Cobalt Sailing by Jerusha Jones

Author:Jerusha Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy mystery, clean and wholesome, female protagonist, culinary cozy, organized crime, kidnapping, clean mystery, clean romance, comedy, small town, murder, murder mystery, funny mystery, food mystery, oregon, washington, pacific northwest, police, fbi, food
Publisher: Jerusha Jones
Published: 2021-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

I made Willow eat a snack before we went inside. “They probably have vending machines in there, but...” I shook my head. Breakfast had been a paltry affair, despite our preparations the prior evening. My stomach had been too jittery, and I suspected Willow’s had been in an even more flummoxed state.

“I know, I know,” Willow grumbled. The swallow cost her—the masticated lump of cherry scone moved down her throat jerkily. “She knows we’re coming.”

I nodded. We’d had to fill out an online application, but it had been approved far more expeditiously than I’d expected from a state institution, and we’d gotten word in just a few hours, before we went to bed the previous night. The prison administration really did seem to want to concentrate visitors onto the designated Sundays, probably for economies of scale and planning the guards’ extra shifts.

It was a first for me—to be wanded thoroughly after having walked through metal detector gates (the Transportation Security Administration has nothing on the Oregon Department of Corrections), to being checked for visible tattoos or other prohibited signaling via my skin and clothing, to signing my life away at a check-in booth and receiving a time-sensitive visitor’s badge, to securing the few possessions I’d brought inside—my car keys, my driver’s license, Willow’s learner’s permit—in a locker, to huddling next to Willow on hard plastic chairs in a cold, cavernous room that was most definitely not designed for the comfort of its occupants. To waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

In truth, the enforced monotony probably wasn’t all that much different from Jody’s life on the other side of the bars.

There was no conversation. There was just observation of—and a sort of separation from—all the other families that crowded the room. Were we really like them?

I don’t think either one of us wanted to be. And yet there we were, on the same hard chairs, marking the same painful creep of minutes, dulled by the reverberating echo of too many shrill, scattered voices off the smooth, confining walls.

When the guard bellowed our names, we almost didn’t recognize them at first, so deep was the numbing stupor we’d sunk into. We lurched out of our chairs at his second call, and he glared at us while beckoning. Apparently, he had a timetable to stick to.

He led us into the adjacent room, equally large and cavernous but bisected with a long row of squat, partitioned desks built up against a clear plexiglass divider. We’d been assigned to bay #12, down at the end.

“Half an hour, max,” the guard reminded us before walking away, everything about the equipment he carried on his bulky frame squeaking and jangling with the sway of those broad hips.

The sound gave me a momentary craving for Bettina’s company, crazy as that may seem. I far preferred her jangling jewelry to his. And a dose of her feisty attitude would be a welcome relief in this surreal setting.

“Have you ever been sent to the principal’s office?” I asked Willow as we each claimed yet another hard, grimy plastic chair.

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