Paradise Lost by J. A. Jance

kids,” she added. “You maybe didn’t know Andy back when he was twelve and thirteen, but I can tell you he was a handful at that age—a handful, but still not smart enough to put much over on us, either. You just go to your wedding, have fun, and don’t worry.”
    “All right,” Joanna said. “I’ll think about it.”
    “Good. Do you want to talk to Jenny again?”
    “No,” Joanna said. “That’s probably not necessary.”
    She put down the phone and was amazed to realize they were almost in Flagstaff.
    “Well?” Butch asked.
    “Typical,” Joanna said. “My own mother gives me hell. Eva Lou tells me everything is fine and not to worry.”
    “Should I call now and tell them that you’ll probably miss the rehearsal dinner?”
    Bolstered by her back-to-back conversations with Ernie and High Lonesome Ranch, Joanna Brady shook her head. “You’ll do no such thing,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind. Things sound like they’re under control at home. There’s no need for me to go racing back there. I’ll do the next-of-kin interview and be back in plenty of time for the rehearsal dinner.”
    “Good enough,” Butch replied, with a dubious shake of his head. “If you say so. Are you going to call Eleanor and let her know?”
    Joanna shook her head. “I think I’ll let sleeping dogs lie,” she said.
    They stopped for gas in Flagstaff. After leaving Flag, Butch leaned over against the passenger-side door and fell sound asleep. For a change, the cell phone remained blissfully silent, leaving Joanna some time alone to mull over her thoughts.
    If Jenny was suffering any ill effects from her experience on Friday night, it certainly wasn’t apparent in anything she had said just then on the phone. So, even though Joanna was relieved on that score, she still wondered about how much having a mother who was a sheriff had contributed to Jenny’s walk on the wild side. That immediately brought Joanna back to the discussion she and Butch had been having about whether or not Joanna should run for reelection.
    Three years earlier, when she had agreed to stand for election the first time, it had been in the stunned and awful aftermath of Andy’s death. A Cochise County deputy at the time as well as a candidate for sheriff in his own right, Andrew Roy Brady had been murdered by a drug dealer’s hit man. Refusing to accept the officially proffered theory that Andy had taken his on life, Joanna had forged ahead with an investigation of her own that had eventually revealed a network of corruption in the previous sheriff’s administration.
    Joanna’s key role in bringing that corruption to light had eventually resulted in her being encouraged to run for office in Andy’s stead. When she won, Joanna had taken her election to mean that the voters of Cochise County had given her a mandate to go into the sheriff’s department and clean house. Which was exactly what she had done. But that departmental housecleaning had come at a sleep personal price, one that had been paid by Juanita and by Jenny and now, to a smaller extent, was being paid by Butch Dixon as well.
    At the moment Butch was fine about it, but Joanna wondered how he would feel months from now if she was still doing the job of sheriff and running for reelection at the same time. Would their marriage withstand that kind of pressure? What if Butch decided he wanted a family of his own? He loved Jenny, and he was good with her, and he had said that as far as the two of them having children together went, he was content to abide by Joanna’s wishes. Maybe that was fine for the short term, but what if he changed his mind later on?
    Joanna’s thoughts strayed once again back to what Jenny had said the previous night. She claimed she had taken the cigarette by accident, that she had done it without really intending to. Joanna was struck by the similarity between Jenny’s misadventure with Dora’s cigarette and the way in which Joanna herself had become