She nodded.
“I’ll have one of those, too,” Carol Strong said. “Wait a minute. She didn’t give us menus. I’d better go get one.”
“No need. Everybody gets the same thing today,” Butch Dixon said. “Turkey, dressing, and all the rest.” He went down the bar and returned with the two soft drinks.
“How much does it cost?” Carol asked.
Butch shrugged. “Whatever,” he said.
“Whatever?”
Butch waved toward the crowded dining room. “Some of these people won’t be able to pay anything at all. No problem. That’s the way it is around here. If you can pay, fine. If you can’t pay, that’s fine, too. Let your conscience be your guide.”
He looked up at the television set. “You’ve to watch this. The part with the jacket always cracks me up.”
The food was delicious. The movie was a scream. Joanna laughed so hard she was almost sick. But during the last few frames when Steve Martin drags a hapless John Candy—his unwanted and yet welcome guest—home for dinner, Joanna found herself with tears in her eyes.
And not just because of John Candy, either. It had something to do with family and with reconciliation and with forgiveness. Something to do with Eleanor Lathrop and Bob Brundage.
“Great dinner,” Joanna said to Butch when he came to take their empty dessert plates. She turned to Carol. “I think I’d better go back to the hotel now,” Joanna said. “After missing dinner, I probably have a little fence-mending to do.”
Carol nodded. “That’s probably a good idea. We’ll both think about this overnight and then put our heads together tomorrow morning. What do you say?”
“What time?”
“Not before noon,” Carol said. “I’m going to need my beauty sleep.”
They were headed for the door when Butch called after Joanna. “You haven’t seen Dave Thompson around today, have you? I would have thought he’d be in for dinner by now.”
Carol and Joanna exchanged looks. “We’d better tell him,” Carol said, turning back.
And so they did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In the backseat of the Blazer the next morning, Jenny was babbling to Ceci Grijalva. “And so this man comes to see us. It turns out he’s my uncle. Grandma Lathrop wants me to call him Uncle Bob, but I’d rather call him Colonel Brundage. Uncles should be someone you know, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” Ceci mumbled.
Joanna and Jenny had picked Ceci up from her grandparents’ no-frills trailer park in Wittmann at ten o’clock on the dot. They were now in the process of driving her back to the Hohokam, where Bob Brundage and Eleanor Lathrop were suppose to join them for an early lunch in the coffee shop before Bob caught a plane back to Washington D.C.
With Bob running interference, Joanna had almost managed to work her way back into her mother’s good graces. Still, she wasn’t looking forward to the ordeal of a mandatory lunch. Requiring Joanna’s attendance was Eleanor’s method of exacting restitution from her daughter for being AWOL from the previous evening’s Thanksgiving festivities.
Joanna found it ironic that, with the notable exception of Eleanor, no one else seemed to have missed her at all. Adam York had come to the Hohokam, stayed for dinner, and left again without Joanna ever laying eyes on him, although she had talked to him late that night after they both had returned to their respective hotels. It sounded as though Adam had made the best of the situation. He had spent most of the dinner chatting with Bob Brundage. The two of them had hit it off so well that they had agreed to try to get together for lunch the next time Adam traveled to D.C.
“The company gets to choose what we do,” Jenny was earnestly explaining to Cecelia. “Do you want to watch movies or swim?”
“What movies?” Ceci responded. “I can’t go swimming because I don’t have a suit.”
“Yes, you do,” Jenny told her. “Grandma Brady brought one along for you. I think it’ll fit. And when we get to the hotel, we can choose the movies. What do you like?”
“I don’t care,” Ceci said. “Anything will be all right.”
Driving along, Joanna only half listened to the chattering girls. More than what was being said, she focused on Ceci Grijalva’s tone of voice. The lethargic hopelessness of it was heartbreaking. It seemed as though the little girl’s childhood had been stretched to the breaking point. At nine years of age, all the playfulness had been ripped out of her.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Jenny continued. “Did you know you were on TV?”
“Me?” Ceci asked. “Really?” For the first time, there was a hint of interest in her voice.
“Yeah, really. You were on the news. Mom has a tape of it. I saw it last night after dinner. We can watch that, too, if you want.”
“I’ve never been on the news before.”
“I have a couple of times,” Jenny said. “It’s kinda neat. At first it is, anyway.”
Cecelia Grijalva’s eyes were wide as they walked into the lobby. “I’ve seen this place, but I’ve never been inside it before.”
“Come on,” Jenny said. “I’ll show you the pool first, and then I’ll take you up to the room.”
While the girls wandered off for a quick tour of the hotel, Joanna headed back to the room. She felt tired. She’d been awake much of the night, worrying about whether or not Dave Thompson had acted alone. Up in the room, she found the telephone message light blinking. On the voice-mail recording, she heard Lorelie Jessup.
“I just now came home from the hospital,” Lorelie said. “Kim brought me here so I could sleep in a bed for a while. From your call this morning, I thought you’d want to know that Leann’s doing better, but she’s still not able to talk. They’ve upgraded her condition to serious. I did speak with her doctor. He says that with the kinds of injuries received, it’s unlikely she’ll have any recollection of events leading up to what happened. He says short-term memory is usually the first casualty, so I doubt she’ll be able to help you. If you need to talk to me, here’s my number, but don’t call right away. It’s ten o’clock. I’m going to bed as soon as I get off the phone.”
Relieved that Leann was better, Joanna erased the message and replaced the receiver. But, she knew that the doctor was most likely right. The critical hours both immediately before and after a severe trauma or a skull-fracturing accident can often be wiped out of a victim’s memory banks. That meant Leann Jessup would probably be of little or no help in establishing the identity of her attacker.
Jenny’s electronic key clicked in the door lock and the girls bustled into the room. Jenny gave Ceci a quick tour of the room and then dragged her back to the television set. “We’ll watch the news tape before we go to lunch and Snow White after,” Jenny said, expertly shoving a tape into the VCR. Clearly, she was enjoying the opportunity to boss the listless Cecelia around. “And we’ll go swimming right after lunch.”
“You’d better get with it, then,” Joanna said. “It’s only a few minutes before we’re supposed to meet Grandma Lathrop and Colonel Brundage.”
As Jenny fooled with the tape, running it backward and forward to find the right spot, Joanna watched Ceci Grijalva closely, worrying about the child’s possible reaction to the emotionally wrenching material she was about to see.
“In our lead story tonight,” the television anchor said smoothly into the camera, “longtime ASU economics professor Dean R. Norton was arraigned this afternoon, charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of his estranged wife, Rhonda Weaver Norton. Her partially clad body was found near a power-line construction project southwest of Carefree late last week.
“Here’s reporter Jill January with the first of two related stories on tonight’s newscast. Later on this half hour, Jill will be back with another story concerning a local group determined to do something about the increasing numbers of Valley homicide cases resulting from domestic violence.”