“Was I premature?” Jennifer asked suddenly.

The jolting question came from clear out in left field. A slice of peach slid down sideways and caught momentarily in Joanna’s throat. She coughed desperately to dislodge it.

“Premature?” Joanna choked weakly when she was finally able to speak.

Joanna Brady had always known that eventually she’d have to face up to the discrepancy between the timing of her wedding anniversary and Jenny’s birthday six short months later. But she had expected the question to come much later, when Jennifer was thirteen or fourteen. Not now when she was nine, not when Joanna hadn’t had time to prepare a suitable answer.

“What makes you ask that?” she asked, stalling for time.

“Well,” Jennifer said thoughtfully. “Me and Monica were talking about babies…”

“Monica and I,” Joanna corrected, pulling herself together.

Jennifer scowled. “Monica and I,” she repeated. “You know, because of Monica’s new baby sister. She says babies always take nine months to get born unless they’re born early because they’re premature. Today’s your tenth anniversary, right? And I turned nine in April, so I was just wondering if I was premature.”

“Not exactly,” Joanna hedged, feeling her cheeks redden.

“What does that mean?”

“You were right on schedule. The wedding was late.”

“How come?”

“Because.”

There was no way Joanna could explain to her daughter right then how a dashingly handsome Andrew Roy Brady, three years older and considerably wiser, had returned from his two-year stint in the army on that fateful Fourth of July weekend ten years earlier. Parked down by the rifle range and with the help of a cheap bottle of Annie’s Green Spring wine they had seduced each other in the back seat of her father’s old Ford Fairlane while Bisbee’s annual fireworks display lit up the sky overhead. Joanna Lathrop had simultaneously stopped being a virgin and started being pregnant.

Now, faced with her daughter’s uncomfortable question, a convenient television commercial rescued her. Eleanor Lathrop limped into the kitchen and helped herself to a dish of peaches. “Isn’t that man here yet?”

“Not so far,” Joanna answered.

The older woman leveled a meaningful stare at her granddaughter. “Shouldn’t you finish up and go to bed pretty soon?” she asked. “Don’t you have school in the morning?”

The child returned the look with a level stare of her own. “It’s too early,” Jenny returned. “I’m in the third grade now, Grandma. I don’t have to go to bed until nine o’clock. Besides, I want to stay up and kiss Daddy goodnight.”

Eleanor Lathrop shook her head disparagingly. “That’s silly,” she sniffed. “It could be all hours before he gets here. Besides, he’s probably off politicking somewhere and has forgotten completely what night this is.”

“He didn’t forget,” Joanna asserted firmly. “Something must have come up at the department, some emergency. He just hasn’t had a chance to call.”

“Men never do. He’s already almost two hours late, you’d think he’d have the common decency…^”

Not waiting for her mother to finish the sentence, Joanna hurried to the kitchen wall phone and dialed the Cochise County Sheriff’s department. The local telephone exchange was smallenough that it was only necessary to dial the last five digits of the telephone number. The clerk who answered said that Andy was out. Unable to provide any further information about how long ago he had left or where he might be, the clerk offered to put Joanna through to Chief Deputy Richard Voland who, despite the lateness of the hour, was still in his office.

“Hi, Dick. It’s Joanna Brady. What’s going on that everybody’s still at work?”

“I don’t know about anybody else,” Dick Voland replied, “but I’m catching up on a mountain of paper. Ruth and the kids are bowling tonight, so I’m in no hurry to get home.”

“Have you seen Andy?”

“Andy? Not for a couple of hours. He lit out of here right around five o’clock. I thought from what he said that he was pretty much going straight home. Isn’t he there?”

Joanna felt a tight clutch of fear in her stomach, a cop’s wife’s fear. “No. Did he say he was going somewhere else before he came home?”

Dick Voland didn’t answer immediately, and Joanna heard the momentary hesitation in his voice. “One or two of the day shift guys are still out in the other room. Let me check with them. Hang on. Someone will be right back to you.”

Half a minute later, someone else came on the line. “Joanna, what’s up?”

She was relieved to recognize the voice of Ken Galloway, one of Andy’s best friends in the department.

“Andy’s late getting home, and we were supposed to go out tonight. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

“Christ!” Ken exclaimed. “It’s almost eight o’clock and he’s not there yet? I thought he was on his way home hours ago. He mentioned a couple of errands, but nothing that should have taken this long. Maybe he had car trouble.”

The knot in Joanna’s stomach tightened into a fist. Jennifer’s suggestion of car trouble had been annoying. Coming from Ken Galloway, the supposedly comforting words sounded patronizing. She bridled. “If it were car trouble, don’t you think we’d have heard from him on the radio by now?”

“Seems like it. Where are you?”

“At home.”

“I’ll do some checking from this end and give you a call back.”

Joanna put down the phone. For a moment she stood there indecisively, then she spun around and marched to the back door where she pulled a worn pair of suede work boots on over her pantyhose, then she took Andy’s old Levi’s jacket down from its peg beside the back door. Sensing an outing, Sadie eagerly nosed her way to the door and waited for Joanna to open it.

“Where are you going?” Eleanor demanded.

“To look for him,” Joanna answered simply. “Something’s wrong. I know it. He may be hurt.”

“But why should you go looking? The department will handle that. That’s what we pay them for,” Eleanor Lathrop pointed out. “That’s what your father always said.”

Invoking the name and memory of Sheriff D. H. Lathrop, Joanna’s father who had been dead now for some fifteen years, had been Eleanor’s foolproof way of winning almost every intervening argument with her daughter. This time it didn’t work. Joanna didn’t knuckle under.

“Mother,” Joanna answered curtly. “Andy’s my husband, and I’ll go looking for him if I want to.”

Jenny slipped out of the breakfast nook and hurried to the door. “I’ll come too.”

“No. You stay here with Grandma.”

With that, Joanna turned on her heel and sprinted out the door, taking the dog with her. She had gone only a few steps when the single floodlight in the yard came on. Joanna looked back and waved to Jenny who was standing beside the yard light switch with her face pressed longingly against the fine screen mesh.

“I’ll be right back,” Joanna called. “You wait here.”

Sadie raced ahead toward the detached garage, knowing from the noisy jangle of the key ring in Joanna’s hand that she would be taking the car. While the dog danced in happy circles, Joanna backed her worn Eagle station wagon out of the garage. Moments later, with the dog once more in the lead, they started down the rutted dirt road that was little more than a pale yellow ribbon winding through a forest of mesquite.

In the still but chilly desert night, moonlit leaves cast delicate lacy shadows on the ground. Sadie gamboled along ahead of the car for only a few yards before she raced off into the underbrush, nose to ground. Within moments the dog set up a noisy racket-the characteristic booming-that meant she had scared up some desert quarry. It was probably the same old wiry, neighboring jack rabbit the dog always chased. In stylized ritual, the dog pursued the rabbit hour after hour, day after day, without either one of them ever fully putting their hearts into the contest.