“Something to do with that nonexistent boyfriend maybe? But if she went to all the trouble of taking both journals along, why didn’t she take the pills, too?”
Joanna thought about that for a moment. “According to Katherine, she didn’t generally come into Bree’s room. If she did, the books were all there on the bookshelf, in plain sight. The pills were put away.”
Ernie shook his head. “None of that makes much sense to me,” the detective said. “But then I’m not a girl.”
“I suppose I am?” Joanna returned.
“Aren’t you?”
Had anyone else in the department called Sheriff Brady a girl, she might well have taken offense. But Ernie Carpenter was a crusty homicide detective who, from the very beginning, had treated Joanna as a fellow officer-a peer-rather than as an unwelcome interloper. Their already positive relationship had solidified when the two of them had narrowly survived a potentially fatal dynamite blast. Since they were comrades in arms, Joanna was able to overlook Ernie’s occasional lapses into male chauvinism.
“Look,” Joanna replied, “girl or not, it doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going on here. Bree was far more worried about her parents’ finding out what was in her journal than she was about them stumbling over her supply of birth control bills. So that’s where we have to start with whatever is in that journal.”
“Great,” Ernie said. “But as you’ve already noticed, the last seven or eight months of entries are missing.”
“No problem,” Joanna said. “Just because whatever Bree wrote is a deep dark secret to her family, that doesn’t mean it is to everyone else. Half the students at Bisbee High School may know what’s been going on. The trick is going to be getting one of them to tell us.”
“Mrs. O’Brien gave me a list of all her friends,” Ernie uttered.
Joanna shrugged. “We can start with them, I suppose,” she said. “But we’ll get what we want sooner by talking to Bree’s enemies. They’re the ones who’ll give us the real scoop.”
“Enemies!” Ernie sputtered. “What kind of enemies would Bree O’Brien have? She’s eighteen years old, comes from a good family, is an honor student, and was valedictorian of her class. That’s not the kind of girl you’d expect to be drinking, drugging, or hanging around with gangs, which, as far as I’m concerned, is where most teenage problems and fatalities come from.”
Joanna looked at Ernie. He was a man who brought to his position as detective a bedrock of old-fashioned, small-town values. His solid beliefs and common sense had seen him through years of investigating the worst Cochise County had It) offer. He and his wife, Rose, had raised two fine sons, both of whom were college graduates-although neither of the boys had followed his father into law enforcement.
“You and Rose only raised sons,” Joanna said. “You probably still believe girls are made of sugar and spice and every-thing nice.”
“Aren’t they?” He turned back and once again surveyed Bree O’Brien’s almost painfully neat room. “But I don’t think that’s the case here,” he said finally.
“Me either,” Joanna said.
“So who’s going to give David O’Brien the good news/bad news?” Ernie asked. “Who gets to tell him that his precious daughter most likely hasn’t been kidnapped but that she’s probably out there somewhere, shacked up for the weekend with an oversexed boyfriend her daddy doesn’t know any-thing about?”
“I suppose,” Joanna said without enthusiasm, “that dubious honor belongs to me.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Angie Kellogg tried calling Joanna several times during the course of the afternoon. She had known Joanna was taking Jenny to camp that Saturday morning, but Angie also knew that her friend had expected to be back home in Bisbee some time before dark. Angie was still hoping she’d he able to convince Joanna to go along on the next morning’s hummingbird-watching expedition. By the time Angie had to get dressed to go to work, she still didn’t have an answer.
In the end, she decided to pack a bag with hiking gear just in case. After all, it was early in the evening. There was still plenty of time for Joanna to call.
Picking up the phone, Angie dialed the High Lonesome one last time. “It’s Angie again,” she said when the machine clicked on. “Give me a call at work as soon as you get in. I really need to talk to you.”
Joanna and Ernie left Brianna’s room together and started back to the living room. Walking down the hallway, Joanna paused to study a collection of framed photographs that lined both walls. There were four distinctly separate groupings of pictures.
One set featured poses of a much younger and still able-bodied David O’Brien. One photo showed him in an old-fashioned Bisbee High School letterman’s sweater accepting the Copper Pick trophy from the captain of the Douglas team in the aftermath of a long-ago game in which the Bisbee Pumas had beaten the Douglas Bulldogs. Another showed him standing in front of the entrance of the old high school building on Howell up in Old Bisbee. A third photo showed him in a cap and gown standing next to the fountain in front of Old Main at the University of Arizona. Beside him stood two women-one middle-aged and the other stooped, white-haired, and elderly.
The first picture in the next group featured a smiling David O’Brien dressed in white tennis togs. One hand gripped a tennis racket while the other arm was draped casually across the bare, halter-topped shoulders of an attractive young woman. Seemingly unaware of the camera, she smiled up at him with a look of undisguised adoration. When Joanna saw the same woman again in the next picture-an informal family grouping posed around a towering Christmas tree-she realized this had to be David O’Brien’s first family-the wife, daughter, and son who had perished in a fiery chain reaction wreck on Inter-state 10.
The little boy was a somber-faced young man who bore an uncanny resemblance. to his father. The daughter, with an impish smile and a disarming set of dimples, was a carbon copy of her mother. It saddened Joanna to see those two long-dead children, youngsters whose lives had been snuffed out in a moment, leaving them no opportunity to grow to adulthood or to experience all the joys and sorrows life has to offer. With a sudden ache in her heart, Joanna found herself missing fenny.
“‘This must be his first wife and their two kids,” Joanna said quickly to Ernie, pointing back at the Christmas picture.
The detective nodded. “And these must be Katherine.”
In the next grouping, one picture showed a much younger version of Katherine wearing a prom dress but standing alone, posing beside an easy chair all by herself rather than with a male escort. Another featured a young and smiling Katherine proudly wearing her black-banded R.N. cap. A third showed her beaming down at a scowling newborn baby that had to he Brianna.
The last section, one featuring almost as many photos as the other three combined, featured Bree O’Brien herself. Among others there were shots of her on a tricycle, clasping a teddy bear under each arm. One frame held a family Christmas card featuring a toothless six-year-old Brianna along with a caption that read, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” Another photo was a pose of her in a BHS cheerleading uniform. The last picture in the montage was a framed copy of Bree’s senior portrait, the same one that had been featured in the newspaper prior to graduation.
Seeing the pictures grouped together like that gave Joanna the odd sensation of having all those people’s lives spread out in almost instant replay fashion. The one woman and the two children had been wiped off the face of the earth, leaving behind hardly a trace-other than a few photographs-to testify to their all-too-brief lives. David O’Brien had gone from being a strappingly handsome, healthy young man to an embittered, wheelchair-bound, old one. Katherine’s bright-eyed and sweetly smiling nurse’s portrait was totally at odds with the dignified and sadly reserved middle-aged woman she had become. As for Brianna, there was nothing in the photos that gave any kind of hint about the existence of the double life that, Joanna was convinced, lay hidden in her missing journal entries.