When the note was out of her hand, she finally took off the surgical gloves. Lise raised her face to catch a breeze that was full of sweet, clean desert air, looked up at the extravagance of stars in the moonless sky, and yawned. It was over: agenda efficiently covered, meeting adjourned.
On her way back to the hotel, Lise stopped at an all-night drugstore and bought an ice cream bar with some of Henry LeBeau’s money. She ate it as she walked.
The manager was standing in front of the hotel, watching the police and the paramedics speed past, when Lise strolled up.
“Big fuss.” Lise stood on the sidewalk with the manager and finished her ice cream. “You told me it was dead around here this time of year.”
“It’s dead, all right.” The manager laughed her dry, lizard laugh. “Lot of old folks out here. Bet you one just keeled over.”
Lise watched with her until the coroner’s van passed them. Then she took the manager by the arm and walked inside with her.
Lise saw the light of excitement still dancing in the manager’s dark eyes. Lise herself was too keyed up to think about sleep. So she said. “I have another bottle of wine in my room. Let’s say we have a little nightcap. Talk about crooks and the good old days.”
Death of a Snowbird
J. A. JANCE
Judith Ann Jance (b. 1944) was born in Watertown, South Dakota, and educated at the University of Arizona and Bryn Mawr. She now lives in Bellevue, Washington. Before taking up writing, she worked as a high school teacher, Indian school librarian, and insurance salesperson, her father’s profession. In an interview with Rylla Goldberg (Speaking of Murder, volume II [1999]), she credits her family background with her ability to promote her mystery novels effectively. “I started in sales early—homemade jewelry, Girl Scout cookies, newspaper subscriptions, and all-occasion greeting cards. In our family, selling was everybody’s business with my mother dishing out the “leads” about new people in town over the breakfast table. Once my first book was published, I took up where my mother left off.”
Jance’s two series feature Seattle police detective J. P. Beaumont, beginning with Until Proven Guilty (1985), and Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady, beginning with Desert Heat (1993). She has also written nonfiction for children on such topics as parental kidnapping, sexual molestation, and family alcoholism. She remarked to Contemporary Authors (volume 61, new revision series, 1998), “Writing has provided a means of rewriting my own history, both in terms of the children’s books and the murder thrillers. The children’s books confront difficult issues…The murder thrillers are escapist fare with no redeeming social value.” That last statement (though presumably facetious) invites a response: how could a story as entertaining and as unpredictable and as sensitive in its depiction of senior citizens as “Death of a Snowbird” lack redeeming social value?
Agnes Barkley did the dishes. She always did the dishes. After breakfast. After lunch. After dinner. For forty-six years she had done them. Maybe “always” was a slight exaggeration. Certainly there must have been a time or two when she had goofed off, when she had just rinsed them and stacked them in the sink to await the next meal; but mostly she kept the sink clear and the dishes dried and put away where they belonged. It was her job. Part of her job. Back home in Westmont, Illinois, the single kitchen window was so high overhead that Agnes couldn’t see out at all. Here, in Oscar’s RV, the sink was situated directly in front of an eye-level window. Agnes could stand there with her hands plunged deep in warm, sudsy dishwater and enjoy the view. While doing her chores she occasionally caught sight of hawks circling in a limitless blue sky. In the evening she reveled in the flaming sunsets, with their spectacular orange glows that seemed to set the whole world on fire. Even after years of coming back time and again, she wasn’t quite used to it. Every time Agnes looked out a January window, she couldn’t help being amazed. There before her, instead of Chicago’s gray, leaden cloud cover and bone-chilling cold, she found another world—the wide-open, brown desert landscape, topped by a vast expanse of sunny blue sky. Agnes couldn’t get over the clean, clear air. She delighted in the crisp, hard-edged shadows left on the ground by the desert sun, and she loved the colors. When some of her neighbors back home had wondered how she could stand to live in such a barren, ugly place three months out of the year, Agnes had tried in vain to explain the lovely contrast of newly leafed mesquite against a red, rockbound earth. Her friends had looked at her sympathetically, smiled, shaken their heads, and said she was crazy.
And in truth she was—crazy about the desert. Agnes loved the stark wild plants that persisted in growing despite a perpetual lack of moisture—the spiny, leggy ocotillos and the sturdy, low-growing mesquite; the majestic saguaro; the cholla with its glowing halo of dangerous thorns. She loved catching glimpses of desert wildlife—coyotes and jackrabbits and kangaroo rats. She even loved the desert floor itself—the smooth sands and rocky shales, the expanses of rugged reds and soothing, round-rocked grays, all of which, over the great visible distances, would fade to uniform blue.
At first she had been dreadfully homesick for Westmont, but now all that had changed. Agnes Barkley’s love affair with the desert was such that, had she been in charge, their snowbird routine would have been completely reversed. They would have spent nine to ten months out of the year in Arizona and only two or so back home in Illinois.
No one could have been more surprised by this turn of events than Agnes Barkley herself. When Oscar had first talked about retiring from the post office and becoming a snowbird—about buying an RV and, wintering in Arizona—Agnes had been dead set against it. She had thought she would hate the godforsaken place, and she had done her best to change Oscar’s mind. As if anyone could do that.
In the end, she had given in gracefully. As she had in every other aspect of her married existence, Agnes put the best face on it she could muster and went along for the ride, just as Oscar must have known she would. After forty-six years of marriage, there weren’t that many surprises left.
In the past she would have grudgingly tolerated whatever it was Oscar wanted and more or less pretended to like it. But when it came to Arizona, no pretense was necessary. Agnes adored the place—once they got out of Mesa, that is.
J. A. JANCE
Oscar couldn’t stand Mesa, either. He said there were too many old people there.
“What do you think you are?” Agnes had been tempted to ask him, although she never did, because the truth of the matter was, Agnes agreed with him—and for much the same reason. It bothered her to see all those senior citizens more or less locked up in the same place, year after year.
The park itself was nice enough, with a pool and all the appropriate amenities. Still, it made Agnes feel claustrophobic somehow, especially when, for two years running, their motor home was parked next to that of a divorced codger who snored so loudly that the racket came right through the walls into the Barkleys’ own bed-room—even with the RV’s air conditioner cranked up and running full blast.
So they set out to find someplace else to park their RV some-place a little off the beaten track, as Oscar said. That’s how they had ended up in Tombstone—The Town Too Tough to Die. Outside the Town Too Tough to Die was more like it.
The trailer park—that’s what they called it: the OK Trailer Park, Overnighters Welcome—was several miles out of town. The individual lots had been carved out of the desert by terracing up the northern flank of a steep hillside. Whoever had designed the place had done a good job of it. Each site was far enough below its neighbor that every RV or trailer had its own unobstructed view of the hillside on the opposite side of a rocky draw. The western horizon boasted the Huachuca Mountains. To the east were the Wheststones and beyond those the Chiricahuas.
The views of those distant purple mountain majesties were what Agnes Barkley liked most about the OK Trailer Park. The views and the distances and the clear, clean air. And the idea that she didn’t have to go to sleep listening to anyone snoring—anyone other
than Oscar, that is. She was used to him.
“Yoo-hoo, Aggie. Anybody home?” Gretchen Dixon tapped on the doorframe. She didn’t bother to wait for Agnes to answer
before shoving open the door and popping her head inside. “Ready for a little company?”
Agnes took one last careful swipe at the countertop before wringing out the dishrag and putting it away under the sink. “What are you up to, Gretchen?”
At seventy-nine, Gretchen Dixon was given to chartreuse tank tops and Day-Glo Bermuda shorts—a color combination that showed off her tanned hide to best advantage. She wore her hair in a lank pageboy that hadn’t changed—other than color—for forty years. It was one of fate’s great injustices that someone like Gretchen, who had spent years soaking ultraviolet rays into her leathery skin, should be walking around bareheaded and apparently healthy, while Dr. Forsythe, Aggie’s physician back home in Westmont, after burning off a spot of skin cancer, had forbidden Aggie to venture outside at all without wearing sunblock and a hat.
Agnes Barkley and Gretchen Dixon were friends, but there were several things about Gretchen that annoyed hell out of Agnes. The main one at this moment was the fact that despite the midday sun, Gretchen was bareheaded. Agnes loathed hats.
Gretchen lounged against the cupboard door and shook a cigarette out of a pack she always kept handy in some pocket or other, “So where’s that worthless husband of yours?” she asked.
Not that Gretchen was really all that interested in knowing Oscar’s whereabouts. She didn’t like Oscar much, and the feeling was mutual. Rather than being worried about their mutual antipathy, Agnes found it oddly comforting. In fact, it was probably a very good idea to have friends your husband didn’t exactly approve of. Years earlier, there had been one or two of Aggie’s friends that Oscar had been crazy about. Too much so, in fact—with almost disastrous results for all concerned.
“Tramping around looking for arrowheads as per usual,” Aggie said. “Out along the San Pedro, I think. He and Jim Rathbone went off together right after lunch. They’ll be back in time for supper.”
J. A. JANCE
“That figures,” Gretchen said disdainfully, rolling her eyes and blowing a plume of smoke high in the air as she slipped into the bench by the table.
“Aggie,” she said, “do you realize you’re the only woman around here who still cooks three square meals a day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”
“Why not?” Agnes objected. “I like to cook.”
Gretchen shook her head. “You don’t understand, Aggie. It gives all the rest of us a bad name. You maybe ought to let Oscar know that he’s not the only one who’s retired. It wouldn’t kill the man to take you into town once in a while. He could buy you a nice dinner at the Wagon Wheel or at one of those newer places over on Allen Street.”
“Oscar doesn’t like to eat anybody else’s cooking but mine,” Aggie said.
Gretchen was not impressed. “He likes your cooking because he’s cheap. Oscar’s so tight his farts squeak.”
Agnes Barkley laughed out loud. Gretchen Dixon was the most outrageous friend she had ever had. Agnes liked to listen to Gretchen just to hear what words would pop out of her mouth next. Even so, Agnes couldn’t let Gretchen’s attack on Oscar go unchallenged. After all, he was her husband.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on him,” she chided. “You’d like him if you ever spent any time with him.”
“How can I spend time with the man?” Gretchen returned sarcastically. “Whenever I’m around him, all he does is grouse about how it isn’t ladylike for women to smoke.”
“Oscar was raised a Southern Baptist,” Agnes countered.
“Oscar Barkley was raised under a rock.”
Agnes changed the subject. “Would you like some lemonade? A cup of coffee?”
“Aggie Barkley, I’m not your husband. I didn’t come over here to have you wait on me hand and foot the way you do him. I came to ask you a question. The senior citizens in town have chartered a bus to go up to Phoenix to the Heard Museum day
after tomorrow. Me and Dolly Ann Parker and Lola Carlson are
going to go. We were wondering if you’d like to come along.”
“You mean Oscar and me?”
“No, I mean you, silly. Aggie Barkley by her own little lone-some. It’s an overnight. We’ll be staying someplace inexpensive, especially if we all four bunk in a single room. So you see, there wouldn’t be any place for Oscar to sleep. Besides, it’ll be fun. Just us girls. Think about it. It’ll be like an old-fashioned slumber party. Remember those?”
Agnes was already shaking her head. “Oscar would never let me go. Never in a million years.”
“Let?” Gretchen yelped, as though the very word wounded her. “Do you mean to tell me that at your age you have to ask that man for permission to be away from home overnight?”
“Not really. It’s just that…”
“Say you’ll go, then. The bus is filling up fast, and Dolly Ann needs to call in our reservation by five this afternoon.”
“Where did you say it’s going?”
Gretchen grinned triumphantly and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray Agnes had unobtrusively slipped in front of her. “The Heard Museum. In Phoenix. It’s supposed to be full of all kinds of Indian stuff. Artifacts and baskets and all like that. I’m not that wild about Indians myself—I can take them or leave them—but the trip should be fun.”
Agnes thought about it for a minute. She didn’t want Gretchen to think she was a complete stick-in-the-mud. “If it’s only overnight, I suppose I could go.”
“That’s my girl,” Gretchen said. “I’ll go right home and call Dolly Ann.” She stood up and started briskly toward the door, then paused and turned back to Agnes. “By the way, have you ever played strip poker?”
“Me?” Agnes Barkley croaked. “Strip poker? Never!”
“Hold your breath, honey, because you’re going to learn. The trick is to start out wearing plenty of clothes to begin with, so if you lose some it doesn’t matter.”
J. A. JANCE
With that Gretchen Dixon was out the door, her flip-flops slapping noisily on the loose gravel as she headed down the hill toward her own mobile, parked two doors away. Agnes sat at the table, stunned. They would be playing strip poker? What on earth had she let herself in for?
Agnes wasn’t so sure she had said yes outright, but she certainly had implied that she would go. She could have jumped up right then, swung the door open, and called out to Gretchen that she’d changed her mind, but she didn’t. Instead she just sat there like a lump until she heard Gretchen’s screen door slam shut behind her.
In the silence that followed, Agnes wondered what Oscar would say. It wasn’t as though she had never left him alone. For years, she had spent one weekend in May—three whole days—at a Women’s Bible Study retreat held each year at the YMCA camp at Lake Zurich, north of Buffalo Grove. And always, before she left, she had cooked and frozen and labeled enough food to last two weeks rather than three days. All Oscar and the girls ever had to do was thaw it out and heat it up.
Well, a Bible study retreat at a YMCA camp and four old ladies sitting around playing strip poker in a cheap hotel room weren’t exactly the same thing, but Oscar didn’t need to know about the poker part of it. Actually, the idea of Agnes going off someplace with Gretchen Dixon and her pals might be enough to set Oscar off all by itself.
And what if it did? Agnes Barkley asked herself, with a sudden jolt of self-determination. Sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander, right? After all, she never balked at the idea of him going off and spending hours on end wandering all over the desert with Jimmy Rathbone, that windy old crony of his, did she? So if Oscar Barkley didn’t like the idea of her going to Phoenix with Gretchen, he could just as well lump it.
That was what Agnes thought at two o’clock in the afternoon, but by evening she had softened up some. Not that she’d changed her mind. She was still determined to go, but she’d fi
gured out a way to ease it past Oscar.
As always her first line of attack was food. She made his favorite dinner—Italian meat loaf with baked potatoes and frozen French-cut green beans; a tossed salad with her own homemade Thousand Island dressing; and a lemon meringue pie for dessert. Agnes never failed to be amazed by the amount of food she could coax out of that little galley-sized kitchen with its tiny oven and stove. All it took was a little talent for both cooking and timing.
Dinner was ready at six, but Oscar wasn’t home. He still wasn’t there at six thirty or seven o’clock, either. Finally, at seven fifteen, with the meat loaf tough and dry in the cooling oven and with the baked potatoes shrivelled to death in their wrinkled, crusty skins, Agnes heard Oscar’s Honda crunch to a stop outside the RV. By then, Agnes had pushed the plates and silverware aside and was playing a game of solitaire on the kitchen-nook table.
When Oscar stepped in through the door, Agnes didn’t even glance up at him. “Sorry I’m so late, Aggie,” he said, pausing long enough to hang his jacket and John Deere cap in the closet. “I guess we just got a little carried away with what we were doing.”
“I just guess you did,” she returned coolly.
With an apprehensive glance in her direction, Oscar hurried to the kitchen sink, rolled up his sleeves, and began washing his hands. “It smells good,” he said.
“It probably was once,” she replied. “I expect it’ll be a little past its’prime by the time I get it on the table.”
“Sorry,” he muttered again.
Deliberately, one line of cards at a time, she folded the solitaire hand away and then moved the dishes and silverware back to their respective places.