this job without you?”
Folding his arms, Ernie stuck his feet out in front of him and examined his shoes. For the first time ever, Joanna noticed that his usually immaculate wing tips were in need of a shine. “Jaime’s young,” Ernie said. “But he’s getting there.”
“But he’s not all the way up to speed yet, is he?”
“No.”
“If you drop the ball now, Ernie, you’ll leave us all in the lurch. Jaime will be in over his head, so will I. So will my department.”
“But what about…” He stopped.
“Hannah Green?”
Ernie nodded.
“I’ve been thinking about that all the way here,” Joanna said. “We gave Hannah Green what she wanted and needed, Ernie. You and Deputy Carbajal and I not only listened to her, we believed her. It may have been the first time ever in her poor unfortunate life that anyone really listened to her. If Reed Carruthers was the kind of man we both suspect, he never paid any attention to a word she said-including what television channels she wanted to watch.”
Holding out the wallet, Joanna handed it back to Ernie. He studied it. “So what are you saying?” he asked. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stay,” she said simply. “Go over to the jail and take charge of our part of the investigation. Hannah Green’s death will have to be investigated by an outside agency, of course. Dispatch has already called in the State Department of Public Safety, haven’t they?”
Ernie nodded. “But you’re to handle our end of it,” Joanna said.
When Ernie Carpenter looked up at her, his eyes were grave. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” Joanna said with conviction.
Slowly, Ernie pulled himself up and out of the chair. He stood there with the leather wallet still open in his hand, staring down at his badge. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll get on it. You’re sure you don’t mind having old duffers like me hanging around?”
Joanna shook her head and smiled. “It’s the old guys, as you call them, who keep the rest of us from having to reinvent the wheel. Not only that, if I were dumb enough to let you quit over Hannah Green, then I’d have to quit myself. After all, I didn’t see it conning any more than you did. As of right now, we’d both he out of a job.”
Closing the wallet, Ernie stuffed it heck in his pocket. “I guess I’d better get cracking,” he said. “Are you coming along over to the jail?”
“In a minute,” Joanna told him.
Ernie headed for the door. “All I can say is, Sheriff Brady, you’re a hell of a salesman. I’ll bet Milo Davis is still kicking himself over losing you.”
At the time Joanna left the insurance agency, she had not yet quite completed the transition from office manager to sales, but there was no reason to explain that to Ernie-not right then.
“I hope so,” Joanna said. “I certainly do.”
It was almost seven by the time Joanna stumbled home. She walked into a house that was alive with the fragrance of frying bacon and brewing coffee. Jenny and Angie Kellogg were already eating breakfast in the kitchen nook. Because she planned on trying to grab another few hours of sleep, Joanna passed on Angie’s offer of coffee. Instead, she opted for a glass of orange juice. Dragging the kitchen stool to the end of the breakfast counter, she sat down, kicked off her shoes, and began rubbing the soles of her aching feet.
“Where were you, Mom?” Jenny asked. “Angie said you had to go to work.”
All the way home, Joanna had dreaded having to answer that question. She was already so mind-numbingly weary, she had hoped to dodge the subject of Hannah Green entirely, but now Jenny’s questioning stare made avoiding the issue impossible.
“Mrs. Green died last night,” Joanna said carefully, mincing around the word “suicide.” “She died at the jail after the guards put her in her cell.”
Jenny’s eyes widened momentarily, then she turned to Angie. “Mrs. Green is the one I was telling you about,” Jenny explained. “She was waiting by the mailbox when we came come last night.” The child turned back to her mother. “What happened? Was she sick?”
Maybe Andy would have been brutally honest at that Joint, but Joanna simply wasn’t up to it. “Yes,” she answered. “She was very sick.”
“Couldn’t a doctor have saved her?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t think so,” Joanna said. “A doctor did come to the jail afterward, but he was too late.”
Jenny seemed to consider that for a moment. Then, abruptly and with childlike unconcern, she simply changed the subject. “The quail were here just a little while ago,” she said. “We used to have roadrunners out here, too,” she added in an aside to Angie. “But that was before we got Tigger.”
Angie Kellogg, newly come to the wonders of birding, both feeding and watching, looked horrified. “You mean your dog chases them?” she asked.
“Of course,” Jenny said with a shrug. “He chases everything, but the only thing he ever catches is porcupines.”
“Can’t you make him stop?” Angie asked.
“Not so far,” Jenny said.
The jarring juxtaposition of Hannah Green’s death and Tigger’s senseless antics cast Joanna adrift from the spoken words. Looking around the kitchen, she realized that the place was spotless. When she had left the house, dirty dishes and pots and pans from last night’s long delayed dinner had still been stacked on the counter and in the sink. Between then and now, someone-Angie, no doubt-had rinsed them, loaded and run the dishwasher, and emptied it as well. The unspoken kindness and concern behind that simple act made Joanna’s eyes fill with fears of gratitude.
“I love roadrunners,” Angie Kellogg was saying when Joanna tuned back into the conversation. “Growing up back in Michigan, I used to think they weren’t real, that the people who made the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons had just made them up.”
“I like those cartoons, too,” Jenny said, scrambling out of the breakfast nook. “But I always feel sorry for the coyote.”
Without having to be told, she took her dishes as far as the sink, rinsed them, and loaded them into the dishwasher. Then she headed for the bathroom to brush her teeth.
“Thanks for doing the dishes,” Joanna said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I didn’t mind,” Angie answered with a laugh. “It was fun-almost like playing house. And it’s so peaceful here. I never knew there were homes like this.”
Over the months, Joanna had heard bits and pieces about Angie Kellogg’s past, about the sexually abusive father who had driven his daughter out of the house. For Angie, life on the streets in the harsh world of teenaged prostitution had been preferable to living at home. Only now, living in her own little house, was she beginning to learn about how the rest of the world lived. Joanna looked around her clean but familiar kitchen and tried to see it through Angie’s eyes. The place didn’t seem peaceful to her. There was still a hole in it, a void that Andy’s presence used to fill.
“I didn’t know where all the dishes went,” Angie continued. “I told Jenny that if she’d put them away for me, I’d give her a ride to school.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Joanna said.
“Why not?” Angie returned. “Greenway School is just a little out of the way. It won’t take more than a couple of minutes for me to drop her oil. That way you can go to bed. You look like you need it.”
Unable to argue, Joanna stood up. “If anything,” she said, “I feel worse than I look.”
She staggered into the bedroom and dropped fully clothed onto the bedspread. Jenny stopped by on her way to her own room. “Aren’t you going to get undressed?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Joanna said, pulling the bedspread up and over her. “I’m too tired.”
Sound asleep, she didn’t stir when Jenny and Angie left the house a few minutes later. The phone awakened
