by J. A. Jance
“That’s true,” Butch said. “But your mother’s behaving like a nutcase now—in the present. Not that I mind her doing the ironing. She’s welcome to stop by and do that anytime, but she’s also keeping you and George upset in the process. I think we all need to know if what she claims happened really did happen or if she made it all up. If she’s created this story out of whole cloth, George certainly needs to know what he’s dealing with, and so do you.”
“Why me?” Joanna asked.
“You’ve always implied that your dad was practically perfect in every way,” Butch said. “But what if he wasn’t? It’s not easy being a paragon. What if Hank Lathrop turns out to have been an ordinary human being after all and ends up getting knocked off that pedestal you’ve kept him on all your adult life? If it turns out your father wasn’t a halo-wearing angel, maybe your mother isn’t the Wicked Witch of the West, either.”
“I never said—” Joanna began.
“All I’m saying,” Butch continued, “is that if Hank wasn’t as good as you’ve always claimed he was, and if Eleanor isn’t as bad, maybe the two of you—you and your mother—could find some common ground.”
“What do you mean, I put my father on a pedestal?” Joanna asked.
Butch shook his head. “Look,” he said, “twenty years or so ago, my father had an affair, too. It was with someone from work—someone who was much younger than my mother. When Mom found out about it because someone from his office called and spilled the beans, she was hell on wheels for the next six months. It’s probably hard for you to think of my mother as being more difficult than she’s been whenever you’ve been around her, but believe me, during those six months she was absolutely impossible. But then, for whatever reason, things died down. No one ever mentioned it again. My folks are still together, all these years later. What they think of as a solid marriage may not conform to your version of holy matrimony, or mine, either, but it suits them. They probably see each other as they were when they met, instead of as they are now.
“And maybe the same thing would have happened for your parents, too,” Butch added. “If your father hadn’t died being a Good Samaritan and changing that flat tire, maybe your parents would have gotten through the tough times the same way my parents did. It’s possible they might have split up over it, but it’s also possible that their marriage would have weathered the storm. They might even have come out the better for it on the other side. Either way, your mother would have had a chance to get over it. As it is, she’s stuck. Whatever happened between your father and Mona or whatever your mother thinks happened is still eating away at Eleanor Lathrop Winfield. It’s hurting her relationship with George, and it isn’t helping her relationship with you, either.”
Those were more words than Joanna had heard Butch Dixon string together in a very long time, if ever. She stared at him in silence for several seconds. Her instinctive reaction was to dig in her heels and argue the point. But Butch’s relationship with his parents was so treacherously similar to her own with Eleanor that she had to admit that he probably had a point.
“All right, then,” she said. “I’ll guess I’ll go delve into my family’s dirty laundry.”
Later on she heard rain falling hard on the roof of the den as she stood studying the shelf where she kept her father’s diaries. Since her mother had been so specific about forbidding Mona to attend Hank Lathrop’s funeral, the last volume, the one he’d been writing in at the time of his death, seemed like a logical place to start. Joanna pulled out the last volume. Then, switching on the lamp, she sat down to read. She went straight to the final entry, the one written the night before her father’s fatal accident:
The worst thing about making a decision is living with the consequences.
In an entry from a few days earlier, Joanna found a damning passage that seemed to show her mother’s accusations had been well founded after all:
This is eating away at me. I’m not sleeping at night. Living like this isn’t fair to Ellie. It isn’t fair to Mona. And it isn’t fair to me. But what will become of Joanna if we split up?
Joanna’s eyes blurred with tears as she read those words. In a matter of seconds everything Joanna had ever believed about her parents’ relationship went out the window. Butch was right. Had her father lived, it was possible her parents really would have been divorced, making Joanna a child of divorce. Had that happened, how different would all their lives have been?
Knowing what seemed to be the worst, Joanna scanned through previous entries. In one from several weeks earlier, woven in among a series of general comments about what was going on in the office, Joanna found this:
Ellie’s still pitching a hissy fit. Nothing I do is right. Nothing I say is right. The only time I have a moment’s peace is when I’m out of the house. If I wasn’t able to go to work, I don’t know what I’d do. But work isn’t exactly peaceful these days, either. M is pushing me to make a decision. I know what she wants. Part of me wants it, too, but not enough to hurt the other people I know will get hurt.
That was what Joanna’s mother had said—that Hank had used work as a way of avoiding her. And that was why now, all these years later, she was so susceptible to thinking George Winfield might be doing the same thing with work and with Madge.
But when had her father’s illicit office romance started? Joanna wondered. Had it been going on the whole time Mona had worked for Hank, or had it happened only during the last few months before her father’s death? The snippets Joanna found offered no specific clues about the timing. What they did make clear, however, was that although Hank Lathrop had cared deeply for Mona, he had also agonized over what his relationship with her would do to his wife and daughter.
M’s dad is back in the hospital, and her mother is a basket case. The whole mess is squarely on her shoulders. I wish there were more I could do to help her. It hurts like hell to watch someone you love being run down by a train when there’s not a thing you can do to stop it.
Joanna stared at the words: “someone you love.” There it was in black and white, an admission written in Hank Lathrop’s own distinctive handwriting. Joanna’s father had fallen in love with someone who wasn’t his wife and wasn’t her mother. Somehow Eleanor had figured it out; found it out. For her that betrayal had been a life-altering experience, and the fact that Eleanor had decided to keep her husband’s secret from Joanna had altered their daughter’s life as well.
Sometime later, Butch appeared in the doorway to the office. “Well?” he asked. “Did you find anything?”
Unaware that she’d been sitting and staring off into space, Joanna was startled by the sound of his voice.
“Mom’s right,” she said. “It’s real. It’s all here in black and white.”
“I’m sorry,” Butch said.
Joanna was surprised to realize that she was still close to tears. Her father’s betrayal had happened years in the past, but for her it was a raw, bleeding wound. “Me, too,” she managed. “Do you want to read it?”
“Naw,” Butch said. “No need. But it’s late, Joey. Don’t you think we should go to bed?”
Without another word Joanna switched off the lamp and followed him to the bedroom. By the time she had changed into her nightgown, Butch was already half asleep, but when she crawled into bed beside him, he turned over and enveloped her in a full body hug. Within a matter of seconds, he was snoring. Joanna was wide awake.
For a long time she lay there going over everything she remembered about her father’s funeral. Joanna had been fifteen at the time and overwhelmed with grief. Her mother had been quietly stoic. If Eleanor had shed any tears at all, she had done so in private—away from her daughter’s prying eyes and away from everyone else’s as well. Joanna remembered hearing people saying how brave Eleanor was being in the face of her husband’s senseless death. Joanna hadn’t thought of her mother as brave—she thought her cruel and heartless. If she had really loved the man, how could she not show it?
St
ill, no matter how much Joanna had disapproved of her mother’s behavior, she had also internalized it, modeled it, and made it her own.
Gradually, as the rain pelted down outside, Joanna stopped thinking about Hank Lathrop’s funeral and started thinking about Andy’s.
At the time of his death, there had been so much going on in his life that Joanna hadn’t known about that the two of them might as well have been living in separate universes. There was his closely guarded secret investigation into corruption inside Walter McFadden’s Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. Joanna had known Andy was running for the office of sheriff, but he hadn’t told her what kind of malfeasance had prodded him into doing so. And there was money from a long-lost uncle that had suddenly come into Andy’s possession. Joanna hadn’t known about that, either—about the source of the money Andy had used to buy the diamond ring he had planned to give her as a surprise at the tenth anniversary dinner they never got to have.
Lying there next to Butch, Joanna remembered in freeze-frame, high-definition detail, that whole difficult time surrounding Andy’s funeral. All of it remained imprinted on her heart. She saw herself sitting in the kitchen polishing Andy’s boots and his badge. She remembered pinning the badge on his uniform, intending that it would be buried with him. Later she had changed her mind about that. She had called the funeral home and asked for them to remove the badge. She had saved Andy’s badge for Jenny, just as Eleanor had saved Hank’s for Joanna.
And then there were the people—hundreds of them, friends and complete strangers—who had come to the visitation and to Andy’s funeral the next day. She remembered the funeral itself and the graveside ceremony—hearing the sound of the bagpipes, seeing the coffin being lowered into the grave, being handed the carefully folded flag, hearing the last call on the two-way radio. Through it all, Joanna had done her best to hold herself in check, behaving to the best of her ability as her mother had behaved under similar circumstances—emulating what Eleanor had done because Joanna didn’t know what else to do.
All of those pictures were there in Joanna’s head, but as she mentally scrolled through them, there was one more detail that had been there from the beginning but that she hadn’t noticed before—or, more likely, had refused to let herself notice. Many of the frames from the funeral home and from the cemetery included the image of a young woman, a blonde a few years younger than Joanna, with the slightly thickened waist of a midterm pregnancy. Whoever the woman was, she was there suffering along with everyone else who had come, her face tear-stained and her features distorted by grief. And yet she had never once spoken to Joanna—not at the visitation or the cemetery nor at the reception afterward. She had never introduced herself to Andy’s widow and had never offered her condolences.
Who was she? Joanna wondered now. What was her connection to Andy? Was she someone from work, perhaps? If so, the woman had disappeared from the sheriff’s department long before Joanna had shown up there after her own election several months later.
The baby monitor squawked as Dennis stirred in the other room. Glad to escape the questions that were plaguing her, Joanna hurried out of bed and turned down the volume so the baby’s fussing wouldn’t disturb Butch. She went to the kitchen to get a bottle, then went into the bedroom where she pulled the wide-awake, screeching child from his crib. She changed him, soothed him, and fed him, but then, long after Dennis had fallen back to sleep in her arms, Joanna continued to sit in the rocker, holding him and rocking, with all those questions and more once again roiling in her head.
Who was she? Where did she come from? Where did she go? Whose baby was it, and where are they now?
But most of all, with the knowledge of her father’s indiscretion newly coalescing in her heart, Joanna found there was one question that trumped all the others: Is she my very own Mona Tipton?
CHAPTER 11
“MOM,” JENNY CALLED FROM THE BEDROOM DOORWAY. “YOU’D better get up. Butch says you’re going to be late for work.”
Joanna opened her eyes and peered at the clock. Seven-fifteen. She staggered out of bed and headed for the bathroom. The hot shower helped get her on track, but no amount of makeup could fix the ravages of her relatively sleepless night.
“And here I thought Dennis finally slept through the night,” Butch said, examining her face as he handed her a mug of coffee. “Turns out I’m the only one who slept. Obviously you didn’t. Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” Joanna said, choosing not to mention that her sleepless night had very little to do with poor little Dennis.
“Toast?” Butch asked. “English muffin?”
Joanna shook her head. “Thanks. I’d better just go. And I’ll probably have to drive up to Tucson later on this morning, after the briefing. I don’t know how late I’ll be.”
“Call on my cell,” Butch said. “Jeff will be here in about an hour with that group of high school kids he rounded up for the cleanup job. We’ll be at the other house most of the day.”
“How’s the wash?”
“I walked down and checked on it earlier,” Butch said. “It’s still running some but passable—as long as you have four-wheel drive. Maybe it’s time to think about unloading that Crown Victoria.”
“Not right now,” Joanna said. “The department’s budget is already in a world of hurt. Believe me, buying new four-wheel-drive patrol cars isn’t in the cards.”
Outside, the sky overhead was a clear cobalt blue. After several days of rain, weeds and grass that had lain dormant in the desert floor were suddenly springing to life and spreading a carpet of unexpected green. Normally, Joanna would have rejoiced at seeing that miraculous green. Today she saw the transformation, but her heart was too heavy to respond. Hank Lathrop was dead. Now her memories of him were dying, too, and poking holes in her memories of Andy in the process.
Joanna made it into the office by ten after eight. She was pulling herself together to face the morning briefing when she heard a woman yelling out in the lobby. “They’ve taken him, Jaime,” she screamed. “They’ve got him and it’s all your fault. What are you going to do about it?”
Joanna hurried to her office door. Jaime Carbajal, standing in front of Kristin’s desk, was trying to fend off the blows from a young dark-haired woman who was flailing away at him with both fists clenched.
“Enough,” Joanna ordered. “Stop it. What’s going on here?”
As the infuriated woman turned to look at Joanna, Jaime succeeded in grabbing her wrists and holding them still. “This is my sister,” Jaime managed. “Marcella Andrade, Luis’s mother.”
“And he’s gone, I tell you,” Marcella raged. “Luis is gone. If he hadn’t come to see you, if you hadn’t let them put his name in the paper—”
“Slow down, please, Marcella,” Joanna said. “Tell us what’s going on. Who has Luis? When did you lose him?”
“I didn’t lose him!” Marcella declared furiously. “You make it sound like I put him down someplace and forgot where I left him. When I came home this morning, he was gone. Oh, God. They’ve taken him, I know they have. What’ll they do to him? What if I never see him again? What if I’ve lost my baby forever?” Suddenly the fury that had propelled her to attack her brother seemed to dissipate. Sobbing, she sagged against Jaime’s chest as he struggled to hold her upright.
“Why don’t you come into my office?” Joanna suggested. “Let’s try to get to the bottom of this.”
Jaime led Marcella into Joanna’s office. While he eased her into one of the captain’s chairs, Joanna handed her a box of tissues. “You think someone has taken your son?”
Marcella nodded numbly.
“Do you know who?”
Marcella didn’t answer right away. “Some bad guys, I guess,” she said finally. “Some of Luis’s father’s friends—Marco’s used-to-be friends.”
“What kind of friends?” Jaime asked.
Marcella bit her lip. “Dealers,” she said. “Drug dealers. Marco was working with them for
a while, and they thought he ripped them off.”
“Did he?” Jaime asked.
Marcella shrugged. “Maybe.”
“So what happened?”
“Marco told me he was afraid that the dealer would try to take Luis in order to get even for what Marco did. That’s why I left Tucson. That’s why Luis and I came back home to Bisbee. I didn’t think he’d know to look for us here.”
“Does this guy—this dealer—have a name?” Joanna asked.
Marcella nodded. “Juan,” she answered. “His name’s Juan Francisco Castro. Everybody calls him Paco.”
Joanna made a note of the name.
“So, like I said,” Marcella continued, “we came back here. We rented a house and we were getting along just fine until Luis found those damned bones. Yesterday morning Jaime let somebody put his name in that newspaper article, and now he’s gone. What if they found out where we were from that? If Paco’s got him, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”
The idea that Jaime had any control over what went into a newspaper article was almost laughable. Besides, the drug dealers Joanna knew personally weren’t exactly news junkies. Still, she supposed it was remotely possible that Paco Castro or one of his cronies could have seen the name in the Tucson papers and put two and two together.
“When did you find out Luis was gone?” Jaime asked.
Marcella paused for a moment before she answered. “When I got home,” she said at last.
“What time was that?”
“About four,” she admitted. “I was out partying with a friend.”
From what Jaime had said about his sister’s exploits the day before, Joanna had an idea about what kind of a friend that might be as well as what kind of party, but she didn’t say a word. Neither did Jaime.