momentarily reconsidered that opinion. And that was the thing that Alma DeLong hadn’t realized, either. Bisbee was a small town. The invisible spiderweb of connections running from one person and one family to the next was another reason Arlee Jones had tackled this case with unaccustomed zeal.
“So are you ready to talk to some reporters?” Jones asked.
“Who, me?” Bobby asked. A look of dismay spread across his face. “Are you kidding?”
“Yes, you,” Arlee said, placing a guiding hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “And I’m not kidding. As far as the people following this trial are concerned, you’re the living face of the victims. You’re the stand-in for every family that ever made the mistake of placing a loved one in a Caring Friends facility. You and the other families did so expecting that their father or mother or grandmother would be well cared for, even though we know now that that wasn’t the case.
“Having you speak to reporters tonight serves two purposes. It shows families that they can’t just drop their loved ones off at one of these places and then not monitor what goes on once the doors slam shut. They have to be vigilant. And it also serves to show people like Alma DeLong that if they deliver inadequate care, there will be consequences. Can you do that?”
“All right,” Bobby said uncertainly. “I guess.”
Witnessing this, Joanna felt her approval needle on Arlee Jones dip back down a bit. No doubt the man would make plenty of political hay from this incident. Having Bobby standing beside him during the press conference would provide a compelling segment on the evening news, and it would probably allow him to bank any number of sound bites that would work well the next time Arlee had to stand for election.
Joanna followed the two men out onto the covered outdoor breezeway. Content to be on the sidelines for a change, she stood next to Arlee Jones and listened in while a number of reporters piled on with a bombardment of questions. To Joanna’s surprise, Bobby Fletcher answered all of them in the unassuming but straightforward manner that had made him an effective prosecution witness during the trial. He hadn’t just dropped his mother off at the facility. He had seen the quality of care going down the tubes, and his attempts to rectify the situation had come to nothing.
All Joanna had to do was listen and smile and nod. The press conference ended without her having been asked a single question. That was exactly how she liked it, and her makeup had been on straight and her hair had been combed properly. Things didn’t get any better than that.
Once the press conference was over, however, a glance at her watch told Joanna she was running late. The day-care facility closed at six, and she had exactly five minutes of grace time to pick up Dennis. After that, she would begin accumulating late fines to the tune of twenty-six dollars for every additional five-minute period. Being late was not an option.
Joanna raced out through the back door of her office, jumped into her Yukon, and headed for Dr. Millicent Ross’s veterinary office in Bisbee’s Saginaw neighborhood, calling Jenny’s cell phone as she went.
“I’m on my way,” she told her daughter. “Meet me outside. Then I’ll drop you off at the church so you can go in and sign Dennis out. If I have to mess around with finding a parking place there, we’re not going to make it on time.”
As directed, Jenny stood by the entrance to the clinic’s driveway, leaning against a gatepost with one strap of her backpack flung over her shoulder. A stiff breeze blew in out of the north, and Jenny’s long ponytail fluttered like a blond flag in the turbulent air. Back in high school, Joanna had been a tiny redhead who had often been referred to as “cute.” Jenny, on the other hand, was beautiful in a tall, slender, blue-eyed way that would never be considered cute.
It came as no surprise to Joanna that Jenny, an accomplished horsewoman, would be a natural choice for the title of Bisbee High School’s rodeo queen at some point in the course of her four years of high school. The surprise had been in the timing. Joanna had expected it to happen later on. Being rodeo queen as a senior would have been just about right, but Jenny had won the crown as a mere junior, leaving Joanna as the mother of a rodeo queen somewhat earlier than she’d thought possible.
Once she had made the mistake of mentioning all of that to her own mother. Eleanor Lathrop Winfield had responded with a singular lack of sympathy.
“It’s one of those surprises that comes with being a parent, and you don’t even have time enough to dodge out of the way,” Eleanor had told her. “Besides, you’re better off as the youngish mother of a rodeo queen than being an underage grandmother.”
The implications in her mother’s statement were quite clear, as in, your daughter’s a fifteen-year-old rodeo queen. Mine was an unmarried, pregnant seventeen-year-old. Which do you prefer?
Guilty as charged, and that was pretty much the end of Joanna’s taking issue with the rodeo queen situation.
“Hey,” Joanna said as Jenny dropped her backpack on the floorboard, scrambled into the passenger seat, and fastened her seat belt. “How are things?”
“Good,” Jenny said.
“And work?”
“Okay.”
The older Jenny got the harder it became to get her to reply to any given question with something other than a single word.
“School?” Joanna ventured.
“School was weird.”
That was more than a one-word answer. It was long on worrisome implications but short on meaning. “What do you mean, weird?”
“When the buses were leaving this afternoon, the parking lot was full of cops.”
“Really?” Joanna asked. “How come? Did something happen? Was the school on lockdown?”
And if it was, she asked herself, why didn’t I know about it?
“Ms. Highsmith is missing or something.”
Debra Highsmith, the high school principal, was someone with whom Joanna had crossed swords several times, most notably when Joanna had been invited to speak at career day and was notified that, due to the school’s strict “zero tolerance of weapons” policy, she would need to leave both her Glock and her Taser at home. Joanna had gone to the school board and had succeeded in obtaining a waiver of that policy for trained police officers.
“Ms. Highsmith is missing?” Joanna asked.
Jenny shrugged and nodded. “She wasn’t at school this morning. When I took the homeroom attendance sheets down to the office, I heard Mrs. Holder talking to Mr. Howard about it—that Ms. Highsmith hadn’t come in and that it was odd that she hadn’t called to let anyone know. After that, I didn’t hear anything else until we were going out to the buses. That’s when all the cop cars showed up.”
Wondering what had happened but not wanting to grill her daughter, Joanna changed the subject. “How was driver’s ed?”
“Mr. Forte is having a hard time finding a stick-shift vehicle for me to practice on.”
Jenny had won her local rodeo crown, but there were other titles to conquer. If she intended to run for or win any of those, both Jenny and her horse, Kiddo, needed to attend the far-flung competitions, a reality which had underscored the fact that
