Page 3 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

Peoria, Arizona

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 she intended 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.

Joanna was taken aback. “You’re willing to give her up? Are you sure?”

Jenny nodded. “When Nick discovered that he couldn’t handle participating in rodeos and going to vet school at the same time, he did the same thing with Dexter.

Dex and Maggie are stablemates at Equine Helpers now, but I’m sure they’d let us take them back.

After all, Bisbee is a lot closer to Tucson than Flagstaff is, and if both Dexter and Maggie were at High Lonesome, maybe Nick and I could come down and go riding together sometimes too. ”

“You’re serious then?” Joanna asked.

Jenny nodded. “I can’t do it for Sage’s birthday, though. I already promised her a late birthday shopping trip in Tucson once I get back home.”

“She’ll love going shopping with you,” Joanna said. “Trying to do that with both Dennis and Sage in tow is like mixing oil and water. It never works. But if you and Nick want Dexter and Maggie to stay with us, I’m sure it will be fine with Butch and me.”

“Let’s think about Christmas then,” Jenny said. “Nick will have some time off then, and he could probably go up to Flag and trailer both horses down to Bisbee.”

“You’re sure he won’t mind?”

“Not at all,” Jenny said. “He misses his Dex as much as I miss Maggie.”

Their waiter showed up just then. They both ordered filet mignons with baked potatoes and crispy Brussels sprouts, accompanied by single glasses of merlot.

Once they were alone again, Joanna steered the conversation back to Jenny’s APOA experience. “How’s it been?” she asked.

Jenny paused before she answered. “Not a walk in the park,” she said finally.

“Hazing?” Joanna asked.

“Some,” Jenny agreed with a nod. “How did you know?”

“Been there, done that,” Joanna replied. “When I was here, there were only two women in our class. I had already been elected sheriff, and LeAnn Jessup was an unapologetic lesbian. That made us both fair game.”

Jenny frowned. “I seem to remember LeAnn. Wasn’t she hurt somehow in all that mess? Whatever happened to her?”

Joanna found it interesting that Jenny had focused on what had happened to LeAnn without mentioning the fact that, as part of “all that mess,” Jenny and one of her friends had been locked away in an abandoned bomb shelter while Joanna had engaged in a fatal shoot-out with their would-be kidnapper.

Since Jenny hadn’t made reference to that, neither did Joanna.

“At the time I met her, LeAnn was a new hire with the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Eventually she joined the FBI. The last I heard, she was still in DC working as a criminal profiler.”

“So you both made it through.”

“Yes, we did,” Joanna agreed. Then, after a pause, she asked, “What kind of hazing?”

Jennifer sighed and her expression darkened. “There are a couple of other guys from Pima County in the class. They got everybody to call me CJ, short for Calamity Jenn.”

“Calamity Jenn?” Joanna repeated. “How come?”

“It’s a play on Calamity Jane because of all my years in rodeo, but they also spread the rumor that I was underqualified and only got hired because of my personal connection to Dan Pardee, a close family friend of Sheriff Fellows. They passed that one along to anyone who would listen.”

“Sounds somewhat familiar,” Joanna said. “Try being here as a trainee when you’ve already been elected sheriff but you have zero law enforcement experience.”

“No fun?” Jenny asked.

“Pretty much, but as far as your being underqualified? I’d guess that, after your year of internship with MMIV, the reality is the exact opposite.”

“I learned so much there that it’s amazing,” Jenny said.

“Forensics, collecting and handling evidence, DNA profiling, you name it, but I was also incredibly miserable. I cried my eyes out almost every night. If Nick hadn’t talked me down out of my tree time after time, I wouldn’t have lasted a month. ”

Joanna was dumbfounded. “That doesn’t sound like you. I’ve never known you to be miserable for even a single day much less for a whole year. How come? What happened?”

“I was the only Anglo,” Jenny answered. “I never knew what it’s like to be a minority, but now I do.

Everybody else was Indigenous, and I wasn’t.

Anna Rae Green was great. She couldn’t have been nicer.

And whenever Dan Pardee was around, he was like a breath of fresh air, but most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis—the lab techs, the clerks, the secretaries?

They seemed to resent me and made me feel like an unwelcome interloper. ”

“Which only goes to show that prejudice works in both directions,” Joanna observed.

“But you know what? I’m guessing having that kind of experience in your background is going to serve you in good stead as a law enforcement officer, especially when you’re dealing with people who’ve had that same kind of treatment at the hands of people who look like you. ”

“Maybe,” Jenny said, after a moment. “I hope so.”

Their food came. The room was filling up with other APOA attendees who were celebrating graduation with their families before the fact rather than after.

“Given all that,” Joanna said eventually, “you’re probably not thrilled at the idea that I’m tomorrow’s guest speaker.”

“That’s not a problem,” Jenny said. “Aside from the guys from Pima County, I probably won’t run into any of my other classmates ever again.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Joanna told her. “Once you’re a full-fledged member of the thin blue line, you’ll discover that world is a lot smaller than you think.”