Dell’s house to her own. He held his head high, probably searching for a scent, but it gave him a serious look that Josie loved. Most days, Chester had already made the quarter-mile walk back down the lane to Josie’s and was lying on the front porch when she got home. She knew the dog would give his own life for hers, but at heart, he was a chicken. He didn’t like the dark.
She slammed the jeep’s door and laughed as the dog made his way up to her, his tongue hanging, back end swaying in the opposite direction of his wagging tail. He moaned and barked, his entire being happy to see her. She rubbed his long velvet ears and finally followed him up to the house where he forced his way through the door ahead of her and made a straight path to the kitchen. She heard the plastic rattle as he pushed his nose down into an open bag full of rawhide bones. Before she made it to the pantry to hang her gun belt on the hook, he had lain down on his rug in the living room for an evening snack and nap.
After she hung her uniform and bulletproof vest in her closet and changed into cotton shorts and a Texas A&M T-shirt, she wandered back to the kitchen to search the pantry shelves for dinner. She opened the cabinet to scavenge and found a can of roast beef and a can of baked beans, which she thought matched surprisingly well. She pulled them down and found the can opener in the silverware drawer. She dumped the contents into two plastic bowls with lids and stuck them in the microwave for two minutes.
As her dinner cooked, Josie pressed the button on the answering machine that sat at the end of her kitchen counter. One message.
“Hey, it’s me.”
Josie smiled. It was Dillon Reese, her longtime, semi-serious love interest. He sounded tired and lonely.
“I’m still in Kansas. The conference is predictable. The feds want more than is humanly possible to give. I’m going out tonight for dinner and drinks. Nothing like twenty accountants to liven up the streets of Topeka. Call me later. I’ll keep my phone with me.” He paused. “Miss you.”
Josie stood at the counter, staring at the answering machine, imagining Dillon in his Dockers and pressed white shirt and striped tie, sitting in a hotel eating conference chicken for lunch, chatting amiably with the other accountants at his table. He was the most stable, the most predictable man she had ever met. She could count on him like the earth’s rotation. She knew what his reaction would be before she knew her own. And she could not fathom why he seemed to love her when she could not offer him the same level of commitment in return.
The microwave buzzed and startled her. She dumped the contents of both containers onto a plate and sat on the couch with Chester gnawing on his rawhide at her feet. She clicked on the local news to watch the grim weather forecast, then clicked it off again. She was tired of bad news.
Her thoughts drifted to Marta, and her daughter Teresa. She wondered what dinner must be like at their house: an angry teenage girl and her frightened mother, trying to look brave and in control across a plate of food that Marta scraped together from a paycheck that never went far enough. Josie wondered if the hole in her own heart would be filled by a child, or if the emptiness she felt so often was just part of her nature. She envied Dillon, lanky and easygoing, able to say what he felt with no forethought or anxiety.
She walked into the kitchen and dug back in the cabinet beside the refrigerator to find her bottle of bourbon. She’d hid it one night after Dillon commented on how quickly the alcohol was disappearing. He had hurt her feelings and she was irritated with herself for hiding something that she knew was not a problem. She poured a juice glass full and went back to the couch, hoping to fill the hole, at least temporarily.
SIX
Tuesday morning Otto awoke at six, but before he made the ritual beeline to the kitchen coffeepot, he walked outside through a light rain to check on his small herd of milk goats that roamed freely on his sixty-five acres of pasture. He found them huddled under the stable, but as soon as they caught