Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(47)
Walking past that, she paused in the doorway long enough to check out the combination dining room/living room. When she left for work that morning, the two rooms had been awash in partially filled boxes that had once been chock-full of Christmas decorations. All those decorations were out on display now. Holiday trappings covered every possible flat surface, while the boxes themselves had vanished from view.
“Anybody home?” Joanna called.
“Family room,” Butch responded. “We’re working on the train, and your dinner’s in the microwave.” It wasn’t exactly an ecstatic welcome-home, and it seemed like a good idea for her to make herself scarce. She went over to the microwave, punched the reheat button, and waited. She was in the doghouse, and deservedly so, and the fact that Butch preferred that she eat her solitary dinner rather than help out in the family room wasn’t a good sign.
When Joanna first met Butch, she’d been attending the Arizona Police Academy in Peoria. When it came to meals, Butch’s diner, the Roundhouse Bar and Grill just up the street, had been the restaurant of choice. The food was good, but the real attraction had been his model trains.
Butch Dixon was a railroad buff. All the decor on the walls inside the restaurant had a railroad connection, but nothing could top the collection of model trains that constantly circled the perimeter of the dining room. They traveled on several different tracks laid on wooden shelving that had been installed a foot below the room’s dropped ceiling. Because there were different tracks, the trains could run in opposite directions without ever crashing into each other. Butch and his model-railroading friends had created a series of miniature dioramas along the tracks that depicted towns, cities, parks, farms, and ranches. There were trees in the forests, saguaros in the deserts, windmills on the ranches, and barns and livestock on the farms.
When Joanna first set foot in the Roundhouse, she loved the food but thought the train-based decor was a bit over the top. She was still a fairly new widow at the time and certainly hadn’t been looking for any kind of romantic connection. When she met Butch Dixon, the Roundhouse’s owner and head cook, she found him intriguing, but that was it. She wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend at all, to say nothing of a long-distance one. Butch’s life was based in Peoria and in his restaurant, while Joanna’s was located four hours away in Cochise County. In her book that was that.
Except it wasn’t. A few months later, the city of Peoria had come along and offered Butch a buyout that he couldn’t refuse. He took the money and ran, intent on two very different pursuits. One was to follow his lifelong dream of becoming a writer. The other was to win over a petite and somewhat contrary red-haired woman who’d walked into the Roundhouse and turned his life on end.
Once they married, and when it came time to build their new house, Butch had insisted that his model trains had to come along for the ride. The arrangement in the family room at High Lonesome Ranch was similar to the one formerly in the restaurant, but on a much smaller scale. Here again the tracks rested on shelving just below ceiling level, but this was a simpler display with fewer tracks and, as a consequence, far fewer trains.
These days Butch, with Denny’s increasingly capable assistance, switched out the display from time to time, retiring some trains, bringing out others, and changing the scenery to match the season.
After eating her solitary leftovers and cleaning up the resulting mess in the kitchen, Joanna ventured warily into the room where Butch and Denny were creating a display Butch liked to call “Trains in Winter,” complete with tiny lit Christmas trees lining the tracks. A chaos of boxes, some empty and some not, covered the floor. Butch, perched on a ladder, stood above the fray while Denny handed things up to him. Sage, confined to a playpen, seemed happy to remain on the periphery of all the action.
“Hey, Mom,” Denny said, catching sight of her. “What do you think?”
The wonderful thing about Denny is that he didn’t mind when she missed dinner. Chances are, he hadn’t even noticed.
“It’s amazing!” Joanna said without exaggeration, because it was amazing. No doubt it would be even more so once Butch’s trains started buzzing around on their shelf-laid tracks.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Check out all the Christmas trees,” Butch said, “and make sure they light up before Denny hands them to me.”
For the next hour and a half, they worked on the train display. By the time trains started moving around the decorated tracks, Butch seemed a little less grumpy. Because it was a school night, they had to pause then and get the kids to bed. Once that happened, they returned to the family room to close up and put away boxes. That was when the phone rang with Jenny’s face showing in caller ID.
“Hey,” Joanna said when she answered. “I’ll put you on speaker. Dad and I are in the family room cleaning up the debris field left behind by this year’s Trains in Winter project.”
“You’re already working on that?” Jenny sounded dismayed. “The trains are usually the last thing we work on.”
“And they were this time, too,” Joanna agreed. “That’s because everything else is done. We put up the tree yesterday. The living room and dining room are both decorated to the hilt, and all boxes from there are put away. Believe me, we’re on a roll around here.”
“But will there be anything left for me to do when I get there?” Jenny asked. Clearly she didn’t like feeling as though she’d been excluded from the process, and that made sense, since in previous years she’d been in charge of most of the Christmas decorating.