Certainly Butch Dixon wasn’t interested in her, was he?
Joanna barely allowed her mind time enough to frame the question.
“Nah!” she said aloud to the naked image staring back at her from the mirror. “No way! Couldn’t be!”
With that, pulling on her nightgown, Joanna headed for bed. She fell asleep much later with the light on and with the heavy textbook open on her chest—only thirty pages into Dave Thompson’s seventy-six-page reading assignment.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Because Jim Bob and Eva Lou were both early risers, Joanna had read another twenty pages and was down in the student lounge with the telephone receiver in hand by ten after six the next morning. Her mother-in-law answered the phone.
“Is Jenny out of bed yet?” Joanna asked.
“Oh, my,” Eva Lou replied. “She isn’t here. Your mother invited her to sleep over in town last night. I didn’t think it would be a problem. I know Jenny will be sorry to miss you. If you want, you might try calling over to your mother’s.”
“Except you know how Eleanor is if she doesn’t get her beauty sleep,” Joanna returned. “And by the time she’s up and around, this phone will be too busy to use. I’ll call back later this evening. Tell Jenny I’ll talk to her then.”
“Sure thing,” Eva Lou replied. “As far as I know, she plans on coming straight home from school.”
Relinquishing the phone to another student, Joanna poured herself juice and coffee and a toasted couple of pieces of whole wheat bread. Then she settled down at one of the small, round tables, flipped open
“Mind if I sit here?”
Joanna looked up to find Leann Jessup standing beside the table. She was carrying a loaded breakfast tray. “Sure,” Joanna said, moving her notebook and purse out of the way. “Be my guest. There’s plenty of room.”
Leann began unloading her tray. Toast, coffee, orange juice, corn flakes, milk. She set a still-folded newspaper on the table beside her food.
“Not much variety,” Leann commented. “By Christmas, the food in that buffet line could become pretty old. But I shouldn’t complain,” she added. ‘It’s food I don’t have to pay for out of my own pocket.
“How close are you to done with that stupid reading assignment?” Leann asked, nodding in the direction of Joanna’s textbook as she sat down.
Joanna sighed. “Twenty pages to go is all. History never was my best subject, and this stuff is dry as dust.” While she returned to the book, Leann Jessup picked up the newspaper and unfolded it. Moments later she groaned.
“Damn!” Leann Jessup exclaimed, slamming the palm of her hand into the table, rattling everything on its surface. “I knew it. As soon as she turned missing, I knew he was behind it.”
Joanna glanced up to find Leann Jessup shaking her head in dismay over something she had read in the paper.
“Who was behind what?” Joanna asked. “Is something wrong?”
