accused of murdering his ex-wife up in Phoenix. Juanita thought I might be able to help him, but I had to tell her I can’t.”
“If it happened up in Phoenix, of course you can’t do anything about it,” Eleanor said huffily. “What a stupid idea! I can’t imagine why they’d even bother to ask. Frank certainly knows better than that.”
“Frank wasn’t the one doing the asking, Mother,” Joanna said.
“But he brought her here, didn’t he?” Eleanor returned. “And on your day off, too. I don’t know about him, Joanna. He just doesn’t seem all that sharp to me. And why you’d want to go out on a limb and make one of the men who ran against you your chief deputy ...”
This was ground Joanna and Eleanor had already covered. Several times over. “Never mind, Mother,” Joanna said, opening the door and herding Eleanor into the house. “Let’s go on out to the kitchen and see if Eva Lou needs any help.”
Just then, Marianne and Jeff’s sea-foam-green VW pulled into the yard and stopped at the back gate. When Joanna went out through the laundry room to open the door, she was still holding Juanita’s Grijalva’s envelope.
Joanna stood by the dryer for a moment, examining the still-sealed package. The best course of action would probably be to throw it away without ever knowing what was inside. Still, Jorge Grijalva’s mother had gone to a lot of trouble to bring her that material. Didn’t Joanna owe the woman at least the courtesy of reading it?
True, the case was 140 miles outside Joanna’s jurisdiction. And no, she couldn’t possibly do anything about it, but there was no law against her reading about it. What could that hurt?
Making up her mind, Joanna dropped the envelope onto the dryer next to her car keys and purse, then she hurried outside to greet the last of Eva Lou’s invited guests.
CHAPTER 5
The dinner went off surprisingly well, from the moment they sat down at the dining room table until the last morsel of Cynthia Sawyer’s praline cake had been scraped off the dessert plates.
AII through the meal, Joanna couldn’t help noticing that Eva Lou was right. Eleanor Lathrop wasn’t at all herself. After the initial wrangle about Frank Montoya, she had curbed her critical tongue. She was so uncommonly cheerful—so uncharacteristically free of complaint—that Joanna found herself wondering if it was the same woman. Once, when Eleanor was laughing gaily—almost flirtatiously—at one of Jim Bob’s folksy, time-worn quips, Joanna found herself speculating for just the smallest fraction of a moment if there was a chance Eva Lou was right after all. Maybe there was a new man in Eleanor Lathrop’s life.
In the end, though, Joanna attributed her mother’s lighthearted mood to the fact that there were nonfamily guests at dinner. She reasoned that Jeff and Marianne’s presence must have been enough to force Eleanor Lathrop to don her company manners. Whatever the cause of her mother’s sudden transformation, Joanna welcomed it.
The festive dinner with its good food and untroubled conversation helped ease Joanna past her earlier misapprehensions about being away at school. Jenny and the ranch would be in good hands while Joanna was gone. There was no need for her to worry. She said her flurry of good-byes, to everyone else in the house; then Jenny alone walked Joanna out to the loaded Blazer.
“Ceci and I are almost alike, aren’t we,” Jenny said thoughtfully.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, my daddy’s dead, and
