Paradise Lost

hamper.

Dressed in a nightgown and robe, she went to Jenny’s bedroom and knocked on the door. Her questioning knock was answered by a muffled “Go away.”

“I can’t,” Joanna said, opening the door anyway. “I need to talk to you.”

The room was dark, with the curtains drawn and the shades pulled down. Even the night-light had been extinguished. Joanna walked over and switched on the bedside lamp. At her approach, Jenny turned her face to the wall in her cavelike bottom hunk and pulled a pillow over her head.

“Why?” Jenny demanded. “Dora’s dead. What good will talk­ing do?”

“We’re not going to talk about that,” Joanna told her daughter. “We can’t. You’re a witness in this case. Tomorrow morning you’ll have to go to work with me so Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal can talk to you. They’ll want to go over everything that happened this weekend, from the time you went camping on Friday. They’ll question you in order to see if you can help them learn what happened to Dora and who’s responsible.”

“Grandma Lathrop is responsible,” Jenny insisted bitterly. “Why couldn’t she just mind her own business?”

“I’m sure Grandma Lathrop thought she was doing the right thing—what she thought was best for Dora.”

“It wasn’t,” Jenny said.

They sat in silence for a few moments. “I didn’t really like Dora very much,” Jenny admitted finally in a small voice. “I mean, we weren’t Friends or anything. I didn’t even want to sleep in the same tent with her. I was only with her because Mrs. Lambert said I had to be. But then, after Dora was here at the ranch that day with Grandpa and Grandma, she acted different—not as smart-alecky. I could see Dora just wanted to be a regular kid, like anybody else.”

Just like you, Joanna thought.

“Dora cried like crazy when that woman came to take her away, Morn,” Jenny continued. “She cried and cried and didn’t want to go. Is that why she’s dead, because Grandma and Grandpa Brady let that woman take her away?”

“Grandpa and Grandma didn’t have a choice about that, Jenny,” Joanna said gently. “When somebody from CPS shows up to take charge of a child, that’s the way it is. It’s the law, and the child goes.

“You mean if Grandpa and Grandma had tried to keep her they would have been breaking the law?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I wish they had,” Jenny said quietly.

“So do I,” Joanna told her. “God knows, so do I.”

There was another long silence. Again Jenny was the first to speak. “But even if I didn’t like Dora Matthews, I didn’t want her dead. And why do there have to be so many dead people, Mom?” Jenny asked, turning at last to face her mother. “How come? First Dad, then Esther Daniels, then Clayton Rhodes, and now Dora. Are we a curse or something? All people have to do is know us, and that means they’re going to die.”

Jenny lay on her back on the bottom bunk, absently tracing the outlines of the upper bunk’s springs with her finger. Meanwhile Joanna searched her heart, hoping to find the connection that had existed only two nights earlier between herself and her daughter, when Joanna had been the one lying on the bottom bunk and Jenny had been the one on top. The problem was that connection had been forged before Dora was dead; before Sheriff Joanna Brady—who had sworn to serve and protect people like Dora Matthews—had failed to do either one.

“It seems like that to me sometimes, too.” With her heart breaking, that was the best Joanna could manage. “But dying’s part of living, Jen,” she added. “It’s something that happens to everyone sooner or later.”

“Thirteen’s too young to die,” Jenny objected. “That’s all Dora was, thirteen—a year older than me.”

A momentary chill passed through Joanna’s body as she saw in her mind’s eye the still and crumpled figure of a child lying lifeless in a sandy wash out along Highway 90. “You’re right,” she agreed. “Thirteen is much too young. That’s why we have to do everything in our power to find out who killed her.”