mother, Eleanor Lathrop, had been so busy they had barely seen each other. Not only that, there had been an alarming drop in the number of Eleanor’s phone calls.
Time to do your daughterly duty, Joanna told herself. Besides, if she showed up to see her mother wearing one of the new outfits she had purchased earlier in the afternoon, she was bound to get an instant evaluation. There was comfort in knowing that, Joanna decided as she drifted off to sleep. Eleanor Lathrop had never been one to soft-pedal her opinions. She would take one look at whatever her daughter was wearing and say exactly what she thought.
Good, bad, or indifferent, at least I’ll know what she thinks.
“I’m too hot,” Jenny grumbled to her mother in an irritating whine. “Can’t we stop and get something to drink?”
Joanna Brady was hot, too. Twenty miles earlier, just outside Tombstone, the air-conditioner in her Eagle had finally given up the ghost. For weeks now, she had heard an ominous howl in the AC’s compressor, but she had hoped to nurse it along for a while longer-at least long enough to drive Jenny to camp. Naturally, it had quit working completely on the tip to Mount Lemmon and on what promised to be a record-breaking scorcher of a June day.
Still, none of that was sufficient reason for Jenny to dispense with the niceties.
“Is there a please hiding in there somewhere?” Joanna asked. “I didn’t hear one.”
“Pretty please,” Jenny said.
Joanna nodded. “All right then,” she agreed. “We’ll stop in Benson for lunch.”
“At Burger King?”
“I suppose.”
As they drove down Benson’s almost-deserted main drag, the thermometer on the bank read 105 degrees. Joanna shook her head, letting the hot wind from the open window blow over her face. If it was already this hot in Benson, what would it be like when they dropped farther down into the valley?
“Why couldn’t we bring the other car?” jenny had asked when the air-conditioning vents started blowing nothing but hot air.
Jenny was referring to the county-owned Crown Victoria Sheriff Joanna Brady now drove for work. The Blazer she would have preferred to use as an official vehicle was out of commission after being too near an unexpected blast of dynamite. Since the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department was currently long on Crown Victorias and short on Blazers, Sheriff Joanna Brady was stuck with one of the former.
“Taking you to camp at Mount Lemmon on my day off hardly qualifies as county business,” Joanna replied. “And since I’m trying to discourage unauthorized private use of official vehicles, that would be setting a pretty poor example.”
“I know,” Jenny said glumly. “But at least the air conditioner works.”
“I’m sure I can get this one fixed.”
“Before you come back to bring me home?”
“We’ll see.”
Fifteen minutes later, armed with the remains of two large Cokes and in somewhat better spirits, Joanna and Jenny hooded north on 1-10. The seventy-mile-an-hour speed limit on the interstate chewed up miles so fast that there was still some Coke left by the time they turned off the freeway onto Houghton Road. Using that and Old Spanish Trail, Joanna was aide to make it to the Mount Lemmon Highway without ever having to endure central Tucson’s heavier traffic.
Had Joanna been willing to get up at four A.M. and drive to Tucson, it would have been possible for Jenny to ride up to ramp on a chartered bus that had left for Camp Whispering Pines from Tucson ’s Park Mall at six o’clock that morning. However, knowing that weekend nights often resulted in late night calls, Joanna had opted instead to drive Jenny up to camp on her own. Joanna had used the too-early hour as a handy excuse. Although her rationale might have sounded reasonable enough to anyone else, Joanna herself knew that getting up at the crack of dawn was only part of her reluctance. The truth was that even today she was still having a hard time dealing with the idea of Jenny’s going off to camp on her own lift two whole weeks. After all, with Andy dead, Jennifer Ann Brady was all Joanna had left.
As soon as the General Hitchcock Highway began climbing tip) out of the desert floor into the Catalina Mountains, the temperature began to fall. Halfway up the mountain, Jenny screeched with excitement when she spotted a multicolored Gila monster lumbering across the two-lane road. By the time they reached the turnoff to the camp, near Mount Lemmon ’s 9,100-foot summit, the breeze blowing in the windows felt pleasantly cool. Somewhere in the high eighties, Joanna estimated. But the improved comfort in the car did nothing to lessen her concern about saying good-bye to her daughter.
“You’re sure you packed everything on the list?”
Yes, Mom,” Jenny said resignedly.
“Everything? Even the insect repellent?”
“Even that,” Jenny replied with a scowl. “It was on the list, too. I checked everything off as I put it in the bag. You sound just like Grandma Lathrop, you know,” she added.
Unfortunately, Joanna realized at once that Jenny’s criticism was right on the money. Eleanor Matthews Lathrop was forever firing off barrages of blistering questions. To Joanna, who was usually on the receiving end, those questions always felt more like an attack than anything else. Now Joanna found herself wondering if her mother’s unending grilling hadn’t served to disguise what was really going on. Maybe Eleanor had been just as concerned about her daughter as Joanna was about hers. Maybe firing off all those questions had served as a substitute for the motherly concern Eleanor never seemed to know quite how to express.