Page 5 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
Originally Nick had planned to attend veterinary school in Washington State, but once his widowed mother had remarried and the couple had moved from Utah to Arizona, Nick had changed his mind. He was now in his second year of a three-year program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. After finishing her stint with MMIV in Denver, Jenny had focused her job search in Tucson, where she and Nick now shared an apartment. Since they weren’t even officially engaged, Joanna wasn’t exactly thrilled with that arrangement, but considering her own premarital track record, she kept her mouth shut.
Yes, tonight it would be just the two of them—Joanna and Jenny, mother and daughter. For that Sheriff Joanna Brady was extremely grateful.
Chapter 2
Peoria, Arizona
Thursday, November 9, 2023
Joanna had timed her arrival at the Hohokam Hotelso she’d pull up at the front entrance just in time for her three p.m. check-in. As she followed the GPS directions off I-17, she had been stunned by all the changes. At the time she’d attended APOA, the Hohokam had been the only high-rise game in town. That was no longer the case. Another hotel property covered the block where Butch Dixon’s Roundhouse Bar and Grill had once stood, because not only had her time at the academy marked the beginning of her long career in law enforcement, it had also been the start of her relationship with Butch.
Butch’s restaurant had been the nearest watering hole for APOA attendees. While there, she and Butch had met and hit it off. Later on Butch had used the proceeds from selling his restaurant to build the enviro-friendly hay-bale ranch house where they now lived, having left behind the old farmhouse-style home on High Lonesome Ranch where Andy, Joanna’s first husband, had grown up and where Joanna and Jenny had lived after his death. So for Joanna, in many ways, this trip meant revisiting memories from a time that had marked a huge turning point in her life.
Her dinner reservation with Jenny was set for six, so Joanna decided to use the time of relative quiet to work on the remarks sheintended to deliver at the graduation ceremony. Many things had changed dramatically since her time at the APOA, and it was difficult to know where to start. Knowing she needed to speak from her heart rather than reading a prepared speech, Joanna spent the next couple of hours putting together a list of the topics she wanted to cover and then saving it in the Notes app on her phone:
How I got here
No Girls Allowed (LeAnn Jessup and me)
Hazing
Shoot/Don’t Shoot
Where we are now
First line of defense
By the time her thoughts were organized, Joanna hit the shower. While putting on her makeup, she couldn’t help but notice that, as time passed, she was beginning to resemble her mother more and more, except for her hair, that is. Joanna had always been a redhead, but now the red was sprinkled with gray—something Eleanor Lathrop Winfield would never have tolerated. The moment her roots began to show, she had been off to see Helen Barco for an emergency dye job. Joanna, on the other hand, regarded each gray sprig as a non-red badge of courage, and she wore all of them with pride.
Thinking she was early, Joanna headed down to the lobby at ten to six only to find Jenny already seated there, waiting. “It was the last day, so they let us go early,” she explained, after giving her mother a hug.
“On good behavior?” Joanna asked.
“I guess,” Jenny agreed.
Joanna asked for a quiet table, so the hostess escorted them to the far side of the restaurant where they had a view of the sparsely populated pool. Once snowbirds arrived in force after Thanksgiving, no doubt the pool would be fully occupied at this time of day.
“You won again,” Jenny observed once they were seated. “Congrats.”
“Thanks,” Joanna said. “Since I was running unopposed except for a nutcase from Kansas Settlement who launched a write-in campaign, winning was pretty much a foregone conclusion.”
“No election night celebration?”
“Yes, but only a small one. You have to thank the volunteers, but when it comes to election night parties, there’s nothing to top the one where Sage decided to make her initial appearance smack in the middle of it.”
“Speaking of my little sister, how was her pizza party?”
“Small but good,” Joanna replied. “Last year she wanted to invite her whole class. Thank heaven, this year it was five girls only, Sage included, but I’m afraid the whole thing was a bit of a letdown.”
“How come?”
“Because she wants to be a barrel racer just like her big sister, and she was hoping for a horse,” Joanna admitted. “She says that since Dennis has Kiddo, she should have a horse of her own, at least one that isn’t blind, but Butch and I talked it over and decided eight is still a bit young.”
When Jenny turned ten, Kiddo, Jenny’s first barrel-racing horse, had been a birthday gift to her from her grandparents, Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. Once Maggie, Jenny’s new ride, had entered the picture, Kiddo had been passed along to Dennis while Sage was forced to make do with Spot, a blind mare the family had rescued years earlier.
“What if I gave her Maggie?” Jenny asked.
Maggie had been Jenny’s mount throughout her college barrel-racing career. After graduating from NAU and knowing she’d be in Denver for a yearlong internship with MMIV, Jenny had passed Maggie along to Equine Helpers, a horse therapy organization in Flagstaff that was located at the same ranch facility where she’d boarded Maggie all four years.
