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.
At this point Butch had been a published author for a number of years. Over time Joanna had learned that authors are paid on an irregular basis. Advances on royalties are paid on signing a contract, on delivering a manuscript, on hardcover publication, and again on paperback publication. With Butch still off on tour and due back on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, this envelope most likely contained the pub payment for his current book.
Wanting to guarantee that the important missive didn’t go AWOL, Joanna ventured into Butch’s office and placed it on the keyboard of his desktop computer. As she turned away, she came face-to-face with the shelves containing her father’s leather-bound diaries, although “journals” probably would have been a better term. At least that was the word written in gold leaf on the spine and front cover of each volume.
The books had arrived at Joanna and Butch’s home in a roundabout fashion many years after her father’s death. D. H. Lathrop had come to law enforcement later in life, having spent his early years working as an underground miner. As first a deputy and later a sheriff, he had never been more than a two-finger typist. Joanna remembered him spending night after night, sometimes long after her mother had shut off the TV and gone to bed, laboring over the books in longhand while seated at the dining-room table. Joanna never remembered asking him what he was doing. She had simply assumed it was something to do with work. Her father had made it clear on numerous occasions that he didn’t like discussing work at home under any circumstances, except in vague good-guy/bad-guy terminology that had charmed his daughter and made his job sound not at all dangerous or threatening—more like a game of cowboys and Indians than anything else.
When her father died in an incident long presumed to be an accident, Joanna saw no sign of his books. His personal effects had been packed up and sent home, and her mother had stowed the many boxes in her garage. For almost two decades, they had sat unopened on makeshift platforms on the rafters of Eleanor’s garage.
No one had been more surprised than Joanna when her long-widowed mother had fallen in love. Even more startling was the fact that the object of her affections was a relatively new arrival in town, George Winfield, the medical examiner. They had merged households, with George moving into Eleanor’s home. As part of that process, he had cleaned out the garage and stumbled upon the journals written by his long-dead predecessor, D. H. Lathrop. Eleanor had been of only one mind concerning those journals—get rid of them. George respectfully disagreed.
Prior to marrying Eleanor and in his role as the Cochise County medical examiner, he had worked with Joanna for years. Eleanor saw Joanna as her headstrong, opinionated daughter, while George regarded her as a respected colleague. Since she had followed in her father’s law-enforcement footsteps, George felt she deserved to have access to her father’s personal history.
Against his new wife’s wishes, George had turned the journals over to Joanna, and Butch had taken charge of them. He shelved them in his study in strict chronological order, and there they’d remained. Twice in dealing with cold cases, Joanna had searched through the applicable volumes. Other than that, however, the books had simply languished there, gathering dust and mostly forgotten.
In Joanna’s view her father had always been larger than life. She regarded him as perfection itself. Even before D.H.’s death, Joanna’s unrelenting hero worship of the man had been a bone of contention between her and her mother, and once he was gone, things got worse. It was only after Eleanor’s marriage to George that she had finally revealed her first husband’s feet of clay, disclosing to Joanna that prior to his death her father had been involved in a longtime affair with Mona Tipton, his secretary from work.
At the time Butch had already unpacked D.H.’s journals. In full denial, shaken by what her mother had told her, and hoping to disprove what she thought to be an unfounded allegation, Joanna had turned to the journals in search of the truth, and once she found it, the truth hurt. In among the last journal’s concluding entries, Joanna learned that Eleanor was right. Her father and Mona Tipton had indeed been romantically involved. Once Eleanor became aware of her husband’s infidelity, she had given him the basic her-or-me ultimatum.
The book’s final entry, scribbled in Joanna’s father’s distinctive handwriting, indicated that he had reached a decision of some kind, but there was no accompanying hint as to what that decision might have been, because he had died right after that. With no additional entries to supply the missing information, eventually Joanna had gone to Mona Tipton herself in search of answers. In the unlikely conversation that followed—a conversation between D.H.’s grown daughter and his still-grieving mistress—Joanna had learned that the night before he died, her father had told Mona that he was breaking up with her. He had decided to cast his lot with his wife and daughter.
Joanna had vivid memories of Eleanor’s tight-lipped fury at the funeral and in the days, months, and years after her husband’s passing. As a teenager Joanna had attributed her mother’s anger and apparent lack of grief to a lack of caring. After talking to Mona, Joanna began to suspect that Eleanor had been more crushed by her late husband’s betrayal than she had been by his death.
Would things have been different if Eleanor had known that D.H. had decided to give Mona up in favor of hearth and home—in favor of staying with his wife and daughter? Joanna was left to wonder. Perhaps Eleanor had known the truth and it had made no difference. In any event it was something Joanna and her mother never discussed. The topic of how and when Eleanor had learned of her husband’s affair was never broached between them. Had they been allowed more time together, a few more years maybe, they might have found a way to have that conversation, but Eleanor’s unexpected death had precluded any such outcome.
Now, with Butch away, Joanna stood in his office, staring at the shelf containing her father’s journals. Other than those three occasions when she’d gone looking for answers, Joanna had maintained a hands-off policy toward the books. Butch had read through them—he’d told her so—but she herself had not.
Why? she wondered now. Had she done so out of some kind of loyalty to her mother? Or maybe a sort of misguided allegiance to her father had been at work. Perhaps she suspected that there were other betrayals on her father’s part lurking in those pages and hadn’t wanted to uncover them.
But now Joanna’s parents were both dead and gone. She was the only one left to be the actual grown-up in the room. Maybe it was time for Joanna to finally come to terms with all three versions of her own history—as her father told it, as her mother told it, and Joanna herself told it.
And so, with trembling hands, Joanna Brady went to the first volume on the shelf, pulled the book out of its designated slot, and carried it out to the living room. There, settled in her favorite chair, while Sage slept and while Denny was safely stowed at school, Joanna turned the first page and promptly fell into a rabbit hole.
1967
I hate swing shift. I get off work and come home in the middle of the night. Usually Ellie’s left something on the back of the stove for me to eat, but by then she’s already in bed. I’m done with my day, ready to relax and maybe have a conversation, but like I said, Ellie’s in bed. The TV stations are already off the air by then, so what am I supposed to do? Haul out the booze and drink myself into oblivion every damned night? Nope, that’s what my old man did, and it’s no way to live. It’s also the whole reason I left West Texas, so I wouldn’t turn out to be like him. Not ever.
I told Ellie I can’t just sit around in the middle of the night twiddling my thumbs and waiting to get sleepy, and that’s why she gave me this book for my birthday. She bought it from the stationery department at the company store. She says when it’s late at night and I don’t have anyone to talk to, I can talk to the book. And that’s what I’m doing right now—talking to the book—and it’s just as well, because what’s going through my head isn’t something I can talk about with anyone else, most especially her.
Because it’s always the middle of the night when the house is quiet that it gets to me—when I sit around wondering where is he? What happened to our little boy, our baby? Is he in a good family? Are his adoptive parents taking proper care of him? Do they love him? He’s five now and probably in kindergarten. Does he like school? Is he smart? Is he learning to read?
Most of all, does he know he’s adopted? If he does, what do the people raising him tell him about us—that we didn’t want him? That wasn’t the case for either one of us, but Ellie’s mother was and is a bitch on wheels! If Ellie didn’t agree to give up the baby, her mother was going to go to the cops, have me arrested, and brought up on charges of statutory rape. So Ellie caved. She gave up the baby—and she did it for me. And the whole first year we were married, she cried herself to sleep every single night.
By the time the baby was born, Ellie’s father had been transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia. She went there long enough to get her high-school diploma, but on the day she turned eighteen, she ran away from home, caught a Greyhound bus, and came straight back to Bisbee. She was waiting for me on the sidewalk one day when I came off shift at the Campbell shaft. “What are you doing here?” I asked her when she got into my truck.
“My parents can go to hell,” she told me. “I came back to marry you, and nobody’s going to stop me. I’m eighteen now, and I’ve got my birth certificate along to prove it.”
We drove over to Lordsburg that very weekend and got married in front of the justice of the peace. It was the best day of my life.