guy,” I told her. “He may be the one.”
Without another word, we both reached for our respective laptops.
When they stepped out of the house, Joanna took one look at the yard. The garage door was blocked by several parked cars. The only way to retrieve her Crown Victoria would have meant going back inside and asking several guests to abandon their poker hands long enough to come move their vehicles. When Jaime wasn’t at work, he drove a Toyota Camry. As a latecomer to the party, no one had blocked him in.
“It’s all right,” Joanna said. “I’ll ride with you.”
“Why don’t you just stay here-” Jaime began.
Joanna cut him off in mid-sentence. “I’m coming,” she said determinedly. “When we finish, if I need to, I’ll get one of the nightshift deputies to bring me home.”
Once buckled into Jaime’s car, they were silent as he maneuvered down the bumpy dirt track that led from the house back down to High Lonesome Road. As they bounced across the cattle guard at the end of the of the ranch’s private road, Joanna caught sight of a vehicle tucked in close to the fence line and the stand of mesquite trees behind it. Caught up in his own thoughts, Jaime seemed not to notice and started to drive past.
After registering the vehicle’s presence, it took only a moment for Joanna to identify it. The snub-nosed Toyota RAV-4 sitting just beyond Joanna’s mailbox belonged to none other than reporter Marliss Shackleford.
“Stop, please,” Joanna said. “Go back.”
Jaime pulled a U-turn. The Camry’s wheels had barely stopped moving when Joanna hopped out of the passenger seat. She charged over to the parked SUV and rapped sharply on the window, which Marliss eventually opened.
“What are you doing?” Joanna demanded. She asked the question, but she already knew the answer. Marliss was here hoping to dredge up some dirt on someone; whose dirt it was hardly mattered.
“It’s a party,” Marliss said.
“Yes, it is,” Joanna agreed. “And I’m quite sure you weren’t invited. As I said before, what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see who all came.”
You wanted to see if anyone had too much to drink before they left, Joanna thought. “Now would be a good time for you to leave,” she said.
“This is a county road,” Marliss objected. “You can’t order me off it. I have every right to be here.”
“She’s right, boss,” Jaime called from behind her. “Leave her be. Let’s go.”
“Where are you going?” Marliss asked. “What’s so important that you’re leaving in the middle of your own party?”
Joanna definitely didn’t want Marliss trailing along behind them. Taking a deep breath, Joanna suddenly found herself remembering Marianne Maculyea’s sermon from the previous Sunday. It had been all about turning the other cheek, along with the verse from Proverbs about a soft answer turning away wrath. Maybe, in this situation, giving a soft answer was the only solution.
“When we left, Butch was about to serve dessert,” Joanna said. “I’m sure there’s plenty to go around. Why don’t you mosey on up to the house and see for yourself who all’s there?”
Joanna saw at once that her invitation left Marliss torn. She wanted to know all the details about who had come to the party and what was going on. She was also curious about where Joanna was going. In the end, curiosity about the party won out.
“Are you sure it’ll be all right?” she asked, turning the key in the ignition.
“Absolutely,” Joanna said. “Tell Butch I sent you.”
Joanna stood there and waited while Marliss turned her RAV-4 around and headed up the road toward the house. As soon as she got back in Jaime’s car, he put it into gear.
“Thanks for getting rid of her,” he said. “I don’t think I would have been that nice.”
CHAPTER 13
When the next-of-kin notifications had been made, Joanna asked Deputy Raymond to drop her off at home. By then the bachelor party was long since over. She fell into bed and into a sound sleep. When she staggered into the kitchen the next morning with Lady at her heels, Joanna was amazed to see that the place was clean as a whistle and unnaturally quiet. Dennis and the three other dogs were evidently still at Carol’s place. Butch had made use of the child- and dog-free time to haul the rented tables and chairs out of the family room and to return pieces of furniture to their customary positions.
“How was it?” Butch asked, studying her face as he handed her a cup of coffee.
“Pretty rough,” she admitted, stroking Lady’s long smooth fur.
“Pretty rough” was an understatement. It had been more than rough. Joanna would never forget how fifteen-year-old Luis had heard the awful news of his mother’s murder in stoic silence. Only when Jaime finished had the boy’s narrow shoulders slumped. He had turned away and tried to bolt from the room, but Jaime had caught him on the way past. Engulfed in a smothering embrace, the boy had sobbed brokenly into his uncle’s chest.
Eventually, leaving the boy in the care of Jaime’s wife, Delcia, Joanna and Jaime had gone on to take the bad news to Jaime’s parents’ house. The moment Elena Carbajal answered the bell and saw who was standing on her doorstep, she knew why they were there. She had burst into a keening wail of grief before either Jaime or Joanna said a word. The gut-wrenching sound had prompted Jaime’s father to burst into the living room. He had emerged from the bedroom wearing slippers and pajamas.
“What is it, Elena?” Conrad Carbajal, Jaime’s father, had asked. “What’s going on?”
Jaime, as he had done with Luis, was the one who gave his parents the bad news.
“Naturally the parents blame themselves for what happened to their daughter,” Joanna told Butch over coffee. “But parents always do. Marcella was evidently a headstrong, out-of-control teenager. She ran off at age seventeen without ever completing high school. Her parents disapproved of her friends and her lifestyle, but they were thankful when she and Luis moved back here a year or so ago. At least that gave them a chance to look out for Luis.”
“How’s Jaime doing?” Butch asked.
“He’s on bereavement leave as of this morning,” Joanna answered. “Naturally he’s devastated.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Butch replied. “When someone dies, the people who are left behind assume that they’re somehow the root cause-that the tragedy happened because of something they did or didn’t do at some critical juncture.”
Joanna nodded. “You’ve got that right,” she said. “On our way uptown Jaime told me about a family Easter- egg hunt when he and Marcella were little. He was three years older than she was. She was running. She tripped and spilled her basket. Jaime tried to find all the missing eggs and put them back. He traded some of his own good eggs for some of her broken ones.”
Butch looked puzzled. “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“I think that was probably the first time Jaime tried to smooth things over for his little sister, but I think he’s been doing the same thing all his life.”
“Except this one can’t be smoothed,” he said.
Just then Carol Sunderson bustled in through the back door with a bright-eyed Dennis parked on her hip and with the three boisterous dogs trailing behind. None of them seemed any worse for wear for having spent the night away from home. For the next several minutes the kitchen was a chaotic circus of dogs and boy as Dennis did his best to relate everything that had gone on the evening before. Eventually, though, Dennis trotted off, taking the dogs with him. In the sudden quiet, Butch turned to Joanna.
“How about some breakfast?” he asked.
“Toast, maybe,” Joanna said. “I’m not very hungry.”
While Butch set about fixing it, Joanna leaned back, rested her head against the wall behind her, and closed her eyes.
“So what’s the plan?” Butch asked.
Joanna looked at her watch. “It’s supposed to be a light day,” she said. “The daily briefing first and then the
