More comfortable now, she returned to the kitchen. ‘Anything else?” she asked.
223
“Nothing much. You remember we’re having dinner with Jim Bob and Eva Lou after church tomorrow?”
“Thanks for the reminder,” she said. “I had forgotten all about that.”
After dinner Joanna and Butch enjoyed a quiet evening together. Joanna Brady reveled in just watching TV, while several of Butch’s O-gauge trains chugged around and around the room on the shelf that had been built for them just over the tops of the windows and doors. Frank Montoya never called her, and for a change Joanna resisted calling him. If there was nothing that pressing demanding her attention, she was better off lying low. And tomorrow or the next day would be time enough to write up her reports and pass along to her investigators the information she had gleaned from her trip to New Mexico. The past few days had been hell for her department. She figured they all needed a bit of a break.
At nine-thirty, though, the phone rang. It was late enough that Joanna was tempted not to answer, but when she saw the call was coming from Jeannine Phillips of Animal Control, Joanna took it.
“What’s up?” she asked, worried that some of the AWE activists had decided to picket the Animal Control offices.
“How’s Blue Eyes?” Jeannine asked.
“You mean Lady?” Joanna returned. “Jenny renamed her, and she’s settling in fine.
She’s great with the other dogs, and she’s even starting to accept Butch.”
“Good,” Jeannine said awkwardly. “That’s good.”
There was a long pause. “Is that all you wanted?” Joanna asked. “To check on the dog?”
“Well, not really.”
“What then?”
224
Jeannine took a deep breath. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said. “For what you said about us-about Animal Control. It was nice. When I saw it on the news, I felt like … well … like somebody had finally noticed what we’re doing here. And how.”
“You’re welcome, Jeannine,” Joanna said. “You are doing a good job.”
There was another strained pause. It seemed as though there was something else Jeannine Phillips wanted to say, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
“It’s about hoarders,” Jeannine said. “We used to call them collectors. Now we call them hoarders. What exactly do you know about them?”
Joanna gathered her thoughts. ‘As I understand it, it’s a kind of mental disorder, an obsessive-compulsive disorder that causes people-women, mostly-to gather animals in hopes of taking care of them, of protecting them. The disorder can be controlled with medication and it comes back without it.”
“But do you know what causes it?”
“No,” Joanna said. “Not really.”
“The women almost always have one thing in common,” Jeannine Phillips said.
“Really. What’s that?”
There was another long pause. “They almost always have a history of childhood sexual abuse.”
For a moment Joanna had nothing to say.
“If I didn’t have this job, Sheriff Brady, I’d be one, too,” Jeannine added softly.
“In fact, I guess I am one. It’s just that I don’t take the animals here to my own place. It’s why I do what I do, Sheriff Brady. But it’s important for me to know that you think I do a good job anyway, and I wanted to say thank you.”
I
225
“You’re welcome, Jeannine,” Joanna murmured as she put down the phone.
“Who was that?” Butch asked. “Not an emergency, I hope.”
“No,” Joanna said. “Believe it or not, it was someone calling to say thank you.”
Joanna and Butch went to bed early that night. Butch went right to sleep. Joanna lay awake for a long time, thinking about what Jeannine Phillips had said and what she had left unspoken.
Having been saved from the thunder and lightning by Butch, Lady was ready to switch her loyalties. For the first time the dog curled up on Butch’s side of the bed rather than on Joanna’s, which made it easier the next morning when it was time for Joanna’s daily hand-over-mouth race to the bathroom.
“Didn’t take as long this morning,” Butch observed when she came into the kitchen for her single cup of tea.
“Maybe I’m getting used to it,” Joanna returned.
After breakfast, Butch and Joanna stopped by Cassie’s house to pick Jenny up and take her along to church. On the way into town Joanna was amazed to notice that less than twenty-four hours after that first drenching downpour, the long-bare stalks of ocotillo were already showing a hint of green as a new crop of round leaves poked out of what, for months, had seemed to be nothing more than a bundle of dried thorn-covered sticks. In another day, six-inch-long clumps of red tube-shaped flowers-the kind of flowers hummingbirds loved-would pop out
