by J. A. Jance
“.. he cries anyway, and I can’t make him stop. That’s all,” Cecelia finished saying on-screen while the child on the couch sobbed quietly, her whole body quaking under the gentle pressure of Joanna’s protective arm.
“They wanted me to say something nice about my mom,” Ceci said, her voice choking. “But when I got there, all I could think about was Pepe.”
“You did fine,” Joanna said.
“Nana Duffy says it’s my daddy’s fault, that he did it, but I don’t think so. Do you?” Ceci looked questioningly up at Joanna through tear-dewed eyelashes. Joanna wanted to comfort the grieving child, but what could she tell her?
Torn between what she knew and what could say, “I don’t know” was Joanna’s only possible answer.
“And now here’s my mom,” Jenny said.
The camera on Joanna and Leann making their way through the crowd.
“ .. police officers in attendance,” Jill January was saying “Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady.”
“Cecelia Grijalva is a friend of my daughter’s . . .” Joanna heard herself saying when suddenly Ceci scrambled out from under her arm.
“I know him, too,” she said, pointing to a spot on the screen where a man’s face had momentarily materialized directly over Leann’s shoulder. He was leading a crowd of people filing down the aisle toward the exit.
When first Joanna and then Leann stopped, so did he, but not soon enough. He blundered into Leann, bumping her from behind with such force that he almost knocked her down.
The camera was focused on Joanna in the foreground. Her words were the ones being spoken on tape. Still, the jostling in the crowd behind her was visible as well. As she watched the televised Leann turn around to see what had hit her, Joanna remembered Leann telling her about the incident on their way back to the car after the vigil.
And the glare Leann had mentioned—the one she had said might have been enough to spark a drive-by shooting—was there, captured in the glow of the television lights. Even thirdhand—filtered through camera, videotape, and TV screen—the man’s ugly, accusing stare was nothing short of chilling. He and Leann stood eye to eye for only a moment. Then he glanced up and into the camera as though seeing it for the first time. A fraction of a second later, he ducked to one side behind Leann and disappeared into the crowd.
“You know him?” Joanna asked.
Ceci nodded.
“Who is he?”
Ceci shrugged. “One of my mom’s friends.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me her friends’ names.”
“Jenny,” Joanna said, “would you please run the tape back to that spot and stop it there? I want to look at that sequence again.”
Jenny’s agile fingers darted knowledgeably over the remote control. Moments later, the man’s face reappeared. With his features frozen in place on the television screen, the glower on his face was even more ominous than it had seemed in passing.
“Did you know he was there that night?” Joanna asked.
Ceci shook her head. “No. I didn’t see him until just now.”
“Were there other people there that you knew?”
“Some,” Ceci answered. “There were two teachers from my old school, Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Sandoval. And a man named Mr. Gray from the place where Mom used to work, but he talked to Grandpa, not to me.”
“Didn’t this friend of your mother’s come talk to you?” Joanna asked. “Or to your grandparents?”
Ceci shook her head. “If he did, I didn’t see him.”
“Okay, Jenny. Let it play again.”
As Cecelia’s words played back one more time, Joanna closed her eyes momentarily, remembering the vigil, recalling how people had poured up onto the stage after the speeches, how they had gathered in clumps around the various speakers, offering condolences and words of support. Everyone there had come to the vigil with some cause to be angry, but it was only on the face of that one man that the anger had registered full force. Still, if he had felt that strongly about what had happened to Serena, why hadn’t he come forward to visit with the dead woman’s family?
“Did he come to your house while your mother was alive?”
“A couple of times.”
“What kind of car did he drive?”
“Not a car. A truck. A green truck with a camper on it. He brought us an old chair once. He said someone in Sun City was throwing it away because nobody bought it at a garage sale. He said he knew we needed furniture. And sometimes he’d help my mom bring the clothes home from the laundry.”
The phone rang just then, and Jenny pounced on it. “It’s Grandma,” she mouthed silently to Joanna, holding her hand over the mouthpiece as she handed the receiver over to her mother.
“Well,” Eleanor Lathrop said huffily to Joanna, “are you coming down to lunch or not? We’re already down in the coffee shop. Bob’s plane is at two, so he doesn’t have all day. Surely you aren’t going to stand us up two days in a row, are you?”
“Sorry, Mother,” Joanna said. “We were watching something on the VCR. The girls and I will be right there.” Joanna put down the phone. “Turn it off, Jenny. We’ll have to finish this later. Come on.”
Jenny switched off both the TV and VCR. “Have you ever met Grandma Lathrop?” Jenny asked Ceci as they started down the hallway.
“I don’t think so,” Ceci answered.
“She’s a little weird,” Jenny warned. “She sounds mad sometimes, even when she isn’t.”
“Nana Duffy’s like that, too,” Ceci said.
Walking behind them, Joanna realized that having a thorny grandmother was something else the little girls had in common.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Halfway across the Hohokam’s coffee shop, Joanna could hear Eleanor. Already in fine form and haranguing as usual, she was reeling off one of her unending litanies to Bob Brundage, who sat, head politely inclined in her direction, providing an attentive and apparently sympathetic audience.
“From the time that man was elected sheriff,” Eleanor was saying, “I don’t believe we ever again ate on time, not as a family. He was perpetually late. It was always something. I kept roasts warm in the oven until they turned to stone. And now that Joanna’s sheriff, it’s happening all over.”
Hearing Eleanor’s familiar whine of complaint, Joanna found herself wondering what had happened to her mother. What had divested her of what must have been freethinking teenage rebelliousness and turned her into an unbending prig? What had happened to that youthful, romantic love between her parents—the forbidden Romeo-and-Juliet affair her long-lost brother had found so captivating? By the time Joanna had any recollection of D. H. and Eleanor Lathrop, they had settled into a state of constant warfare, perpetually wrangling over everything and nothing.
As Joanna and the two girls crossed the room, Bob Brundage stood up to greet them in a gentlemanly fashion. To Joanna’s surprise, however, when he came around the table to hold her chair for her, he winked, but only after making sure the gesture was safely concealed from Eleanor’s view.
“And you must be Cecelia,” he said gravely, helping Ceci into her chair as well. “Jenny was telling me about you last night at dinner. I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”
“Thank you,” Ceci murmured.
“Marliss Shackleford wants you to call her,” Eleanor said sourly to Joanna, sidestepping Bob’s polite attention to social niceties. “She wants to talk to you. Something about a picture.”
“Oh, no,” Joanna said. “I forgot all about that.”
“All about what?”
“She asked me for a picture—an eleven-by-fourteen glossy of me. She asked for it just before I left town. She’s on the facilities committee at the Women’s Club. They need the picture to frame and put up in the department. It’s supposed to go in that glass display case at the far end of the lobby along with pictures of all my predecessors.”
“But, Mom,�
�� Jenny objected, “you don’t have a picture like that. All those other guys are standing there wearing their cowboy hats and their guns. And they all look sort of . . . well, mean, even Grandpa Lathrop.”
Eleanor shook her head disparagingly. Jenny’s observant objection might not have met with Eleanor Lathrop’s approval, but to Joanna’s way thinking, it was on the money. The display in question, located at the back of the department’s public lobby, featured a rogues’ gallery of all the previous sheriffs of Cochise County, who did all happen to be guys.
The photos in question were primarily of the formally posed variety. In most the subject wore western attire complimented by obligatory Stetsons. All of them wore guns, while only one was pictured with his horse. Most of them frowned into the camera, their grim faces looking for all the world as though they were battling terrible cases of indigestion.
Ignoring Eleanor’s disapproval, Joanna couldn’t resist smiling at Jenny. “The mean look shouldn’t be any trouble. I can handle that,” Joanna said. “And I’ve already got a gun. My big problem is finding a suitable horse and a hat.”
“You’re not taking this seriously enough, Joanna,” Eleanor scolded. “You’re an important public official now. Your picture ought to be properly displayed right along with all the others. That doesn’t mean it has to be exactly like all the others. Maybe you could use the same picture that was on your campaign literature. That one’s very dignified and also very ladylike. If I were you, I’d give Marliss one of those. And don’t let it slide, either. People appreciate it when public servants handle those kinds of details promptly.”
With Bob Brundage looking on, Joanna couldn’t help smarting under Eleanor’s semipublic rebuke. ‘Marliss only asked me about it in church this last Sunday, Mother,” Joanna replied. “I wasn’t exactly in a position where I could haul a picture out of my purse and hand it over on the spot. And I’ve been a little busy ever since then. Besides, I don’t know why there’s such a rush. They don’t make the presentation until the annual Women’s Club luncheon at the end of January.”
“That’s not the point,” Eleanor said. “Marliss still needs to talk to you about it, and probably about everything else as well.”
“What everything else?” Joanna asked. “The food at the jail?”
“Hardly,” Eleanor sniffed. “Obviously, you haven’t read today’s paper. Your name’s splashed all over it as usual. It makes you sound like—”
“Like what?” Joanna asked.
Eleanor frowned. “Never mind,” she said.
A folded newspaper lay beside Eleanor’s place mat. Jenny reached for it.
“That’s great. First Mom’s on TV, and now she’s in the paper,” Jenny gloated. “Can I read it? Please?”
Eleanor covered the paper with her hand, adroitly keeping Jenny from touching it. “Certainly not. You shouldn’t be exposed to this kind of thing. It’s all about that Jessup woman. It’s bad enough for your mother to be mixed up in all this murder business, but then for them to publish things about people’s personal bad habits right there in a family newspaper.... “
“Oh,” Jenny said. “Is that why you don’t want me to read it? Because it talks about lesbians? I ready knew about that from going to see Mom’s friend at the hospital yesterday. Her brother called a dyke, so I sort of figured it out.”
“Jenny!” Eleanor exclaimed, her face going pale. “What language!”
“Well, that’s what he said, didn’t he, Mom?” Joanna returned defiantly.
“So you know about lesbians then, do you, Jenny?” Bob Brundage asked, gently nudging himself into what had been only a three-way conversation.
“ ‘Course,” Jenny answered offhandedly.
“Did you learn about that from your mom or from school?” he asked, carefully avoiding the icy disapproval stamped on Eleanor Lathrop’s face “Or do the schools in Bisbee have classes in the birds and the bees?”
Knowing Eleanor’s attitude toward mealtime discussions of anything remotely off-color, Joanna observed this abrupt turn of conversation in stunned silence. What in the world was Bob Brundage thinking? she wondered. Was he deliberately baiting Eleanor by encouraging such a discussion? But of course, since Bob didn’t know Eleanor well, it was possible he had no idea of her zero-tolerance attitude toward nonparlor conversation, as she called it.
On the other hand, maybe he did. As he gazed expectantly at Jenny, awaiting her answer with rapt attention, Joanna caught what seemed to be a twinkle of amusement glinting in his eyes. I’ll be, Joanna thought. He’s doing it on purpose.
At that precise moment, she made the mistake of taking a tiny sip of water.
“Mom told me some of it,” Jenny said seriously. “But we mostly learn about it in school, along with AIDS and all that other icky stuff. Except we don’t call it the birds and the bees.”
Bob Brundage raised a questioning eyebrow. “You don’t? What do you call it, then?”
Jenny sighed. “When it’s about men and women, we call it the birds and the bees. But when it’s about men and men or women and women, we call it the birds and the birds.”
“I see,” Bob Brundage said, nodding and smiling.
“Jennifer Ann!” Eleanor gasped, while Joanna choked on the water, sending a very undignified and unladylike spray out of her mouth and nose into a hastily grabbed napkin. When she looked up at last, Bob Brundage winked at her again.
“Such goings-on!” Eleanor said, shaking her head. “And in front of company, too. Jenny, you should be ashamed of yourself.” Eleanor picked up the newspaper and handed it over to a still-coughing Joanna. “If you’re willing to let your daughter see this kind of filth at her tender age, then you’re going to have to be the one to give it to her. I certainly won’t be a party to it.”
Joanna took the paper and stuffed it into her purse.
“And you’d better decide what you want to order,” Eleanor continued. “Bob and I have already made up our minds. We had plenty of time to study the menus before you got here.”
Obligingly, Joanna picked up her menu and began looking at it. She held it high enough that it concealed her mouth where the corners of her lips kept curving up into an irrepressible smile.
Bob Brundage may have been a colonel in the United States Army, but he was also an inveterate tease. Even now, while Joanna studied the menu, he managed to elicit another tiny giggle of laughter from Eleanor Lathrop, although the previous flap had barely ended.
To Joanna’s surprise, instead of still being angry, Eleanor was smiling and gazing fondly at Bob Brundage. Her doting eyes seemed to caress him, lingering on him as if trying to memorize every feature of his face, every detail of the way he held his coffee cup or moved his hand.
And while Eleanor studied Bob Brundage, Joanna studied her mother. That adoring look seemed to come from someone totally different from the woman Joanna had always known her mother to be. Gazing at her long-lost son, Eleanor seemed softer somehow, more relaxed. With a shock, Joanna realized that Eva Lou Brady had been right all along. Eleanor was different because there was a new man in her life. In all their lives.
“What can I get you?” a waitress asked.
How about a little baked crow? Joanna wondered. “I’ll have the tuna sandwich on white and a cup of soup,” she said. “What kind of soup is it?”
“Turkey noodle,” the waitress said. “What else would it be? After all, it is the day after Thanksgiving, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “It certainly is.”
The remainder of the meal passed uneventfully. When it was over, Joanna said her good-byes to both Bob Brundage and to her mother while standing in the Hohokam’s spacious lobby. “You’re sure you don’t want to stay another night, Mother?”
“Heavens no. I have to get back home.”
Joanna turned to Bob Brundage. They stood looking at one another awkwardly. Neither of them seemed to know what to do or say. Finally, Joanna held out her hand. “It’s been nice meeting
you,” she said.
The words seemed wooden and hopelessly inadequate, but with Eleanor looking on anxiously, it was the best Joanna could do.
“Same here,” he returned.
Jenny, unaffected by grown-up awkwardness, suffered no such restraint. When Bob Brundage bent down to her level, she grabbed him around the neck and planted a hearty kiss on his tanned cheek. “I hope you come back to visit again,” she said. “I want you to meet Tigger and Sadie.”
“We’ll see,” Bob Brundage said, smiling and ruffling her frizzy hair. “We’ll have to see about that.”
Back in the room, Ceci and Jenny disappeared into the bathroom to change into bathing suits, while Joanna extracted Eleanor’s folded newspaper from her purse. She wasted no time in searching out the article Eleanor Lathrop had forbidden her granddaughter to read:
A Tempe police officer was seriously injured early Thanksgiving morning and a former longtime Chandler area police officer is dead in the aftermath of what investigators are calling a bizarre kidnapping/suicide plot.
After being kidnapped from her dormitory room at the Arizona Police Officers Academy in Peoria, Officer Leann Jessup jumped from a moving vehicle at the intersection of Olive and Grand avenues while attempting to escape from her assailant. A carload of passing teenagers, coming home from a party, narrowly avoided hitting the gravely injured woman when her partially clad body tumbled from a moving pickup and landed on the pavement directly in front of them.
Two of the youths followed the speeding pickup and managed to provide information that led investigators back to the APOA campus itself and to David Willis Thompson, a former Chandler police officer who has been the on-site director of the statewide law enforcement training facility for the past several years.
Thompson’s body was discovered on the campus later on yesterday afternoon. He was found in a vehicle inside a closed garage, where he is thought to have committed suicide. Investigation into cause of death is continuing, and an autopsy has been scheduled.