“Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “Didn’t you forget something? What about my good-night kiss?”
Jenny rolled her eyes. “Mom,” she said. “I’m almost twelve. That’s too old for good-night kisses.”
“I’ll decide what’s too old for good-night kisses. Now come here!” Joanna commanded.
Shaking her head, Jenny came across the room, planted a glancing kiss on the top of Joanna’s head, and then darted away before her mother could capture her in a hug.
“You’re a brat,” Joanna told her.
“A nearly twelve-year-old brat,” Jenny agreed with a grin, then she disappeared into her bedroom and closed the door.
For some time, Joanna remained where she was, sitting on the couch and wondering how it was all going to work. In the time since Andy’s death, she had grown accustomed to having the house to herself in the evenings, to doing things her own way, without having to consult any other adult about how the place was run. She and Jenny had hit on a reasonable way for the two of them to share the house’s single bathroom. And all the while Butch had lived the same way—on his own. How would all the logistics work out when they tried to combine two separate households and lifestyles together?
Financially, they would be fine. With Butch’s income from selling his Roundhouse Bar and Grill and Joanna’s salary as sheriff, the two of them would be rich by Cochise County standards. They had talked about the possibility of selling High Lonesome Ranch and moving into a place that was neutral territory—a house where neither of them had lived before. But Joanna didn’t want to live in town, and neither did Butch.
High Lonesome Ranch was only a few miles east of the Cochise County Justice Complex where Joanna worked, but it was far enough away to offer a retreat from some of the stresses of her job. It was a place where Jenny could have a horse—more than one, if she wanted—and multiple dogs as well. As for Butch, the ranch offered a perfect hideaway for someone dealing with the tortuous process of writing his first novel. In the end, Butch and Joanna had decided that the High Lonesome was where they would stay.
The upshot of that decision had Butch moving into Joanna’s house with an eye toward doing some serious remodeling—adding another bedroom, an office, and an additional bathroom, as well as totally redoing the kitchen. He was enthusiastic about the prospect of tackling this ambitious project and confident in his ability to get the job done. Joanna had her doubts. Her misgivings stemmed from having lived seven years of her childhood in an ongoing construction project while her father had spent all his off-work hours trying to remodel the family home on Campbell Street to Eleanor Lathrop’s demanding and ever-changing specifications.
Shaking herself out of her reverie, Joanna got up and headed out to the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher and cleaning off the counters. As she put in the soap and turned on the dishwasher, Sadie strolled over to the back door and whined to be let out.
“Time to go for a walk, girl?” Joanna asked as she went to open the door. “Come on, Tigger, you, too. Out you go so we can all come back inside and go to sleep.”
While the dogs went wandering off to relieve themselves, Joanna stood on the back porch. The blustery wind that had blown all day long had died down, but even without the wind, the thirty-degree drop between daytime and nighttime temperatures left Joanna feeling chilled. She shivered while looking off across the sparsely settled Sulphur Springs Valley to where a golden sliver of full moon was beginning to rise up over the Chiricahua Mountains.
Sadie was already back in the house and Tigger was nosing his way up the walkway when Joanna heard Kiddo neighing from his stall in the barn. Kiddo’s whinny was soon joined by a chorus of unsettled mooing from Joanna’s several head of cattle out in the corral. That struck her as odd. Usually, once the sun went down, the livestock didn’t make much noise. They lived on a schedule similar to Clayton Rhodes’ early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise credo.