Skeleton Canyon

“Look at this,” Joa

“Stop what?” Ernie asked.

“Keeping a journal. Bree started doing it three years ago. From the looks of it, she poured her heart and soul into these hooks. Each day’s entry covers one to three pages, and one volume fills three to four months. Then, at the end of the first week of last October, she stops cold. But her mother just told Hs that Bree writes in her diary every night before she goes lo sleep. So what’s happened to the last eight months’ worth of entries?”

Ernie came over to where Joa

“Where’d this one come from?” he asked.

Joa

“Bree took one with her,” Ernie said decisively. “The ghost of the book’s footprint is still here, in the dust at the back of the shelf behind the books. That means that, if she’s continued to write her diary entries at the same pace, she may have taken two volumes along-one completed and the other nearly so.”

“Why?” Joa

“Something to do with that nonexistent boyfriend maybe? But if she went to all the trouble of taking both journals along, why didn’t she take the pills, too?”

Joa

Ernie shook his head. “None of that makes much sense to me,” the detective said. “But then I’m not a girl.”

“I suppose I am?” Joa

“Aren’t you?”

Had anyone else in the department called Sheriff Brady a girl, she might well have taken offense. But Ernie Carpenter was a crusty homicide detective who, from the very begi

“Look,” Joa

“Great,” Ernie said. “But as you’ve already noticed, the last seven or eight months of entries are missing.”

“No problem,” Joa

“Mrs. O’Brien gave me a list of all her friends,” Ernie uttered.

Joa

“Enemies!” Ernie sputtered. “What kind of enemies would Bree O’Brien have? She’s eighteen years old, comes from a good family, is an honor student, and was valedictorian of her class. That’s not the kind of girl you’d expect to be drinking, drugging, or hanging around with gangs, which, as far as I’m concerned, is where most teenage problems and fatalities come from.”

Joa

“You and Rose only raised sons,” Joa

“Aren’t they?” He turned back and once again surveyed Bree O’Brien’s almost painfully neat room. “But I don’t think that’s the case here,” he said finally.

“Me either,” Joa

“So who’s going to give David O’Brien the good news/bad news?” Ernie asked. “Who gets to tell him that his precious daughter most likely hasn’t been kidnapped but that she’s probably out there somewhere, shacked up for the weekend with an oversexed boyfriend her daddy doesn’t know any-thing about?”

“I suppose,” Joa

CHAPTER SEVEN

Angie Kellogg tried calling Joa

What do I do now? she asked herself, standing in front of her closet. Should I take along hiking clothes or not?

In the end, she decided to pack a bag with hiking gear just in case. After all, it was early in the evening. There was still plenty of time for Joa

Picking up the phone, Angie dialed the High Lonesome one last time. “It’s Angie again,” she said when the machine clicked on. “Give me a call at work as soon as you get in. I really need to talk to you.”

Joa

One set featured poses of a much younger and still able-bodied David O’Brien. One photo showed him in an old-fashioned Bisbee High School letterman’s sweater accepting the Copper Pick trophy from the captain of the Douglas team in the aftermath of a long-ago game in which the Bisbee Pumas had beaten the Douglas Bulldogs. Another showed him standing in front of the entrance of the old high school building on Howell up in Old Bisbee. A third photo showed him in a cap and gown standing next to the fountain in front of Old Main at the University of Arizona. Beside him stood two women-one middle-aged and the other stooped, white-haired, and elderly. His mother and grandmother, Joa

The first picture in the next group featured a smiling David O’Brien dressed in white te

The little boy was a somber-faced young man who bore an unca

“‘This must be his first wife and their two kids,” Joa

The detective nodded. “And these must be Katherine.”