Dixon grinned. “Mine told me exactly the same thing. No wonder I’m such a disappointment to her.”
Once again Joanna returned to her story. “The upshot of all this is that one of the jail inmates—a lady who allegedly took after her husband wit sledgehammer on Monday—is currently serving as interim cook in the Cochise County Jail. Just wait until the media gets wind of that. There’s one particular local reporter, a lady of the press, who’ll have a heyday with it.”
Butch chuckled. “You might give her a friendly warning, just for her own protection. It sounds to me as though anybody who gets on the wrong side of your pinch-hitting cook does so at his or her own
Risk.”
Joanna and Leann both ended up laughing at that. They couldn’t help it. When their food came, Butch Dixon stood up. Tearing several sheets out of the yellow pad, he folded them and handed them over to Joanna, who tossed them into her purse. Then Dixon excused himself, leaving the two women to enjoy their meals.
When lunch was over, Joanna dropped Leann back at the APOA campus. Joanna felt a moment of guilt as Leann climbed out of the car. “This place looks really lonely. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come over to the hotel and spend the afternoon there?”
Leann shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of homework to do. After the way Dave Thompson climbed all over us this morning, I want to be prepared for Monday morning. Thanks for suggesting the Roundhouse for lunch. That hamburger was great.”
Two was still an hour too early to show up at the hotel, but Joanna went there anyway.
The afternoon was perfect. With blue skies overhead and with the temperature hovering somewhere in the eighties, it was hard to come to terms with the idea that this was the day before Thanksgiving. Bisbee’s mountainous climate lent itself to more seasonal changes. November in Bisbee usually felt like autumn. This felt more like summer.
Outside the automatic doors, huge free-standing pots and flower beds were ablaze with the riotous colors of newly planted bedding plants—marigolds, petunias, and snapdragons. Inside the lobby a totally unnecessary gas-log fire burned in a massive, copperfaced fireplace. Scattered stacks of pumpkins and huge bouquets of brightly colored mums and dahlias spilled out of equally huge Chinese pots. Looking around the festive lobby, Joanna allowed a little holiday spirit to leak into her veins. This wasn’t at all like High Lonesome Ranch at Thanksgiving, and that was just as well.
Surprisingly enough, when Joanna approached the desk, she discovered that her room was ready after all. Joanna checked in. Refusing the services of a bellman for her single suitcase, she took a mirror-lined elevator up to the eighth-floor room she and Jenny would share for the next three days. She put down her suitcase and walked over to the picture window overlooking Grand Avenue. Across a wide expanse of busy roadway and railroad track, Joanna had a clear view of the APOA campus.
Turning away from the window, Joanna surveyed the room. Although her dormitory accommodations and the main room at the Hohokam were similar in size, shape, and layout, there were definite differences. The hotel room had two queen sized beds instead of a single narrow one. In plan of a narrow student desk, there was a small round table with two relatively comfortable chairs on either side of it. The uniformly plastered walls of the hotel room were dotted with inexpensively framed prints. Except for the one mirrored wall in the dorm room, the walls there were totally bare.
It was in the bathroom, however, where the difference between hotel and dorm was most striking and where, surprisingly, the Hohokam Resort Hotel came up decidedly short. The hotel bathroom contained a combination bathtub/shower rather than both shower and tub. Not only that, there were no Jacuzzi jets in the tub, although a guest brochure on the table did say there was a hot tub located in the ground-floor recreation area.
After unpacking what little needed unpacking, Joanna sat down at the table and completed the letter she had started writing to Jenny two days earlier. When that was finished, Joanna tore it out of her notebook, folded the pages together, and placed them into an official Hohokam Resort Hotel envelope. Writing Jenny’s name on the outside, Joanna left it on top of the pillows on one of the two beds. Then she lay down on the other and tried reading.
Her assignment in
