Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(5)
Entering the warm kitchen, Joanna found herself in a kind of controlled bedlam. Sage, squealing with delight, rocketed around the room in her walker, leaving behind a trail of Cheerios. Lucky, the deaf black Lab Jenny had rescued years earlier, followed dutifully in Sage’s tracks, sniffing out and scarfing up abandoned Cheerios as he went. Carol stood at the counter, dishing stew out of their relatively new programmable pressure cooker into a serving bowl while a frowning Denny concentrated on setting the table. He stood at Joanna’s end of the kitchen nook with a table knife in his right hand and with that hand placed over the left side of his heart. That way he could be sure the knife would be placed on the correct side of his mother’s plate.
“Soup’s almost on,” Carol announced. “You might want to get Sage out of the cart, change her, and strap her into the high chair.”
“Will do,” Joanna said, giving the housekeeper a mock salute before capturing the child, lifting her out of the walker, and heading for the nursery. A few minutes later, as Joanna strapped Sage into her high chair, she noticed that the table was set for only four. On nights like this, Carol usually cooked enough for everybody and her crew ate here in the kitchen right along with everyone else.
“The boys aren’t coming?” Joanna asked.
“Rick’s working, and Danny has a basketball game in Douglas. I’ll take some stew home for them to eat later on.”
“Are you going to the game?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t know,” Carol said. “The varsity game starts at seven. Danny wanted me to come, but I wasn’t sure if you’d be home in time.”
Joanna’s not showing up at home on time was often a sore subject with Butch—and occasionally with Carol, too.
“Well,” Joanna said, “I’m home now, so you should be able to go. I’m perfectly capable of cleaning up the kitchen and putting the kids to bed.”
While Joanna supervised Denny and Sage, Carol bolted down some dinner of her own. Then, after loading stew into plastic containers for each of her boys, she headed out. Left to handle the evening tasks on her own, Joanna discovered that they took longer than she’d expected. It was after eight thirty before she had the kids bathed and in bed and the kitchen cleaned up as well. Only then did she sit down at the dining-room table—the space deemed Christmas Card Central—to deal with the task at hand.
When Joanna had first decided to run for the office of sheriff, it hadn’t occurred to her that she would end up having to become a politician as well. Her first husband, Andy, had been a deputy sheriff running for office against his boss, then the current sheriff, when he’d been gunned down by a drug-cartel hit man on his way home from work. During the reception after Andy’s funeral, one of the guests had broached the idea that maybe Joanna should run for office in Andy’s stead. When she finally agreed to do so, it had been more to get people to shut up about it than with any expectation of winning. And once the election was over and she’d won, she took office without realizing that she was on a path that would bring her to her life’s work, that of being a professional law-enforcement officer—a LEO. For most LEOs being a cop is just that, but being sheriff is different. Sheriffs have to do the job, yes, but in order to keep it they have to run for office. That reality had forced Joanna to become a politician, and that was what had brought her up against the Christmas-card problem.
In ordinary times—meaning prior to Joanna’s becoming sheriff of Cochise County—a single box of twenty-five cards would have been enough to do the trick. In terms of her personal list, that was still true—holding steady at twenty-five or so. Those were longtime friends and relations—the ones who got the family holiday newsletter with a collection of chatty year-in-review updates written and arranged by Butch and illustrated with selected photos: Denny with his two front teeth missing, Jenny in a cowboy hat sitting astride Maggie as both horse and rider celebrated their latest barrel-racing win, Sage and Denny posing with a professional mall Santa in a photo that Butch had managed to have taken the day after Thanksgiving. For that one Denny had been grinning from ear to ear while Sage screamed her head off. Santa photos were like that, Joanna supposed—you win some, you lose some.
Once she went to work on the cards, Joanna discovered that Eva Lou had approached the problem in an efficient and typically logical fashion. All the envelopes had been addressed in Eva Lou’s flawless, old-school penmanship. Once addressed, the envelopes had been divided into two distinct groupings. Eva Lou had slipped cards and neatly folded copies of the newsletter under the flap of each envelope in the personal stack. In the other stack, plain envelopes awaited cards only. The personal stack was much smaller, so Joanna tackled it first—signing both the cards and newsletters and adding personal notes as needed.
She was done with that one and starting on the larger stack when her phone rang with Butch on the line. “You must be done,” she said. “How’d it go?”
“Well enough, I guess,” he answered with a singular lack of enthusiasm. “I’m getting pretty tired of giving the same old talk and answering the same old questions, but I love telling stories, so I should shut up and enjoy it, right?”
“Right,” she replied.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Christmas cards,” she answered bleakly. “Eva Lou got all the envelopes addressed. I did the personal list first before starting on the others.”