“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.... “