Desert Redemption by Betty Webb

Author:Betty Webb [Webb, Betty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781464210983
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-01-16T20:36:31+00:00

When Juliana showed up at Desert Investigations a few minutes after eleven, I was still shaken over the way Sharona had taken the news about Megan. She’d become so pale that one of her customers, a lean whippet of a man with a New Jersey accent, asked if he should call 9-1-1. Hearing that, Sharona recovered enough to shoo out the customers before shutting down the gallery for the day.

“What’s wrong!?” Juliana shrieked, the minute she saw me. “You hear something bad about the kids!?”

I shook my head. “Calm yourself. I just came back from delivering bad news to somebody. As it turns out, she and another person might have had a closer relationship than I’d believed, so I’m not feeling super-confident about my judgment right now.”

“Join the club,” she said, bitterly.

This time Juliana insisted we ignore Ali’s and Kyle’s regular haunts and hit the parking lots of local wilderness areas: South Mountain, McDowell Mountain Regional Park, McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and all entrances to the Superstitions. It turned out to be a waste of time because we found no eight-year-old white Hyundais with the right license plates. Of course, license plates can be changed, so when we were at the Superstitions’ Peralta Trailhead lot and I spotted a car resembling the Etheridges’ beat-up sedan, I peered through the window, only to see the passenger’s seat filled with textbooks on urban design. Then I noticed a dust-covered ASU sticker on the window.

A little after four, we gave up, and joined the rush hour traffic on Highway 60.

“Well, it was worth a try,” Juliana said.

“Hmmm.”

“They could have been camping out in any one of those places.”

“Hmmm.”

“You think I’m a fool, don’t you?”

“I never said that.”

“You know what I found out Ali’s friends call me?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“They call me the ‘egg mom.’”

I winced, only partially because a chromed-up Chevy Silverado swerved in front of me, causing me to slam on the Jeep’s brakes. “I thought you didn’t know.”

“Ali was angry with me when I cut her TV time down to an hour, so in retaliation she told me that’s what the kids were saying. How do you think it makes me feel?”

“Not great, I imagine.”

“But they call the other one her birth mother.”

“Technically, that’s correct. And at least it isn’t ‘Vagina Mother.’”

But my attempt at a joke failed.

“I can’t seem to do anything right,” Juliana mourned.

I wasn’t about to let that pass. “This, from the Honorable Juliana Thorsson, rising political star with two terms as a U.S. Congresswoman, currently the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate?”

“Probably failed Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate,” she muttered, looking out at the traffic.

“Your kid runs away so now everything in your life is a failure, even your career? C’mon, you know better than that, Juliana. You’ve accomplished amazing things. Medaled in the Olympics, won…” I rolled out a long list of her achievements over the years, but she was too mired in her full-on guilt trip to pay attention.

“I should have been nicer to her,” she moaned.

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