Dead to Rights by J. A. Jance

Author:J. A. Jance [Jance, J. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2009-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

It was almost seven by the time Joanna stumbled home. She walked into a house that was alive with the fragrance of frying bacon and brewing coffee. Jenny and Angie Kellogg were already eating breakfast in the kitchen nook. Because she planned on trying to grab another few hours of sleep, Joanna passed on Angie’s offer of coffee. Instead, she opted for a glass of orange juice. Dragging the kitchen stool to the end of the breakfast counter, she sat down, kicked off her shoes, and began rubbing the soles of her aching feet.

“Where were you, Mom?” Jenny asked. “Angie said you had to go to work.”

All the way home, Joanna had dreaded having to answer that question. She was already so mind-numbingly weary, she had hoped to dodge the subject of Hannah Green entirely, but now Jenny’s questioning stare made avoiding the issue impossible.

“Mrs. Green died last night,” Joanna said carefully, mincing around the word “suicide.” “She died at the jail after the guards put her in her cell.”

Jenny’s eyes widened momentarily, then she turned to Angie. “Mrs. Green is the one I was telling you about,” Jenny explained. “She was waiting by the mailbox when we came come last night.” The child turned back to her mother. “What happened? Was she sick?”

Maybe Andy would have been brutally honest at that Joint, but Joanna simply wasn’t up to it. “Yes,” she answered. “She was very sick.” Which isn’t a complete lie, she thought. But it’s a long way from the truth.

“Couldn’t a doctor have saved her?” Jenny asked.

“I don’t think so,” Joanna said. “A doctor did come to the jail afterward, but he was too late.”

Jenny seemed to consider that for a moment. Then, abruptly and with childlike unconcern, she simply changed the subject. “The quail were here just a little while ago,” she said. “We used to have roadrunners out here, too,” she added in an aside to Angie. “But that was before we got Tigger.”

Angie Kellogg, newly come to the wonders of birding, both feeding and watching, looked horrified. “You mean your dog chases them?” she asked.

“Of course,” Jenny said with a shrug. “He chases everything, but the only thing he ever catches is porcupines.”

“Can’t you make him stop?” Angie asked.

“Not so far,” Jenny said.

The jarring juxtaposition of Hannah Green’s death and Tigger’s senseless antics cast Joanna adrift from the spoken words. Looking around the kitchen, she realized that the place was spotless. When she had left the house, dirty dishes and pots and pans from last night’s long delayed dinner had still been stacked on the counter and in the sink. Between then and now, someone—Angie, no doubt—had rinsed them, loaded and run the dishwasher, and emptied it as well. The unspoken kindness and concern behind that simple act made Joanna’s eyes fill with fears of gratitude.

“I love roadrunners,” Angie Kellogg was saying when Joanna tuned back into the conversation. “Growing up back in Michigan, I used to think they weren’t real, that the people who made the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons had just made them up.

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