Paradise Lost

all he has to do is give me some kind of lame excuse, and the whole thing will go away. I t won’t!”

“You still haven’t spoken to him?” Marianne asked.

“No. What’s the point? What’s tearing me up is what am I going to tell Jenny, Mari? She loves Butch almost as much as she loved her dad. What will happen to her if she loses Butch, too? And how am I going to face all the people in town, the ones who came to our wedding—the ones who told me I was jumping iii too soon? The ones who said I should have given myself more time? It turns out that they’re right and I’m wrong. How will I ever be able to live this down?”

“Where are you right now?” Marianne asked.

“Metrocenter,” Joanna answered. “When I left the hotel, I didn’t know where to go. I thought about coming home, but I was crying so hard that it wasn’t safe to drive. I stopped here at the im.ill because I was afraid I was going to kill someone.”

“Good decision,” Marianne said. “Nobody should try to drive when they’re crying their eyes out. So what are you going to do now?”

“Come home,” Joanna said in a small voice.

“Where’s Butch?” Marianne asked.

“Back at the hotel,” Joanna answered. “At the Conquistador, in Peoria. That’s where the wedding’s going to be held, the one where Butch is the man of honor. What a joke!”

“And how’s he getting home?”

“How should I know?” Joanna asked.

“Does he have a car?”

“No. We took my county car up to the Sheriffs’ Association Conference in Page. We stopped off in Phoenix for the wedding on the way back down.”

“How’s he getting back to Bisbee?”

“He can walk, for all I care.”

“I see,” Marianne said.

Around her, the mall was filling up with people while Joanna Brady had never felt so alone in her life. Families—mothers and fathers with young, boisterous children—walked through the mall. Some were just out shopping. Others, still dressed in their Sunday finery, were headed to the food court for an after-church lunch. There were throngs of teenagers, kids Jenny’s age, laughing and joking as though they hadn’t a care in the world. Everyone else seemed happy and glad to be alive while Joanna was simply deso­late. She noted that a few of the passersby aimed wary, sidelong glances in her direction.

They probably think I’m crazy, she thought self-consciously. Here I sit. Tears are dripping off my chin, and I’m holding on to my cell phone as though it’s a damned life preserver!

“I think you should go back,” Marianne Maculyea was saying when Joanna’s straying attention returned to the phone.

“I should do what?”

“When it’s safe for you to drive, you should go back to the hotel and talk to Butch.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

Marianne sighed, sounding the way she did when dealing with Ruth, her recalcitrant three-year-old. “Before we go into that, I want you to tell me what’s been going on. All of it, from the beginning.”

And so Joanna found herself relating all the events of the past several days, including how Jenny and Dora Matthews had found Constance Haskell’s body and how Joanna had ended up leaving Phoenix the previous afternoon in order to bring Maggie MatFer­son to Bisbee to identify her sister’s body. She explained how Eleanor had precipitated a crisis at home by dragging Child Pro­tective Services into an already overwrought situation. It was harder to talk about coming back to the hotel that morning and discovering Butch hadn’t been there. Finally she came to the part where Butch and Lila Winters had found her reading Maggie MacFerson’s article in the hotel lobby. As she recounted that, Joanna was once again