Shaking her head, still speechless, Joanna started toward the bathroom. “You can’t go in there at all,” Butch said.
“Why not?”
“All the fixtures were broken off,” he said. “I’ve turned off the water, but the drywall is soaked. It’s so full of water, the walls and the ceiling may come down at any minute.”
Shaking her head in astonishment, Joanna headed for her own bedroom. There it was the same story all over again. Drawers had been torn out, upended, and then smashed to smithereens. The bedding and the bed itself had been sliced to pieces, as had most, if not all, of her clothing. Joanna had left the gifts from her Sunday-afternoon bridal shower neatly stacked in one corner of the room. The boxes had all been torn open and the contents ripped to shreds. What remained had been piled into a heap in the middle of the room, where the better part of a gallon of bleach had been poured over it.
In fact, nothing seemed to have escaped the destructive frenzy, not even the creamy silk dress-still in its distinctive Nordstrom bag-that Joanna had planned to wear for her wedding ceremony on Saturday afternoon. Seeing the ruined dress, a single involuntary sob escaped her lips.
“It’ll be okay,” Butch whispered. “Don’t worry.”
Joanna took a deep breath. Standing in the middle of her wrecked bedroom, she finally regained the power of speech. “This had to take hours,” she managed.
Butch nodded grimly. “Whoever it was must have turned up this morning right after you and Jenny left and made a day of it. That’s why Dr. Ross is so worried about Sadie and Tigger. It may be touch and go for them because the poison was in their systems for such a long time.”
Stunned, Joanna looked at him. “You mean they could die?”
Butch nodded, his eyes dry but red. “They could,” he said.
Unable to say anything more, Joanna turned away from Butch so he wouldn’t see the tears blurring her own eyes. When she did so, she caught sight of the shattered top of her rolltop desk-the place where she kept her various weapons under lock and key.
“My Colt Two Thousand is missing,” she said as a sudden chill passed over her body. She had stopped using the Colt due to dependability problems, but she also knew that when it did fire, it was a powerful and deadly weapon.
“I know,” Butch said. “I noticed that, too.”
“What about Jenny’s room?”
“It’s fine,” Butch said.
It sounded to Joanna as though he was telling her that to soothe her rather than because it was the truth. “Fine?” she demanded. “What do you mean, fine?” Even she could hear the threat of hysteria rising in her voice. “You mean, like this is fine?” she asked, swinging one arm to encompass the wreckage of her bedroom.
“I mean it’s fine,” Butch said. “Whoever did this left Jenny’s room entirely alone. It’s untouched. Nothing is broken; nothing wrecked. Now come on. We have to go back outside.”
“I don’t want to go outside,” Joanna protested.
“We have to,” Butch insisted. “Frank Montoya didn’t think you should come in here at all, not until after the crime-scene techs have had a chance to process the scene. But I told him that wouldn’t work-that you’d have to see it firsthand. The only way I got him to agree to that was to promise we wouldn’t touch anything and that we’d come back out as soon as you had seen it for yourself. Come on.”
Joanna tried to dodge away, but he caught her hand and pulled her toward the doorway. “Really, Joanna. You’ve seen enough. Standing here in the mess isn’t going to make it any better.”
“But who would do such a thing?” Joanna murmured. “Who could possibly hate me this much?”
“Good question,” Butch said, leading her back the way they had come. “It’s what we were talking about outside just before you drove up. Dick Voland was telling us he had a call from Reba Singleton late last night.” Butch paused. “She’s missing, by the way. Did you know that?”
“Of course I knew that,” Joanna replied. “I’m the one who told Dick about it in the first place.”
“What you maybe don’t know is that Reba’s husband had her served with divorce papers at her B and B here in Bisbee yesterday afternoon after the funeral and just before she was getting ready to leave town.”
“He what?”
“You heard me,” Butch replied. “He had the divorce papers served on the poor woman just hours after her father’s funeral. The no-good son of a bitch must have been planning it for days. No wonder she didn’t go flying straight home when she was supposed to. I’d be a missing person, too, if somebody had pulled that kind of asshole stunt on me.”
A power surge of mind-clearing anger erupted in Joanna’s head. “So that’s what happened!” Joanna exclaimed. “Dennis Singleton did Reba dirt, and so she turned it all on me.”
“That’s the general consensus,” Butch agreed.
“How could he do such a thing?”
Butch shrugged. “Some men are all heart,” he said.
Looking around the mayhem that had once been Joanna’s home, she saw the damage in a new light-as the manifestation of a broken woman’s rage and hurt and utter despair. In her outrage, Reba Singleton had focused her anger on property-on things. Dennis Singleton, on the other hand, had aimed his heart-seeking missile directly at his wife’s very soul. As Joanna grasped both those concepts, her perspective shifted. A toggle switch in her head went from off to on.
“Where’s Dick Voland now?” she demanded.
“Outside,” Butch replied. “At least that’s where he was when I left everybody else to go meet you.”
They were crossing the dining room and heading back toward the shattered kitchen when something bright and sparkly reflected back the light from the broken chandelier and caught Joanna’s eyes. Up against the mopboard and almost out of sight behind the swinging door was a tiny piece of glassware-Joanna’s maternal grandmother’s cut- glass toothpick holder. Seeing it, Joanna realized that the light pink Depression-era piece had been knocked out of the buffet along with everything else. Something must have cushioned its fall because it had landed without breaking. Spilling a thin trail of toothpicks, it had rolled across the floor and come to rest in a place where it was almost out of sight and hidden away from the frenzy of ongoing devastation.
Escaping from Butch’s grasp momentarily, Joanna bent over and scooped up the fragile piece. Holding it up to the light, Joanna examined it for cracks and chips, but it was perfect. All this while she had managed to hold her tears in check. Now they burst through and threatened to overwhelm her. Seeing the glowing toothpick holder was like catching sight of the first rainbow after a terrible thunderstorm. And, like a rainbow, the delicately colored glass held a promise that perhaps the worst was over and that somehow, someday, the sun would shine again.
With a sigh, Joanna plunged the piece deep in her pocket.
“Wait a minute,” Butch objected. “I told you I promised Frank that we wouldn’t touch anything as long as we were in here.”
“Too bad,” Joanna said. “This toothpick holder belongs to me, and I’m keeping it. If it turns out this is the only thing in the whole house with usable fingerprints on it, that’s too bad as well. In that case, we’re going to have a hard time catching the perp who did this.”
Butch looked at her. “It sounds like Sheriff Brady is back,” he said. “I think you’re going to be okay.”
She nodded. “I will be okay,” she agreed. “Seeing all this was a shock to the system, but this is all stuff- inanimate objects. I’m far more upset about what happened to the dogs. What about Kiddo and the cattle?”
“They seem to be fine.”
“Good.”
“There is one thing that really pisses me off,” Butch added.
“What’s that?”
The shadow of a grin played around the corners of his mouth. “Here we spent all that time and effort on Sunday cleaning your damned oven,” Butch told her. “In all this mess, nobody’s ever going to notice-not your mother, and not mine, either.”
Hearing his good-natured grousing, Joanna felt some of the strain drain out of her own body. After all, this was Butch Dixon’s way of dealing with a crisis-to make light of it if at all possible. Under most circumstances, it would have been Joanna’s preferred way of coping as well, but she allowed herself only the smallest of giggles. She didn’t dare laugh out loud. It would be only the merest of baby steps to go from dissolving into real laughter and then
