Paradise Lost

and opening the door. As Joanna got in, she handed the attendant his tip. “Will you be needing directions this morning?” he asked.

Not trusting herself to speak, Joanna shook her head mutely. Then she drove off without a backward glance, leaving Butch standing alone on the curb. She made it only as far as the first stop-light before she burst into tears. Sobbing so hard she could hardly see, she finally turned into a nearby parking lot, one belonging to the Peoria Public Library. Looking around, she was grateful to see that late on a Sunday morning the lot was completely deserted.

She had put the car in neutral and set the parking brake when her cell phone began to crow. She picked it up and looked at it. The readout said UNAVAILABLE, which meant her caller might pos­sibly be Butch calling from the hotel. It could also be someone else who needed to reach the sheriff of Cochise County. Sniffing to stifle her tears, she punched SEND, then sat there holding the phone in her hand but saying nothing.

“Joey?” Butch’s voice sounded frantic. She winced when she heard him utter his pet name for her. “Joey,” he repeated. “Are you there? Can you hear me? Where did you go?”

Still she said nothing. She couldn’t.

“Joey,” he pleaded. “Please talk to me. I can explain what hap­pened.”

Suddenly she could speak, but in that odd strangled way that was just above a whisper. It seemed as though the strength of her voice was somehow inversely proportional to whatever she felt. The stronger her emotions, the smaller her voice.

“I already told you,” she croaked. “I don’t want any of your damned explanations.”

She heard Butch’s sigh of relief, and that hurt her, too. The very sound of his voice—the voice she had come to love—made her whole body ache. “You are there, then,” he said. “You’ve got to come back to the hotel, Joey. You’ve got to give me a chance to tell you what went on.”

“I know what went on,” she snapped back at him. “And I’m not coming back.” With that, she punched the END button. Butch called back almost immediately. Eventually the ringing—that awful roosterlike crowing—stopped, only to begin again a moment later. He called five more times in as many minutes, but she didn’t answer. Each time the phone rang, and each time she didn’t answer it, Joanna Brady gathered a little more of her anger around her. Finally she switched the ringer to SILENT and flung the phone out of reach on the far side of the car.

Out of sight, out of mind, she thought. But that gave her pause, too. Wasn’t that exactly what had happened with Butch? Evidently, the moment Joanna had been out of sight, she had been out of his mind as well, enough so that Lila Winters had been able to walk in and make her move.

Just then a group of skateboarders and in-line skaters—bronzed, bare-chested teenagers oblivious to the scorching, one-hundred-­fifteen-degree sun—appeared at the far end of the parking lot. Not willing to let even strangers see her in such a state, Joanna put the Crown Victoria back in gear and drove away. For a while, she drove aimlessly through Peoria, Glendale, and North Phoenix. She could think of only one person who might be able to help her, only one who would understand her sense of betrayal and offer comfort—her best friend, pastor, and confidante, Marianne Maculyea. The problem was, Marianne was more than two hundred miles away, back home in Bisbee.

So distracted that she hardly noticed her surroundings, Joanna was brought up short by a blaring horn. To her dismay she discov­ered she’d gone through an amber light and had almost been broadsided by someone jumping the green. With her heart pound­ing in her throat, she turned right at the next intersection, a side street which led to the back entrance of one of Phoenix’s major shopping malls, Metrocenter.

Realizing it wasn’t safe for her to continue driving, she parked in the broiling parking lot. Her cell phone had slipped off the end of the seat. She had to walk around the car and open the passenger door in order to retrieve it. When she picked it up, the readout said she had missed fifteen calls, all of which were from UNAVAILABLE. All from Butch, no doubt, she told herself.

Slamming the car door shut, she made her way into the mall. Finding a bench near a noisy fountain, she glanced down at her watch. One o’clock was time enough for Jeff and Marianne to have finished up with both the church service and the coffee hour and to have returned home to the parsonage. Gripping the phone tightly, Joanna punched Marianne’s number into the keypad.

“Maculyea/Daniels residence,” Julie Erickson said. Julie was the live-in nanny who cared for Jeff and Marianne’s two children—their almost-four-year-old adopted daughter, Ruth Rachel, and their miracle baby—the one doctors had assured the couple they would never have—one-and-a-half-month-old Jeffrey Andrew.

For years, Marianne Maculyea had been estranged from her par­ents. A partial thaw had occurred a year earlier, when Ruth’s twin sister, Esther Elaine, had been hospitalized for