Free Moving Target by J. A. Jance Page A

things would have turned out?”
    “Who knows?” Ali agreed. “But here’s one good thing. We’re staying at the Highcliff as opposed to Jordan’s-by-the-Sea. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had quite enough of your relatives for one day. Why don’t we go up to the room? If we’re hungry later, we can order from room service or raid the rest of the fruit basket.”
    “I doubt I’ll be hungry,” Leland said.
    Ali studied him as they rode up in the elevator. Some of the light had gone out of that jaunty, nattily dressed gentleman who had ridden down with her in the same elevator only an hour and a half earlier.
    “What’s wrong?” Ali asked.
    “Fifty years,” Leland replied dejectedly, shaking his head. “I wondered about Thomas from time to time, but I never would have imagined that—that he would have been married for fifty years. That’s a very long time for me to have been so mistaken about who I thought he was. It’s as though my entire life was based on a series of erroneous assumptions.”
    “Maybe you weren’t wrong,” Ali said. “Back in that era and even now, I have a feeling, there have been more than a few gay people who married and stayed married for camouflage reasons.”
    Leland shook his head. “Maybe so,” he said.
    Hoping to brighten his spirits, Ali asked, “What’s on the agenda for tomorrow?”
    “If the weather’s better, I’d like to visit the cemetery and spend some time at my parents’ graves. If you don’t mind, that is.”
    So much for brightening spirits, Ali thought. She said cheerfully, “Regardless of the weather, I’m here to do whatever you want to do.”

H ow about some coffee?”
    At the sound of her mother’s voice, LeAnne Tucker roused herself and sat up on the uncomfortable love seat where she had finally fallen asleep. Sunlight was streaming in through the window on the opposite side of the waiting room in the burn unit at Austin Memorial Hospital. Her mother, Phyllis Rogers, stood in front of her holding out a cardboard-wrapped cup of Starbucks from the lobby coffee bar downstairs.
    When LeAnne’s son landed in the ICU, her mother had offered to drive down from Eugene to help. At first LeAnne tried to put the kibosh on the whole idea. She hadn’t wanted her widowed seventysomething mother to be out on the interstates, driving by herself with only her two yappy pugs as traveling companions, through hazardous winter conditions for the better part of two thousand miles. Phyllis had been adamant, insisting that she was more than capable of taking care of herself and of traveling cross-country. She and her two dogs, Duke and Duchess, had made the trip in her Honda Accord in what Phyllis regarded as a “leisurely” five days; she’d smoked Pall Malls every mile of the way.
    Once Phyllis arrived, LeAnne couldn’t imagine how she would have coped without her mother’s help. She had to admit that having a secondvehicle available, even one that reeked of cigarette smoke, was a definite blessing. While LeAnne remained camped out in a hospital waiting room, waiting for Lance to awaken from his drug-induced coma, Phyllis had taken charge of things back home in San Leandro, some fifty miles away, supervising Lance’s younger brothers, making sure they had food to eat, and providing transportation as required to and from various school activities.
    LeAnne accepted the cup, noticing gratefully that the coffee was far too hot to drink. That was the problem with the tepid stuff that came out of the machine in the vending alcove down the hall. Not only was it barely lukewarm, it was tasteless. LeAnne had complained about the machine, but so far no one had come by to fix it, and no one had returned the two bucks she had fed into it when no coffee came out, either.
    Phyllis had arrived in the room carrying a small overnight bag. When she took a seat in the next chair over, a cloud of secondhand-smoke residue wafted in LeAnne’s direction. Phyllis set the bag