Judgment Call. J. A. Jance

I think I would have told my mother to piss off,” Deb Howell muttered.

      Joanna nodded. “No one would have blamed you, either.”

      “I always thought people who lived on the Vista had perfect lives,” Deb added thoughtfully. “This sounds anything but perfect.”

      That had been Joanna’s perception, too. She’d had no idea of the steep price that someone like Abby, one of the seemingly privileged few, might have paid living as a virtual prisoner, first as a victim of her parents’ demanding expectations and later as the target of their unrelenting disapproval. It pained Joanna to think that all the time she and the other kids had secretly made fun of Abby Holder’s perpetually grim outlook on the world, the poor woman had been coming to work, day after day and year after year, with a permanently broken heart, mourning the loss of both the love of her life and the love of her parents. Generations of schoolkids had mistaken that sadness for anger.

      By the time Abby returned from the kitchen, Joanna Brady regarded her with a whole new respect.

      She came into the living room carrying a tray laden with tea makings, including a plate of carefully trimmed, triangular cucumber sandwiches. She set the tray down on the coffee table in front of Joanna and Deb.

      “If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” she said, “I’ll take something in to my mother.”

      She dosed a cup of tea with cream and sugar, took it and a plate holding three sandwiches with her, and went off in the same direction in which her mother had departed. She returned a few moments later. If she’d had to endure another tirade from her mother in the meantime, it didn’t show on her face or in her actions. She sat down and served tea in a fashion that not even her highly critical mother could have faulted.

      “I don’t believe I ever said a proper thank-you to your father, Sheriff Brady,” Abby said quietly as she passed Joanna a delicate bone china cup and saucer. The cup was filled to the brim with fragrant tea. It took real concentration on Joanna’s part to keep from slopping some of it into the saucer at this unexpected turn in the conversation.

      “Thanked him for what?” Joanna asked.

      “For digging Fred out of the stope the day he died,” Abby answered. “Your father was one of the crew of miners who pulled him out of the muck and tried to revive him. Of all those guys, your father was the only one who had balls enough to come to Fred’s funeral. Everyone else was so afraid of what my father might do that they didn’t dare show up.

      “As a consequence, it was a very small funeral,” Abby continued. “Your mother came, too, by the way, but it was your father whose job was on the line. Your parents were a little older than I was, but back then we were all relatively young. I was barely out of high school and already a widow. I didn’t really understand the risk your father ran by going against my father’s wishes, and I never made a point of telling your father how much it meant to me. I’m thanking you because I never thanked him.”

      It wasn’t the first time in Joanna Brady’s years in law enforcement that she had heard stories about her late father, D. H. Lathrop, being a stand-up kind of guy. She could count on one hand, however, the number of times her mother, Eleanor, had been mentioned in that regard. Now she wondered if being at odds with the superintendent of the local mining branch, the town’s major employer, might have had something to do with her father’s leaving the mines to go into law enforcement. Everyone had always maintained that D. H. had stopped working underground because he had wanted to.

      Was that really true? Joanna wondered now. Or was he forced out?