Paradise Lost Read Online Free Page A

departing leaders. After recruiting one of the mothers to be assistant leader, she had succeeded in infusing new life into Jenny’s floundering Girl Scout troop.
    “According to what Eva Lou said, the camp-out is still on. They dust won’t be cooking outdoors, and they won’t be staying in regular campgrounds, either. Faye has managed to borrow somebody’s 1W. They’ll camp out on private land over near Apache Pass. The girls will be doing their cooking in the motor home, and they’ll have indoor bathroom facilities to boot. All they’ll be missing is the joy of eating food that’s been incinerated over open coals. No s’mores, I guess,” he added.
    “Oh,” Joanna said. “‘That’s a relief then.”
    And Eva Lou said something else,” Butch added. “She said to tell you she managed to find Jenny’s sit-upon. What the hell is a sit-upon?”
    “Jenny will kill me,” Joanna said at once. “The girls made them years ago when they were still in Brownies. Jenny wanted me to throw hers away the minute she brought it home, but I insisted on keeping it. Because it was up on the top shelf of Jenny’s closet, it didn’t get wrecked along with everything else when Reba Singleton did her job on the house.”
    Days before Joanna and Butch’s wedding, a distraught woman who blamed Joanna for her father’s death had broken into the house on High Lonesome Ranch, leaving a trail of vandalism and destruction in her wake. Although Reba had wrecked everything she could lay hands on in the rest of the house, she had left Jenny’s bedroom entirely untouched—including, as it turned out, Jenny’s much despised sit-upon.
    “You still haven’t told me what a sit-upon is,” Butch grumbled.
    “The girls made them—as part of an arts-and-crafts project—by sewing together two twelve-by-twelve-inch squares of vinyl. Jenny’s happens to be fire-engine red, but there were several other colors as well. The girls used white yarn to whipstitch the two pieces of vinyl together. Once three sides were sewn together, the square was stuffed with cotton batting. Then they closed the square by stitching tap the last side. And, voila! The next time the girls go out into the woods, they have a sit-upon to sit upon.”
    “I see,” Butch said. “So what’s the matter with Jenny’s? Why did she want you to get rid of hers?”
    “You know Jenny, how impatient she is—always in a rush. She did tine with the stitches on the first side. They’re really even and neat. On the second side the stitches get a little longer and a little more ragged. By the third side it’s even worse. On the last side, there were barely enough stitches to hold the batting inside.”
    “In other words, it’s pug-ugly.”
    “Right. That’s why she wanted me to throw it away. But I maintain that if I’m going to keep mementos for her, I should keep both good stuff and bad. It’s what Eleanor did for Inc. I knew Faye Lambert had put sit-upons on the list of required equipment for the camp-out. Knowing Jenny’s feelings on the matter, I had planned to just ignore it, but Eva Lou isn’t the kind to ignore some-thing if it happens to be on an official list of required equipment.”
    “That’s right,” Butch agreed with a laugh. “Eva Lou Brady’s not the ignoring type.”
    He wrapped an arm around Joanna’s shoulder and pulled her five-foot-four frame close to him. “The poker game was obviously an unqualified success. How did the rest of your day go?”
    Joanna sighed. “I spent the whole afternoon in a terminally boring meeting run by a nerdy little guy who’s never been in law enforcement in his life. His job—as an overpaid ‘outside’ consultant from someplace back East—Massachusetts, I think—is to get us to sign up our departments for what his company has to offer.”
    “Which is?”
    “They do what he calls ‘team building’ workshops. For some exorbitant amount of money, everyone in the department is cycled through a