The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) (10 page)

At last the bookshelf was cleared. The cookbooks, plucked clean of their hidden treasure, lay in a careless heap on the floor. During the search, Liza had gone from first being surprised and amazed to being beyond furious. The more money she found, the more she wondered if the small fortune in hidden bills had been in Selma’s possession the whole time. If so, why had Selma always pretended to be poor? Why had she denied her children and herself simple creature comforts like running water and hot baths that some of that money might have afforded all of them?

As a teenager, Liza had never thought to question the fact that they were poor. Their poverty was an all too demonstrable reality. She had listened in silence while her mother bewailed their fate, complaining about their lot and blaming the fact that Liza’s father had run off—presumably with another woman—leaving them with barely a roof over their heads and not much else. Liza knew from something her brother had said that before Anson Machett bailed, he’d at least had the decency to quitclaim the family home—the farm and the run-down house that had belonged to his great-grandparents—to his soon-to-be-abandoned wife. Before Guy left home, Selma had told the kids that their father was dead, having died in a car wreck somewhere in California. Selma had offered no details about a memorial service or a funeral. First their father was gone and then he was dead.

Now, at age twenty-nine and standing in the desolation of Selma’s filthy kitchen, Liza Machett found herself asking for the very first time if anything her mother had told them was true. If Selma had lied to them about being poor, maybe she had lied about everything else, too.

After gathering the last of the money from the books, Liza stayed in the kitchen for a long time, too stunned to know what to do next. Should she go to the hospital and confront her mother about all this? Should she demand to be told the truth, once and for all?

Ultimately Liza realized that a direct confrontation would never work. Instead, she reached down, pawed through the pile of books, and retrieved the one at the bottom of the heap—the
Joy of Cooking.
Pulling the thick wad of bills from her pocket, she extracted seven of them and placed them in various spots throughout the book. If Selma remembered the exact pages where she had stuck the money, then Liza was screwed. Otherwise, Liza could hand the book over to Selma and act as though she hadn’t a clue that there was money hidden inside.

She hoped the trick would work. If Selma didn’t realize Liza had discovered her secret, it would buy Liza time—time to look for answers on her own and to sift through the rest of the debris in the house. Liza knew that once she reached the living room, she would find stacks of back issues of
National Geographic, Life,
and
Reader’s Digest
as well. What if those had all been seeded with money in the same way the cookbooks had? There was only one way to find out for sure, and Liza was determined to do so—she intended to search through every single one.

Back outside with the cookbook in hand, Liza stripped off her mask and gloves and drew in a deep breath of clean fresh air. Her Nissan, parked at the end of the driveway, sat unlocked and with the windows wide open. Leaving the windows open kept the interior from getting too hot. That was important especially during hot weather since the Nissan’s AC had stopped working long ago.

Liza dropped the book on the passenger seat before going around to the other side to climb in. When she turned to fasten her seat belt, the tail end of her ponytail swished in front of her face. That’s when she smelled it—the same pungent combination of foul odors that had plagued her as a girl and that had been the cause of so much painful bullying from other kids. The odor of decay in her mother’s home had somehow permeated Liza’s hair and clothing. She could barely tolerate sitting in the car knowing that she was probably leaving the same stinky residue on the car seats and carpeting.

Hating the very idea, Liza headed for her apartment rather than for the hospital. She would go see her mother and deliver the book, but only after she had showered and washed her hair. Looking at the book, she realized it probably smelled the same way. Once she hit Great Barrington, she pulled in to the drive-in window of the local Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered a bag of their Breakfast Blend coffee beans. She had heard that coffee beans helped get rid of bad smells. It seemed worth a try.

At home, Liza located a gallon-size Ziploc bag. She placed the book inside that along with all the bills she had stuffed in her pockets. Then, having added the whole beans, she zipped the bag shut before going into the bathroom to shower.

She stood under the stream of hot water for the next fifteen minutes, trying to wash away the dirt and grit from her mother’s house. With her eyes closed, she hoped she was washing off something else as well—the soul-destroying contamination of her mother’s many betrayals.

She needed to send Selma Machett’s perfidy circling down the drain every bit as much as she needed to rid herself of the odor of mouse droppings and rotting food that, despite all her scrubbing, still seemed to cling to her skin.

Chapter 1

T
HE SUN WAS
just coming up over the distant Chiricahua Mountains to the east of High Lonesome Ranch when a rooster crowed at ten past five in the morning. At that hour of the day, it might have been one of the ranch’s live resident roosters announcing the arrival of a new day, but it wasn’t. This was the obnoxiously distinctive crowing of Sheriff Joanna Brady’s cell phone.

Groping for the device in its charging stand on the bedside table, Joanna silenced the racket and glanced across the bed. Her husband, Butch, slept undisturbed with a pillow pulled over his head. Taking the phone in hand, Joanna scrambled out of bed. Now that Lady, her rescued Australian shepherd, had decamped to a spot next to Joanna’s son’s bed, she no longer had to deal with tripping over a dead-to-the-world dog when it came to late-night callouts, which usually meant there was serious trouble somewhere in Cochise County.

Hurrying into the bathroom and closing the door behind her, Joanna answered, “Sheriff Brady.”

“Chief Bernard here,” a male voice rumbled in her ear. “Sorry to wake you at this ungodly hour, but I could sure use your K-9 unit if you can spare them.”

Alvin Bernard was the police chief in Bisbee, Arizona. Once known as a major copper-producing town, Bisbee’s current claim to fame was its reputation as an arts colony. It was also the county seat. Alvin Bernard’s departmental jurisdiction ended at Bisbee’s city limits, the line where Joanna’s countywide jurisdiction began.

Years earlier, Joanna had been elected to the office of sheriff in the aftermath of her first husband’s death. Andy Brady had been running for the office when he died in a hail of bullets from a drug cartel’s hit man. When Joanna was elected sheriff in her late husband’s stead, members of the local law enforcement old boys’ network had sneered at the outcome, regarding her election as a straight-up sympathy vote, and had expected Joanna to be sheriff in name only. She had surprised the naysayers by transforming herself into a professional police officer. As she developed a reputation for being a good cop, that initial distrust had melted away. She now had a cordial working relationship with most of her fellow police administrators, including Bisbee’s Chief Bernard.

“What’s up?”

“Junior Dowdle’s gone missing from his folks’ house up the canyon. He left his room sometime overnight by climbing out through a bedroom window. His bed hasn’t been slept in. Daisy’s frantic. She and Moe have been up and down the canyon several times looking for him. So far there’s no trace.”

Junior, Moe and Daisy Maxwell’s developmentally disabled foster son, had been found abandoned by his paid caregiver at a local arts fair several years earlier. Once his blood relatives were located, they had declined to take him back. That was when the Maxwells had stepped in. They had gone to court and been appointed his legal guardians. Since then they had cared for Junior as their own, giving him purpose in life by teaching him to work as a combination busboy and greeter in the local diner that bore Daisy’s name.

In recent months, though, Junior’s behavior had become increasingly erratic, both at home and in the restaurant. Only a few weeks earlier the family had been given the dreaded but not-so-surprising diagnosis—not so surprising because the doctor had warned the Maxwells a year earlier about the possibility. Now in his early sixties, Junior was suffering from a form of dementia, most likely Alzheimer’s, an affliction that often preyed on the developmentally disabled. Under most circumstances, a missing person report of an adult wouldn’t have merited an immediate all-out response. Because Junior was considered to be at risk, however, all bets were off.

“He’s on foot then?” Joanna asked.

“Unless some Good Samaritan picked him up and gave him a ride,” Alvin answered.

“Okay,” Joanna said. “I’ll give Terry a call and see what, if anything, he and Spike can do about this.”

Terry Gregovich was the human half of Joanna’s departmental K-9 unit. Spike, a seven-year-old German shepherd, was Terry’s aging canine partner.

“You’re sure Junior left through a window?”

“Daisy told me they’ve been concerned about Junior maybe wandering off, so they’ve gotten into the habit of keeping both the front and back doors to the house dead-bolted. It was warm overnight, so Daisy left the window cracked open when Junior went to bed. Had Daisy Maxwell ever raised a teenage son, she would have known she needed to lock the window as well.”

“That’s how he got out?”

“Yup, it looks like Junior raised the window the rest of the way, pushed open the screen, and climbed out.”

“Do you want me to see if I have any additional patrol officers in the neighborhood who could assist with the search?”

“That would be a huge favor,” Alvin said. “We’ll be using the parking lot of St. Dominick’s as a center of operations. Once the neighbors hear about this, there will be plenty of folks willing to help out. From my point of view, the more boots we have on the ground, the better. It’ll make our lives easier if Terry and Spike can point the search crews in the right direction.”

“I’ll have Dispatch get back to you and let you know if anyone else is available.”

She called Terry first, dragging him out of bed, then she called Dispatch to let Tica Romero, her overnight dispatcher, know what was going on. The City of Bisbee and Cochise County had a standing mutual aid agreement in place, but it was better to have everything officially documented in case something went haywire. Mutual aid in the course of a hot pursuit was one matter. For anything else, Joanna had to be sure all the necessary chain-of-command
t
’s were crossed and
i
’s were dotted.

Butch came and went through the bathroom while Joanna was in the shower. Once dried off, she got dressed, donning a neatly pressed everyday khaki uniform and a lightweight pair of lace-up hiking boots. Early on in her career as sheriff, she had worn business-style clothing, most of which couldn’t accommodate the Kevlar vest she wore each day right along with her other officers. Then there was the matter of footwear. After going through countless pairs of pantyhose and wrecked pairs of high heels, she had finally conceded defeat, putting practicality ahead of fashion.

Minutes later, with her bright red hair blown dry and her minimally applied makeup in place, she hurried out to the kitchen, where she found Butch brewing coffee and unloading the dishwasher.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I’m on my way to St. Dominick’s,” she explained. “Junior Dowdle took off sometime overnight. Alvin Bernard is using the parking lot at St. Dom’s as a center of operations, and he’s asked for help from my K-9 unit.”

Joanna knew that her husband maintained a personal interest in Junior’s life and welfare. She and Butch hadn’t been married when Junior first came to Bisbee after being abandoned at the Arts and Crafts Fair in Saint David. Bringing him to Bisbee in her patrol car, Joanna had been stumped about where to take him. Her own home was out. The poor man wasn’t a criminal and he wasn’t ill. That meant that neither the jail nor the hospital were possibilities, either. In the end, she had taken him to Butch’s house in Bisbee’s Saginaw neighborhood, where Junior had stayed for several weeks. A restaurant Butch had owned previously, the Roundhouse in Peoria, Arizona, had once fielded a Special Olympics team, and Butch had been one of the team coaches. He had taken charge of Junior with practiced grace and had kept him until more suitable permanent arrangements could be made with the Maxwells.

“You’re going to join the search?” Butch asked, handing Joanna a cup of coffee.

She nodded.

“All right,” he said. “If they haven’t found Junior by the time I drop the kids off at school, I’ll stop by and help, too. Do you want breakfast before you head out? It won’t take more than a couple of minutes to fry eggs and make toast.”

That was one of the advantages of marrying a man who had started out in life as a short-order cook. Joanna didn’t have to think long before making up her mind. Depending on how her day went, the next opportunity to eat might be hours away. Besides, this was Alvin’s case. She and her people were there as backup only. In addition, Butch’s over-easy eggs were always perfection itself.

“Sounds good,” she said. “Do you want any help?”

“I’m a man on a mission,” Butch told her with a grin. “Sit down, drink your coffee, and stay out of the way.”

Doing as she’d been told, Joanna slipped into the breakfast nook. She’d taken only a single sip of coffee when Dennis, their early-bird three-year-old, wandered into the kitchen dragging along both his favorite blankie and his favorite book—
The Cat in the Hat
. There wasn’t a person in the household who didn’t know the story by heart, but Joanna pulled him into a cuddle and started reading aloud, letting him turn the pages.

They were halfway through the story when two dogs scrambled into the kitchen—Jenny’s stone-deaf black lab, Lucky, and a relatively new addition to their family, a fourteen-week-old golden retriever puppy named Desi. The puppy carried the tattered remains of one of Jenny’s tennis shoes in his mouth. Both dogs dove for cover under the table of the breakfast nook as an exasperated Jenny, wearing a bathrobe and with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, appeared in the doorway.

“I was only in the shower for five minutes,” she fumed. “That’s all it took for Desi to wreck my shoe.”

“Wait until you have kids of your own,” Butch warned her. “Desi will be over it a lot faster than a baby will. Besides, it could have been worse. It’s only a tennis shoe. When Lucky was a pup, he always grabbed one of your boots.”

Leveling a sour look in Butch’s direction, Jenny knelt down by the table. Rather than verbally scolding the miscreant puppy, she glowered at him and gave him two-thumbs down—her improvised sign language equivalent of “bad dog.” Next she motioned toward her body with one hand, which meant “come.” Finally she held out one cupped hand and patted the cupped one with her other hand, the hand signal for “give it to me.”

There was a momentary pause under the table before Desi squirmed out from under his temporary shelter and handed over the mangled shoe. In response, Jenny gave him a single thumb-up for “good dog.” Two thumbs would have meant “very good dog,” and currently, no matter what he did right, Desi didn’t qualify. Once the puppy had been somewhat forgiven, Lucky dared venture out, too. He was rewarded with the two-thumb treatment before Jenny took her damaged shoe in hand and left the room with both dogs on her heels.

Joanna couldn’t help but marvel at how the hand signals Jenny had devised to communicate with Lucky were now making it possible for her to train a service dog as part of a 4-H project. There was the expectation that, at some time in the future, Desi would make a difference in some person’s life by serving as a hearing assistance dog.

“Your breakfast is on the table in five,” Butch called after Jenny as she left the room. “Two eggs scrambled, whole wheat toast. Don’t be late.”

“I’m afraid training that dog is more work than Jenny anticipated,” Joanna commented. “After losing Tigger the way we did, I’m worried about her ability to let Desi go when it’s time for him to move on.” Tigger, their previous dog, a half golden retriever, half pit bull mix, had succumbed within weeks of being diagnosed with Valley Fever, a fungal disorder commonly found in the desert Southwest that often proved fatal to dogs.

“Jenny and I have already discussed that,” Butch said, “but you’re right. Talking about letting go of a dog is one thing. Handing the leash over to someone else is another.”

Joanna nodded in agreement. “We all know that when it comes to horses and dogs, Jennifer Ann Brady has a very soft heart.”

“Better horses and dogs than boys,” Butch observed with a grin. “Way better.”

That was a point on which Joanna and Butch were in complete agreement.

“Speaking of horses, did she already feed them?”

For years the horse population on High Lonesome Ranch had been limited to one—Kiddo, Jenny’s sorrel gelding, who was also her barrel-racing partner. Recently they had added a second horse to the mix, an aging, blind Appaloosa mare that had been found, starving and dehydrated, in the corral of a recently foreclosed ranchette near Arizona Sunsites. The previous owners had simply packed up and left town, abandoning the horse to fend for herself. When a neighbor reported the situation, Joanna had dispatched one of her Animal Control officers to retrieve the animal.

After a round of veterinary treatment at county expense, Butch and Jenny had trailered the mare home to High Lonesome, where she seemed to have settled into what were supposedly temporary digs in the barn and corral, taking cues on her new surroundings from Kiddo while she gained weight and recovered. Dennis, after taking one look at the horse, had promptly dubbed her Spot.

In Joanna’s opinion, Spot was a far better name for a dog than it was for a horse, but Spot she was, and Spot she remained. Currently inquiries were being made to find Spot a permanent home, but Joanna suspected that she had already found one. When Butch teased Joanna by saying she had turned High Lonesome Ranch into an unofficial extension of Cochise County Animal Control, it was more true than not. Most of the dogs that had come through their lives had been rescues, along with any number of cast-off Easter bunnies and Easter chicks. Now, having taken in a hearing impaired dog and a visually impaired horse, they were evidently a haven for stray animals with disabilities as well.

“The horses are fed,” Butch answered. “Jenny and the dogs went out to do that while I was starting the coffee and you were in the shower.”

By the time Jenny and the now more subdued dogs returned to the kitchen, Joanna was ready to head out. After delivering quick good-bye kisses all around, she went to the laundry room to retrieve and don her weapons. For Mother’s Day a few weeks earlier, Butch had installed a thumb recognition gun safe just inside the door. Located below a light switch, it was within easy reach for Joanna’s vertically challenged five-foot-four frame. With her two Glocks safely stowed—one in a holster on her belt and the other, her backup weapon, in a bra-style holster—Sheriff Joanna Brady was ready to face her day.