by J. A. Jance
Ali opened the diary and fanned through the pages. A few of them had been written on. Most of them were blank.
“As you can see, reading it won’t take long,” Arabella added. “I was given the diary on the occasion of my ninth birthday, and I wasn’t very good about keeping it up. You’re far more faithful at writing cutloose than I ever was at keeping the diary.”
Ali didn’t want to accept this assignment. She didn’t want to have anything to do with Arabella Ashcroft’s benighted book project. On the other hand, considering what Arabella and her mother had done for Ali all those years earlier, she didn’t feel as though she had a choice.
“All right,” she agreed at last, reluctantly slipping the diary into her purse. “But I’m not making any promises that I’ll be able to help.”
“Wonderful,” Arabella said with a brilliant smile. “I can’t ask for more than that.”
Just then the double doors swung open and the butler entered the room once more. “Would you like me to clear now, madam?” he asked. He had evidently decided on his own that three martinis amounted to Arabella’s limit. He was cutting her off.
“Yes, Mr. Brooks,” Arabella said. “Thank you. That would be very nice. And after that, feel free to take the rest of the evening off. I don’t think I’ll be needing anything more. I’ll just toddle off to bed.”
Ali noticed that Arabella’s tongue seemed slightly thick—that she was stumbling over the words.
After that many martinis, I wouldn’t be needing anything more, either, Ali thought. I’d be comatose.
Mr. Brooks led Ali back through the front hallway and out into the front driveway where he opened the door to Ali’s Porsche Cayenne SUV. “Do come again,” he said graciously.
Ali smiled and nodded. “I will,” she said.
Still she drove away feeling uneasy. What have I gotten myself into now? she wondered. And how much of Arabella’s story was the truth and how much was drunken rambling?
Ali’s intention was to head straight home, but a phone call from an escrow officer at the title company detoured her. Left to unload her deceased husband’s real estate holdings, Ali’s first plan had been to empty the house on L.A.’s Robert Lane and then list it. In talking to a real estate agent, however, the suggestion had been made that she consider selling it on a turn-key basis with all the furnishings and artwork intact. Ali had thought finding a buyer on those terms was unlikely, but in that respect she was wrong. Within days she had a full-price offer.
The buyers were people who had just won an amazing Power-ball jackpot and who wanted to move up into newer and classier digs without having to do any of the work on their own. They were ready to buy everything, pots and pans and linens included. In the back of Ali’s mind, the distrustful, snarky part, she wondered if her agent had been straight with her. It seemed likely that the agent must have known that those particularly needy purchasers were out there. It made Ali wonder if maybe the advice from the Realtor had been less impartial than it should have been. Maybe she could have gotten more.
But the truth was, Ali Reynolds was glad to be done with the Los Angeles house and was more than ready to let it go. She had balked at unloading a few items—the Limoges china she had chosen when she and Paul married; the leather couch from the family room; and Paul’s extensive wine collection along with the water-damaged credenza. Other than those, however, Ali had accepted the purchasers’ offer and had let everything else go without a second thought.
“I know our closing appointment is scheduled for tomorrow,” said Linda Highsmith of Highsmith Red Rock Title. “But the papers are here now, ready to be signed. Unfortunately, I have a conflict tomorrow. I know it’s late, but if you could possibly come by this afternoon…”
“Sure,” Ali said. “I’ll be right there.”
It was close to five. Most of the uptown area was a maze of road construction. Once through that, the traffic on Sedona’s main drag to the far side of town was maddeningly slow as well, so Ali wasn’t “right there” nearly as fast as she thought she’d be, but Linda was delighted when she finally did show up.
“I really appreciate this,” Linda said, ushering Ali into a conference room. “It’s only a parent/teacher conference, and I didn’t find out about it until just this afternoon. I suppose I could have handed the closing off to someone else, but…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ali said. “I’m glad to get it out of the way today.”
The whole process took the better part of an hour. “Once the purchasers sign and the sale is recorded, the funds will be deposited in the account you’ve designated,” Linda explained as they finished up. “This is only our good-faith estimate of the moneys due to you. The actual amount may vary slightly from this.”
Alison Reynolds looked down at the line Linda indicated. The amount written there was more than substantial. It amounted to more money than Ali ever would have imagined accumulating in her lifetime.
And Linda Highsmith, who had also grown up in Sedona, seemed to be thinking much the same thing. “Small-town girl makes good,” she said with an envious smile. “It must feel pretty incredible.”
Ali nodded and smiled back as best she could, but the truth was, it didn’t feel all that terrific. This unexpected real estate windfall was coming to her not because she personally had earned or deserved it, but because she had married well—from a financial point of view, at least, and because Paul had died before their divorce became final. In Ali’s book, neither of those two items really qualified as “making good.”
“I guess that remains to be seen,” she said.
{ CHAPTER 4 }
The truth was, Ali left the title company office knowing she had money coming her way, but feeling more burdened by that fact rather than less. Ali briefly considered going by to see her parents, but decided against it. She usually enjoyed being around Bob and Edie Larson, but the last time she had seen them, her mother had been all over her about being “down in the mouth.” Edie had asked several pointed questions about what Ali was doing to “get herself back on track.”
Not wanting to risk being lectured by the parental units, Ali drove back home where she was delighted to see Chris’s Prius already parked in the driveway. Chris’s energy and cheerfulness were usually welcome antidotes for her current bout with unaccustomed torpor.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, looking up from the evening news as she walked in. With his blond hair suitably moussed and spiked, the six-foot-one Christopher could have easily passed for one of the new breed of weather reporters showing up on the tube. Chris had gotten in the habit of watching television news back in the old days when his mother was often on screen. Ali was pretty much over her own TV news addiction. Chris wasn’t. He sat on the couch with Sam stretched out next to his leg.
“My night to cook,” Chris told her. “Pizza’s on the counter in the kitchen.”
Ali had grown up in a household at the back of a restaurant. Her parents were both professional cooks. As a consequence learning to cook had never been a priority—she had never needed to. When she had been married the first time, to Chris’s father, she had cooked enough to get by, but that was all. When she had married Paul, she had moved into a place where yet another professional cook, Elvira Jimenez, had held sway over the kitchen. Besides, Ali’s news anchor duties had precluded her being anywhere near home during meal prep time.
The upshot of all that meant that not only was Ali not a capable cook, neither was her son. Between them, they subsisted on takeout and leftovers sent over from the Sugarloaf.
Ali went over to the counter and scooped up a napkin and a piece of still steaming pepperoni pizza. She stared down at the message book beside the telephone.
“Dave called?” she asked.
Dave was Detective Dave Holman, a fellow alum of Mingus Mountain High, where he had graduated a year before Ali. He had served in the U.S. Marine Corps and, along with his work as a homicide detective for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, he was
still a member of the Marine Reserves. During the years Ali had been away from Sedona, Dave had established a firm friendship with her parents. Now he was her friend as well. Months earlier, during that awful time in California after Paul’s murder, Dave had been at Ali’s side every step of the way.
“Yup,” Chris said. “Wanted to know if you’d be home later. Said he’d like to stop by. I told him as far as I knew you’d be here. I also told him if he’s not too good to turn up his nose at pizza he’d be welcome to have dinner. Tuesday is the two-for-one special, so we have plenty.”
Pizza was their usual Tuesday night fare, and Chris usually spent the remainder of the evening playing city league basketball down at the high school gym. Much as Ali enjoyed her son’s company, she was also accustomed to having the house to herself on the evenings he played ball, taking advantage of the solitude to work on her blog entries and go through her readers’ comments. Tonight, if time allowed, she had planned to delve into Arabella’s diary. There was a part of her that resented the fact that Chris had seen fit to invite company over without consulting her first, especially when he had no intention of being at home.
“Oh,” Chris added. “And Gramps called. He wanted to know if you knew where Kip went.”
“Kip?” Ali returned. “I have no idea. He was here earlier this afternoon, but I haven’t seen him since.”
“That’s what I told Gramps—that since the credenza was there in the entryway, Kip must have come by. He said not to worry; something probably came up. I could hear Grandma grousing in the background—that Kip had probably fallen off the wagon and gone out and wrecked Grandpa’s precious Bronco. There’d be hell to pay if that happened.”
Bob Larson’s vintage Bronco was precious all right. Ali reached for the phone. “Did Grandpa want me to call?”
Chris unfolded his long legs from the couch, dislodged Sam, and came over to the counter where he collected another piece of pizza.
“Depends on how brave you are,” he said. “It sounded to me like he and Grandma were going at it pretty hot and heavy. If I were you, I’d wait awhile and give them a chance to cool off.”
Ali found a soda in the fridge and brought it to the counter. She was several bites into her pizza before she spoke again. “I signed the papers on the Robert Lane house,” she said.
“The sale went through then?”
“As long as the buyers sign, too.”
“Good,” Chris said. “I’m glad that’s all behind you.”
Except it wasn’t all behind Ali. Selling the house would go a long way toward allowing Ali to finally straighten out Paul Grayson’s financial obligation to his daughter—an out-of-wedlock child whose mother had refused, on religious grounds, Paul’s offer to pay for an abortion. That whole issue was still an unsettling obstacle to Ali as she attempted to move forward and consign her deceased husband to where he belonged—as a fading image in her rearview mirror.
Something in Ali’s facial expression must have betrayed what she was thinking. “Are you okay?” Chris asked.
“Of course, I’m okay,” Ali answered abruptly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Don’t bite my head off,” Chris replied. “And I asked because you don’t look okay. You look upset. You’ve been upset for weeks now.”
You’re almost as bad as my parents, Ali thought.
“I’m okay,” she repeated, but just because she said it didn’t necessarily make it so. She got up from the table, tossed the rest of her pizza into the disposal, and made a show of loading the few dirty dishes into the dishwasher. Once that was done, she went into the bedroom to get out of the tea-drinking attire she’d worn to Arabella Ashcroft’s house and into something a little more comfortable—a pair of well-worn sweats. When she emerged, Chris had disappeared.
Without knowing when Dave would show up, Ali was reluctant to start reading Arabella’s diary. Instead, she reached for her laptop, but before she had time to log on, the doorbell rang. Peering outside, she found Dave Holman standing on her front porch. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, he had turned away from the door and seemed to be staring off at the last of the sunlight on the distant red rock formations.
Determined not to let him gripe at her about her current emotional state, Ali opened the door with a flourish and was going to make some smart-mouthed comment. When she glimpsed the grim set of Dave’s lean, square-jawed face, she stifled.
“Come in,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
Stepping inside, Dave grimaced. “It’s that apparent?”
“Evidently,” Ali responded. “What’s up?”
“It’s Crystal,” he said. “She ran away.”
Crystal was Dave’s twelve-year-old daughter. Dave’s three kids—sixteen-year-old Rich and two daughters, including eight-year-old Cassie, lived with their mother, Roxanne, and her second husband, a time-share salesman with a none-too-sparkly reputation.
“From Lake Havasu?” Ali asked.
Dave gave Ali a look and then dropped heavily onto the sofa. “From Vegas,” he said. “They moved to Vegas the first of October, remember? Cassie and Rich seem to have adjusted all right, but not Crystal. Roxie called me about it just a little while ago.”
Listening to the news, Ali took a hit in the guilt department. She had been so caught up in her own miseries that she hadn’t been paying any attention to her friend’s difficulties. The last Ali remembered Dave’s kids had still been living in Lake Havasu with their mother and her new husband. She had no recollection about them having moved to Vegas.
How come I didn’t know about any of this? What kind of a friend am I? Ali wondered.
“How long has Crystal been gone?” Ali asked.
Dave’s face was bleak. “Since early this morning,” he said. “Rich dropped her off at school, but she never showed up for any of her classes.”
“A twelve-year-old truant on her own in Vegas?” Ali asked. Not good, she thought. Not good at all!
“They’ve issued an Amber Alert,” Dave continued. “But only just now—an hour or so ago. Somehow the school didn’t notify Roxie that Crystal wasn’t at school, and nobody worried when she didn’t show up at home as soon as school was out. When it comes to parental supervision, Roxie runs a pretty loose ship. Until it was almost bedtime, everyone assumed Crystal was off at a friend’s house. And she’s thirteen, by the way,” Dave added. “Not twelve. Just turned. Her birthday was last week. I’m terrified thinking about what might happen to her, and with a twelve-hour head start, she could be anywhere by now.”
Las Vegas was less than three hundred miles away—a drive of a little under five hours. The way Dave looked right then, he could probably make the trip in far less time than that. Ali stood up, brought the pizza box over from the counter, and offered him some. Absently he took a slice of the cooled pie and bit into it.
“If all this is happening in Vegas, what are you still doing here?” Ali asked. “I would have thought you’d be on your way by now.”
“Roxie asked me not to come,” Dave replied. “Told me not to, actually. She said she had enough on her plate right now without having to worry about me showing up and making things worse.”
“But you’re a cop,” Ali objected. “How could you possibly make things worse?”
“You’d be surprised,” Dave said grimly. “You don’t know Gary, her jerk of a husband.”
Ali didn’t know Gary Whitman personally, but what little she knew about the man wasn’t good. He had been new to town—a hotshot time-share salesman—when he had taken up with Roxanne Holman, wining and dining her while Dave was off doing his second tour of duty with the reserves in Iraq. The affair had started then. The actual divorce hadn’t happened until months later, after Dave got back home from his deployment.
Just being divorced had been hard enough on Dave, but the previous fall, when Roxanne and Gary had moved from Sedona to Lake Havasu and taken the kids with them, Dave had been devastated. Ali vaguely remembered Dave mentioning that there ha
d been trouble of one kind or another with Gary’s employment situation in Lake Havasu, but that was all she could recall. She had no idea that another move had occurred, and right that minute, none of that seemed particularly important.
“Forget about Gary Whitman,” Ali said now. “He doesn’t matter. What does matter is figuring out where Crystal could have disappeared to and why. And how do we go about bringing her back home?”
“I suppose Roxie’s right in a way about wanting me to stay here,” Dave admitted. “I can make more inquiries—official inquiries, that is—by going through channels on this end than I could as boots on the ground in Nevada, where I’d be outside my jurisdiction.”
Ali knew from personal experience that being outside his jurisdiction hadn’t kept Dave Holman from riding to Ali’s rescue when she had needed his help in California a few months earlier. Surely, with his own daughter at risk, there could be no question now about what he should do.
“You have to go,” Ali declared urgently. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”
Dave blew out his breath as though trying to relieve some pressure. “Rich said pretty much the same thing his mom did when I talked to him a little while ago—that I shouldn’t come. He says Gary and Roxie fight about me all the time as it is. He said if I come up, it’ll only make things worse.”
“All the more reason for you to go,” Ali insisted. “True, you may not be able to do anything to help find Crystal, but at least you can be there as moral support for Cassie and Rich, and they’re the ones who need it. What did Rich tell you, by the way? Did he have any idea why Crystal might have taken off?”
“Not really. According to him she’s been quite the handful since they got to Vegas. She’s already been suspended from her new school—twice.”
“Suspended twice from middle school?” Ali asked. “What did she do?”
“I have no idea,” Dave said. “Roxie hadn’t mentioned it to me, and Rich didn’t say, either. But here’s what I don’t understand. It used to be that, of all the kids, Crystal was the one who actually liked going to school. At least, I thought she did. Up until this year, she was always a straight-A student. I can’t imagine what’s gotten into her.”