Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(4)
“Besides staring at their cell-phone screens you mean?”
“Exactly,” Joanna agreed with a laugh.
“Based on what Jenny had to say about the weather up in Flag, I’m really glad New York left the northern end of the state off the tour schedule this time around. Phoenix traffic is a pain, but it’s better than driving in snow and ice.” Then, after a brief pause, he added, “So what are your plans for tonight?”
“The Christmas cards didn’t go out last week, which means they have to go out by Friday at the latest,” Joanna told him with a sigh. “In other words, tonight I’ll be up to my eyeballs in doing those. Eva Lou said she would stop by this afternoon to help address envelopes. I left her copies of the lists, but I’m the one who has to do all the signing and stuffing.”
Eva Lou Brady had been Joanna’s first mother-in-law. After Andy Brady’s untimely death, Eva Lou and her husband, Jim Bob, had stayed close to their daughter-in-law and granddaughter, a relationship that hadn’t diminished once Butch appeared on the scene. They had welcomed him with open arms, treating him as though he were their own son-in-law rather than a widowed daughter-in-law’s second husband, and once Dennis and Sage had turned up, they had welcomed them with the same kind of loving enthusiasm. Jenny was their first grandchild. Dennis and Sage counted as numbers two and three.
Joanna’s folks—her father and mother as well as a beloved stepfather—were all gone now. Butch’s parents—his father, Don, and his incredibly toxic mother, Margaret—were full-time RVers who, to Butch’s immense relief, preferred to spend most of their time east of the Mississippi. That meant that in the grandparent department Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady were the only ones left standing.
“Eva Lou’s a doll,” Butch said, “and I’m so glad she’s helping out, but I should have worked on the Christmas-card issue before I left on tour.”
“You did,” Joanna reminded him. “For one thing, you wrote, laid out, and printed the Christmas newsletter, but if I remember correctly, at about the same time you had a horrendous batch of copyediting to do.”
“Right,” Butch muttered, “with a brand-new copyeditor who was more than a little challenging.”
“So get off your cross about the Christmas cards,” she told him, as she pressed the remote and opened the garage door. “You're good.”
“Sounds like you’re home.”
“I am,” she said. “I’ll let you go. Give me a call once the event is over and you get back to the hotel.”
“Will,” he said. “Love you.”
“I love you, too,” Joanna murmured. “I love you a lot.”
Chapter 1
When Joanna opened the car door, the irresistible aroma of cooking food—most likely a beef stew—filled the garage, and she uttered a small prayer of thanks for the presence of Carol Sunderson in their lives.
Carol was Joanna and Butch’s not-quite-live-in nanny/housekeeper. Years earlier Carol and her physically disabled husband, Leonard, had been living in a rented and extremely decrepit mobile home while caring for two preteen boys, grandchildren who’d been abandoned by their drug-addicted daughter. Leonard had perished in a house fire caused by a faulty electrical circuit that their landlord could and should have corrected.
The fire had left Carol and the two boys, Danny and Rick, homeless. All this had come about several months after Joanna and Butch had moved from High Lonesome’s original ranch house into the new one they’d had built a little farther up the road. For a time they’d had renters in the old house, but when the renters decamped within days of the Sunderson mobile-home fire, Joanna had suggested letting Carol and her grandsons live there for free.
Carol Sunderson might have been poor, but she was also proud. Unable to afford rent of any kind but disinclined to accept charity, she had offered to help out in the Brady/Dixon household in lieu of paying rent. Joanna had encouraged Carol to take her former landlord to court, where years later he’d been held liable for damages in Leonard Sunderson’s death. A court-awarded settlement had improved Carol’s financial situation immeasurably, but her living arrangement with Joanna and Butch remained in place. She and the boys continued to live rent-free in Joanna’s old house while Carol helped out as needed in the new one.
The grandsons, Rick and Danny, were almost grown. Rick was a senior in high school. He had a driver’s license, an old clunker of a car, and a part-time job in town delivering pizza. Danny, a sophomore, was currently making a name for himself on Bisbee High School’s varsity basketball team. With her boys able to come and go relatively independently, Carol was a daily calming presence in Butch and Joanna’s busy home. Joanna’s position as sheriff called for long hours at times, and without Carol’s logistical assistance in terms of household management Butch wouldn’t have been able to write books much less go on tour.
Joanna entered the house via the laundry room, pausing there long enough to stow her weapons in the gun safe. Once that was done, she closed the metal shutters that covered the exterior windows and doors. High Lonesome ranch was located at the base of the Mule Mountains on the far western edge of the Sulphur Springs Valley. As the crow flies, the two houses were less than ten miles from the border with Mexico. In recent years, because of the drastic increase in cartel-related smuggling, living there had become riskier. That was the reason Butch and Joanna had installed rolling shutter systems and security window screens on both houses. Joanna had always loved sleeping with the windows open, so sleeping in what amounted to a locked vault wasn’t her first choice, but better to be safe than sorry.