J. Jance - Skeleton Canyon

“They’re not nonsense,” Joanna told him. “When you see a sign that says DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, don’t. A wash like the one back there can fill up with water in less than a minute. In fact, in less than sixty seconds it can swallow a car.”

“How can that be?” George asked. “It doesn’t look that deep.”

“The sand liquefies in the water,” Joanna explained. “What looks like a foot-deep little drop right now can turn into a six-or seven-foot killer during a storm. People drown in them all the time.”

“No shi-” Winfield stopped himself. “No kidding,” he corrected.

Joanna looked across the seat at George and smiled. In the last several hours, they had worked so hard together and in such a focused, purposeful manner, that all personal considerations had somehow melted away. They had been sheriff and coroner working together as professionals. Now, his small verbal slip brought the personal back into view.

“It’s all right if you use the word shit around me,” Joanna assured him. “You don’t have to edit what you say and you certainly don’t need to apologize. I’m a big girl. I’ve heard it all before.”

“It’s just that..”

“That’s one of the differences between my mother and me,” Joanna continued. “On occasion, with enough provocation, I’ve been known to use that particular expression myself and a few that are worse. I don’t believe, however, that any of those words have ever passed Eleanor Lathrop’s lips. As far as know, she’s never moved a whit beyond a heartfelt ‘My stars and garters.’“

George smiled and nodded. They reached the fence then. Joanna waited while George climbed out into the driving rain lo open the gate. When he stepped back inside, he was soaked to the skin.

They were almost to the turnoff at Apache before he spoke again. “Why do you call her that?” he asked.

“Why do I call my mother Mother?” Joanna asked.

“No. Why do you call her Eleanor?”

Until George pointed it out, Joanna wasn’t even aware of it. She had to think about her answer for some time before she save it. “I’ve always called her that,” Joanna said.

“Do you call her that to her face, or is it just when you speak of her to other people?” George persisted.

Again, Joanna considered her reply. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever called her that to her face,” she admitted honestly. “But it is how I talk about her, and it’s how I think about her, too. As Eleanor.”

“I see,” George said, nodding thoughtfully and rubbing his thin, “So what you’re saying is that it’s not so much a matter of disrespect as it is a matter of distancing.”

And because the questions and George Winfield’s resulting conclusion came far too close to home, Joanna had to lash out sit him.

“She I tied to hold me too close,” Joanna snarled. “She tried to smother me.”

For a long time after that, while they traversed the rest of the gravel track into Apache and then for several miles after they turned onto the blacktop, they drove through the curtain of pouring rain with neither of them saying a word.

“Ellie isn’t doing it anymore,” George Winfield said at last. “I believe she’s willing to let you go, Joanna. Isn’t it about time you did the same?”

By the time they reached Douglas, Joanna realized she had been wrong in her assumption about that first storm of the season. The rain wasn’t soaking in after all. Water came down in such a swift deluge that there wasn’t time for soaking. The dips on Highway 80 northeast of Douglas were already trickling with water that, Joanna knew, could turn into a torrent at any time once runoff from higher elevations drained into the willies and washes.

In Douglas proper, the highway’s railroad underpass was closed-for good reason. Years earlier, the highway department had painted markers on the wall in foot-long increments in order to measure and warn otherwise unsuspecting motorists of the water’s dangerous and potentially lethal depth. Joanna was surprised to see that the water filling the Southern Pacific underpass-murky, reddish brown stuff topped by a loamy white froth-had already topped the four-foot mark and was still rising.

“Now I see what you mean,” George Winfield murmured as the Eagle sat idling next to the yellow-and-black sign that stated the all-too-obvious-DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED.

Southeastern Arizona’s summer thunderstorms are often fierce but brief. For some reason, this one, after that first incredible outburst, had now settled into a steady downpour. George Winfield’s clothing, still damp from getting out to open the gate, made the windows inside the Eagle keep steaming up. Unfortunately, because the air-conditioning compressor wasn’t working, neither was the defroster. As they waited in the detour line to be routed around the flooded underpass, Joanna thought she glimpsed Marianne Maculyea’s 1960s vintage VW far ahead of them.

Seeing the car reminded Joanna that Marianne hadn’t shown up in Skeleton Canyon. Had she been there with the Search and Rescue Unit looking for Angie, Joanna surely would have heard about it. Something serious must have come up in Bisbee, Joanna reasoned. It wasn’t like Marianne not to show up in person when one of her friends and/or parishioners was in trouble.

Thinking of Angie reminded Joanna once again of just how wrong she could be. And how often. This supposedly welcome rain storm was turning into a veritable flood. Instead of spending an unauthorized weekend with her boyfriend, Brianna O’Brien was dead-at the hands of person or persons unknown. And Dennis Hacker, who had struck her as a nice man, had turned out to be a jerk instead.

You’re batting a thousand, old girl, Joanna told herself. just keep it up.

At the Double Adobe turnoff, Joanna stopped to let George Winfield into his own vehicle. “Do you want to transfer her into my van now?” he asked before opening his door. “‘That way you could go straight home from here.”

Joanna shook her head. The rain was still falling. The coroner’s office up in Tombstone Canyon was housed in a former funeral home that came complete with a covered portico. “I’ll take her the rest of the way to your office,” Joanna told him. “That way she won’t get wet, and neither will your satchel.”

“‘Thanks, Joanna,” George told her, climbing out. “See you there.”

The usually dry creek in Mule Gulch was running bank to hank where it crossed the highway, and there were fallen rocks anti muddy debris on the roadway in the high cuts between there and Bisbee. Wanting to report the hazard and summon someone to clean it up, Joanna reached for her radio. For the dozenth time that day, it wasn’t there. Her ability to communicate with Dispatch was at home in the Crown Victoria, parked in the yard of High Lonesome Ranch.

That does it, she thought. Budget or no budget, I’m getting a cellular phone.

It was almost four in the afternoon as Joanna made her way up Tombstone Canyon. That wasn’t easy, either. The deluge had washed what looked like at least one vehicle down Brewery Gulch. It was stuck in the subway, a massive storm drain designed for just such occasions. Driving past emergency vehicles and personnel out in the downpour trying to pull whatever it was out, Joanna couldn’t help being grateful that this latest incident, whatever it might be, was inside the Bisbee city limits rather than outside. That made it someone else’s problem, not hers.

She realized then that she was hungry. Not just hungry-starving. She’d had nothing to eat all day long. She had missed Eva Lou Brady’s Sunday dinner, which had probably been something wonderful like a pork roast or fried chicken. Health-conscious badgering might have persuaded the Colonel to change a few things at KFC, but there had been no change in Eva Lou’s philosophy of what was appropriate fare for Sunday dinner.