by J. A. Jance
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.
&nb
sp; 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.
Chapter 3
THE BOSS OFTEN WENT AWAY FOR DAYS AT A TIME, LEAVING HIS prisoners chained but otherwise unguarded. The girls had discussed his absences among themselves—first just the three of them, and later, once Amelia joined them, all four of them together—theorizing about where he went and what he did while he was gone. This time, however, he had made his intentions clear. He was off hunting—but where? Latisha had no idea. Soon some other poor girl would be cast into this hellish nightmare with her, and eventually one or the other of them would die.
But for now Latisha was alone. Sandy had disappeared first. Maybe she’d gotten away, or maybe the Boss had let her go. That’s what Latisha hoped. One day Sandy went upstairs and never returned. Sadie was the next to leave. Now Amelia was gone, too, with no question whatsoever about what had happened to her. Amelia hadn’t escaped. There was no one left in the basement for Latisha to talk to—no stories to tell, no histories to share, only endless stretches of time where one day bled into the next, or maybe not. She sometimes awakened from sleep thinking that a whole day had passed, or a night, and maybe that wasn’t true. All she had to do—all she could do—was think about how much she missed the others—Sandra Ruth Locke, Sadie Kaitlyn Jennings, and Amelia Diaz Salazar. She repeated their names aloud each time she thought of them, almost like a sacred chant. She didn’t want to forget them, because someday, if she ever got away and lived to tell the story, Latisha wanted to let the world know about her friends and what had happened to them.
In many ways all their histories were unsurprisingly similar—fractured families and lives complicated by poverty, drug use, and other criminal activity. To begin with, and more than anything else, they talked about food. Given their stark circumstances, that was hardly surprising.
Sandy had been thirteen when her mom, Margo—a divorced, single mother—had gone to prison for writing bad checks. Sandy’s father had never been “in the picture,” and with Margo incarcerated, he didn’t step forward then, either. Instead Sandy had gone “into the system” and had ended up in foster care. Thanks to a series of unfortunate circumstances, she’d gone through a series of foster homes.
Sandy’s first placement, with Ben and Andrea Thompson, had been a revelation. Ben and Andrea were a married couple in their early forties. Ben worked long hours selling medical equipment, but he made good money. Andrea was an architect who worked out of their home, a sweet little bungalow in Van Nuys, California. Unable to have children of their own, they had signed up for foster care with the ultimate intention of adoption.
Throughout Sandy’s young life, Margo hadn’t come close to being Mother of the Year. She had worked sporadically, but working or not, she was seldom at home when school let out. From a very early age, Sandy was a latchkey kid with very little adult supervision. She came home from school, ate whatever was available, and then spent the evenings watching cartoons rather than doing homework. By the time she landed in foster care, she was a freshman in high school and reading at a fifth-grade level.
Once Sandy moved in with the Thompsons, Andrea set out to change all that. When Sandy came home from school, Andrea was there, more often than not with a batch of freshly baked cookies—chocolate chip or peanut butter—cooling on the kitchen counter. Then she would sit Sandy down at the kitchen table and help her with homework until Ben came home for dinner.
The idea of eating the evening meal as a family was also strange. Margo’s idea of a balanced diet had been a Big Mac and a Diet Coke. For her a home-cooked meal was a Papa Murphy’s bake-at-home pizza. Andrea actually cooked food for dinner each night—grilling pork chops or steaks, serving them with salads and fresh vegetables—combinations Sandy had encountered before only in school cafeterias.
“That musta been weird,” Sadie had observed.
“It was,” Sandy agreed. “I didn’t know that things like broccoli and cauliflower could actually taste good. And I didn’t know that real people ate like that, either, sitting down in an actual dining room so they could all eat together. I thought that was a thing that only happened on TV. It made me feel sort of like Cinderella. My grades started getting better. I thought I was going to be okay.”
In the dark of the basement, her voice faded into silence.
“So what happened?” Latisha wanted to know.
“One day when I came home, Andrea wasn’t there, and there weren’t any cookies.”
“How come?”
“There’d been a wreck on the 405—a multi-car wreck. Ben’s car was rear-ended by a semi
. He ended up with a broken neck—a quadriplegic. It’s bad of me, but sometimes I found myself wishing that he’d died. Maybe that way I could have stayed with Andrea, but she told me she couldn’t take care of him and me, too, so I ended up back in the system.”
“And then what?”
“The next place wasn’t a foster family so much as it was a foster farm. As far as the Millers were concerned, taking in foster kids was strictly a moneymaking proposition. It turns out Mr. Miller was especially fond of little girls. I was almost fifteen, so I was too old for him, but someone finally blew the whistle on him, and they ended up shutting the place down.”
“And then?”
“They sent me someplace else, but by then my grades were crap again. The dad was retired military. When he told me to shape up or ship out, I shipped. I was seventeen. I hit the streets, hooked up with a pimp, and was doing okay until I ended up here. But if I could make a wish and have it come true, I’d be back in Andrea’s kitchen, stuffing my face with chocolate-chip cookies.”
“What about you, Sadie?” Sandy had asked. “If you could eat anything in the world, what would it be?”
“My grandma’s fried chicken,” she answered at once. “No doubt about it.”
“And you, Latisha?”
“Lyle’s pancakes,” she answered.
“Who’s Lyle?”
“My stepfather,” Latisha said.
“Whoa, you got a stepfather who actually cooks? I got one of those, too. Problem is, the only thing he cooks is meth, and that’s how both he and my mom ended up in the slammer. But about these pancakes,” Sadie continued, sticking to the topic at hand. “Buttermilk or plain?”