Exit Wounds - J. A. Jance [85]
“You’re welcome, Jeannine,” Joanna murmured as she put down the phone.
“Who was that?” Butch asked. “Not an emergency, I hope.”
“No,” Joanna said. “Believe it or not, it was someone calling to say thank you.”
Joanna and Butch went to bed early that night. Butch went right to sleep. Joanna lay awake for a long time, thinking about what Jeannine Phillips had said and what she had left unspoken.
Having been saved from the thunder and lightning by Butch, Lady was ready to switch her loyalties. For the first time the dog curled up on Butch’s side of the bed rather than on Joanna’s, which made it easier the next morning when it was time for Joanna’s daily hand-over-mouth race to the bathroom.
“Didn’t take as long this morning,” Butch observed when she came into the kitchen for her single cup of tea.
“Maybe I’m getting used to it,” Joanna returned.
After breakfast, Butch and Joanna stopped by Cassie’s house to pick Jenny up and take her along to church. On the way into town Joanna was amazed to notice that less than twenty-four hours after that first drenching downpour, the long-bare stalks of ocotillo were already showing a hint of green as a new crop of round leaves poked out of what, for months, had seemed to be nothing more than a bundle of dried thorn-covered sticks. In another day, six-inch-long clumps of red tube-shaped flowers—the kind of flowers hummingbirds loved—would pop out along the top of each of those newly leafed branches.
“That’s why I love ocotillos so much,” Joanna said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because it takes so little rain and time for them to spring back to life. It always seems like a miracle to me.”
“I feel the same way about you,” Butch said.
She smiled, took his hand, and squeezed it.
When they stepped out of the Subaru in the parking lot at Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, the sky overhead was a brilliant washed-clean azure with a few puffy white clouds perched on top of the surrounding red-and-gray hills. But with the onset of the rainy season, the humidity was also on the rise—so much for Arizona’s supposedly dry heat.
Church that morning was warm and awkward, too. Marliss Shackleford was there, front and center, along with her fiancé, Richard Voland, a man who had once been Joanna Brady’s chief deputy and whose resignation she had been forced to engineer and accept. Out of law enforcement, he now worked as one of Cochise County’s few private investigators.
Marliss Shackleford and Richard Voland had been engaged for some period of time with no hint of whether or when they would take the plunge and marry. During the time of sharing, however, Marliss ended all speculation by standing up and announcing that they had recited their marriage vows in a private ceremony on Saturday of the previous week and that the wedding cake to be served during the social hour after church would be part of an informal reception.
Sitting several pews back, Joanna was stunned by this news. Her ongoing difficulties with Marliss and the complications surrounding Richard Voland’s resignation made her relationship with the bridal couple strained, to say the least. She resented the idea that she was being coerced into attending a surprise wedding reception. All through Marianne Maculyea’s sermon, Joanna stewed about the upcoming social hour and made up her mind to leave as soon as the last hymn was sung. That plan was foiled by Jenny’s disappearing into the basement for cake and punch before Joanna had a chance to stop her.
Taking Butch’s arm, she allowed herself to be led into the social hall with about as much enthusiasm as a prisoner being led to execution. A beaming Marliss, with Richard Voland at her side, waited at the door, greeting each new arrival.
As Joanna approached, Marliss leaned over and whispered in Joanna’s ear, “Love is lovelier the second time around—but then I guess you and Eleanor already figured that out.”
Marliss’s first husband and high school sweetheart, Bradley Shackleford, had been out