“Tell me, Mom.”
Coming from across the desert, Joanna heard the joyous yips from Sadie and Tigger, who had no doubt heard the sound of the familiar engine and were coming to welcome their mistress home.
“Let’s get back in my car before the dogs get here,” Joanna urged. “Then I want you to tell me what’s going on.”
To Joanna’s surprise, Eleanor didn’t object. Instead, she leaned against her daughter and allowed herself to be led. Joanna opened the door. Before letting her mother in, she reached over and brushed her unholstered Glock under the seat of the car. After helping Eleanor inside, Joanna stopped at the trunk long enough to retrieve two bottles of water. She regained the inside of the car just as Sadie and Tigger burst through the mesquite and came racing toward them. The dogs circled the car madly, three times each. Then, finding it immovable, they gave up and went bounding off through the underbrush after some other, more interesting, prey.
Joanna passed the bottled water to her mother. “This should probably be something stronger, Mom, but its the best I can do at the moment.”
Eleanor took the bottle, opened it, and downed a long grateful swallow.
“So what is it?” Joanna asked after a moment. “Tell me.”
Eleanor sighed and closed her eyes. “It was had enough to know Dora was dead,” she began shakily. “As soon as George told me that, I knew that was all my fault. I mean it’s obvious that Dora was perfectly content to be out here at the ranch with Eva Lou and Jim Bob. If I had only let things be ...”
“That’s not true,” Joanna said. “Dora wasn’t happy at all. Hive you talked to Jenny today? Have you spoken to Butch?”
Eleanor shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t spoken to anyone. I was too ashamed.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Joanna told her. “The reason Dora didn’t want to go with the woman from Child Protective Services was that she had already made arrangements for her boyfriend to conic pick her up later that same night at her mother’s house up in Old Bisbee.”
“He was?” Eleanor asked. “Her boyfriend really was going to come get her?”
“Yes. At least that’s what we were told. His name is Christopher Bernard. He’s sixteen years old and lives up in Tucson. Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal will be interviewing hiss tomorrow afternoon.”
“Do they think he may have had something to do with Dora’s death?”
“Possibly,” Joanna said. “Although, at this point, no one knows anything for sure.”
“Oh, dear,” Eleanor said. “That poor girl, that poor, poor girl.” With that, Eleanor once again burst into uncontrollable sobs.
Joanna was baffled. She had thought that what she had said would make her mother feel better, but it was clearly having the opposite effect. For several minutes, she let her mother cry without making any effort to stop her. Finally Eleanor took a deep shuddering breath and the sobs let up.
“Mother,” Joanna said. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”
“Don’t you see?” Eleanor pleaded. “George told me Dora was pregnant. Thirteen and pregnant. Unfortunately, I know exactly how that felt. Of course, I was a little older than that when it happened to me, but not all that much older, and every bit as alone. Your father loved me and would have married me then, if my parents would have stood for it and given permission, but they wouldn’t. I’ve never felt so lost, Joanna. Never in my whole life. And knowing that’s what was going on with poor Dora Matthews brought it all back to me, that whole awful feeling of not knowing where to go or what to do or whom to turn to for help.
“I’ve spent the rest of my life blocking out that terrible time, but when George told me about Dora, a floodgate opened and it all came rushing back. Like it was yesterday. No, that’s not true. Like it was today, like it was happening to me all over again. I know George didn’t mean to upset me when he told me about Dora. He couldn’t have seen how I’d react, but I just had to get away for a while, and not just from him, either. I had to get away from every-one. I had to be off by myself so I could think things through. You do understand, don’t you, Joanna? Please tell me you do.”
Joanna shut her eyes momentarily to squeeze back her own tears. She had once been through the exact sane anguish when she, too, had found herself pregnant and unmarried. She had been old enough that she and Andy had been able to marry without parental consent, but at the time and for years afterward, it had never occurred to Joanna that her mother might possibly have lived through a similar ordeal. She had needed her mother’s help and had been no more able to ask for it than Eleanor had been to give it.
Joanna and Eleanor had battled over all kinds of things in the years after Joanna’s overly hasty marriage to Andy Brady, but the underlying foundation for most of those hostilities had been Joanna’s feeling of betrayal, Joanna’s belief that Eleanor hadn’t been there for her when she had needed her most. For years she had endured Eleanor’s constant criticism without realizing that her mother’s finger-pointing had been a ruse to conceal her own long-held secret—the baby Eleanor had borne and given up for adoption prior to her marriage to Big Hank Lathrop. It wasn’t until that long-lost child, a grown-up and nearly middle-aged Bob Brundage, had come searching for his birth parents that Joanna had finally learned the truth as well as the depth of her mother’s hypocrisy.
Instead of forming a bond between mother and daughter, Bob Brundage’s appearance had made things worse. For Joanna, learning of her brother’s existence and her mother’s youthful indiscretion constituted yet another betrayal on Eleanor’s part. And now, after years of continual warfare, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield had come suing for peace and pleading for understanding, asking for the kind of absolution she herself had never been able to grant.
Joanna’s first instinct was to say, “No way!” But then she thought about Marianne Maculyea. For years her friend had been estranged from her own mother. Only now, after years of separation, Evangeline Maculyea had finally come around. It had taken the death of one grandchild and the birth of another, but Marianne’s mother had finally opened the door to a reconciliation. It was, as Marianne had told Joanna, “the right thing to do.” And so was this.
“I do understand,” Joanna said quietly.
“Would that boy have married Dora, do you think?” Eleanor whispered, making Joanna wonder if she had even heard. “Not right now, of course,” Eleanor added. “Dora was only thirteen, so she would have been too young. But maybe later, when she was older, this Chris could have married her the same way your father married me.” She paused before saying what before would have been unthinkable. “The same way Andy married you.”
Joanna wanted to answer, but her voice caught in her throat. She thought about what Jaime had said on the phone about Christopher Bernard and his family. Much as she would have liked to believe in the fairy tale, it didn’t seem likely that Chris Bernard was cut from the same cloth as either D. H. Lathrop or Andrew Roy Brady.
“I don’t know, Mom,” Joanna finally managed. “I honestly don’t know”
“I hope so,” Eleanor returned, wiping new tears from her eyes. “I hope he cared about her that much. I suppose that’s a stupid thing to say, isn’t it. George said something about my being overly emotional about this, and it’s true. But I hope Christopher really did care. I hope Dora found someone to love her even for a little while because it doesn’t sound as though that mother of hers has sense enough to come in out of the rain.”
Joanna sighed. This was far more like the Eleanor Lathrop Winfield she knew. “I hope so, too,” she said.
Eleanor straightened now, as though everything was settled. The emotional laundry had been washed and dried and could now be safely folded and put away.