“I think your grandmother’s right,” Joanna told her.
“About the earrings?” Lucy asked.
“About your mother wanting you to have this.”
“And was she really a bad person?”
Joanna considered her answer. “No,” she said, softly. “I don’t think she was bad. I think she made mistakes, but I also think she loved you very much.”
Just then a terrible screech rent the air. Looking up, Joanna saw Big Red plummeting out of the sky, diving beak first straight for her head. Thinking she was under attack, Joanna covered her face with both arms and dodged to one side. When she opened her eyes, the bird had settled, nonchalantly, on Lucy Ridder’s narrow shoulder. As Joanna watched, he nuzzled up to her and buried his head in her hair. All the experts would have told her such a relationship was impossible, and yet Joanna was seeing it with her own eyes. And something made her think that the old Apache chief, Eskiminzin, wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
“And I think your great-grandmother was right as well,” Joanna added after a moment as she dropped her arms and attempted to regain a little of her dignity. “It’s all part of the pattern.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy asked.
“I mean,” Joanna told her, “that your mother was an interesting person, and so are you.”
EPILOGUE
The wedding was beautiful, although Joanna didn’t realize it at the time. Only later, later, when she saw the pictures, would she finally notice how much fun everyone seemed to be having. Her dress was beautiful, and the flowers were gorgeous. The bride was radiant, so was the groom, so was the flower girl, and so was the mother of the bride. If anybody cried, Joanna didn’t see it.
She and Butch left the reception at Palominas while the party was still in full swing and drove as far as Tucson to spend the night. Early Sunday morning found them standing in a check-in line at Tucson International Airport. “So,” the clerk said with a smile as she examined the passports Butch had presented for identification purposes along with their tickets. “Is Paris your final destination today?”
Butch nodded. “Have you ever been to Paris before?” the clerk continued.
“I have, but my wife hasn’t,” he replied.
Meanwhile Joanna had been struck speechless. Up to that very moment, Butch Dixon had refused to divulge where they were going.
“Paris?” she blurted. “That’s where we’re going—Paris, France?”
Butch shrugged. “It’s April, isn’t it? Paris is supposed to be lovely this time of year. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. And it should be a pretty nice place for you to buy those new clothes. You sure as hell need them.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank all the many people who were involved with the Bisbee Kiwanis Club’s successful Helipad Project and with the creation of this book. As my mother would say, “Whoever you are, you know who you are.”
—JAJ
Appendices: A Statement by Joanna Brady
My name is Joanna Brady. Joanna Lee Lathrop Brady. A few years ago I was elected sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona. I’m a widow who never expected or wanted to be drawn into law enforcement. I was working for an insurance company and trying to be a good wife and mother when Andy, my husband and a deputy sheriff, was killed by a drug dealer. Originally, Andy’s death was mislabeled as a suicide. First I had to convince the authorities that it was really a homicide. After I managed to apprehend the killer almost single-handedly, I was asked to run for sheriff myself.
Cochise County, in southeastern Arizona, is eighty miles wide by eighty miles long. That means my department is responsible for six thousand square miles of territory filled with cattle ranches, mines, ghost towns, hordes of undocumented aliens, and even a genuine city — Sierra Vista. My department is spread far too thin to have any permanent partnership kinds of arrangements. Sometimes I’m thrown in with one or the other of my two chief deputies – homicide detectives, Ernie Carpenter or Jaime Carbajal. Chasing crooks with those guys is as new for me as having a female boss is for them, but to give credit where it’s due, we’re all making it happen.