“Well give me your cigarette, then. Don’t let it go to waste.”
Jenny handed over the burning cigarette. Embarrassed, she stumbled away from where Dora sat, heaving as she went. Twenty yards farther on, she bent over a bush and let go. In the process she lost all her popcorn and Orange Crush from the campfire along with the lunch Eva Lou Brady had packed for her ever so carefully. Finally, when there was nothing left, Jenny lurched over to a nearby tree and stood there, leaning against the trunk, gasping and shivering and wishing she had some water so she could get the awful taste out of her mouth.
“Are you all right?” Dora asked from behind her. She was still smoking one of the two cigarettes. The smell of the smoke was almost enough to make Jenny heave again, but she managed to stave off the urge.
“I’m all right,” she said shakily.
“You’ll be okay,” Dora told her. “The same thing happened to me the first time I tried it. You want an Altoid? I always keep some around so Grandma can’t smell the smoke on my breath.”
With shaking hands, Jenny gratefully accepted the proffered breath mint. “Thanks,” she said and meant it.
The two girls stood there together for some time, while Jenny sucked on the breath mint and Dora finished smoking the rest of the remaining cigarette. When it was gone, Dora carefully ground out the butt with the sole of her shoe. “I wouldn’t want to start a fire,” she said with a laugh. “Somebody might notice. Then we would be in trouble.”
They were quiet for a time. The only sound was the distant yip of a coyote answered by another from even farther away. Then, for the first time that evening, a slight breeze stirred around them, blowing up into their faces from the valley floor below. As the small gust blew away the last of the dissipating cigarette smoke, Jenny noticed that another odor had taken its place.
“There’s something dead out there,” she announced.
“Dead,” Dora repeated. “How do you know?”
Jennifer Ann Brady had lived on a ranch all her life. She recognized the distinctively ugly odor of carrion.
“Because I can smell it, that’s how,” Jenny returned.
The slight softening in Dora’s voice when she had offered the Altoid disappeared at once. “You’re just saying that to scare me, Jennifer Brady!” Dora declared. “You think that because they were saying all that stuff about Apaches killing people and all, that you can spook me or something.”
“No, I’m not,” Jenny insisted. “Don’t you smell it?”
“Smell what?” Dora shot back. “I don’t smell anything.”
Jennifer Brady had seen enough animal carcasses along the road and out on the ranch that she wasn’t the least bit scared of them, but she could tell from Dora’s voice that the other girl was. It was a way of evening the score for the cigarettes—a way of reclaiming a little of her own lost dignity.
“Come on,” Jenny said. “I’ll show you.”
Without waiting to see whether or not Dora would follow, Jenny set off. The breeze was still blowing uphill, and Jenny walked directly into it. After watching for a moment or two, Dora Matthews reluctantly followed. With each step, the odor grew stronger and stronger.
“Ugh,” Dora protested at last. “Now I smell it, too. It’s awful.”
Their path had taken them up and over the ridge that formed one side of the basin where the troop had set up camp. Now, the girls walked downhill until they were almost back at the road that had brought them up into the basin. And there, visible in the moonlight and at the bottom of the embankment that fell down from the graded road lay the body of a naked woman.
“Oh, my God,” Dora groaned. “Is she dead?”
Jenny’s neck prickled as hair on the back of it stood on end. “Of course she’s dead,” she said, wheeling around. “Now come on. We have to go tell Mrs. Lambert.”
“We can’t do that,” Dora wailed. “What if Mrs. Lambert finds out about the cigarettes? We’ll both be in trouble then.”
Jenny was worried about the same thing, but the threat of getting in trouble wasn’t enough to stop her. Neither was Dora Matthews.
“Too bad,” Jenny called over her shoulder. “I’m going to tell anyway. Somebody’s going to have to call my mom.”
About the Author
J. A. Jance is the American Mystery Award-winning author of the J.P. Beaumont series as well as eight enormously popular novels featuring small-town Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady. She has also written two critically acclaimed thrillers, Kiss of the Bees and Hour of the Hunter. Jance was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.