J.A. Jance - Dead Wrong

“For right now, we’d better take the victim option,” Jaime said. “If we even acknowledge that she could be a suspect-”

“Exactly,” Joanna said. “First let’s try to find out everything we can about the woman. Then tomorrow, maybe you can go talk to her.”

“Did you have any luck tracking down whoever bought primer over the weekend?” Ernie asked Debbie.

She shook her head. “I spent all day on this.”

“That’s all right,” Ernie said. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time to do that.”

For a change Joanna left the office right at five. Dinner at the Rob Roy was good-at least the food was. Margaret was off on another tirade, but Joanna, taking Butch’s advice, simply tuned her mother-in-law out. Instead, Joanna found herself thinking about Bradley Evans-a convicted murderer and a murder victim as well, a man whose life in prison and out of it seemed to be a complete contradiction. The people who knew him best-like Ted Chapman, for instance-seemed to have thought very highly of him. On the surface it appeared that he had lived an almost monastic life.

But somewhere along the line Brad Evans had met up with someone who hadn’t liked him nearly as well as other people did. This unknown person had disliked Evans enough not just to kill him but to mutilate his body as well.

How much do you have to hate someone, Joanna wondered, to systematically remove their fingers?

“Well,” Margaret Dixon asked impatiently, “what do you think?”

Joanna’s attention returned to the dinner table in time to find the other four people seated there staring at her and waiting for an answer. Butch, seeing what must have been a totally blank look on her face, came to her rescue.

“Dessert,” he said quickly. “What do you think about dessert?”

Joanna actually didn’t want dessert. Caught off guard, though, she ordered some anyway. “I’ll have the creme brulee,” she answered at once. Which was why, when midnight rolled around, she was wide awake, tossing and turning and suffering from a terrible case of indigestion.

Not wanting to disturb Butch, she and Lady abandoned the bedroom. For a while, Joanna and the dog sat on the couch in the living room. Finally, though, recognizing that this was a time when she’d have a bit of privacy, Joanna headed for her office. Butch had carried through on his promise to lock the door, but the key was hidden beneath one of his prized O-gauge model train engines displayed on a nearby shelf.

Joanna let herself into the office, where she found Butch’s laptop in the middle of her desk. No doubt he had used the office as a refuge from his parents during the course of the previous day.

Putting the computer aside, Joanna focused on the boxes stacked along the wall. One by one, she lifted them. It wasn’t necessary to open them in order to discern which ones held knickknacks. Those were all fairly light. The boxes at the bottom of the stack were too heavy to lift. Slicing open the top one, she found that the box was chock-full of books.

Some of them were old history texts. D. H. Lathrop had been a self-taught history buff. She remembered him regaling her with stories of the Old West, and it didn’t surprise Joanna in the least to find a collection of history books among her father’s treasured possessions. And there were several outdated law enforcement manuals as well. D. H. Lathrop had left off formal schooling without completing high school. When he had wanted to switch from mining to law enforcement, signing up for a college degree in criminal justice hadn’t been an option. Instead, he had pored over the textbooks and manuals on his own, using what he learned there to bootstrap himself out of a dead-end job as a miner into the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.

He may have started out there as a deputy, but he had worked his way up through the ranks until eventually he had been elected sheriff. Just seeing the books he had used to accomplish that transformation gave Joanna a whole new sense of her father’s single-minded struggle to better himself.

Joanna found the diaries in the second of the two heavy boxes. When she picked up the first of the leather-bound volumes, she did so almost reverently. Two dates-March 26, 1964, to June 8, 1969-were inscribed in indelible black ink on the front cover of the book and repeated again, in the same hand, on the spine. It took Joanna’s breath away to think that the small volume in her hand contained five years of her father’s life-five years she knew nothing about. At the time D. H. Lathrop had been writing in this diary, his daughter, Joanna, hadn’t been born.

She opened the first page. It was yellow and brittle to the touch, but her father’s distinctive handwriting leaped out at her.

“Work,” the entry dated March 1964 read. “I hate it. I hate working in the mine. I hate being dirty. I hate the dust and the dark. Fell in a stope today. It’s a wonder I didn’t break my neck. I don’t know how long I can keep this up, but I promised Ellie…”

Joanna stopped cold, allowing the word to sink into her consciousness. Ellie! Her father had called her mother that. So did George Winfield. Two very different men with the same wife who used the same affectionate nickname.

“… that I would support her until death do us part. And I will. A promise is a promise.”

And there it was. Joanna had always known that much about her parents’ relationship-that her mother had married someone who had been considered beneath her and that Eleanor had never, not for one day, allowed her husband to forget that fact. Regardless, though, Eleanor hadn’t bolted. She had married D. H. Lathrop for better or for worse. She may have been disappointed. There may have been far more “worse” days than “better,” and her husband may not have measured up to Eleanor’s lofty expectations, but she had stuck with him, too.

For the very first time, it occurred to Joanna that in reading her father’s version of his life, she might be doing her mother a disservice-that if she read the diaries she might come away with too much information about both of them.

Eleanor isn’t perfect , Joanna thought. But maybe neither was he .

Closing the book, Joanna threw it down. Then she took out the others-fifteen of them in all-and arranged them in chronological order across her desk. At volume eight, the format suddenly changed. The handsome leather-bound volumes were replaced with reddish cloth-bound books, with only the word “Journal” stamped on the front, with a blank space provided where her father had dutifully inked in the dates.

Joanna was lost in thought when Butch appeared in the doorway. “What are you doing?” he asked.

She jumped. “You startled me,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to disturb you, so Lady and I came in here.”

“Your father’s books?” Butch asked.

Joanna nodded. “His diaries and some other books as well.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Keep them,” Joanna answered.

“I know that. I guess, I meant, where are you going to keep them? My mother isn’t the only one who might pay your office an unauthorized visit. Your mother wouldn’t be above doing some snooping, either.”

In the end, they stowed all of the books in the bottom drawer of Joanna’s file cabinet. And because bending over was too cumbersome for Joanna, Butch was the one who actually put them away.

“This is silly, you know,” she said. “After all, it’s our house.”

Butch straightened up and looked at her. “How much luck have you had changing your mother’s behavior?” he asked.

“None.”

“Same thing with my mother,” he said. “So let’s just deal with it-and keep the door locked. Now come to bed. It’s going to be another long day tomorrow.”