Joanna put down the phone and left the lounge. Back in her own room, she realized she still hadn’t returned Adam York’s call, but she didn’t bother to go back down to the lounge. Instead, she lay on the bed in her room and thought about strangling her infuriatingly meddlesome mother.
Jenny’s long blond hair had been perfectly fine the way it was. Joanna remembered it floating in the wind as Jenny had waved good-bye.
Where the hell did Eleanor Lathrop get off?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Joanna Brady and Leann Jessup ate dinner at La Pinata, a Mexican restaurant near the capitol mall. Over orders of
“My mother divorced my dad when my brother was five and I was three,” Leann told Joanna. “The last time I saw my father was twenty years ago. He showed up at my sixth birthday party so drunk he could barely walk. Mom threw him out of the house and called the cops. He never came back.”
“You haven’t talked to him since?” Joanna asked.
Leann shook her head. “Not once.”
“Is he still alive?”
Leann shrugged. “Maybe, but who cares? He never called, never sent any money. My mother had to do it all. Most of the time, while Rick and I were little, she worked two jobs—one full-time and one half-time—just to keep body and soul together.
“In my high school English class, the teacher asked us to write an essay about our favorite hero. Most of the kids wrote about astronauts or movie stars. I wrote about my mom. The teacher made fun of my paper, and he gave me a bad grade. He said mothers didn’t count as heroes. I thought he was wrong then, and I still do.”
Joanna bit her lip. Thinking about her own mother and the flawed relationship between them, she felt a twinge of envy. “You like your mother then?” she asked.
“Why, don’t you?” Leann returned.
“Most of the time, no,” Joanna answered honestly. “I always got along better with my dad than did with my mother.”
She went on to tell Leann about her own folks, about how Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop died after being hit by a drunk driver while changing a tire for a stranded motorist and about the high school years when she and her mother had been locked in day-to-day guerrilla warfare. Joanna finished by telling Leann Jessup how, that very afternoon and from two hundred miles away, Eleanor Lathrop had been able to use Jenny’s hair to push Joanna’s buttons.
From there—from discussing mothers and fathers—the two women went on to talk about what had brought them into the field of law enforcement. For Joanna it had been an accident of fate. For Leann Jessup it was the culmination of a lifelong ambition.
Over coffee, Joanna got around to telling Leann about Andy’s death. Recounting the story always brought a new stab of pain. Telling Butch Dixon the night before, Joanna had managed to corral the tears. With Leann, she let them flow, but she was starting to feel ridiculous. How long would it take before she stopped losing it and bawling at the drop of a hat?
“What about you, Leann?” Joanna asked, mopping at her eyes with a tissue when she finished. “Do you have anyone special in your life?”
Pm a moment, the faraway look in Leann Jessup’s eyes mirrored Joanna’s own. “I did once,” she said, “but not anymore.” With that, Leann glanced at her watch and then signaled for the waitress to bring the check. “We’d better go,” she added, cutting short any further confidences. “It’s getting late.”
