Shoot / Don't Shoot

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.

Meantime, Leann Jessup is listed in serious but stable condition at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where she underwent surgery yesterday for a skull fracture and where she is being treated for numerous cuts and abrasions.

Thompson, a longtime Chandler police officer, left the force there under a cloud in the aftermath of a serious altercation with his estranged wife in which both she and a female friend were injured.

In this latest incident, the injured woman and Cochise County Sheriff, Joanna Brady, were the only women enrolled in a class of