Paradise Lost jb-9

by J. A. Jance

  Joint accounts! she chided herself. She had done that on purpose, too. In a fit of defiance, Connie had put Ron on as a signatory to all her accounts just to spite people like her sister Maggie and the other naysayers who had told her Ron was only after her money. Had she listened? Had she paid any of them the slightest bit of heed? No. Her father had been right after all. She was stupid—unbelievably stupid. She had taken everything Ron Haskell told her as gospel, and he had betrayed her. Other women might have railed and cried and blamed their betrayers. Driving back home, her eyes dry and gritty with unshed tears, Constance Marie Richardson Haskell blamed only herself.

  Once in the house, Connie saw the blinking light on the answering machine as soon as she put her car keys and purse down on the kitchen counter. Hurrying to the machine, she punched the play button. First came Ken Wilson’s message, which she had already heard but had failed to erase. She fast-forwarded through that one. Then, after a click, she heard Ron’s voice, and her heart leaped in her throat.

  “Connie,” he said. “It’s Ron. I don’t know if you’re there or not. If you are, please pick up.” There was a pause, then he contin­ued. “I guess you’re not. I don’t know where to start, Connie, honey. I’m so sorry. About everything. I’m at a place called Pathway to Paradise. I thought these people could help me, and they are—helping me, that is. It’s going to take time, and I want to talk to you about it, Connie. I want to explain. Maybe you’ll be able to forgive me, or maybe not. I don’t know.

  “I can’t leave here, because I’ve made a commitment to stay for the full two months, but it would mean so much to me if you would come here to see me. That way I can be the one to tell you what happened instead of your having to hear it from somebody else. Please come, Connie. Please, preferably this evening. Pathway to Paradise is at the far end of the Chiricahua Mountains, just out-side Portal on the road to Paradise. It’s north of town on the right-hand side of the road. You’ll see the sign. Wait for me along the road, sometime between nine and ten, and—”

  At that point an operator’s voice cut in on Ron’s. “If you wish to speak longer you’ll have to deposit an additional one dollar and sixty-five cents.”

  “Please,” Ron added.

  And then the answering machine clicked off. For almost a minute afterward, Connie stood staring blankly at the machine, then she began to quake once more.

  Connie Richardson Haskell was a woman who had always prided herself on keeping her emotions under control. Her father had expected it of her. After all those years under her father’s tute­lage, Connie had come to expect it of herself. The whole time she had cared for her aging and at times entirely unreasonable parents, she had never once allowed herself to become angry.

  But now anger roared through her system with a ferocity that left her shaken. It filled her whole being like an avalanche plunging down the throat of some narrow, rock-lined gorge. How dare he! After disappearing for two weeks without a word, after taking my money without permission, now he calls and expects me to come running the moment he crooks his finger and says he’s sorry?

  Finally she nodded. “I’ll be happy to join you in Paradise, you son of a bitch,” she muttered grimly. “But I’m going to bring along a little surprise.”

  With that, she turned and walked into the bedroom. There, behind one of her mother’s vivid watercolors, was Stephen Richardson’s hidden wall safe. Inside the safe was her father’s well-oiled .357 Magnum. Connie didn’t need to check to see if the gun was loaded. Stephen Richardson had always maintained that hav­ing an unloaded weapon in the house was as useless as having a plumber’s helper with no handle.

  Not taking the time to shut the safe or rehang the painting, Connie walked back to the kitchen, where she stuffed the pistol into her purse right next to her mother’s Bible. Then, without a backward glance and without bothering to lock up the house, turn on the alarm, or even make sure the door was firmly closed, Con­nie went back out to Claudia’s Town Car. Her father had always insisted on keeping a Rand McNally Road Atlas in the pocket behind the seat. Connie pulled out the atlas and studied the map of Arizona until she located the tiny dots that indicated Portal and Paradise. After charting a route, she put the atlas back in its spot and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  This time, when she switched on the engine, she turned on the air conditioner as well. Until that moment, Connie Richardson Haskell had thought the term “heat of anger” was only a figure of speech.

  Now she knew better.

  Slamming the big car into reverse, she tore out of the garage and headed for Pathway to Paradise to find her husband. As she drove down the citrus- and palm-tree-lined street and away from the house that had been her home her whole life, Connie didn’t bother to look back, and she didn’t notice that the garage door had tidied to close. There was no reason to look back. It was almost as though she knew she was finished with the house and the neigh­borhood, and they were finished with her. No matter what hap­pened, Connie Richardson Haskell wouldn’t be returning. Ever.

  CHAPTER ONE

  At one o’clock Friday morning, Sheriff Joanna Brady let herself back into the two-room suite at the Marriott Hotel in Page, Arizona. Butch Dixon, her husband of a month and a little bit, lay sound asleep on the bed with his laptop computer sitting open in front of him. The laptop was evidently sleeping every bit as soundly as Butch.

  Joanna kicked off her high heels and then stood still, gratefully wiggling her cramped toes in the plush carpet. Butch had the room’s air conditioner turned down as low as it could go, and the room was pleasantly cool. Joanna took off her jacket and sniffed it. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, she tossed it over the back of the desk chair. It reeked so of cigar and cigarette smoke that she’d need to dry-clean the suit before she could wear it again. But, after an evening spent playing cutthroat poker with fellow members of the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association, what else could she expect?

  Peeling off her skirt and blouse, she draped those over the chair as well, hoping that hanging out in the air-conditioned room overnight would remove at least some of the stale-smelling smoke. Then, going over to the dresser, she peered at herself in the mirror. There was an impish gleam in her green eyes that even the lateness of the hour failed to dim. Reaching into her bra, she plucked a wad of bills, along with some change, from one of the cups. After counting the money, she found the total amounted to a little over two hundred dollars. Those were her winnings culled from all but one of her poker-playing opponents and fellow Arizona sheriffs. Leaving that money on the dresser, she removed a much larger wad from the other cup of her bra. That was the money she had won from one poker player in particular, Pima County Sheriff William Forsythe. That sum came to just under five hundred dollars, $488.50, to be exact. Over the course of the evening, the other players had dropped out one by one until finally it had been just the two of them, Joanna Brady and Bill Forsythe, squaring off. It had done Joanna’s heart good to clean the man’s clock.

  For the first two years of her administration, Joanna had kept a low profile in the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association. She had come to the annual meetings, but she had stayed away from the camaraderie of the association’s traditional poker party. This year, though, fresh from yet another slight at the hands of the obnoxious Sheriff Forsythe and his department, she had gone to the meeting intent on duking it out with the man over beer, cards, and poker chips.

  Joanna Lathrop Brady had learned to play poker at her father’s knee. Cochise County Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop had been a skilled player. Lacking a son with whom to share his poker-playing knowledge, he had decided to pass that legacy on to his daughter. To begin with, Joanna hadn’t been all that interested. Once her mother, Eleanor, began voicing strenuous objections, however, Joanna had become far more enthusiastic. She had, in fact, turned into an apt pupil and an avid devotee. Now, years alter Big Hank’s death, his patiently taught lessons were still paying off.

  Quietly casing the door shut behind her, Joan
na hurried into the bathroom, stripped off the remainder of her clothing, and then stepped into a steaming shower. When she returned from the bath room with a towel wrapped around her head and clad in one of the hotel’s terry-cloth robes, Butch had closed the laptop, stripped off his own clothes, and was back in bed.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I wasn’t really asleep. So how’s my redheaded dynamo, and what time is it?”

  “Your redhead is great, thank you,” she told him crisply. “And the time is just past one.”

  “How’d you do?”

  Smiling smugly, Joanna walked over to the dresser and retrieved both wads of money. She handed Butch the smaller of the two, giv­ing him a brief peck on his clean-shaven head in the process. “Whoa,” he said, thumbing through the money. “There must be two hundred bucks here.”

  “Two hundred eleven and some change,” Joanna replied with a grin.

  “Not bad for a girl.” Butch Dixon smiled back at her. He had been only too aware of the grudge-match status behind his wife’s determination to join the poker game. “How much of this used to belong to Sheriff Forsythe?” Butch added.

  “Some of that,” Joanna told him triumphantly. “But all of this.” She plunked the other chunk of money down on Butch’s chest. ‘Then she went around to her side of the bed, peeled off the robe, and crawled in. Sitting with her pillow propped against the head board, she began toweling her hair dry.

  On his side of the bed, Butch started counting the money and then gave up. “How much?” he asked.

  “Four eighty-eight.”

  Butch whistled. “And all of this is his?”

  Joanna dropped the towel. Naked and still damp, she lowered her pillow and snuggled up against Butch’s side. “He deserved it, too,” she said. “Bill Forsythe was drunk. He was showing off and making stupid bets. Eventually everybody but the two of us dropped out, but they all hung around to watch the fireworks. The drunker Bill got, the worse he played. I wound up wiping the floor with him.”

  “Beating the pants off Sheriff Forsythe isn’t going to do much for interdepartmental relations, is it?” Butch asked.

  Joanna giggled. “He never was a fan of mine to begin with. This isn’t likely to make things any worse. They were already in the toilet anyway.”

  “You just added salt to the wound.”

  “He shouldn’t have said I was hysterical,” Joanna said, referring to an incident that had occurred a good two months earlier.

  “And some people shouldn’t pack grudges,” Butch replied. “So now that you’ve won all this cash, what are you going to do with it? It’s almost seven hundred dollars.”

  “I was thinking about that while I was in the shower,” Joanna said. “I think I’ll do something Bill Forsythe wouldn’t be caught dead doing. I think I’ll donate the whole amount to the Girl Scouts. Jenny’s troop is trying to raise enough money for a trip to Disneyland at the end of the summer, just before school starts. Seven hundred dollars that they weren’t expecting would give them a big leg up.”

  “Speaking of Scouts, Eva Lou called.”

  Eva Lou and Jim Bob Brady, Joanna’s former in-laws and her daughter’s paternal grandparents, were staying out at High Lonesome Ranch to look alter the house and the animals during Joanna’s and Butch’s absence at the Sheriff’s Association conference and for the remainder of the weekend as well.

  Joanna raised herself up on one elbow. “Is something the matter with Jenny?” she asked, as a note of alarm crept into her voice. Being away from her daughter for extended periods of time still made her nervous.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Butch reassured her. “Nothing to worry about, anyway. It’s just that because of the severe drought conditions, the Forest Service has posted a statewide no-campfire restriction. They’re closing the public campgrounds. No fires of any kind will be permitted.”

  “Great,” Joanna said glumly. “I suppose that means the end of penny’s camp-out. She was really looking forward to it. She said she thought she’d be able to finish up the requirements on two separate badges.”

  “Surely you can give Faye Lambert more credit than that.”

  Faye Lambert, wife of the newly appointed pastor of Bisbee’s First Presbyterian Church, had stepped into the vacuum left by two departing leaders. After recruiting one of the mothers to be assis­tant leader, she had succeeded in infusing new life into Jenny’s floundering Girl Scout troop.

  “According to what Eva Lou said, the camp-out is still on. They dust won’t be cooking outdoors, and they won’t be staying in regu­lar campgrounds, either. Faye has managed to borrow somebody’s 1W. They’ll camp out on private land over near Apache Pass. The girls will be doing their cooking in the motor home, and they’ll have indoor bathroom facilities to boot. All they’ll be missing is the joy of eating food that’s been incinerated over open coals. No s’mores, I guess,” he added.

  “Oh,” Joanna said. “‘That’s a relief then.”

  And Eva Lou said something else,” Butch added. “She said to tell you she managed to find Jenny’s sit-upon. What the hell is a sit-upon?”

  “Jenny will kill me,” Joanna said at once. “The girls made them years ago when they were still in Brownies. Jenny wanted me to throw hers away the minute she brought it home, but I insisted on keeping it. Because it was up on the top shelf of Jenny’s closet, it didn’t get wrecked along with everything else when Reba Singleton did her job on the house.”

  Days before Joanna and Butch’s wedding, a distraught woman who blamed Joanna for her father’s death had broken into the house on High Lonesome Ranch, leaving a trail of vandalism and destruction in her wake. Although Reba had wrecked everything she could lay hands on in the rest of the house, she had left Jenny’s bedroom entirely untouched—including, as it turned out, Jenny’s much despised sit-upon.

  “You still haven’t told me what a sit-upon is,” Butch grumbled.

  “The girls made them—as part of an arts-and-crafts project—by sewing together two twelve-by-twelve-inch squares of vinyl. Jenny’s happens to be fire-engine red, but there were several other colors as well. The girls used white yarn to whipstitch the two pieces of vinyl together. Once three sides were sewn together, the square was stuffed with cotton batting. Then they closed the square by stitching tap the last side. And, voila! The next time the girls go out into the woods, they have a sit-upon to sit upon.”

  “I see,” Butch said. “So what’s the matter with Jenny’s? Why did she want you to get rid of hers?”

  “You know Jenny, how impatient she is—always in a rush. She did tine with the stitches on the first side. They’re really even and neat. On the second side the stitches get a little longer and a little more ragged. By the third side it’s even worse. On the last side, there were barely enough stitches to hold the batting inside.”

  “In other words, it’s pug-ugly.”

  “Right. That’s why she wanted me to throw it away. But I maintain that if I’m going to keep mementos for her, I should keep both good stuff and bad. It’s what Eleanor did for Inc. I knew Faye Lambert had put sit-upons on the list of required equipment for the camp-out. Knowing Jenny’s feelings on the matter, I had planned to just ignore it, but Eva Lou isn’t the kind to ignore some-thing if it happens to be on an official list of required equipment.”

  “That’s right,” Butch agreed with a laugh. “Eva Lou Brady’s not the ignoring type.”

  He wrapped an arm around Joanna’s shoulder and pulled her five-foot-four frame close to him. “The poker game was obviously an unqualified success. How did the rest of your day go?”

  Joanna sighed. “I spent the whole afternoon in a terminally boring meeting run by a nerdy little guy who’s never been in law enforcement in his life. His job—as an overpaid ‘outside’ consul­tant from someplace back East—Massachusetts, I think—is to get us to sign up our departments for what his company has to offer.”

&nbs
p; “Which is?”

  “They do what he calls ‘team building’ workshops. For some exorbitant amount of money, everyone in the department is cycled through a ‘rigorous outdoor experience’ where they learn to ‘count’ on each other. What the hell does he think we do out there day after day, sell lollipops? And what makes him think I can afford to pay my people to go off camping in the boonies instead of patrolling the county? He claims the experience ‘creates an atmo­sphere of trust and team spirit.’ I felt like telling him that I’m a sheriff, not a cheerleader, but some of the other guys were really gung-ho about it.”

  “Bill Forsythe’s such a cool macho dude,” Butch offered. “‘That program sounds like it would be right up his alley.”

  “You’re on the money there,” Joanna said. “He and a couple of the other guys are ready to write the program into their budgets the minute they get back home. Maybe their budgets can handle it. Mine can’t. I’ve got my hands and budget full trying to deal with the ten thousand Undocumented Aliens who come through Cochise County every month. What about you?”

  Butch grinned. “Personally speaking, I don’t have a UDA problem.”

  Joanna whacked him on the chest. “You know what I mean. What did you do today?”

  She glanced at the clock. In anticipation of the late-night poker session, she had drunk several cups of coffee during dinner. Now, at almost two in the morning, that dose of late-in-the-day caffeine showed no signs of wearing off.

  “Nothing much,” Butch replied.

  “You mean you didn’t go antiquing with the wives?”

  Butch shook his head. “Nope. You know me and antiques. I opted out of that one.”

  “Golfing, then? I heard somebody raving about the golf course here.”