She heard the sounds of chains clanking. Then, to her surprise, she felt her mattress shift underneath as though people had sat down next to her, on either side. An invisible hand patted her shoulder.
“I’m sorry for what he did to you,” Sadie said. “But there’s nothing we could do to help.”
It was small comfort, but comfort nevertheless. And much to Latisha’s further surprise, it was the beginning of an unlikely but abiding friendship.
Chapter 2
SAGE’S UNSCHEDULED EARLY ARRIVAL HAD PUT A FLY IN ANY NUMBER of ointments. Based on a December due date, the release of Butch’s next book, Just the Facts, and the accompanying book tour had been rescheduled. It was now set to occur starting the week after the election. Butch immediately offered to call his publisher and cancel the two-week tour for his upcoming murder mystery, but Joanna nixed that idea.
Years earlier, when Butch had sold his restaurant in Peoria, Arizona, he had come to Bisbee intent on pursuing two very different things—Joanna and his lifelong ambition to become a writer. He had won big on both counts. His first book, a cozy called Serve and Protect, featured Kimberly Charles, the fictional chief of police in Copper Creek, a tiny fictional Arizona town. Did Kimberly bear any resemblance to Joanna Brady? When people asked him that question, he would smile and say, “You be the judge.”
In marketing that first book, Drew Mabrey, his agent, had advised him against using his real name—F. W. Dixon.
“Hey,” he had told her, “I always loved the Hardy Boys.”
Drew was not amused, and since Butch was writing cozies, she suggested a more “gender-neutral name,” which is how his nom de plume became Gayle Dixon as opposed to F.W. The book about to hit the shelves, Just the Facts, was the fourth book in the Kimberly Charles series, and at every book-signing event he had to deal with someone, usually an opinionated LOL, who couldn’t quite believe that a “man can write these books.”
“Look,” Joanna said, “we both know that tours for midlist authors are hard to come by these days. The fact that your publisher was kind enough to readjust the pub date in order to take both the election and my projected due date into consideration was a huge concession on their part, and we need to treat it as such. You go out there and do your job, and I’ll stay here to keep the home fires burning. As long as you’re home in time for Thanksgiving, it’s not a problem.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
The truth is, they both knew that even with Butch out of town she’d have plenty of help. For one thing, Carol Sunderson would be there to assist her with looking after Dennis as well as Sage. Years earlier Carol and her husband had been living nearby and raising their two grandsons when their mobile home had burned to the ground. Carol’s husband had died in the fire. Not only was she left alone, she and her grandsons had nowhere to live.
At the time Joanna and Butch had moved into their new place just up the road, and Joanna’s old place, High Lonesome Ranch’s original ranch house, was sitting empty. They’d been able to offer Carol a place to live rent-free along with a part-time paid gig as housekeeper/nanny—a job that suited Carol Sunderson to a tee.
With Butch off on the road, Carol came to the house early enough each day to help get Denny fed, dressed, and down to the end of High Lonesome Road in time to catch the school bus. Eva Lou Brady showed up on an almost daily basis, often bringing along a casserole or two, as did Marianne Maculyea. And both of them were more than happy to take over baby-holding duties when called upon to do so. Having all those helping hands around left Joanna feeling truly blessed that she wasn’t having to look after both a newborn and a five-year-old on her own.
Butch’s publicist had organized a short but intense two-week book tour that had launched on time, while most of the items on Joanna’s to-do list had taken a direct hit. Expecting to be off work most of December and part of January, she had originally planned to spend November’s spare time focused on wrapping up election issues—finishing the legally mandated paperwork that follows an election campaign and sending out personal thank-you notes to her many supporters. Once her maternity leave started, she would have had all of December to get ready for Christmas.
Now, though, with the prospect of being back at work in early December, everything got lumped together in a hodgepodge November. Yes, she had time for cuddling and caring for her newborn infant, but in order to get everything else accomplished, too, Joanna lived a twenty-four-hour cycle—sleeping only by fits and starts and nursing every couple of hours. Luckily, Eva Lou came over and helped get the thank-you notes written and sent. Carol went out and bought a set of Christmas cards that Joanna managed to get signed and addressed in short order.
A week and a half into her maternity leave and long before either Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Joanna had gotten most of her Christmas shopping done online, with UPS stopping by the house on an almost daily basis, dropping off gifts that showed up at the door prewrapped.
In other words, Joanna was busy and productive, but was she happy? Not exactly. Halfway through the second week of her leave, she was antsy and restless. For one thing, she wasn’t used to spending so much time at home. She missed the office. She missed the job and the responsibility. Most of all she missed the people. Tom Hadlock, Joanna’s current chief deputy, was the man in charge during her maternity leave. She resisted the temptation to drop by the office and check on things, because it was important not to second-guess the acting sheriff or undercut his authority. Nonetheless, he called her often, giving her updates on what was happening.
There had been another high-speed chase between the Border Patrol and a coyote smuggling undocumented aliens. The unfolding incident had ended in a fiery crash near Wilcox in which seven illegal immigrants and their would-be smuggler, another illegal, had all perished. Joanna’s team of homicide investigators had devoted the better part of the past two weeks to tracking down the victims’ real identities so that their survivors—in Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras—could all be properly notified.
It was frustrating, time-consuming, thankless work. There were other cases that they should have been investigating. Instead a big portion of Joanna’s sworn officers had spent precious hours and effort doing a job which by all rights should have been the responsibility of the federal government. That was a part of the “migrant crisis” that the open-borders folks and the news media seldom noticed or acknowledged—the added costs that accrued to local law-enforcement agencies left to pick up the pieces when the federal government failed to do its job of maintaining and policing the borders.
While the department’s homicide investigators had been preoccupied with that, Acting Sheriff Hadlock, true to his jail-commander roots, had managed to see to it that the inmates’ Thanksgiving dinner plans, under the auspices of the jail’s recently hired chef, Wendell Marks, were laid out well in advance.
Tom Hadlock had been around long enough to remember the time, early in Joanna’s tenure as sheriff, when the turkeys intended for the inmates’ holiday dinner had been siphoned off by a previous jail cook who’d left town in the dark of night. No one wanted a repeat of that challenging episode.
On Friday afternoon Joanna found herself pretty much caught up with everything on her to-do list. With Sage down for her afternoon nap, Joanna had sorted through the mail that Carol had brought from the post office when she went to town to get groceries. In among the Bed Bath & Beyond coupons and the home-improvement catalogs was a first-class envelope from Butch’s publisher.