“You just added salt to the wound.”
“He shouldn’t have said I was hysterical,” Joanna said, referring to an incident that had occurred a good two months earlier.
“And some people shouldn’t pack grudges,” Butch replied. “So now that you’ve won all this cash, what are you going to do with it? It’s almost seven hundred dollars.”
“I was thinking about that while I was in the shower,” Joanna said. “I think I’ll do something Bill Forsythe wouldn’t be caught dead doing. I think I’ll donate the whole amount to the Girl Scouts. Jenny’s troop is trying to raise enough money for a trip to Disneyland at the end of the summer, just before school starts. Seven hundred dollars that they weren’t expecting would give them a big leg up.”
“Speaking of Scouts, Eva Lou called.”
Eva Lou and Jim Bob Brady, Joanna’s former in-laws and her daughter’s paternal grandparents, were staying out at High Lonesome Ranch to look alter the house and the animals during Joanna’s and Butch’s absence at the Sheriff’s Association conference and for the remainder of the weekend as well.
Joanna raised herself up on one elbow. “Is something the matter with Jenny?” she asked, as a note of alarm crept into her voice. Being away from her daughter for extended periods of time still made her nervous.
“Nothing’s the matter,” Butch reassured her. “Nothing to worry about, anyway. It’s just that because of the severe drought conditions, the Forest Service has posted a statewide no-campfire restriction. They’re closing the public campgrounds. No fires of any kind will be permitted.”
“Great,” Joanna said glumly. “I suppose that means the end of penny’s camp-out. She was really looking forward to it. She said she thought she’d be able to finish up the requirements on two separate badges.”
“Surely you can give Faye Lambert more credit than that.”
Faye Lambert, wife of the newly appointed pastor of Bisbee’s First Presbyterian Church, had stepped into the vacuum left by two departing leaders. After recruiting one of the mothers to be assistant leader, she had succeeded in infusing new life into Jenny’s floundering Girl Scout troop.
“According to what Eva Lou said, the camp-out is still on. They dust won’t be cooking outdoors, and they won’t be staying in regular campgrounds, either. Faye has managed to borrow somebody’s 1W. They’ll camp out on private land over near Apache Pass. The girls will be doing their cooking in the motor home, and they’ll have indoor bathroom facilities to boot. All they’ll be missing is the joy of eating food that’s been incinerated over open coals. No s’mores, I guess,” he added.
“Oh,” Joanna said. “‘That’s a relief then.”
And Eva Lou said something else,” Butch added. “She said to tell you she managed to find Jenny’s sit-upon. What the hell is a sit-upon?”
“Jenny will kill me,” Joanna said at once. “The girls made them years ago when they were still in Brownies. Jenny wanted me to throw hers away the minute she brought it home, but I insisted on keeping it. Because it was up on the top shelf of Jenny’s closet, it didn’t get wrecked along with everything else when Reba Singleton did her job on the house.”
Days before Joanna and Butch’s wedding, a distraught woman who blamed Joanna for her father’s death had broken into the house on High Lonesome Ranch, leaving a trail of vandalism and destruction in her wake. Although Reba had wrecked everything she could lay hands on in the rest of the house, she had left Jenny’s bedroom entirely untouched—including, as it turned out, Jenny’s much despised sit-upon.
“You still haven’t told me what a sit-upon is,” Butch grumbled.
“The girls made them—as part of an arts-and-crafts project—by sewing together two twelve-by-twelve-inch squares of vinyl. Jenny’s happens to be fire-engine red, but there were several other colors as well. The girls used white yarn to whipstitch the two pieces of vinyl together. Once three sides were sewn together, the square was stuffed with cotton batting. Then they closed the square by stitching tap the last side. And,
“I see,” Butch said. “So what’s the matter with Jenny’s? Why did she want you to get rid of hers?”
“You know Jenny, how impatient she is—always in a rush. She did tine with the stitches on the first
