Morgan spun around and turned on her. His dark brown eyes flashed with barely suppressed fury. “What’s there to talk about?” he demanded. “And who the hell are you?”
Obviously Morgan hadn’t been paying much attention to Deputy Pakin. “I’m Joanna Brady,” she answered coolly. “Sheriff Joanna Brady.”
“How many cops did that jerk call? I’m surprised he didn’t have someone issue an all-points bulletin.”
“Nobody called me,” Joanna replied, matching the severity of her tone to his. “And there’s no APB, either. My dog got into a porcupine last night. I came by to drop him off so Dr. Buckwalter can pull out the quills. What are you doing here, Mr. Morgan?”
“Picketing,” he replied more evenly, making a visible effort to calm himself. His troubled eyes met and held Joanna’s questioning gaze. “This is the first time I’ve had a whole week off since he got out of jail and treatment. And if this is what I want to do with my spare time, no one’s going to stop me.”
In that tense atmosphere, when Morgan’s hand disappeared into a jacket pocket, Deputy Pakin made as if to reach for his own holstered weapon. Instead of a gun, however, Morgan’s hand emerged from his pocket holding a fanfold of brochures. While the deputy breathed a sigh of relief, Morgan handed one of the brochures to Joanna.
“It’s informational picketing only,” he added. “I’m passing out literature for Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. There’s no law against that, is there?”
Joanna looked down at the brochure. On the cover was the cap-and-gown high school graduation portrait of a sweet-faced young woman. “Danielle Leslie Mitchell,” the caption read. “Born June 17, 1976. Died June 18, 1994.” That was all it said, but it was enough. For Danielle Leslie Mitchell, eighteen years had been an entire lifetime.
Joanna raised her eyes once more and met Morgan’s challenging stare. “There’s a law against this,” she said, nodding toward the picture. “But not against picketing, as long as you do as the deputy said and don’t disrupt traffic or trespass on private property. Understood?”
Morgan said nothing, but he nodded. She turned to the photographer. “I think you can stop now, Kevin. The incident’s over. And Deputy Pakin, since it looks as though everything’s under control, you might as well go on to your next call while I take my dog into the clinic.”
“Right, Sheriff Brady,” Lance Pakin said. “Thanks for the assist.”
Joanna returned to her Blazer, turned off the flashing lights, and drove across the cattle guard. As she passed the man with his sign, she paused and rolled down her window. “Please accept my condolences about your wife, Mr. Morgan,” she said. “You must have loved her very much.”
For the space of a second or two, the mask of anger dropped away from the man’s face, leaving behind nothing but an expression of naked, unaffected grief. That painful look was one Joanna Brady recognized all too well. Some-thing very much like it reflected back at her every time she gazed into a mirror. However long Mr. Morgan’s wife had been dead, the man’s overwhelming grief was still close enough to the surface to be noticed by even the most casual observer.
“Thank you,” he murmured and then turned away, wiping at his eyes with the back of his sleeve. It was possible that a sudden gust of wind had blown some dust or grit into his eye, causing it to tear, but Joanna didn’t think so. Anger was all that had held Morgan together during his heated confrontation with Doc Buckwalter. With that gone, the slightest kindness-even something so small as an expression of condolence-made him fall apart. That was something else Joanna recognized. That, too, had happened to her-more than once.
Shaking her head, Joanna drove on through the gate and into the clinic parking lot.
TWO
“Not Tigger and the porcupine again,” Terry Buckwalter said, peering over the reception desk as soon as Joanna le the quill-sprouting dog into the animal clinic’s waiting room
Joanna leaned down and rubbed the dog’s ears. “I’m sure it hurts, but he doesn’t seem to mind the quills as much we do. Still, you’d think he’d wise up after a while.”
“Some dogs can be pretty hardheaded,” Terry said.
Joanna laughed. “To say nothing of expensive. For what we’ve spent on porcupine quills, we probably could have ended up with a purebred puppy, as opposed to this ugly mutt. But Jenny loves him to pieces, and he’s great at catching Frisbees.”
“And porcupine quills,” Terry added with a smile. SI came around the counter and took Tigger’s lead. “We already have several surgeries scheduled for this morning,” she sail “Bucky probably won’t be able to get around to doing this until mini-afternoon. If it looks like Tigger’s starting to get dehydrated, we’ll start him on an IV.”
Joanna nodded. “What time do you think he’ll be ready to pick up? I won’t be off work before five.”
“He should be ready to go by then,” Terry said. “If not, we may have to keep him until tomorrow morning.”
“That’s all right with me,” Joanna said, “but Jenny isn’t going to like it.”
Terry Buckwalter led a subdued and unprotesting dog through a swinging door into a kennel area at the back of the clinic. The new arrival was greeted by frantic barking from the several dogs already in residence.
“Sounds like you have quite a crowd back there,” Joanna commented when Terry returned to the waiting room.
She nodded. “Some are patients and some are being boarded,” she said. “We also have three reject Christmas puppies that we’re hoping to find other homes for. You don’t happen to need another dog, do you?”
Joanna shook her head. “Two are more than enough. What do you mean, ‘reject puppies’?”
“It only takes a couple of weeks after Christmas for some people to figure out that owning a puppy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The reality turns out to be a whole lot different from those red-ribboned golden-retriever pups in all those cute Kodak photo ads.”
“You’re right.” Joanna grimaced. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad showing a dog with his nose full of porcupine quills.”
Terry went back behind the counter, searched through a file drawer, and pulled out a folder that was evidently Tigger’s treatment record, which she perused for a few moments. “Tigger’s due for his rabies shot next month. Do you want us to go ahead and handle that while he’s here? It’ll save you an extra trip later on.”
“Sure,” Joanna replied. “That’ll be fine.”
Terry Buckwalter added the file folder to several others that were already stacked on the counter. “I’m sorry you got stuck in all that mess outside,” she said. It was the first time either woman had referred to the earlier confrontation by the clinic’s entrance.
Joanna tried to pass it off. “It wasn’t any big deal,” she said reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it.”
But Terry Buckwalter didn’t seem ready to let it go. “It just goes on and on,” she said, shaking her head. “This whole year has been a nightmare. Ever since Bucky’s accident…”
She broke off suddenly, as if concerned that she had said too much.
Terry Buckwalter was a slight, potentially attractive woman in her mid-thirties. She might have been better- looking if she had made the effort. She was tanned and solidly built, but whatever figure she had was perpetually concealed beneath the flowing folds of a man-sized, knee-length lab coat. Her shoulder-length, naturally streaked blond hair was pulled back into an unbecoming bun. And her tanned, sun-lined face showed not the barest hint of makeup. There were dark circles under her eyes, and a grim set to her mouth.
Looking at her, Joanna was struck by the thought that ‘Terry Buckwalter was living under the weight of some heavy emotional burden. Although Terry herself had been at home in Bisbee, some two hundred miles away from her husband’s fatal car accident, no doubt she had been dealing with fallout from that event ever since. Clearly, Hal Morgan wasn’t the only innocent victim suffering in the aftermath of Bonnie Morgan’s death.
“I’m sure it’s been difficult for you,” Joanna said sympathetically. “Situations like that are tough on everyone connected to them.”
