by J. A. Jance
“Your husband’s death is a big story, and everybody is covering it,” Victor cautioned. “That means there may be reporters outside the door. So when we get out of the vehicle to go inside, try to keep quiet. I don’t want any off-the-cuff remarks from anybody, you included, Helga,” he added.
With Ali’s attention focused on the garishly painted truck, she almost missed the group of reporters bearing down on them as Ted Grantham hustled out of the house to usher them inside. “Right this way,” he said hurriedly. “Les isn’t here yet. He called to say he’s tied up in traffic. April should be down in a few minutes.”
Down from what used to be my room, Ali thought, but she said nothing.
“Sorry about all the uproar,” Ted commented, leading them toward the front door, where a hand-lettered DO NOT DISTURB sign had been posted over the doorbell. “But the film crew was already scheduled to be here today as part of the festivities,” he continued. “Since this is the only day they can be here, April decided to go ahead with the shoot after all. Even with Paul gone, she thinks once the program is in the can there’s a chance they’ll still be able to get it on the air—maybe on one of those reality shows.”
“What shoot?” Helga asked.
“The Sumo Sudoku shoot,” Ted answered. “Surely you’ve heard of Sumo Sudoku. It’s Paul’s latest brainchild. April’s, too, for that matter. It’s all the rage around here and supposedly the next big thing. You play it with rocks. When Tracy McLaughlin of Team McLaughlin takes the RV down to the beach and sets up a match there, it’s amazing. People line up to play; they’re even willing to fork over good money for the privilege.”
Only half listening to Ted, Ali stepped through the double doors with their elegant frosted glass and into the spacious foyer. It was a strange experience. This light-washed entryway with its hardwood floor and antique credenza had once been part of her home. Most of the house had been decorated in accordance with Paul’s unrelentingly modern sensibility. In the face of all that brass and glass, Ali had gravitated to the one exception—a beautifully wrought, bird’s-eye maple credenza that had occupied the place of honor in the entryway. She had loved the slightly curved lines of the piece and complex patterns in the grain of the wood. In a way, the credenza had seemed almost as much of an interloper in Paul’s house as Ali herself had been.
Now the credenza was covered with a collection of fragrant condolence bouquets, all of them complete with unopened envelopes from various senders. At least one of the vases had been carelessly deposited on the polished wood, leaving behind a distinct and indelible water mark. Seeing the stain saddened Ali. She made a halfhearted effort to rub it out but it didn’t go away. It would take someone wiser in the ways of cleaning to make the offending moisture ring disappear.
With no one paying any attention to her, Ali ventured a few steps into the living room. In anticipation of the wedding, most of the furniture had been removed—replaced by a dozen or so rows of cloth-covered banquet-style chairs arranged so they faced a wooden arch at one end of the room. On either side of the arch stood ranks of candles and immense baskets of flowers—an avant-garde mix of traditional and fragrant lilies punctuated with an occasional bird-of-paradise.
Ali wasn’t the least bit surprised by this somewhat odd combination. Bird-of-paradise wasn’t exactly commonplace in bridal floral arrangements, but Paul had always preferred it to any other flower. He would insist on sending it on occasions when other people—Ali included—would have preferred roses or gladiolas or even snapdragons. The oddly angular buds with their comical topknots and brilliant colors had never spoken to Ali the way they had to him.
The same could be said of Paul’s choices in furniture—unabashedly modern and not especially comfortable—and art. On this early Saturday morning, with most of the furniture removed in honor of a wedding that would never happen, only the artwork remained. The big splashy original oil canvases had bold colors and plenty of panache. Ali knew the paintings came with top gallery pedigrees and spectacular price tags. What they lacked was heart.
Just like the rest of the house, Ali thought. No wonder she had never felt at home here. If it hadn’t been for Elvira Jimenez doing her cooking magic in the kitchen, the house on Robert Lane could just as well have been a museum of modern art.
The far wall of the living room was lined with French doors that led out onto a spacious terrace. Through the open doors, Ali saw the terrace was stocked with a dozen or so linen-covered cocktail tables and even more chairs. Empty buffet tables, chafing dishes at the ready, were situated at both ends of the terrace. Again, Ali wasn’t surprised that Paul would have selected this spot as the site of his now canceled wedding reception. Paul had always loved entertaining on the lavish terrace with its unobstructed if sometimes smog-obscured view of the city. Ali had usually gravitated toward the smaller and more private tree-and-bougainvillea-lined patio out back by the pool house.
With the three attorneys settled in the library in a low-voiced huddle, Ali wandered out onto the terrace. The grassy lawn below the stone balustrade was a beehive of activity. Someone was using a handheld dispenser to lay out a complicated pattern of white chalk lines on Paul’s carefully tended grass. Ali looked around for Jesus Sanchez, Paul’s longtime gardener. He had always taken great pride in the fact that his grass could have been plunked down on the eighteenth green of any self-respecting golf course without anyone knowing the difference. Ali more than half-expected Jesus to appear out of nowhere, bellowing a loud objection to the chalk-spreader’s desecration.
Moments later Jesus did in fact appear around the corner of the house above and behind Ali, but he wasn’t making any kind of fuss about the chalk on his grass lawn. Instead, he was totally occupied by two young men who were pushing a pair of heavily laden wheelbarrows loaded with perfectly round rocks down the steep path that led from the back of the house to the lawn below.
As one of the men made the corner, the wheelbarrow wobbled in his hands. The next thing Ali knew, the load of rocks came spilling down the hill and onto the flagstone terrace. Some of them bounced almost head high while one of them smashed to pieces, sending shards of granite flying in every direction. One needlelike piece seemed headed directly for Ali’s throat. It missed her by an inch. Seconds later, a man vaulted off the path and over the rail, landing on the terrace next to her.
“Are you all right?”
Ali was shaken but unhurt. “I’m fine,” she said.
Nodding, the angry man turned back to the frightened workman who was still clinging to the handles of his empty wheelbarrow.
“You stupid jerk! Don’t you know how to do anything? You could have killed this poor woman!”
Only then did Ali recognize him. The man doing the yelling had to be Tracy McLaughlin, the same tall blond guy pictured on the RV. The big difference was that now he wore regular khakis rather than a kilt.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked Ali again. “It’s a good thing that eight broke into a million pieces. Otherwise it might have taken your head right off. I’m not surprised, though. The kind of piss-poor help we’re having to put up with here today…” He shook his head in disgust. “Come get these, will you?” he shouted up at the men waiting on the path. “And then go back to the truck. Thank God I have a spare eight there. It’s got a crack in it, but it’ll have to do.”
As the one man came to collect his scattered load, the other made his way down to the grass. “Don’t put them there, you stupid asshole,” Tracy shouted at him. “Don’t you know anything? Those are the fours. They belong on this side.”
As the man hefted the rocks out of another wheelbarrow and onto the ground, the truth about Sumo Sudoku finally came home to Ali. When Ted had said it was played with rocks, Ali had envisioned something the size of marbles. These smooth, round hunks of granite were more like boulders, with large numbers chiseled into the surface. From the size and obvious weight of the “fours,” Ali could only guess how much damage the stray eight migh
t have done had it hit her full on.
Ali was still shaken from her near miss when she saw a young woman, blond and very pregnant, emerge from the living room. She walked over to the debris field left by the broken rock and kicked at some of it. “What’s this?” she wanted to know.
Helga had said April Gaddis was gorgeous, and that was true. Even without makeup and with her hair in disarray, she was a fine-featured beauty except for her eyes. They were red and puffy from a combination of weeping and lack of sleep. And she was pregnant enough that the silk robe she wore didn’t quite cover her expanded middle. She was beautiful but utterly distraught and very, very young.
“One of my rocks,” Tracy explained. “That cretin up there didn’t know how to work a friggin’ wheelbarrow. He lost his whole load and it came crashing down on the terrace here. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill this lady. A miracle really.”
As the workman in question scurried to load the remaining rocks back into his wheelbarrow, April looked at Ali uncertainly.
“What are you doing here?” April asked. At least she didn’t try to pretend that she didn’t know who Ali was.
“The lawyers,” Ali said, quickly forgetting her near miss with the exploding rock. “We’re supposed to be meeting with the lawyers this morning in the library.”
April shrugged. “I’m not in any condition to deal with this stuff right now. All I was trying to do was sneak down and get some breakfast from the buffet, but there are way too many workmen here already. I had no idea the crew would be this big.”
Ali had sometimes imagined how she would react in what she had thought was the unlikely event she would ever come face-to-face with April Gaddis, her rival. Ali had scripted any number of biting remarks, but faced with the young woman and seeing her obvious desolation, Ali forgot all of them. Instead, Ali tried to focus on the homespun wisdom passed along to her in the e-mail from Phyllis in Knoxville.
“I’m sorry we’re meeting like this, April,” Ali said kindly. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ali’s words seemed to sap all of the young woman’s strength. April staggered over to a nearby table, where she sank onto a chair and made a halfhearted attempt to smooth her hair.
“No one told me you’d be coming,” she said accusingly.
“Ted Grantham is the one who set up the meeting,” Ali returned. “He should have told you.”
“He didn’t.” April seemed close to tears.
“I’m sorry,” Ali said.
April probably could have handled a fight, but she was unable to cope with kindness. Her lips trembled, her face crumpled. Burying her head in her hands, she began to sob.
“I can’t believe any of this is happening,” she said despondently. “This was supposed to be my wedding day. I can’t believe Paul is gone, just like that—with no warning at all. Instead of our wedding guests, the house is full of lawyers who are here about his will. Paul’s will, for God’s sake! What am I going to do without him? How will I manage? What’ll happen to me? What’ll happen to my baby?”
April’s unbridled grief over losing Paul struck Ali as utterly raw and real—and refreshingly different from her own conflicted emotions. Learning about Paul’s death—seeing him dead—had left Ali more empty than sad. Having him dead made her own life far less complicated. She hadn’t cried. In fact, she hadn’t shed a single tear, not even in the coroner’s office. For that she felt guilty. In a way, being a party to April Gaddis’s uncompromising despair made Ali feel better. She was relieved to know that Paul’s sudden death meant something to someone—even if that person was the one who had unceremoniously booted Ali out of her home and out of her marriage.
And where were April’s friends? Why was she all alone? Without thinking about it, Ali sat down next to the grieving woman, laying a compassionate hand on her shoulder. What this very pregnant twenty-five-year-old was facing now was territory Ali Reynolds knew all too well. She had been there once, too, only she had been a few years younger than April when it had happened to her.
Ali had been a happily married twenty-two-year-old and pregnant with Chris when her first husband, Dean Reynolds, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma and died within months. Ali knew what it meant to be expecting a baby who would most likely be and indeed was a fatherless child on the day he was born. She remembered lying awake at night, pregnant, with her back hurting, and with the baby hurtling around inside her womb, and asking those very same questions over and over: What will become of us? How can I raise this baby on my own? Why is this happening to me?
During those dark, sleepless nights she hadn’t known that she would be able to make it; that despite being a single mother she’d somehow manage to go back to school to finish her education and then go on to have a life and career that most people would have thought of as charmed. Back in that terrible time, there had been no easy answers for her, and she didn’t try to pass along any easy answers to April Gaddis, either.
“You’ll manage,” Ali said, patting the weeping woman on the shoulder. “Being a single mother is tough. There are times when the baby is crying and the responsibility is all on your shoulders and you’ll think you won’t be able to live through one more day, but you will. There are times you’ll question God and times when you’ll rail at Him. But some day, on a bright fall afternoon, you’ll be standing on the sidelines of a soccer field cheering like mad when that baby of yours kicks his first goal. That’s when you’ll know God was right; that’s when you’ll know everything you went through was worth it.”
April raised her head. Her bleak eyes met Ali’s. “But the divorce didn’t go through,” she said. “Paul and I weren’t even married. What if he left me out of his will? He said he was going to rewrite it. He told me he had, but what if he didn’t? Where will the baby and I live? What am I going to do? What?”
Ali could see that April’s grief had her operating on a very short loop. “That’s why we both have attorneys,” Ali counseled gently. “I’m sure that’s what they’re doing right now—they’re inside sorting things out.”
“But I don’t even have an attorney,” April said. “I never thought I needed one.”
Oh, honey lamb, Ali thought, if you were messing around with Paul Grayson, how wrong you were!
“It’s going to be okay,” Ali said with more conviction than she felt.
“Are you sure?” April asked.
Ali nodded. “Now what about you? You look a little queasy. You said you were looking for something to eat?”
Faced with a crisis, Ali automatically reverted to the coping skills she had learned at her mother’s knee. In the Edie Larson school of crisis management there was nothing so bad that it couldn’t be improved by the application of some well-prepared food served with equal amounts of tender loving care and judicious advice.
April nodded. “I called down to the kitchen, but no one answered. The cook’s probably out overseeing the caterers for the film crew.”
Ali stood up. “Someone in your condition shouldn’t be running on empty. Let me go ask Elvira to fix you something. An omelet, maybe? Elvira’s huevos rancheros are wonderful, but probably not for someone as pregnant as you are.”
“Elvira doesn’t work here anymore,” April said. “She quit, or else Paul fired her. I’m not sure which.”
Ali was surprised to hear Elvira was gone—surprised and sorry, both. “But you do have a cook,” Ali confirmed.
April nodded.
“Why don’t I go find her,” Ali offered. “What’s her name?”
“We’ve gone through half a dozen cooks since that first one left,” April said. “Sorry. I don’t know her name.”
“What would you like then?”
“Toast,” April said uncertainly. “And maybe some orange juice.”
“How about some bacon?”
“Oh, no. I don’t eat anything that had a face. I’m a vegan.”
That was, of course, utterly predictable. “Whole wheat?” Ali asked.
�
��Yes, please. With marmalade. And coffee. Have her make me a latte—a vanilla latte.”
Ali wasn’t sure a dose of caffeine was in the baby’s best interests, but she set off for the kitchen without saying anything. On the way she caught a glimpse of Ted Grantham, Victor Angeleri, and Helga Myerhoff still huddled in the library, still conferring. In the spacious kitchen, Ali found a heavyset black woman standing in front of the stainless steel sinks and working her way through a mountain of dirty dishes.
“The breakfast buffet’s out by the pool house,” she said impatiently. “That’s where the film crew is. There’s food and coffee out there. Help yourself.”
She sounded exasperated, overworked, and underappreciated if not underpaid. Having another stranger wander into her kitchen was more than she could handle.
“This is for April—for Ms. Gaddis,” Ali explained. “She asked me if you could make her some toast—whole wheat toast with marmalade, orange juice, and a vanilla latte.”
The woman shook excess water off her hands and then dried them on a tea towel. “Very well,” she said with a curt nod. “Do you want to wait here for it or should I bring it to her?”
“It might be best if you brought it,” Ali said. “We’re out on the terrace.”
“You want some coffee, too?”
“Yes, thank you,” Ali said. “That would be nice.”
Ali returned to the terrace to find April sitting exactly where Ali had left her. She seemed to be absorbed in watching the ongoing rock-hauling and arranging process down below, but when Ali sat down next to her, she realized April was really staring off into space, seeing nothing.
“Breakfast’s on its way,” Ali said.
April nodded without answering.
“So when’s the baby due?” Ali asked. She hoped that drawing April into a conversation might help her out of her solitary reverie and back into the present.