by J. A. Jance
“Hey, Mom,” Denny said, catching sight of her. “What do you think?”
The wonderful thing about Denny is that he didn’t mind when she missed dinner. Chances are, he hadn’t even noticed.
“It’s amazing!” Joanna said without exaggeration, because it was amazing. No doubt it would be even more so once Butch’s trains started buzzing around on their shelf-laid tracks.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Check out all the Christmas trees,” Butch said, “and make sure they light up before Denny hands them to me.”
For the next hour and a half, they worked on the train display. By the time trains started moving around the decorated tracks, Butch seemed a little less grumpy. Because it was a school night, they had to pause then and get the kids to bed. Once that happened, they returned to the family room to close up and put away boxes. That was when the phone rang with Jenny’s face showing in caller ID.
“Hey,” Joanna said when she answered. “I’ll put you on speaker. Dad and I are in the family room cleaning up the debris field left behind by this year’s Trains in Winter project.”
“You’re already working on that?” Jenny sounded dismayed. “The trains are usually the last thing we work on.”
“And they were this time, too,” Joanna agreed. “That’s because everything else is done. We put up the tree yesterday. The living room and dining room are both decorated to the hilt, and all boxes from there are put away. Believe me, we’re on a roll around here.”
“But will there be anything left for me to do when I get there?” Jenny asked. Clearly she didn’t like feeling as though she’d been excluded from the process, and that made sense, since in previous years she’d been in charge of most of the Christmas decorating.
“Don’t worry,” Butch assured her. “There’ll be plenty of wrapping for you to do—wrapping and baking both—so how about if we change topics. How are your finals going?”
“I’m almost to the end of them,” Jenny said. “Only two more to go, one tomorrow and one on Friday morning at eight o’clock. That one will be easy peasy. I’ll be done, packed, and headed down I-17 by noon, which should put me ahead of most of the traffic.”
“When is Beth’s last final?” Butch asked.
“That’s on Friday, too, but slightly later. Even so, we should still be on the road by noon.”
“Her folks live in Tucson, don’t they?” Butch asked.
“In SaddleBrooke,” Jenny answered.
“Meaning close to Tucson but not exactly inside the city limits,” Butch commented. “Are you going to stop by and see them on the way?”
“I doubt that. I don’t think Beth wants to.”
“So she’s still at loggerheads with them?”
“Yup, big time.”
“What seems to be the problem?” Butch asked.
Joanna was often mystified at how Butch always seemed to know so much more about Jenny’s private life than her mother did.
“I think it’s all about Beth’s boyfriend,” Jenny answered. “Her folks seem to hate the guy.”
“Will they come around?” Butch asked.
“Maybe,” Jenny replied. “Not necessarily because they’ll have a change of heart, but because the boyfriend seems to be turning into a short-timer. Things on that score seem to have gone haywire recently. Beth’s been down in the dumps for days now. She’s been a mess all weekend.”
“You think they’re breaking up?” Butch asked.
“That’s how I see it,” Jenny replied. “Beth hasn’t been doing much sleeping or eating. She’s so distracted right now that I’m surprised she’s able to take finals, much less pass them.”
The exchange gave Joanna a possible answer to her earlier question. Butch knew about Jenny’s life because he asked detailed questions and then—surprise, surprise—he actually listened to her answers. As for Joanna? She hadn’t the slightest clue about where Beth Rankin’s parents lived, and she certainly didn’t care whether or not this girl she didn’t know was breaking up with her current boyfriend.
“Have you met the guy?” Butch asked.
“Naw,” Jenny replied. “Beth met Ronald Cameron online at some kind of dating site. He’s into computers in a big way—cybersecurity, I think. He lives in Washington, D.C. I doubt we’d have anything in common. As you already know, geeks have never been my thing. I’m a lot more likely to go for guys who prefer riding horses and herding cattle to tapping keyboards.”
“Computer guys probably make more money than cowboys do,” Butch suggested, “but that’s all right. I don’t necessarily trust geeky computer guys either.”
They all laughed at that, and then Joanna changed the subject.
“What do the weather reports look like for Friday afternoon?” she asked.
Right that minute she was far less concerned about the possibility of collegiate love affairs going bad than she was about her daughter having to drive home from Flagstaff in adverse road conditions.
“It’s supposed to be clear and dry by then,” Jenny said. “Perfect weather for driving.”
“Good,” Joanna said, “but I’ll still be worried until you’re here safe and sound.”
“Mom,” Jenny said, “you worry too much.”
In actual fact it wasn’t a matter of Joanna Brady’s worrying too much. It was a matter of her worrying too much about the wrong things.
“Take care anyway,” she advised her daughter. “And good luck with those last two finals.”
“She doesn’t need luck,” Butch declared in the background. “That girl of ours has her finals aced.”
Once the phone call was over, Joanna noticed that some of the earlier tension had drained away. As they finished cleaning up in the family room, she began recounting everything that had happened in the course of the day. By the time she finished, they were on their way to bed.
“You might have been stuck at your desk all day, but your people were out working like crazy,” Butch said. “No wonder you were late to dinner.”
“I’m sorry. . . .”
Butch waved off her apology. “Not to worry,” he said. “You’re forgiven. It’s par for the course, and I’m over it.”
“But I shouldn’t—”
“Joey, you have a job to do. People are counting on you. And don’t pay that much attention if I get my nose out of joint occasionally.”
Joanna was lying in bed and not quite asleep when Butch spoke again. “So you think Madison was behind this whole thing?” he asked.
“I do,” Joanna said, “and I believe that insurance money was the motive.”
“Will you be able to charge her with anything?”
“I doubt it. I think she fully intended to take him out herself, most likely staging things to make it look like he’d attacked her. Unfortunately for Armando, he showed up at that critical juncture and things went in a very different direction.”
Butch was quiet for several moments after that. Joanna decided he’d probably dropped off to sleep, but then he spoke again. “Leon was right, you know.”
“About what—changing his beneficiary?”
“That yes, but also about it being unlikely he’d get a fair shake in any kind of custody dispute. Biological fathers get screwed over in divorce proceedings all the time. As an adoptive father who also happened to be a stepfather, I don’t think he would have stood a chance in a court of law, no matter what kind of high-powered lawyer Lyndell Hogan was footing the bill for. And now, no matter what kind of mother Madison Hogan is, her kids are stuck with her.”
Moments later Butch started snoring while Joanna tossed and turned. Murder was bad enough, but this was an even worse outcome than usual. It seemed likely that Kendall and Peter Hogan would be raised by a woman who might well get away with their father’s murder.
Chapter 19
With Peter asleep below her, Kendall lay on the top bunk and listened to the voices coming from the kitchen, where Grandma Puckett was having what she called he
r “nightly cocktail” and Mommy was drinking beer. No doubt they were both smoking cigarettes. Mrs. Baird said smoking was bad for people’s lungs, but maybe Mommy and Grandma Puckett didn’t know that.
Tonight Kendall had left the bedroom door cracked open. That meant cigarette smoke drifted into the room, but it also meant she could hear what was being said.
“How can it be there’s no insurance?” Grandma Puckett demanded. “I thought Leon had a big life-insurance policy where he worked.”
“He did, but I don’t get any of it,” Mommy said, “not a dime. He changed the beneficiary arrangement a few weeks ago. He did it behind my back, without saying a word about it. He left all the proceeds to the kids in a way that cuts me out of it completely. It’s supposed to be held in trust for them until they’re of age.”
Kendall didn’t know what insurance was, and she didn’t understand what that b-word was or what “of age” meant either, but whatever those things added up to, they had made her mother furious. She’d been on the phone earlier in the afternoon, talking to someone else about those very things—especially insurance and the b-word. Once Mommy got off the phone, she started yelling and throwing things every which way. There’d always been a picture of Daddy in his army uniform, hanging on the wall in the living room. Mommy had torn that down and smashed it into a million pieces. Then she turned to Kendall.
“Clean that up,” she’d ordered, pointing at the mess she’d just made. “Get rid of that broken glass before one of you kids steps on it and cuts a foot.”
Kendall had used a broom and a dustpan and cleaned up the mess as well as she could. There were lots of tiny pieces of glass on the floor. She didn’t know if she’d gotten all of them. She hoped so. As for the picture itself? If Daddy was gone, she didn’t want to forget how he looked, so she slipped the photo out of its frame and smuggled it into the back of her closet, where she hid it away along with the rest of her treasures.
About that time Grandma Puckett had shown up after driving down from Casa Grande. Randy had been there hanging around during the phone call, but the moment Grandma Puckett arrived, he’d taken off. She didn’t like him, and he didn’t like her. Kendall thought that was just fine, especially if it meant Randy would make himself scarce.
By then it had been getting on toward dinnertime. Grandma Puckett had taken one look in the fridge, found it to be mostly empty, and announced that she was taking everybody out for dinner. For Kendall that was very good news. At breakfast that morning, she’d emptied the last crumbs of Lucky Charms into two bowls, one for her and one for Peter. Once she took a bite, though, the milk tasted funny, so she’d ended up dumping out both bowls, and they’d eaten toast with peanut butter on it for breakfast.
If they’d gone to school that day, they would have had both breakfast and lunch. But they weren’t going to school right now, so for lunch they’d had another marshmallow sandwich on the floor of their bedroom. For dinner at Denny’s, though, they had a true feast. Both of them had Grand Slams, and not kiddie Grand Slams either. Peter had the Slugger with pancakes and hash browns, while Kendall ordered her favorite, the one with French toast, both of them accompanied by milk shakes.
“Don’t you ever feed these kids?” Grandma Puckett asked. “They act like they’re starving.”
She smiled when she said that—like she was making a joke or something, but Kendall didn’t think it was funny. Sometimes it felt like she and Peter really were starving.
On the way home from dinner, they stopped off at Safeway and Grandma Puckett bought more groceries than Kendall had seen since Daddy moved out of the house. There was fresh milk and bread and eggs, boxes of cereal, packages of sliced luncheon meat and cheeses. There was even a bottle of orange juice. It had been a long time since they’d had orange juice at home.
Full for a change and relieved to know that Randy wasn’t just down the hall, Kendall was about to doze off when the sound of a ringing doorbell roused her. Grandma Puckett must have gone to the door. A moment later she returned. “It’s Lyndell and Isabella Hogan,” she said. “They’re waiting outside. They’re staying at the Copper Queen in Bisbee, but they were hoping to see the kids tonight.”
Kendall’s heart leaped. Daddy’s parents were here?
“Well, they’re not seeing the kids!” Mommy said. “Tell them to go away.”
“For Pete’s sake, Maddie!” Grandma Puckett exclaimed. “They’re Leon’s parents. They’ve come all the way from Wyoming.”
“They could have come from Australia for all I care,” Mommy said, raising her voice. “I don’t want to see them, and the kids can’t see them either. Leon was trying to kill me! If that cop hadn’t been there, he would have succeeded, too, but you still think I should roll out the red carpet for them? Not on your life. I don’t mind if they come to the funeral. That’s up to them, but if you think I’m going to have those people in my house or chumming around with my kids, think again.”
Kendall’s heart constricted. Daddy had been trying to kill Mommy? That couldn’t be true! No way! He wouldn’t have done that, not ever. Mommy had come after Daddy sometimes, but never the other way around.
“This is just so wrong,” Grandma Puckett was saying, but it sounded as though she was walking away from the kitchen. Kendall heard the front door open again. A few words were exchanged, and then the door closed again.
From the kitchen Kendall heard the thunk of an empty beer bottle landing in the trash. The refrigerator door squeaked open and shut. Mommy was probably getting another beer. Their fridge sometimes ran out of milk, but it was never in any danger of running out of beer.
“Speaking of the funeral,” Grandma said, picking up the conversation. “What are you going to wear? For that matter, what are the kids going to wear?”
“I’ll find something,” Mommy said. “I’ve lost weight, so now some of my old clothes fit me again. As for the kids? Whatever they wear to school will be fine.”
A couple times a year, Mommy would go to Goodwill and come home with bags of clothing. Some of it fit and some didn’t. Kendall knew that a few of the kids made fun of them because their supposedly “new” clothes weren’t new at all.
“I’ll take them shopping tomorrow,” Grandma Puckett announced. “I noticed tonight that Peter’s pant legs are at least three inches too short, and Kendall’s shoes have seen better days.”
“That’s totally up to you,” Mommy said. “The last thing I want to do is spend the day dragging kids in and out of stores. Besides, I have an appointment with the funeral director in the morning. You can take the kids shopping while I take care of that.”
“How much is the funeral going to cost?”
“I have no idea,” Mommy said. “Some money has come into that GoFundMe account—about three thousand dollars the last I checked. But I told the guy at the funeral home that we’ve got to keep the price down to a bare minimum. Cremation and an urn—that’s it. I’m not paying for a casket just so they can burn it to cinders. Randy told me that if I come up short, he’ll take care of the difference.”
“Big of him,” Grandma Puckett said, but it didn’t sound like she meant it as a compliment.
“Don’t you start saying bad things about Randy,” Mommy objected, her voice rising in pitch. “He takes good care of me.”
So did Daddy, Kendall thought as she finally drifted off to sleep. But he took care of all of us.
Chapter 20
Joanna’s phone was ringing as she stepped out of the shower the next morning. When she picked it up, Casey Ledford’s face was showing in caller ID.
“You’re at work early,” Joanna observed when she answered.
“I’m not at work yet,” Casey replied. “A text from DPS came in while I was eating breakfast. Stains on the protective order test positive for scopolamine. If you happen to be doing CSI work for one of the big shots at DPS, you get first-rate service.”
“Are you saying you want to make the switch and go work for them?” Joanna asked.<
br />
“Not on your life,” Casey said with a laugh. “Chances are the place is teeming with plenty of other people just like Dave Newton.”
“So what’s the next step?” Joanna asked. “Not that you’re allowed to tell me, that is.”
“That’ll be Dave Newton’s call. He was copied on the same text that just showed up here, and it certainly lends credence to Armando’s claim that Leon Hogan was impaired at the time of the shooting. Once I get into the office and have a chance to enhance them, I’ll be sending him and you some of our crime scene photos.”
Joanna was puzzled. “What kind of crime scene photos?” she asked.
“Just wait and see,” Casey said. “I think you’ll find them interesting.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think Madison Hogan had time to clean up her mess before she went racing out of that living room.”
In the kitchen Joanna found that Denny had been delivered to his bus stop and a previously read copy of the Bisbee Bee lay on the table next to her place setting. She started to reach for it, but Butch stopped her.
“Don’t bother reading it,” he said. “Marliss has outdone herself with a puff piece on Dave Newton. It’s all about how rogue law-enforcement officers operating out of mismanaged jurisdictions must be held to account when it comes to line-of-duty shootings that put innocent civilians in harm’s way. Those aren’t the exact words Marliss used, but you get the picture.”
“I certainly do.”
“Who was that on the phone?” Butch asked. “I heard it ringing while you were in the bathroom.”
“It was Casey,” Joanna answered. “The protective order tested positive for the presence of scopolamine.”