by J. A. Jance
“Will he make it?” Ali asked.
“I just talked to his wife, Teresa. The jury’s still out,” Donnatelle answered grimly. “He was airlifted to Physicians Medical Center in Tucson, where he’s undergone surgery. According to Teresa, the hospital lists his condition as guarded.”
“Doesn’t sound good,” Ali agreed.
“It gets worse. Teresa is eight and a half months pregnant. She’s stuck at the hospital with her two preschoolers from a previous marriage.”
Clearly, Donnatelle had stayed in closer contact with Jose and his family than Ali had. She had heard that he was married, but the last bit—about three kids being involved in this looming tragedy—hit Ali hard.
She understood more than most exactly how tough it was to raise even one baby without a father. She’d had to do that herself when Dean, her first husband, had lost his battle with glioblastoma weeks before Christopher was born. If Jose Reyes died as a result of his wounds, he would leave behind a widow with three orphaned children.
“Do you have any contact information for them?” Ali asked.
“Sure do,” Donnatelle said. “Like I said, Jose’s wife’s name is Teresa—with a T-E rather than a T-H. About a year ago they bought a place in Patagonia.”
Donnatelle reeled off both a post office box as well as phone numbers and an e-mail address. Ali jotted down the information.
“I’m just now going off shift,” Donnatelle went on. “Tomorrow is my day off. It sounds like Teresa is completely overwhelmed and could use some help. My mom’s coming over to look after my kids. As soon as she gets here, I’m on my way to Tucson.”
“I can’t come down today,” Ali said. “I’ve got company coming for dinner. But I could show up tomorrow and stay for a day or so. You’ll keep me posted?”
“Sure will,” Donnatelle said.
“And speaking of your kids,” Ali said, “how are they?”
“Fine,” Donnatelle answered. “All three of them made the honor roll.”
“Good for them,” Ali said. “And good for you!”
That was the main reason Donnatelle had been determined to make it through the academy. She had wanted to set a good example for her kids, and she was obviously doing so.
They hung up after that. Ali stood with her cell phone in hand and her dialing finger poised to dial Teresa Reyes’s cell phone number. Ultimately, she didn’t call. For one thing, Teresa Reyes didn’t know Ali from Adam, and in the midst of this crisis, she didn’t need to be juggling phone calls from people she didn’t know. Helping out in person would be different. Even now, years after her first husband’s death, Ali could remember the people, some of them distant acquaintances or friends of friends, who had simply shown up unannounced at the hospital or at the apartment to help Ali with her dying husband and later with her newborn son.
Ali knew right then that she’d be on her way to Tucson first thing on Sunday morning. Maybe she didn’t owe it to the Reyes family, but she did to the people who had helped her when she needed it. They had paid it forward, and now she would pay them back.
“What’s up?” B. asked. He was still hard at work on the elliptical machine.
“Jose Reyes, one of the guys from the academy, got shot Saturday night.”
“That deputy down in Santa Cruz County?”
Ali nodded.
“It was on the news a little while ago,” B. said. “I thought the name sounded familiar, but I didn’t make the connection. Wasn’t he the one who blacked your eye just before that Labor Day weekend?”
“That’s the one,” Ali answered with a smile. “He’s also the one who helped me out when Brenda Riley was in such bad shape. Donnatelle Craig, one of our classmates, heard about it on a Blue Alert and called from Yuma to let me know.”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“Can’t tell,” Ali answered. “He’s been airlifted to Tucson for surgery. According to Donnatelle, he and his wife are expecting a baby in a matter of weeks, and there are two older kids as well.”
“Tough,” B. said.
Nodding her agreement, Ali stepped onto the treadmill and punched in her settings. “Sister Anselm is coming for dinner tonight, and Leland has been cooking up a storm. Tomorrow I’ll drive down to Tucson and see what I can do to help. Being in a hospital waiting room with an injured husband and little kids is no picnic.”
“Speaking of Brenda Riley,” B. said after a pause, “what do you hear from her these days? Is she still sober?”
Brenda Riley and Ali Reynolds had been contemporaries working for sister television stations back in the days when Ali was a television newscaster in L.A. They had been forced off-screen about the same time, due to having reached the female equivalent of a pull-by date. Since that was about the same time Ali’s second marriage blew up, she had come home to Sedona to get her her life back in order and recover. Brenda had done the opposite. She had gone on a bender that lasted for a couple of years and nearly killed her.
While Brenda was in the process of sobering up, she’d had the misfortune of falling under the spell of a cyberstalker. When the situation had gone from bad to worse, Ali, with the help of a Grass Valley homicide detective named Gilbert Morris, had managed to pull Brenda’s fat out of the fire.
Much to Ali’s surprise, in the ensuing months, Detective Morris and Brenda had morphed into a romantic item, complete with a beachside wedding Ali had attended solo because B. was off on some business trip or other. After the ceremony, Gil and Brenda had laughingly told Ali that theirs was a match made in hell rather than heaven.
“Yes, she’s still sober,” Ali said. “She wrote a book that's due out soon. You do remember that her mother died, don’t you?”
“Not really,” B. admitted.
“Brenda’s share of the estate evidently came to quite a chunk of change. Last month Gil was able to pull the pin on his job with the Grass Valley PD.”
“He’s a little young to be retired, isn’t he?” B. asked.
“He’s only retired from law enforcement,” Ali answered. “He and Brenda are in the process of buying an operating B-and-B in Ashland, Oregon. Ashland isn’t all that far from Redding, where Gil’s kids live with his ex-wife.”
“Sounds like a lot of work,” B. said.
“Having an ex-wife?”
“No, running a B-and-B. It’s a job description that automatically requires the owner to be civil to a bunch of yahoo customers first thing in the morning,” B said. “Before you even have your first cup of coffee. Spare me.”
“Because you’re a grump in the morning?” Ali asked.
“Pretty much,” B. agreed.
When their joint workout was over, Ali and B. paused in the kitchen long enough to share a cup of coffee and two pieces of leftover pizza. Coffee beans kept in the freezer were the only fresh food that could survive B.’s long absences without going bad. Ali was grateful for the pizza. After spending the night living in sin at her place or B.’s, she was capable of showing up at the Sugarloaf and brazening it out with her parents, but she didn’t like doing it.
“I’m going to miss you,” Ali said.
“No, you won’t,” B. replied. “You’ll be too busy planting that garden of yours to even notice I’m gone.”
“You’re wrong,” Ali told him. “I’ll notice.”
Sometime later, knowing that B. needed time to get gathered up and packed, Ali kissed him goodbye and headed home, where she found she had the place to herself. Leland was out doing some last-minute shopping for dinner, while the house was filled with the tangy aromas of the duck-breast and sausage-laced cassoulet they would share that evening with Sister Anselm.
Stopping off long enough to pour herself a cup of coffee, she went into the library, where there was a distinct chill in the air. A storm had blown in overnight, driving away yesterday’s bright blue sky. Outside her window, a few flurries of snowflakes drifted from an overcast sky.
“So much for spring,” Ali muttered, lighting the
gas log in the fireplace.
At her desk, Ali set her cup down in the empty space next to her computer and found herself missing her kitty. For years, that spot on her desk had been one of Samantha’s favorite perches. Trying not to miss Sam too much, Ali booted up her computer and began looking for articles about a recent officer-involved shooting near Nogales. She was busy reading through a collection of online news articles when her new-e-mail notice dinged. Checking the list, she found a message from Sister Anselm.
Sorry. Just had a call out. On my way to Tucson. Please give Mr. Brooks my regrets. So sorry to miss his cassoulet.
An energetic seventy-something, Sister Anselm split her time between serving as a resident psychologist at St. Bernadette’s, a facility for troubled nuns in Jerome, and acting as a special emissary for the head of the the Phoenix diocese, Bishop Francis Gillespie. A “call out” meant that she had been summoned to serve as the patient advocate for some unfortunate who had landed in a hospital somewhere in Arizona without anyone to act as an intermediary between the injured patient and the medical community.
The vast majority of Sister Anselm’s patients were UDAs who came to grief while making the dangerous trek north and hoping to cross the border undetected somewhere in the wilds of the Arizona desert. Some of her patients came with injuries suffered in fierce car chases that routinely scattered dead and dying illegals along isolated stretches of Arizona roadways. Some of them, attempting to cross the border on foot, were abandoned by coyotes without sufficient food or water to survive in the unrelenting desert. Sometimes Sister Anselm’s patients were found close to death from dehydration or starvation or sunstroke. Others were clearly the victims of vicious acts of violence perpetrated either by their supposed guides or by their fellow illegals.
The most seriously injured ended up in hospitals with no idea of what had happened to them or how they had come to be there. Isolated and alone, they found themselves being treated by doctors they couldn’t understand. Usually they had no one to help them navigate the unknown health procedures that might or might not save their lives. In those situations, Sister Anselm often turned out to be their only ally. She knew what it was like to be lost and alone in a foreign land because it had happened to her.
Sister Anselm had been born as Judith Becker into a German-American family from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, prior to the beginning of World War II. When war broke out, her father, Hans, a recent immigrant, was arrested on suspicion of being a German spy and sent to a war relocation center in Texas, where he developed TB. His wife, Sophia, a natural-born citizen, renounced her U.S. citizenship and went to Texas to care for him, taking her two young daughters with her.
The father. Hans, died on board a Swedish ocean liner during an abortive prisoner-of-war exchange, leaving his widow and daughters to soldier on as displaced persons in war-torn Europe. By then Sophia had also developed TB. When she, too, died, her orphaned daughters were taken in and cared for by the sisters in a small convent in France. The older of the two girls had rebelled against her religious caretakers and come to a bad end on the streets of Paris by the time she was seventeen. The younger girl, Judith, had grown up to become a nun herself—Sister Anselm.
Blessed with a natural facility for foreign tongues, she was fluent in several languages and conversant in several more. Sister Anselm’s personal history of utter abandonment while she was a child had left her with an affinity for people in similar circumstances. It was her skill as a translator that had brought Sister Anselm and her story to the attention of a young American priest named Father Gillespie at Vatican II in Rome. Years later, when Father Gillespie was appointed bishop of the Phoenix Diocese, he had sought out Sister Anselm and brought her back to the land of her birth where he put her to work interceding on behalf of people who otherwise would have no voice.
That was how Sister Anselm and Ali had first met—at the bedside of a critically burned woman who was terribly injured in a fire set by an ecoterrorist. Before it was over, the two women found themselves facing down a crazed killer in a desert shoot-out. With a relationship forged under a hail of bullets, it was hardly surprising that the two women had been fast friends ever since, but they both knew that when Sister Anselm was on call, she was on call.
Ali went straight to the kitchen to let Leland know their expected dinner guest would be a no-show. She knew he would be saddened that his cassoulet, two days in the making, would be wasted on just Ali and Leland. For her part, Ali was already regretting that she and Sister Anselm would miss the long philosophical conversation that often preceded and accompanied their shared meals. For Ali, those discussions were as much food for the soul as Leland’s well-cooked dishes were food for the body.
In the kitchen, the yeasty aroma of baking bread had been added to the mix. When Ali gave Leland the bad news, he was clearly disappointed.
“How about if I invite my parents and Chris’s family to come over?” Ali suggested. “Chris would probably jump at the chance to dodge making dinner.”
Leland brightened at the prospect of having company. “If the little ones are coming,” he said, “I should probably whip up a batch of mac and cheese. No doubt the cassoulet will be far too rich for them.”
In situations like this, Ali usually checked with her daughter-in-law before checking with her son. She didn’t want to be held responsible for bullying Athena into a social engagement she didn’t really want. It turned out, however, that Athena was absolutely ecstatic at the idea of eating Leland Brooks’s food, regardless of what it was. With Chris and Athena’s invitation settled, Ali moved on to her parents, catching up with her mother at the Sugarloaf during a small lull in the weekend lunch crowd.
“It would have to be early,” Edie Larson cautioned.
Unseen on her end of the phone, Ali rolled her eyes. It wasn’t exactly news that Edie Larson went to bed with the chickens so she could be up at O-dark-thirty, in time to do the day’s worth of baking at the Sugarloaf.
“It will be early,” Ali promised. “Athena says her softball game should be over right around five. She’ll come here straight from school. That means we should be able to sit down to dinner by five-thirty at the latest.”
“You’re sure Mr. Brooks doesn’t mind cooking for all of us?” Edie asked.
“I’m sure,” Ali said.
“Do you want us to bring something?”
“Just yourselves,” Ali told her, “and your appetites.” She went into the kitchen to give Leland a revised guest list. “Everybody’s coming, twins and all.”
“I think I’ll do a flan for dessert, then,” he said. “Colleen especially likes that.”
His statement confirmed something Ali already suspected—that Colleen Reynolds had Leland Brooks wrapped around her pudgy little finger.
“Do you need any help?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Leland said, but he gave her a disparaging look that, roughly translated, meant “Are you kidding?”
“All right, then,” Ali said. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Taking another cup of coffee, Ali returned and found a few more late-breaking articles about the Reyes shooting, but they told her less than she had already learned from Donnatelle. Ali didn’t know the exact distance between Yuma and Tucson, but it was bound to include several hours’ worth of driving time. In the meantime, Ali used the address information from Donnatelle to send Teresa Reyes an e-mail:
Dear Teresa,
My name is Alison Reynolds. Jose and I were in the police training academy together. Donnatelle Craig, another academy classmate, called today to tell me about what happened to Jose. I’m so sorry to hear the news. Please know that you and your family are in my thoughts and prayers. I know what it’s like to be stuck in a hospital setting with little kids. Unless I hear from you otherwise, I’ll show up there tomorrow and see if there’s anything I can do to help.
Sincerely,
Ali Reynolds
Considering the catastrophe that had befallen the Reyes fam
ily, writing a note and offering to come help seemed like a puny gesture, but it was better than doing nothing.
10
2:30 P.M., Saturday, April 10
Tubac, Arizona
It was early afternoon when a weary Sheriff Manuel Renteria pulled into the attached garage at his house on the outskirts of Tubac. He parked his dusty patrol car next to his refurbished candy-apple-red Dodge Charger and then sat there for a few minutes, gauging how tired he was. Halfway through his third four-year term of office, this had been his worst day ever on the job.
“I’m too damned old for this crap,” he muttered to himself as he made his way into his too-quiet house.
The stucco tract home in Tubac was covered with trellises of bright pink bougainvillea that climbed the outside walls. Once, the house and the yard had been a lively place with kids coming and going at all hours and a dog or two racing to the gate or the door to greet him.
Back then, when he came home from work, the house was always filled with the smells of cooking, because that was the way Midge was. She loved to cook, and she always had something simmering on top of the stove or baking in the oven. Now there was no one here but him, and the only cooking that went on was in the microwave as he heated up an occasional Hungry-Man frozen dinner.
The kids were grown and gone, Midge had been dead for five years, and two months earlier he’d had to put down his aging German shepherd, Charger, named after the car, of course.
Manuel would never be able to admit it to his kids, but right now he missed Charger more than he missed Midge. He guessed that over time he had gotten used to her being gone. The loss of the dog was still too new. Up until a few weeks ago, he’d still been able to help Charger into the Dodge to take long Sunday drives. Charger loved riding shotgun, with his nose stuck out the window and mariachi music pounding through the muscle car’s killer sound system.
Inside the house, Renteria hung his Stetson on the hat hook next to the back door. Stripping off his belt and his holstered 9mm Glock 17, he hung them there, too. Midge would have disapproved of his leaving his weapon in the kitchen, but she was gone now.