Free The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) by J. A. Jance Page B

about once burned, twice shy? I had fallen head over heels once before, and I was determined that if Joanna was the one for me, I was going to take things slow and easy. I could see that she liked me—at least I thought she did—but that was about as far as things went before she finished up her academy training and went back home to Bisbee.
    That’s when my life took another unexpected turn. In the middle of December a guy named Clark Ashton showed up at the Roundhouse with an offer to buy me out. He had bought up all of Jeffrey Jones’s properties as well as his permits and plans, and he was eager to get his new hotel building under way as soon as possible. We dickered back and forth for a time, but not that much, not that hard, and not that long, because Ashton wanted to buy, and by then I wanted to sell.
    Bisbee’s a little over two hundred miles to the southeast from Peoria. When you’re head over heels in love, two hundred miles is entirely too much distance.
    It took time for me to convince Joanna Brady that I was the new man in her life. She wasn’t an easy sell. And I didn’t tell her about someone trying to frame me for murder until much later in our relationship because I didn’t want to spook her. It wasn’t, in fact, until after Charlie called to let me know that Pop O’Malley had passed away in his sleep that I finally got up my nerve and told her the whole story once and for all.
    “Tim O’Malley and his friends did all that?” she marveled once I had finished.
    I nodded.
    “And now I can’t even meet the man long enough tell him thank-you?”
    “No, I’m afraid you can’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry.”
    “I’m sorry, too,” she told me, wiping a tear from her eye. “He and your Grandma Hudson must have been quite a pair.”
    Thinking of the two of them together made me smile. “You’re right,” I said. “They certainly were.”

 
    Next from J. A. Jance
    An old woman, a hoarder, is dying of emphysema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While cleaning out her house, her daughter, Liza Machett, discovers a fortune in hundred dollar bills hidden in the stacks of books and magazines. Trying to discover the provenance of that money will take Liza on a journey all the way to Joanna Brady’s Cochise County. In the meantime, Joanna has problems of her own when a family friend is found dead in a limestone cavern near Bisbee. But are these seemingly unrelated cases more closely connected than they appear?
    Here is a sneak preview of
    Remains of Innocence
    Coming soon
    from William Morrow
    An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

 
    Prologue
    L IZA M ACHETT’S HEART was filled with equal parts dread and fury as she pulled her beater Nissan into the rutted driveway of her mother’s place, stopped, and then stepped out to stare at the weedy wasteland surrounding the crumbling farmhouse. In the eleven years since Liza had left home, the place that had once been regarded as messy or junky had become a scene of utter desolation.
    Spring had come early to western Massachusetts and to the small plot of land outside Great Barrington that had been in her father’s family for generations. Liza had heard that in a much earlier time, while her great-grandparents had lived there, both the house and the yard had been immaculate. People said Great-Grandma Machett herself had tended the garden full of prize winning roses that had surrounded the front porch. Shunning help from anyone, she had donned an old-fashioned homemade bonnet and spent hours toiling in the yard, mowing the grass with a push-powered mower.
    Great-Grandma Machett had been gone for decades now, and so was all trace of her hard work and industry. Thickets of brambles and weeds had overrun the grass and choked out the roses. Long ago a swing had graced the front porch. Swinging on that with her much older brother, Guy, was one of Liza’s few happy childhood memories. The swing was gone. All that remained of it were two rusty