Desert Heat (2 page)

Despite Joanna’s soothing words to the contrary, Jennifer assessed her mother’s mood with uncanny accuracy. “Are you mad at him?” she asked.

“A little,” Joanna admitted reluctantly. A lot was more like it, she thought. It was a hell of a thing to be stood up like this on your own damn wedding anniversary, especially when Andy himself had insisted on the date and had made all the arrangements. He was the one who had first suggested, and then insisted, that they get a room at the hotel and spend the night, reliving their comic opera wedding night from ten years before.

At the time Andy had suggested it, Joanna had asked him if he was sure. For one thing, staying in the hotel would cost a chunk of money, an added expense they could ill afford. For another, there was time. Not only was Andy a full-time deputy for the Cochise County Sheriff’s department, he was also running for sheriff against his longtime boss, Walter McFadden.

The election was now less than six weeks away. Joanna had been through enough campaigns with her father to know that conserving both energy and focus was vital that close to election day. In the meantime, Joanna had her own job to worry about. Milo Davis, the owner of the insurance agency where she worked as office manager, had offered her a partnership. To that end he had started sending her out on more and more sales calls, letting her earn commission over and above her office-duty pay. But it meant that she, too, was essentially holding down two full-time jobs.

Joanna was the first to admit that between the two of them, she and Andy had precious little time to spend together, but staying in the hotel overnight seemed to be overdoing it. Andy, however, had laughed aside all Joanna’s objections and told her to be ready at six when he’d come by to pick her up.

Well, six had long since come and gone and he still wasn’t home. Eleanor Lathrop, Joanna’s mother, had been at the house watching television since five-thirty. Since six sharp, Joanna’s small packed suitcase had sat forlornly by the back door, joined now by her discarded shoes, but at seven forty-five, An-drew Roy Brady was still nowhere to be found.

“Maybe he had car trouble,” Jennifer suggested, snagging a piece of green chili from her plate and stuffing it back inside her grilled cheese sandwich from which she had carefully removed all the crusts. Joanna bit back the urge to tell jenny to stop being silly, to shape up and eat her discarded bread crusts, and to stop casting herself in the role of family peace-maker, but Joanna Brady had embarked on a conscious struggle to be less like her own mother. She let it pass. After all, there was no sense in turning Jennifer into any more of a family Ping-Pong ball than she already was.

“You’re right,” Joanna agreed finally. “That’s probably what happened. He’ll be here any minute.”

“Are you going to tell Grandma to go on home?” Jenny asked.

Joanna shook her head. “Not yet. We’ll wait a little longer.”

Jenny finished her sandwich, pushed her plate aside, and started in on the dish of sliced peaches. Eva Lou Brady, Joanna’s mother-in-law, had canned them herself with fruit from the carefully nurtured freestone peach trees planted just outside the kitchen door. Joanna got up and dished out a helping of peaches of her own. Two hours past their usual dinner hour, it was a long time since lunch, and she was starving.

“Was I premature?” Jennifer asked suddenly.

The jolting question came from clear out in left field. A slice of peach slid down sideways and caught momentarily in Joanna’s throat. She coughed desperately to dislodge it.

“Premature?” Joanna choked weakly when she was finally able to speak.

Joanna Brady had always known that eventually she’d have to face up to the discrepancy between the timing of her wedding anniversary and Jenny’s birthday six short months later. But she had expected the question to come much later, when Jennifer was thirteen or fourteen. Not now when she was nine, not when Joanna hadn’t had time to prepare a suitable answer.

“What makes you ask that?” she asked, stalling for time.

“Well,” Jennifer said thoughtfully. “Me and Monica were talking about babies....”

“Monica and I,” Joanna corrected, pulling herself together.

Jennifer scowled. “Monica and I,” she repeated. “You know, because of Monica’s new baby sister. She says babies always take nine months to get born unless they’re born early because they’re premature. Today’s your tenth anniversary, right? And I turned nine in April, so I was just wondering if I was premature.”

“Not exactly,” Joanna hedged, feeling her cheeks redden.

“What does that mean?”

“You were right on schedule. The wedding was late.”

“How come?”

“Because.”

There was no way Joanna could explain to her daughter right then how a dashingly handsome Andrew Roy Brady, three years older and considerably wiser, had returned from his two-year stint in the army on that fateful Fourth of July weekend ten years earlier. Parked down by the rifle range and with the help of a cheap bottle of Annie’s Green Spring wine they had seduced each other in the back seat of her father’s old Ford Fairlane while Bisbee’s annual fireworks display lit up the sky overhead. Joanna Lathrop had simultaneously stopped being a virgin and started being pregnant.

Now, faced with her daughter’s uncomfortable question, a convenient television commercial rescued her. Eleanor Lathrop limped into the kitchen and helped herself to a dish of peaches. “Isn’t that man here yet?”

“Not so far,” Joanna answered.

The older woman leveled a meaningful stare at her granddaughter. “Shouldn’t you finish up and go to bed pretty soon?” she asked. “Don’t you have school in the morning?”

The child returned the look with a level stare of her own. “It’s too early,” Jenny returned. “I’m in the third grade now, Grandma. I don’t have to go to bed until nine o’clock. Besides, I want to stay up and kiss Daddy goodnight.”

Eleanor Lathrop shook her head disparagingly. “That’s silly,” she sniffed. “It could be all hours before he gets here. Besides, he’s probably off politicking somewhere and has forgotten completely what night this is.”

“He didn’t forget,” Joanna asserted firmly. “Something must have come up at the department, some emergency. He just hasn’t had a chance to call.”

“Men never do. He’s already almost two hours late, you’d think he’d have the common decency....
^”

Not waiting for her mother to finish the sentence, Joanna hurried to the kitchen wall phone and dialed the Cochise County Sheriff’s department. The local telephone exchange was small enough that it was only necessary to dial the last five digits of the telephone number. The clerk who answered said that Andy was out. Unable to provide any further information about how long ago he had left or where he might be, the clerk offered to put Joanna through to Chief Deputy Richard Voland who, despite the lateness of the hour, was still in his office.

“Hi, Dick. It’s Joanna Brady. What’s going on that everybody’s still at work?”

“I don’t know about anybody else,” Dick Voland replied, “but I’m catching up on a mountain of paper. Ruth and the kids are bowling tonight, so I’m in no hurry to get home.”

“Have you seen Andy?”

“Andy? Not for a couple of hours. He lit out of here right around five o’clock. I thought from what he said that he was pretty much going straight home. Isn’t he there?”

Joanna felt a tight clutch of fear in her stomach, a cop’s wife’s fear. “No. Did he say he was going somewhere else before he came home?”

Dick Voland didn’t answer immediately, and Joanna heard the momentary hesitation in his voice. “One or two of the day shift guys are still out in the other room. Let me check with them. Hang on. Someone will be right back to you.”

Half a minute later, someone else came on the line. “Joanna, what’s up?”

She was relieved to recognize the voice of Ken Galloway, one of Andy’s best friends in the department.

“Andy’s late getting home, and we were supposed to go out tonight. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

“Christ!” Ken exclaimed. “It’s almost eight o’clock and he’s not there yet? I thought he was on his way home hours ago. He mentioned a couple of errands, but nothing that should have taken this long. Maybe he had car trouble.”

The knot in Joanna’s stomach tightened into a fist. Jennifer’s suggestion of car trouble had been annoying. Coming from Ken Galloway, the supposedly comforting words sounded patronizing. She bridled. “If it were car trouble, don’t you think we’d have heard from him on the radio by now?”

“Seems like it. Where are you?”

“At home.”

“I’ll do some checking from this end and give you a call back.”

Joanna put down the phone. For a moment she stood there indecisively, then she spun around and marched to the back door where she pulled a worn pair of suede work boots on over her pantyhose, then she took Andy’s old Levi’s jacket down from its peg beside the back door. Sensing an outing, Sadie eagerly nosed her way to the door and waited for Joanna to open it.

“Where are you going?” Eleanor demanded.

“To look for him,” Joanna answered simply. “Something’s wrong. I know it. He may be hurt.”

“But why should you go looking? The department will handle that. That’s what we pay them for,” Eleanor Lathrop pointed out. “That’s what your father always said.”

Invoking the name and memory of Sheriff D. H. Lathrop, Joanna’s father who had been dead now for some fifteen years, had been Eleanor’s foolproof way of winning almost every intervening argument with her daughter. This time it didn’t work. Joanna didn’t knuckle under.

“Mother,” Joanna answered curtly. “Andy’s my husband, and I’ll go looking for him if I want to.”

Jenny slipped out of the breakfast nook and hurried to the door. “I’ll come too.”

“No. You stay here with Grandma.”

With that, Joanna turned on her heel and sprinted out the door, taking the dog with her. She had gone only a few steps when the single floodlight in the yard came on. Joanna looked back and waved to Jenny who was standing beside the yard light switch with her face pressed longingly against the fine screen mesh.

“I’ll be right back,” Joanna called. “You wait here.”

Sadie raced ahead toward the detached garage, knowing from the noisy jangle of the key ring in Joanna’s hand that she would be taking the car. While the dog danced in happy circles, Joanna backed her worn Eagle station wagon out of the garage. Moments later, with the dog once more in the lead, they started down the rutted dirt road that was little more than a pale yellow ribbon winding through a forest of mesquite.

In the still but chilly desert night, moonlit leaves cast delicate lacy shadows on the ground. Sadie gamboled along ahead of the car for only a few yards before she raced off into the underbrush, nose to ground. Within moments the dog set up a noisy racket—the characteristic booming—that meant she had scared up some desert quarry. It was probably the same old wiry, neighboring jack rabbit the dog always chased. In stylized ritual, the dog pursued the rabbit hour after hour, day after day, without either one of them ever fully putting their hearts into the contest.

Joanna, smiling to herself, was comforted by the familiar baying of the hound and by the jack-in-the-box antics of kangaroo rats who leaped fender high in their scramble to get out of the approaching car’s path. Their comical frolics made her feel somewhat better, but still she worried.

She made her way out to the cattle guard that marked the boundary of their property, the High Lonesome Ranch, and swung onto the wider dirt road of the same name. During the early twenties, when water was plentiful, the High Lonesome Ranch with its mail-order Sears Craftsman house, had been one of the larger and more prosperous spreads in the Lower Sulphur Springs Valley. During harder times, one chunk of land after another had been sold off until all that remained of the original ranch was the scraggly forty acres that still held the house and outbuildings.

Just across the cattle guard, Joanna stopped the car, switched off the engine, and got out to listen. Here in a natural depression that was also the roadway, she was unable to see head-lights, but she could hear the steady whine of rubber tires on blacktop. While she listened, three separate vehicles went past without any of them turning east on the Double Adobe Cutoff.

Panting, Sadie trotted up to her side. “He’s not here, girl,” Joanna said, stroking the dog’s smooth forehead. “Let’s go on down to the corner and see if he’s there.”

They started south on High Lonesome Road. This time, Sadie was content to follow along behind the car, sticking to the left-hand shoulder of the road. Between the ranch and Double Adobe Road, High Lonesome crossed a series of four steep washes on the rickety spines of four narrow, one-lane-wide bridges. The bridges were old and no longer strong enough to handle heavy loads. Each year, after the rainy season, the county sent a bulldozer out to grade a track through the sand for over-sized loads.

Joanna was speeding across the third bridge when the moonlight glinted off something in the wash below. Jamming on the brakes, Joanna stood the Eagle on its nose, almost fish-tailing off the road in her haste to stop the car. With dust still billowing up around her, she leaped out of the Eagle and ran back to the bridge while her headlight-handicapped vision adjusted to the sparse moonlight.

“Andy,” she called. “Andy is that you?”

Without remembering how she got there, she found herself standing in the middle of the narrow bridge looking down on what she instantly recognized as her husband’s Bronco. It seemed to be mired down in the sand. Near the pickup’s front bumper she could barely make out a dark smudge on the lighter sand. Her first fleeting thought was that Andy had accidently hit a stray head of livestock, but that was only a trick her mind played on her to shield her from the terrible truth.

“Andy,” she called again. “Are you down there?”

There was no answer, but now she caught sight of a ghostly figure darting past the truck and realized that Sadie must have detoured down from the upper level. The dog stopped short near the smudge in the sand, although Joanna’s eyes still hadn’t adjusted sufficiently for her to see clearly.