Cold Betrayal

by J. A. Jance

  “Why?” Ali asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “I just got off the phone with my grandmother,” Athena said. “Gram has always been my rock. I’ve never heard her as upset as she was just now on the phone.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Gram says someone tried to kill her last night. Someone came into her house while she was asleep. They turned on the gas burners on her kitchen stove without lighting them. The whole house filled up with gas. If it hadn’t been for Princess, Gram’s little dog, they both might be dead by now.”

  “Look,” Ali said, “if we’re talking attempted homicide here, your grandmother needs to report the incident to a local law enforcement agency and let them investigate it.”

  “That’s part of the problem,” Athena answered. “She already did that—at least she tried to. They pretty much told her she’s nuts. They claim she’s so old and frail that she probably turned the burners on herself and doesn’t remember doing it. They didn’t even bother sending someone out to check for prints. You’ve met Gram. Did she strike you as nuts?”

  Ali did know Athena’s grandmother. In fact, Betsy Peterson was the only member of Athena’s family who had bothered to show up for Chris and Athena’s wedding. Athena was estranged from her parents, Jim and Sandra, who, in the aftermath of Athena’s divorce, had, for some strange reason, cast their lot with their former son-in-law along with his new wife and baby.

  The summer following Chris and Athena’s wedding, soon after discovering they were expecting, the newlyweds had taken a trip to Minnesota. Ali had hoped that the visit, including the prospect of the fast-approaching arrival of grandchildren, would help smooth over whatever had caused the estrangement. The hoped-for reconciliation hadn’t happened, and the arrival of the twins had made no difference in the status quo, either. Ali had never been made privy to the gory details of the trip to Bemidji. Once Chris and Athena returned to Sedona, they had been completely closemouthed about it. Ali gathered from their silence on the topic that things had been difficult, but she had resisted the temptation to pry.

  “That’s the other part of the problem,” Athena continued. “Donald Olson, the Beltrami County sheriff, and my folks are great pals. They went all through school together, and they belong to the same Rotary group. That might influence the way the incident is being treated. Do you think you could speak to Sheriff Olson and find out what the deal is?”

  “It’s not my place,” Ali said.

  “Please,” Athena begged. “Can’t you just say that you’re my mother-in-law. I’m concerned about Gram, but since I’m stuck in school and can’t call, I told Gram I’d ask you to do it for me. Besides, it’s true. I can’t call. I have to get back to class.”

  “What’s the name of the county again?” Ali asked.

  “Beltrami.”

  “Give me your grandmother’s number, then,” Ali conceded. “I should probably talk to her about this before I go poking my nose into a hornet’s nest.”

  Athena reeled off the number. Ali jotted it down on the outside of Raphael Fuentes’s file folder. After hanging up, she sat with the phone in her hand for some time before finally breaking down and punching in the number.

  “Athena?” Betsy asked when she answered the phone. She sounded anxious.

  “No,” Ali explained. “It’s Ali Reynolds, Athena’s mother-in-law. We met at the wedding.”

  “Of course,” Betsy said. “I remember you. When I saw the unfamiliar number on caller ID, I thought maybe Athena was calling me back from a phone at school.”

  “I just finished speaking with her,” Ali replied. “She told me a little about what happened last night. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “If the local authorities won’t lift a finger, I can’t imagine what you can do from all the way down there in Arizona.”

  There were no awkward pauses in Betsy’s replies. If she was operating with a few screws missing, Ali would have thought there’d be at least a momentary bit of confusion or hesitation about who Ali was or where she was. Ali had been impressed by the woman when she had met and interacted with her at the wedding. Betsy Peterson had seemed sharp enough back then, and Ali’s first impression now was that she hadn’t lost any ground.

  “What do the local authorities say?” Ali asked.

  “They insist I’ve lost my marbles. They claim I turned on the gas burners on my own stove my own darned self and never bothered to light them. The deputy they sent out overnight somehow got the idea in his head that I had tried to use the stove-top burners to warm up the house—something I would never do, by the way. Even if I had been that dim, I certainly would have been smart enough to light them. I’ve had that same stove top for almost thirty years, from back when my husband and I first moved in here. It’s the stove Alton insisted we get for that very reason—that there were no pilot lights. The burners all have to be lit by hand. I hated them then, and I hate them now, but there’s no sense tossing the stove out on the scrap heap since it still works perfectly.”

  “It’s cold there, I take it?” Ali asked.

  “Not that cold,” Betsy answered. “It’ll probably get all the way up to the twenties today, but we had a blizzard last night, so we’ve got at least six inches of new snow on the ground.”

  In the twenties with six inches of snow sounded cold to Ali. “But not so cold that you would have turned the burners on to warm the place up?”

  “I have central heating and cooling,” Betsy replied indignantly. “Doesn’t anyone understand that? Why on earth would I try heating the house with the burners on the kitchen stove. It makes no sense at all. It’s not something I would do.”

  “You said it snowed. If someone came and left, wouldn’t he have left tracks?”

  “The snow was just starting when I got home from bingo. If there were any other tracks, they’re completely covered over. The only tracks Deputy Severson seemed to be interested in were mine. He was all hot and bothered that I went outside in the snow in my bare feet. I was afraid the house was going to be blown to smithereens, but he thought I should go back to the bedroom to put shoes on? My idea was to get the hell out.”

  According to Athena, her grandmother was a plainspoken woman. That appeared to be true. “Did anyone come back this morning to investigate?”

  “They did not, even though I begged them to please, please send someone out first thing this morning to dust for prints or collect DNA. Sheriff Olson told me that would be a waste of time. He made it sound as though I had made the whole thing up. After all, since I had enough presence of mind to turn the burners off before I went outside, the gas was long gone by the time Deputy Severson showed up. The way that man—the sheriff—spoke to me, I wanted to reach through the phone lines and wring his scrawny neck. Why on earth would I grab my dog and go running barefoot out of the house into a snowy yard if I hadn’t been scared to death? And what did he expect me to do, leave the gas running until one of his slowpoke deputies managed to get himself over here?”

  Betsy’s umbrage at being told she was imagining things hummed through the phone.

  “Do you know of anyone who would wish you harm?”

  Betsy thought about that for several seconds before she answered. “About a year ago I had a disagreement with Sarah Baxter over the way she handled the glasses after Communion. After Sarah’s turn at cleaning up, the next time I set out the Communion glasses some of them still had lipstick smears on them. It was unsanitary. I took her aside and told her that if she wasn’t prepared to do the job properly, she shouldn’t volunteer to do it at all. I tried to keep the matter private, but she took offense and turned the whole thing into World War Three. She ended up getting the entire congregation up in arms.”

  Nothing like a little “neighbor loving thy neighbor” to keep things interesting at church, Ali thought.

  “But that’s all water under the bridge now
,” Betsy continued. “I regret to say that Pastor Anders had to be called in to settle things. It turns out Sarah was having problems with cataracts and so was I. We both decided to resign from the Communion Committee and that took care of that.”

  “It doesn’t sound like the kind of issue that would cause someone to break into your house and try to do you in.”

  “Sarah is out of town at the moment, so it couldn’t have been her,” Betsy said. “Besides, there was no break-in involved. I have no idea how the criminal or criminals got in or out of my house.”

  “Do you have an alarm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it set?”

  Betsy sighed. “No, it wasn’t,” she admitted. “My son would have a conniption fit if he knew I turned it off when I got home and left it off when I went to bed. When Princess needs to go out overnight, the last thing I need is to have that blasted alarm shrieking at us the whole time she’s out in the yard trying to pee.”

  “So maybe whoever came into the house followed you inside when you first came home and then let themselves out again after you fell asleep. What kind of dog?”

  “Princess is a dachshund,” Betsy replied, “a sweet little wiener dog.”

  Ali remembered Athena’s mentioning something about her grandmother having a dog that was a near look-alike to Bella. “Did Princess bark at all last night?”

  “Not really. She whimpered rather than barked when she smelled the gas. At least, I think that’s what woke her up, and that’s when she woke me up. She’s fourteen. Like me, she’s probably more than a little deaf. Fortunately her sense of smell hasn’t gone the way of her hearing. Now that you mention it, Princess did bark at Deputy Severson once he showed up.” She paused and then added plaintively, “Do you believe me?”

  Ali thought about it and then nodded to herself. “Yes,” she agreed aloud. “I think I do.”

  “Thank you for that,” Betsy said with a grateful sigh. “Thank you so much. You have no idea what a boost that is. I was beginning to think that maybe everybody else was right, and I was starting to go bonkers.”

  There was a buzz in Ali’s ear—probably a call-waiting signal on Betsy’s phone rather than Ali’s.

  “Sorry,” Betsy said. “I have to take this, but thank you. Athena was so right to have you call me. You’ve been a huge help, even from that far away.”

  2

  A matter of moments later, Ali located the number for the Beltrami County sheriff and dialed it. It took jumping through a number of gatekeeping hoops before her call was finally put through to Sheriff Donald Olson. “Who is it?” he asked.

  Ali’s husband, B. Simpson, was a huge fan of the Coen brothers, and of all their films, including The Big Lebowski, but Fargo was B.’s all-time favorite. He and Ali had watched the movie together numerous times, and B. could recite many of the lines verbatim. When B. used the expression “He’s a funny-looking little guy,” it was definitely not high praise.

  Sheriff Olson’s distinctive manner of speaking, with its emphasis on the word “isss,” made him sound as though he had stepped straight off the set of Fargo.

  “My name is Ali Reynolds,” she answered. “I’m calling from Sedona on behalf of Betsy Peterson and her granddaughter, Athena.”

  “Oh, that,” Sheriff Olson said dismissively. “The whole ‘somebody’s trying to kill me routine.’ And now it sounds as though she’s calling in reinforcements. Who are you again, and what’s your interest in all this?”

  “I’m Athena’s mother-in-law,” Ali replied. “She’s at school right now and can’t call herself, but she spoke to her grandmother earlier. Athena said Mrs. Peterson sounded very upset, and she asked if I would call to get an idea of what’s really going on.”

  “What’s really going on, Ms. Reynolds, is that Betsy Peterson is a frail, elderly woman who has no business staying on in that big old house way out in the country all by herself. Jim and Sandra, her son and daughter-in-law, are worried sick about her, but they can’t do a thing about it. My mom pulled the same stunt—wouldn’t leave the family farm no matter how much she needed to. I talked myself blue trying to get her to see reason, so it’s not like the Petersons have a corner on the market when it comes to having issues with aging relatives.”

  “It sounds to me as though you’re discounting what happened to her.”

  “What she claims happened to her,” Sheriff Olson corrected. “Athena’s always been a bright girl. If she’d care to read Deputy Severson’s report, I’m sure she’d agree that nothing about Betsy’s wild imaginings rings true. My deputy examined the scene and there was nothing to be found—including no evidence at all of a break-in. It snowed here last night. He found no unusual tracks leading to or from Betsy’s house—no sign of any vehicles and no sign of anyone on foot, either, other than some footprints in the snow out in the backyard. Those belonged to Betsy herself, by the way. She evidently went running around out in the backyard, barefoot in twenty-degree temperatures. If that’s not nuts, what is? If she had wandered off into the woods like that—in her bare feet and wearing nothing but a robe and a nightgown—she would have been dead as a doornail by morning, gas or no gas.”

  Ali didn’t like the man’s tone. “In other words, on the basis of her fleeing a possible gas explosion without returning to the far end of the house to retrieve her shoes, you’re prepared to disregard her claim that someone entered her home, turned on the gas, and tried to kill her?”

  “As I said, ‘claim’ is the operant word here, Ms. Reynolds. By the way, when Deputy Severson arrived at the scene, there was no sign of any gas—none at all. He thinks she made the whole thing up, maybe just to gain a little attention. Or else it could be something else like the first stages of dementia. That’s what those folks do, by the way. They wander around in the middle of the night doing things that make no sense and that they never remember doing. They claim things happened that never happened.”

  “Has Ms. Peterson been diagnosed with any form of dementia?”

  “Not to my knowledge and not officially, I suppose,” the sheriff conceded. “But I’ve heard from Jim that odd things have started to happen. Betsy lost her hearing aids a while back. Weeks later Sandra found them in the freezer in a bag full of chopped-up Jimmy Dean sausages. Then Sandra stopped by Betsy’s house one day and found medications for her yappy little dog mixed in with Betsy’s. No telling what would have happened if Sandra hadn’t straightened that mess out. Betsy could have died or else the dog could have. Oh, and then there was the thing with her reading glasses. She left them in a gadget drawer in the kitchen.”

  “And you know about all this because . . . ?”

  “This is a small town, Ms. Reynolds. People know their neighbors. We talk. Maybe you’re not accustomed to that kind of thing where you live. Jim Peterson and I are lifelong friends. Our parents are aging, and a lot of the folks in our generation are dealing with the same kinds of issues. We’re all in the same boat, don’t ya know?”

  Ali could see that Sheriff Olson’s being in the same boat with Jimmy Peterson meant that he was far too close to Betsy Peterson’s situation to be an impartial bystander.

  “How long was it after the 911 call before your officer arrived at the scene?”

  “Forty minutes or so. Why?”

  “Was the door open or closed?”

  “The front door was closed when Deputy Severson arrived, but the back door was still wide open.”

  “Wouldn’t that open door, added to a forty-minute delay, allow for the gas to dissipate?”

  “I suppose,” Sheriff Olson allowed grudgingly, “but that presumes the gas was present in the first place. Now look, Ms. Reynolds, I have places to go and things to do. You might mention to Athena that if she really cares about her grandmother, she’ll use her influence to talk Betsy into letting go of that big house and moving into one of those assisted-living plac
es where she’ll be properly looked after.”

  Ali felt her temper rising. By the time her parents, Bob and Edie Larson, sold their Sugarloaf Café, they had both spent a lifetime cooking for other people. Done with cooking, they had moved into Sedona Shadows, a retirement community that came complete with a dining room where someone else handled the daily meal service. As far as Ali could see they were having a blast living there.

  Although the move had surprised Ali at the time, her parents had made the decision on their own, in their own good time, and far earlier than expected without any prompting from what her mother had laughingly referred to as “the peanut gallery.”

  Listening to Donald Olson, Ali suspected Betsy Peterson’s situation differed greatly from that of her parents. In Bemidji, the peanut gallery seemed to be holding all the cards.

  “Thank you, Sheriff Olson,” Ali said, struggling to keep a civil tongue in her mouth. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The sheriff didn’t have to say “don’t bother” aloud as she ended the call. His tone of voice made his opinion of Ali’s unwelcome interference entirely clear.

  She was still glaring at the phone in her hand, as if holding it responsible for her bad mood, when it rang again. This time her husband’s phone number showed in the screen.

  “Boy,” she said, “am I glad to hear from you. Are you still in Switzerland?”

  “I am at the moment, but I’m leaving for New York City tomorrow afternoon. I have a day and a half of meetings there. I should be home in time for dinner on Friday.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ve missed you, and so has Bella. She moped around here for days after you left. What do you want for your homecoming dinner?”

  “My first choice would be some of Leland’s meat loaf.”

  “Fair enough,” Ali said. “I’ll make sure meat loaf is on the menu.”

  “After that,” he said, “I’d like to spend the rest of the weekend having a little quiet downtime with my wife and my dog.”