The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) (8 page)

It turns out, so did I. I crawled into bed and slept like a baby. It was ungodly early when I woke up the next morning. Staring at the clock, I saw it was 5:30
A.M.
What had awakened me was the unaccustomed sound of people talking away in my apartment. Out in the main room I discovered Harold Meeks was up, dressed in his preferred courtroom attire, and chatting up an enthralled Matty, who had just brought his breakfast up from the kitchen—two fried eggs and a double helping of bacon along with his own pot of freshly brewed coffee.

“It’s about time you showed up,” Harold growled at me. “We’ve got places to go and things to do.”

“I’ll need to see if I can rent a car,” I said. “I didn’t have time to do that yesterday.”

He shook his head as though dealing with a recalcitrant toddler. “I’ve got a driver and a limo,” he said. “We’ll take that. And when we leave here, I’d like you to bring along my two suitcases. By later this afternoon I think we’ll have this little difficulty well in hand and I’ll be able to go back home.”

T
HE
NEXT FEW
days passed in a blur. Just as Charlie Rickover had predicted, once Harold pointed Jamison and Shandrow in the right direction, they ran with it. The woman named Marina Ochoa never came back to clean my apartment. She and Jeffrey Jones were arrested the following Wednesday. They fought extradition, but it didn’t work, despite the fact that they had hired a high profile defense guy from California. It wasn’t a surprise that Jeffrey suddenly had to liquidate his real estate holdings in order to pony up attorney’s fees.

Life seemed to get back to normal at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. I hired a new cleaning lady—the sister-in-law of one of my dishwashers. (No, Helena isn’t an illegal, and her English is just fine, thank you very much.)

After jumping through all kinds of hoops, I finally got my Honda sedan back, and wished I hadn’t. The bloody bat had been found in the trunk, almost in plain sight, but the CSIs had torn the whole interior of the car to pieces looking for trace evidence. The car was already old before that happened. When the insurance adjustor looked at it, he shook his head, said it was totaled, and gave me a check that was just enough to buy myself a slightly used Honda Gold Wing.

Shortly after that, a new batch of police officer recruits turned up at the police academy next door. One day a couple of weeks later my life changed forever when a little red-haired ball of fire named Joanna Brady—the newly minted Sheriff of Cochise County—marched into the Roundhouse, stepped up to my bar, and ordered herself a Diet Coke.

While attending the academy, she was also in the process of looking out for some poor guy from Douglas, a guy name Jorge, who was about to be given the shaft.

As soon as I met her, I was done for. She may have been a lot slower to come around, but as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. The fact that she went out on a limb to bail Jorge out of a pot of hot water didn’t hurt things, either, at least not for me. Having recently been bailed out of my own pot of hot water, that was one thing about her that I really appreciated.

But what is it they say about once burned, twice shy? I had fallen head over heels once before, and I was determined that if Joanna was the one for me, I was going to take things slow and easy. I could see that she liked me—at least I thought she did—but that was about as far as things went before she finished up her academy training and went back home to Bisbee.

That’s when my life took another unexpected turn. In the middle of December a guy named Clark Ashton showed up at the Roundhouse with an offer to buy me out. He had bought up all of Jeffrey Jones’s properties as well as his permits and plans, and he was eager to get his new hotel building under way as soon as possible. We dickered back and forth for a time, but not that much, not that hard, and not that long, because Ashton wanted to buy, and by then I wanted to sell.

Bisbee’s a little over two hundred miles to the southeast from Peoria. When you’re head over heels in love, two hundred miles is entirely too much distance.

It took time for me to convince Joanna Brady that I was the new man in her life. She wasn’t an easy sell. And I didn’t tell her about someone trying to frame me for murder until much later in our relationship because I didn’t want to spook her. It wasn’t, in fact, until after Charlie called to let me know that Pop O’Malley had passed away in his sleep that I finally got up my nerve and told her the whole story once and for all.

“Tim O’Malley and his friends did all that?” she marveled once I had finished.

I nodded.

“And now I can’t even meet the man long enough tell him thank-you?”

“No, I’m afraid you can’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she told me, wiping a tear from her eye. “He and your Grandma Hudson must have been quite a pair.”

Thinking of the two of them together made me smile. “You’re right,” I said. “They certainly were.”

Next from J. A. Jance

An old woman, a hoarder, is dying of emphysema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While cleaning out her house, her daughter, Liza Machett, discovers a fortune in hundred dollar bills hidden in the stacks of books and magazines. Trying to discover the provenance of that money will take Liza on a journey all the way to Joanna Brady’s Cochise County. In the meantime, Joanna has problems of her own when a family friend is found dead in a limestone cavern near Bisbee. But are these seemingly unrelated cases more closely connected than they appear?

Here is a sneak preview of

Remains of Innocence

Coming soon

from William Morrow

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Prologue

L
IZA
M
ACHETT’S HEART
was filled with equal parts dread and fury as she pulled her beater Nissan into the rutted driveway of her mother’s place, stopped, and then stepped out to stare at the weedy wasteland surrounding the crumbling farmhouse. In the eleven years since Liza had left home, the place that had once been regarded as messy or junky had become a scene of utter desolation.

Spring had come early to western Massachusetts and to the small plot of land outside Great Barrington that had been in her father’s family for generations. Liza had heard that in a much earlier time, while her great-grandparents had lived there, both the house and the yard had been immaculate. People said Great-Grandma Machett herself had tended the garden full of prize winning roses that had surrounded the front porch. Shunning help from anyone, she had donned an old-fashioned homemade bonnet and spent hours toiling in the yard, mowing the grass with a push-powered mower.

Great-Grandma Machett had been gone for decades now, and so was all trace of her hard work and industry. Thickets of brambles and weeds had overrun the grass and choked out the roses. Long ago a swing had graced the front porch. Swinging on that with her much older brother, Guy, was one of Liza’s few happy childhood memories. The swing was gone. All that remained of it were two rusty chains that dangled uselessly from eyebolts still screwed into the ceiling boards. As for the porch itself? It sagged in the middle, and the three wooden steps leading up to the front door were completely missing, making the door inaccessible.

As a consequence, Liza walked around the side of the house toward the back. On the way, she tried peering into the house through one of the grimy storm windows that had been left in place for years, but the interior view was obstructed by old-fashioned wooden window blinds that had been lowered to windowsill level and closed tight against the outside world. A shiver of understanding shot through Liza’s body, even though the afternoon sun was warm on her skin. The blinds existed for two reasons: to keep prying eyes outside and to keep her mother’s darkness inside. Liza was tempted to turn back, but she squared her shoulders and kept on walking.

In the backyard, the freestanding wood-framed one-car garage, set away from the house, had collapsed in on itself long ago, taking Selma’s ancient Oldsmobile with it. That was the car Liza remembered riding in as a child—a late-1970s, two-toned cream-and-burgundy Cutlass that had once been her father’s. Somewhere along the way, her mother had parked the Cutlass in the garage and told her children that the car quit working. Liza thought she had been in the third grade when her mother had announced that they no longer needed a car. From then on, Liza and Guy had been responsible for their own transportation needs—they could catch the bus, ride their bikes, or, worst case, walk. Now the vehicle was a rusted-out hulk with only a corner of the back bumper still visible through pieces of the splintered garage door. Looking at the wreckage, Liza wondered if her life would have been different had the car kept running. After all, that was about the same time her mother had turned into a recluse and stopped leaving the house.

The only outbuilding that seemed to be in any kind of reasonable repair was the outhouse. The well-trod footpath to it led through an otherwise impenetrable jungle of weeds and brambles. Liza had hated the outhouse growing up. The smell had been vile; the spiders that lurked in the corners and would swing down on cobwebs in front of her eyes had terrified her. The presence of the path told her that the anachronistic outhouse, probably one of the last ones in the county, was still in daily use. That made sense. The social worker had told her that Selma’s electricity had been turned off months ago due to lack of payment. Without electricity to run the pump at the well, the house would no longer have any indoor plumbing, either.

Liza’s father had left when she was a baby. She didn’t remember ever having met him, but she had heard stories about how, decades earlier, he and his father, working together, had remodeled the place for his widowed grandmother, bringing the miracle of running water and indoor toilets into the house. Legend had it Great-Grandma Machett had stubbornly insisted on using the outhouse and on keeping the hand pump at the kitchen sink that drew water from a cistern near the house. If that hand pump was, through some miracle, still in operation, it was probably the only running water Liza’s mother had.

“Stubborn old bat,” Liza muttered under her breath.

She had never admitted to the kids at school that they used an outhouse at home. Guy hadn’t told anyone about that, either. Once Great-Grandma Machett passed on, they had moved into her place, and after Liza’s father left, the only bathroom in the house had become Selma’s private domain. No one else was allowed to use it because, she had insisted, running all that water through the faucets and down the toilet was a waste of electricity and a waste of money.

“We’re too poor to send money down the drain like that,” her mother had insisted. “I’m not going to waste the pittance your no-good father left me on that.”

That meant that the whole time Liza and Guy were in grade school, they had been forced to do their sponge-bath bathing at the kitchen sink. That was where they had hand-washed their clothing as well. All that had been doable until the hot water heater had given out, sometime during Liza’s last year of elementary school. After that it had been cold water only, because heating water on top of the stove for baths or for washing clothes had been deemed another extravagant waste of electricity and money.

Liza remembered all too well the jeering boys on the grade-school playground who had bullied her, calling her “stinky” and “dirty.” The stigma stayed with her. It was why, even now, she showered twice a day every day—once in the morning when she first got up, and again in the evening after she got home from work.

Gathering herself, Liza turned to face the back door of the house she hadn’t stepped inside for more than a decade, even though the place where she lived now was, as the crow flies, less than five miles away. Looking up, she noticed that, in places, the moss-covered roof was completely devoid of shingles. Just last year, Olivia Dexter, her landlady in town, had replaced the roof over Liza’s upstairs apartment in Great Barrington. That roof hadn’t been nearly as bad as this one was, but Liza had seen firsthand the damage a leaky roof could do to ceilings and walls and insulation. How, she wondered, had her mother made it through the harsh New England winter weather with no electricity and barely any roof ?

Liza’s mission today was in her mother’s kitchen, and that was where she would go. The disaster that inevitably awaited her in the rest of the house would have to be dealt with at a later time. She remembered all too well the narrow paths between towering stacks of newspapers and magazines that had filled the living room back when she was a girl. Maybe all those layers of paper had provided a modicum of insulation during the winters. Even so, Liza wasn’t ready to deal with any of that now, not yet.

Liza made her way up the stairs and then stood for a moment with her hand on the doorknob, willing herself to find the courage to open it. She knew how bad the place had been eleven years earlier, on that distant morning when she had finally had enough and fled the house. Rather than facing it, she paused, unable to imagine how much worse it would be now and allowing a kaleidoscope of unwelcome recollections to flash in and out of focus.

The memory of leaving home that day was still vivid in her mind and heart, even all these years later. Her mother had stood on the front porch screaming taunts and insults at Liza as she had walked away, carrying all her worldly possessions in a single paper grocery bag. She had walked down the half-mile-long driveway with her eyes straight ahead and her back ramrod straight. There were still times, when she awakened in the middle of the night, that she could hear echoes of her mother’s venomous shouts—
worthless slut, no-good liar, thief
. The ugly words had rained down steadily as she walked away until finally fading out of earshot.

Liza Machett had heard the old childhood rhyme often enough:

Sticks and stones may break my bones

But words will never hurt me.

That was a lie. Being called names did hurt, and the wounds left behind never really healed over. Liza’s heart still bore the scars to prove it. She had learned through bitter experience that silence was the best way to deal with her mother’s periodic outbursts. The problem was, silence went only so far in guaranteeing her safety. There were times when even maintaining a discreet silence hadn’t been enough to protect Liza from her mother’s seething anger.

Liza understood that, on that fateful day, a pummeling from her mother’s fists would have come next had she not simply taken herself out of the equation. Their final confrontation had occurred just after sunrise on a warm day in May. It was the morning after Liza’s high school graduation, an event that had gone totally unacknowledged as far as Selma Machett was concerned. Liza’s mother, trapped in a debilitating web of ailments both real and imagined, hadn’t bestirred herself to attend. When Liza had returned home late that night, dropped off by one of her classmates after attending a graduation party, Selma had been waiting up and had been beyond enraged when Liza came in a little after three. Selma had claimed that Liza had never told her about the party and that she’d been up all night frantic with worry and convinced that Liza had really been out “sleeping around.”

For Liza, a girl who had never been out on a single date all through high school, that last insult had been the final straw. A few hours later, shortly after sunrise, Liza had quietly packed her bag to leave and had tiptoed to the door, hoping that her mother was still asleep. Unfortunately, Selma had been wide awake and still furious. She had hurled invectives after her departing daughter as Liza walked across the front porch and down the steps. The porch had still had steps back then.

Liza walked briskly away with her head unbowed beneath Selma’s barrage of insults. At the time, Liza’s only consolation was that there were no neighbors nearby to witness her mother’s final tirade. Walking away from the house, Liza had realized that she was literally following in her older brother’s footsteps and doing the same thing Guy had done five years earlier. He too had walked away, taking only what he could carry, and he hadn’t looked back.

Liza had been thirteen years old and in eighth grade on the day Guy left home for college. A friend had stopped by shortly after he graduated and given him a lift and a life. During the summer he had waited tables in the Poconos. Then, armed with a full-ride scholarship, he had enrolled at Harvard, which was only a little over a hundred miles away. As far as Liza was concerned, however, Harvard could just as well have been on another planet. Guy had never come back—not over Christmas that first year nor for any of the Christmases that followed, and not for summer vacations, either. From Harvard he had gone on to Maryland for medical school at Johns Hopkins. Unlike Guy, all Liza had to show for enduring years of her mother’s torment was a high school diploma and a severe case of low self-esteem.

Did Liza resent her brother’s seemingly charmed existence? You bet! It was perfectly understandable that he had turned his back on their mother. Who wouldn’t? Liza remembered all too well the blazing battles between the two of them in the months and weeks before Guy left home. She also recalled her brother’s departing words, flung over his shoulder as he walked out the door. “You’re not my real mother.”

Those words had been true for him, and that was his out—Selma was Guy’s stepmother. Unfortunately, she was Liza’s “real” mother. Half brother or not, however, Guy had always been Liza’s big brother. In walking away from Selma, he had also walked away from Liza. He had left her alone to cope with a mentally damaged, self-centered woman who was incapable of loving or caring for anyone, including herself.

All the while Liza had been growing up, there had been no accounting for Selma’s many difficulties, both mental and physical, real and imagined. There had been wild mood swings that most likely indicated Selma was bipolar—not that she’d ever gone to a doctor or a counselor to be given an official diagnosis. There had been episodes of paranoia in which Selma had spent days convinced that people from the government were spying on her. There was the time she had taken a pair of pliers to her own mouth and removed all the filled teeth because she was convinced the fillings were poisoning her. It wasn’t until long after Liza left home that there was a name for the most visible of Selma’s mental difficulties. She was a hoarder. Liza found it disquieting that hoarding was now something that could be spoken of aloud in polite company and that, in fact, there was even a reality television show devoted to the problem.

Liza had watched the show occasionally, with a weird combination of horror and relief, but she had never found a way to say to any of the people who knew her now, “That was my life when I was growing up.” Instead, like a voyeur driving past a terrible car wreck, she watched the various dysfunctional families on the small screen struggling with issues she knew intimately, from the inside out. In the well-ordered neatness of her own living room, she could compare what she remembered of her mother’s house with the messes and horrors in other people’s lives, all the while imagining what Selma’s place must be like now after another decade of unchecked decline.

Sometimes what she saw on one of the shows moved her to tears. Occasionally the televised efforts of loved ones and therapists seemed to pay off and damaged people seemed to find ways to begin confronting what was wrong with their lives and perhaps make some necessary changes. With others, however, it was hopeless, and all the painful efforts came to naught. The people trying to help would throw things in the trash—broken toys, wrecked furniture, nonworking appliances—only to have the hoarder drag the garbage back into the house because it was too precious to be tossed out.