J. Jance - Outlaw Mountain

“1’m working a case, Mother,” Joanna said. “I have no idea what time I’ll finish up. I wouldn’t want to keep you and your other guests waiting. I’ve got to go now. There’s construction on the highway, and I need to concentrate on my driving.”

Ending the call, she put the phone down and drove for several seething minutes before she picked it up again and scrolled through until she found Butch’s number. He answered on the second ring. When he realized who was calling, the pleasure in his voice was unmistakable. “I was hoping you’d call long before this so I could take you to lunch.”

“I missed lunch,” she said, realizing it for the first time. “I’ve been out on a crime scene.”

“Skipping meals isn’t good for you,” he observed.

“Neither is talking to my mother.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Jenny told her that you spent the night. She’s on the war-path about it.”

“You settled her down, didn’t you?” Butch asked. “You did let her know that I slept on the couch?”

“No,” Joanna admitted. “I didn’t. I let her draw her own conclusions.”

There was silence on Butch’s end of the call. “Why did you do that?” he asked finally.

“Because I’m sick and tired of her trying to run my life; of her telling me what to do. I want Eleanor Lathrop Winfield to mind her own damned business and leave me alone.”

“Well,” Butch observed thoughtfully. “Your mother didn’t like me very much to begin with. I doubt this will improve the situation.”

“So you think I did the wrong thing?” Joanna demanded. She was beginning to think so herself, but she didn’t want Butch to share that opinion. And, if he did, she didn’t want to hear it. That would only make it worse.

“No,” he said with an easy laugh. “Not wrong. But you never choose the easy way out, do you, Joanna,” he added. “That’s one of the things I like about you-one of the things I love.”

The word slipped out so smoothly, so naturally that for a second Joanna wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly.

“Oops,” he said. “That probably counts as pushing, and I promised you I wouldn’t-push, that is. Especially not over the phone.”

Joanna’s initial reaction was to tell him to take it back, to unsay it. And yet, if she didn’t want him to care about her and if she didn’t already care about him, what the hell was the fight with her mother all about?

Joanna took a deep breath and decided to sidestep the issue. “Mother’s position is that if we’re sleeping together, we ought to be getting married or we should already be married. She also thinks, because of Jenny, that it’s far too soon for us to even think about such a thing.”

“In other words, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” Butch said.

“Right.”

“See?” he said. “Like mother, like daughter. Eleanor Winfield isn’t known for taking easy positions, either. Has either one of you thought about asking Jenny for her opinion?”

“Butch, she’s only eleven. What does she know?”

“You might be surprised,” he said. “Now if we’re not having lunch, why are you calling?”

“Is Jenny there?”

Lowell, the school Jenny attended, was only three blocks from Butch’s newly refurbished house in Bisbee’s Saginaw neighborhood. On days when she didn’t have after-school activities, she usually went to Butch’s house to have a snack, do her homework, and hang out until Joanna got off work and could come pick her up.

“She’s up the street riding her bike. Do you want me to go find her, or do you want to leave a message?”

“A message will be fine. Tell her I’m on my way to Tombstone to check on a crime scene investigation, and I’ll probably have to stop off in Saint David on the way. It may be late before I get there to pick her up.”

“Don’t worry,” Butch said. “She can stay as long as she likes. I’m making a pot of beef-and-cabbage soup. Soup and freshly baked bread are always a winning combination on a cold winter’s evening. There’ll be plenty for you, too, when you get here.”

“Thanks, Butch,” Joanna said. “By then I’m sure I’ll be hungry. I have to hang up now. I need to make another call.”

“Take care,” Butch said.

“I will.”

Joanna drove down Interstate-10 all the while rehashing both conversations. Butch had slipped that four-letter word into the conversation so unobtrusively that she might well have missed it altogether. Still, he had said it-had admitted aloud that he loved her. Now the ball was in Joanna’s court. Was she going to let their affair grow into something more? Did she love him back or not? And if so, how long before she’d be ready to admit it to herself, to say nothing of anyone else, including her own mother?

Turning off the freeway in Benson, Joanna belatedly realized that she still hadn’t called Father Mulligan. She used the pause at one of Benson’s two red lights to key his number into her phone. He must have been waiting beside the phone. Joanna’s call was answered after only one ring.

“Father Thomas Mulligan here.”

“It’s Sheriff Brady,” she told him. “I’m returning your call. What can I do for you?”

Joanna had met Father Mulligan when she had come to Saint David for a Drug Awareness Resistance Education meeting, along with her department’s DARE officer, earlier in the fall. Joanna had been surprised to encounter the man at an evening PTA meeting in the local public elementary school, since he was prior of a Catholic monastery in a largely Mormon community. She had also been surprised to learn that the priest himself had been instrumental in raising money to fund that year’s worth of DARE activities and prizes in the community.

“We’ve got a little problem here.”

“What kind of problem?” Joanna asked.

“Well, we had our annual autumn arts and crafts fair here over the weekend.”

“Yes, I know,” Joanna said. “My department helped out with traffic control, remember?”

“That’s right. Of course I remember. And there was absolutely no difficulty with that. Your officers were terrific.”

“So what’s the trouble then?”

“It’s a lost-and-found problem.”

Joanna knew that in the aftermath of local festivals, rodeos, and fairs, lost-and-found items could include everything from livestock to motor homes.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did somebody wander off and forget they left a Bounder parked in your RV-park?”

Father Mulligan didn’t laugh. “Actually,” he said seriously, “it’s a bit worse than that. And since I know you personally, I thought you’d be the right person to call to discuss it.”

“So what is it?” Joanna asked.

The priest took a deep breath. “Someone left their son here,” he said. “His name is Junior. I found him in the church this morning before mass. He must have slept there over night.”

“You need to call CPS,” Joanna said at once. “Child Protective Services has case workers who are trained to take charge of abandoned children. They get them into foster care, locate their parents, that kind of thing. The sheriff’s department just isn’t equipped-”

“He’s not a child,” Father Mulligan interrupted. “I can’t tell you exactly how old he is. He could be fifty or so, maybe even older. He told me his name-his first name-and that’s about it. He couldn’t give us his parents’ names or the name of the town where he lives. I checked to see if he was carrying any kind of identification, but he wasn’t. And then I thought maybe there’d be some identifying mark sewn into his clothing, maybe on the labels. But there aren’t any labels on his clothing, Sheriff Brady. They’ve all been removed. I think someone cut them out on purpose, so we’d have no way of following a trail and finding out where they and he came from.”