“That’s a switch,” Joanna said. “If she changed her mind about coming to dinner, maybe she’ll change her mind about Phoenix as well.”
Eva Lou shook her head. “I doubt it. I asked her again, but she said no—that she’s meeting someone here in Bisbee over the weekend, but she wouldn’t say who.” Eva Lou shot Joanna an inquiring glance. “You don’t suppose Eleanor Lathrop has a boyfriend after all these years, do you?”
“Boyfriend?” Joanna echoed. “My mother? You’ve got to be kidding. Whatever makes you say that?”
Eva Lou shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Eleanor hasn’t been at all herself the last few weeks. She’s been acting funny—funnier than usual, I mean. It’s like she’s carrying around some secret that she can barely keep from spilling.”
“Spilling secrets is my mother’s specialty,” Joanna said shortly. “I don’t think she’s ever kept one in her life, certainly not anybody else’s. And a boyfriend? No way. It couldn’t be.”
“Your mother’s an attractive woman,” Eva Lou returned. “And stranger things than that have happened, you know.”
Joanna considered for a moment, then shook her head. “I agree,” she said, “It would be strange, all right.”
With that, banished from the kitchen, Joanne did as she’d been told. She retreated to her bedroom for one last check of her luggage to make sure she had packed everything she would need. When it came time to open the closet door, she hesitated, knowing that the sight of it would leave her with a quick clutch of emptiness in her stomach that had nothing at all to do with hunger.
At her mother’s insistence, Joanna had finally found the strength to take Andy’s clothing to a church-run used-clothing bank down in Naco, Sonora. Although half of the closet was now totally empty, Joanna’s clothing was still jammed together at end of a clothes rod while the other end held nothing but a few discarded hangers. Two months had passed, but Joanna could not yet bring herself to hang her own clothes on the other side of that invisible line that divided her part of the closet from that she still thought of as Andy’s. The time for claiming and rearranging the whole closet would come eventually—at least, she hoped it would—but for now, she still wasn’t ready.
As she turned away from the closet, there was a gentle tap on the bedroom door. “Joanna, Eva Lou says you may need some help packing your stuff out to the car,” Jim Bob Brady said. “Are you ready or do you want to do it later?”
“Why not now?” Joanna returned. “Things are pretty well gathered up.”
Her father-in-law carried two suitcases while Joanna took one. She also lugged along a briefcase crammed full of paperwork in need of her perusal. “I’ve never been away from home this long before. I’m probably bringing too much,” she said, as they e1 the luggage into her county-owned Blazer.
“Better to take too much than too little,” Jim Bob replied.
When all of the suitcases were stowed in the back, Jim Bob Brady closed the cargo gate, then looked at Joanna quizzically. “Seems to me like Peoria’s pretty much flat. And last time I was up in those parts, I do believe all the streets were paved. So how come you’re going up there in a Blazer, for Pete’s sake? You’d get a whole lot better gas mileage from that little Eagle of yours than you will from this gas-guzzling outfit.”
“It’s a requirement,” Joanna explained. “The academy suggests that, wherever possible, students bring along the vehicle they’ll actually be using once they’re out patrolling on their own. That way, when it comes time to practicing pursuit driving, not only will we be learning pursuit-driving techniques, we’ll also be learning the real capabilities of our own vehicles.”
“Oh,” Jim Bob said, scratching his almost bald head. “Guess it does make sense, after all. Need anything else hauled out?”
Joanna shook her head. “That’s it.”
