Desert Heat by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online

peered at her over the top of the newspaper he was holding. “I promised that little girl that I’d bring her up, and I intend to do just that,” he said. “Besides, I’ll have to come back up anyway.”
    “He says he’ll do it,” Joanna told Eleanor Lathrop.
    “I can’t for the life of me see why.”
    Joanna was fast losing patience. “Look, Mother, I can’t talk any longer. I’ve got to go now.”
    She hung up, feeling betrayed. In times of trouble, mothers were supposed to give their children comfort and consolation, not a hard time. At least that’s the way it worked in books and on television. Easygoing Hank Lathrop could very well have passed for Ozzie Nelson, but Eleanor Lathrop would never be mistaken for Harriet. She had far too many sharp edges.
    Joanna left the phone and paced back and forth in the small confines of the waiting room. Walter McFadden watched her over the top of the newspaper. She stopped and stood, still and unseeing, before an impossibly gaudy oil painting hanging on the far wall.
    She looked like a refugee from some nearby war. The oversized denim jacket was an ill match for a torn and tattered, silk-looking blue skirt. The skirt’s hem barely skimmed the top of a pair of scruffy men’s work boots. There were dark stains on both the jacket and skirt, stains Walter McFadden surmised would turn out to be splotches of Andrew Brady’s blood. He wondered if Joanna knew there were blood-stains on the jacket she was clutching to her body as though she were still freezing cold.
    “At times like this, I miss my father,” she said softly. “Even after all these years, I still miss him.”
    The sheriff turned the paper to a different page and then shook it sharply to smooth it out. “D. H. Lathrop was a good old boy,” Walter McFadden observed solemnly. “It was crazy for him to die like that, changing a tire for a lady with a carload of kids and a spare so bad that it didn’t even get her into town.”
    Joanna turned from the picture and walked over to a chair, taking a seat near Walter McFadden. “Did you know he used to call me Little Hank?” she asked.
    “Little Hank?” McFadden repeated.
    Joanna smiled sadly. “He only used his initials in public, but Big Hank was his family nickname, and Little Hank was his way of getting back at my mother. She always insisted that if men had the babies, there’d only be one child in each family, and one was all she was having. So Daddy was stuck with me. He never got the real son he always wanted. Mother wanted me to be one of those sweet, doll-playing, mind-your-mother little girls. My dad turned me into a tomboy, mostly out of spite, I think, and not that it took much effort on his part. The natural inclination was al-ready there. And every time he called me Little Hank it drove my mother crazy.”
    Walter McFadden understood that it was easier right then for Joanna to think and talk about her father than it was for her to deal with her husband’s grave injuries, with the uncertainty of what was happening with Andy’s surgery.
    “Your dad was smart to get out of the mines when he did, Joanna,” Walter said. “He saw the bottom was going to fall out of the copper business a whole lot sooner than anybody else did. He got out to run for sheriff, and once he got elected, he took me with him. Smartest thing I ever did. I owe your dad a helluva lot.”
    Joanna pulled the jacket more tightly around her. Looking down she seemed to become aware of the ugly stains marring the denim. She rubbed fitfully at one. When it didn’t come off, she returned her gaze to Walter McFadden.
    “You paid that debt in full,” she said quietly. “Andy wouldn’t have been hired if it hadn’t been for you. I know that. His grades were okay, but they weren’t that good.”
    “I didn’t do him that big a favor,” Mc-Fadden returned. “Andy was a good deputy.”
    Joanna Brady’s eyes narrowed. “Is!” she said determinedly, balking at how easily the