Skeleton Canyon

Joa

Ernie had pulled out a camera and was already taking photos of the battered wreck. “One journal or two?” he called, without bothering to look over his shoulder.

“Only one so far,” Joa

“You’re wearing gloves, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead then, if you want to,” he said.

Fully aware that the person who had last touched the book was dead, Joa

“It’s the completed one,” Joa

“Well then,” Ernie replied impatiently between squeezes on his camera’s shutter, “go look for the other.”

By then De

“Your face is all red,” George Winfield observed, glancing in her direction. “Better have some of that water of yours. I’d hate for you to have a heatstroke.”

“Thanks,” Joa

The entry for March 4 was written at the very bottom of the page. It consisted of only five words, written in a hurried, careless, and almost illegible scrawl: “My mother is a liar.”

So is mine, Joa

Glancing at the journal again, Joa

Still too hot to return to the ground search for the missing diary, Joa

Remembering that David O’Brien had mentioned the previous November as the time things had changed so for Bria

“Find anything?” he asked.

“We now know the name of the boyfriend. Ignacio Ybarra, the football player from Douglas who was injured during the Bisbee/Douglas game.”

Ernie stopped what he was doing. “The one Bria

“One and the same.”

“We’d better go talk to him. Anything else?”

“The last entry is intriguing. It says, ‘My mother is a liar.’ “

“That’s all?”

“That’s it.”

Ernie frowned. “It sounds as though there’s a possibility that we’re dealing with two liars here-like mother like daughter.”

“It does sound that way,” Joa

“Go ahead,” Ernie told her. “I’ll keep working. If Jaime’s finally dug himself out of that sand trap, tell him to get his ass down here. I need him to establish a grid and start bagging up some of this evidence. I don’t like the sound of that thunder. I want this stuff out of here before it rains, not after.”

Up until then, Joa

Hurriedly, she scrambled back up to the top of the ridge. The crest looked like a traffic jam. Vehicles were parked single file behind Joa

Jaime Carbajal met Joa

“That’s okay. Hurry, though. Ernie wants you down there on the double, establishing a grid and bagging evidence. What about Mr. Hacker?”

“We ran into him about half a mile back. He’s off searching for Angie Kellogg.”

“No one’s heard from her or seen her?” Joa

Looking at the sky and worrying that she had waited too long, Joa

“They’re on the way,” Tica responded.

“Tell them we’ve got an inexperienced hiker lost out here in the Peloncillos, and it looks like a big storm is coming. If they need something of Angie’s to give the dogs her scent, have them get in touch with her boss, Bobo Jenkins, at the Blue Moon up in Brewery Gulch.”

By the time Joa

Joa

“And she just ran off the cliff here?”

“That’s how it looks.”

For a long moment, Frankie stood with her arms crossed, staring down at the wreck. “I know it’s your job to notify the parents,” she said at last. “But I’d guess you’re going to be tied up here for quite some time. If you’d like, I could drive back into town and tell the O’Briens that there’s been a fatality accident out here and the victim is most likely their daughter.”

Notifying the O’Briens was a task Joa