by J. A. Jance
“We have to talk to everyone,” Dave said. “That’s how you get to the bottom of what really happened.”
“But you’re not saying he did it, are you?”
“I’m saying we have to talk to everyone,” Dave repeated firmly. “At this point it could be an accident, but no one’s ruling out suicide, either. If you start down Schnebly Hill Road in a snowstorm, you’re pretty much asking for trouble. And considering what she was looking at, with spending the next few years dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, who could blame her if she did choose a shortcut? I sure as hell would.”
“But what about her kids?” Ali objected. “From what I understand, she had just been diagnosed and was still in reasonably good health. I know her better than that. She wouldn’t just abandon her kids like that, not before she had to.”
Dave shrugged. “She might,” he said.
Bob Larson emerged from the kitchen carrying Chris and Ali’s orders. He set the plates down in front of them. “Morning, Dave,” he said. “See you’ve already met my grandson, Chris.”
Dave shook his head. “I haven’t, actually. I’ve just been jawing with your daughter.” He reached in front of Ali and offered his hand to Chris. “Glad to meet you,” he said. “Your mother and I go back a long way.” Noticing Chris’s UCLA sweatshirt he added, “Think the Bruins will make it all the way to the Final Four this year?”
Chris responded with an enthusiastic affirmative. Chris, Dave, and her father wandered into a spirted discussion of which teams were likely to make it to the championship and which ones wouldn’t. Meanwhile Ali was left to consider how easily men’s conversations-regardless of whether the participants were friends or strangers-immediately devolved into sports talk. It was one of those annoying male traits, an auto-cloaking device designed to keep each of them from knowing anything personal about the others.
Right now mindless chatter was keeping Ali from learning more about what really mattered-whatever it was that had befallen her friend Reenie.
“Hey, sport,” Bob said to Chris. “What say we hit the slopes for a while this afternoon, assuming your grandmother will give me time off for good behavior.”
Chris glanced questioningly at Ali. “It’s fine with me,” she said. “I’m on my way to Flagstaff. I have no idea when I’ll be back.”
“Your grandfather can have the afternoon off,” Edie agreed, “but only if he gets his tail back in the kitchen and finishes up the rest of breakfast.”
Waving his wife’s good-natured nagging aside, Bob retreated to the kitchen. Meanwhile, Ali’s phone rang once more. She could see from the display that Paul was calling again. Leaving her place at the counter, she went out to the parking lot to take the call.
“What?”
“What?” Paul repeated. “Not even hello? Not even good morning? Why didn’t you call me back?”
“April,” Ali said bluntly. “I believe her name is April.”
“My administrative assistant,” he said. “What about her?” He was cool, wonderfully cool.
“I hear she has plans to get married soon-to you,” Ali told him. “And then there’s Charmaine as well-something about your skinny-dipping with Charmaine. Tell her she’s fired by the way. I don’t think I want to have anything more to do with her.”
Paul paused but only for a moment before going on the counterattack. “Who’ve you been talking to?” he wanted to know. “What kind of nonsense is this?”
“It doesn’t matter who my unnamed sources are,” she returned. “And it’s not nonsense.”
“I asked you to talk to that attorney of yours-Marvella or something like that. Did you do it?”
“Marcella,” Ali corrected. “And, yes, I talked to her all right. She told me that you’d made some pointed suggestions to one of her firm’s managing partners about what kind of good things they could expect if they convinced me to drop my wrongful dismissal case. But I’m not dropping it, Paul, and they’re not dropping me, either. If the old guys at the station get to stay on the news desk, then the old girls should get to stay on as well. What’s fair is fair. Now let’s talk about April and Charmaine.”
“Come on, Ali,” Paul returned. “Forget them. They’re not important. Those women mean less than nothing to me. You should know that by now.”
“Actually,” Ali returned, “I don’t know anything of the kind. “‘Those women’ as you call them may not mean anything to you, but they do to me. What they’re saying is that it’s over between us, Paul. Totally and completely over. I’ll be consulting a divorce attorney later on today-a lady who’s associated with Marcella’s firm. Her last name is Myerhoff; first name is Helga. You may have heard of her.”
There was a pause. Helga Myerhoff’s name packed some weight in certain circles. Ali knew beyond a doubt that Helga had handled divorce proceedings against more than one of Paul’s philandering pals.
“Ali Bunny…” he began.
“Don’t call me that!” she snapped.
“Ali, be reasonable. We can fix this. Or if we can’t we can do this amicably. There’s no need to…”
“I don’t want to fix it,” she interrupted. “And I’ve no intention of being amicable. The way you work, I’m quite certain that wouldn’t be in my best interests.”
Much to Ali’s surprise, she remained amazingly dispassionate. She should have been in tears. She should have been devastated. But there was part of her that felt nothing but relief.
“Look, Paul,” she said. “It’s clear that our marriage has been on its way out for some time now. Maybe I was too busy to pay attention and figure out what was really going on. But I’m not too busy now, because, as you may have noticed, I’ve recently lost my job. That means I have the luxury of paying attention and I’m not liking what I’m finding-April and Charmaine included.
“And don’t hassle me about not returning phone calls. You didn’t return mine over the weekend until you were damned good and ready. Was April off with you wherever you were? Or was it Charmaine, since she didn’t bother to come to work on Monday? Is that why you didn’t call me back?”
“Be reasonable,” Paul insisted. “I’m sure we can get to the bottom of all this.”
“Get to the bottom of what?” she demanded. “The fact that you’ve been going around with your pants unzipped and screwing everything in sight?”
Paul sighed. The sigh was supposed to mean that she was being unreasonable. And demanding. “Just tell me when you’ll be home,” he said.
“You’re not listening to me,” she returned coldly. “I won’t be coming home. My friend Reenie is dead. I came to Sedona to be with her family and with mine. I plan on staying as long as I want to.”
“But what about…”
“You have April and Charmaine,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”
Chapter 6
Ali had hung up the phone and was about to step back inside, when the blaring headline in a newspaper vending machine for the Flagstaff Daily Sentinel caught her eye: LOCAL WOMAN DIES IN SNOWY CRASH. Searching through her coat pocket she came up with enough change to purchase a copy.
The Coconino County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the death of Misty Irene Bernard, age forty-five, Executive Director of the Flagstaff YWCA, who died over the weekend when her Yukon plunged off Schnebly Hill Road and rolled several hundred feet. Ms. Bernard, who was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident, was thrown from the vehicle.
Ms. Bernard was reported missing late Friday, twenty-four hours after she failed to return home from a doctor’s appointment in Scottsdale. Coconino County Sheriff’s Office investigators have been trying to trace her activities from the time she left Flagstaff on Thursday until her body was located near the wreckage of her vehicle on Monday.
Investigators tracing Ms. Bernard’s movements have so far been unable to determine why she would have attempted to drive the little traveled treacherous route between Flagstaff and Sedona during a snowstorm so severe that it forced brief nighttime
closures on both I-40 and I-17.
People close to the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity suggested that, after receiving a dire medical diagnosis, she may have committed suicide. Evidence of both drug and alcohol use were found at the scene, but toxicology reports won’t be available for several weeks. An autopsy is scheduled for sometime later this week.
Married to NAU history professor, Howard M. Bernard, the dead woman is survived by her two young children and her parents, longtime Cottonwood residents, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Holzer. Bernard, an NAU graduate, had worked for the YWCA for the past ten years and had served as executive director for the past five.
Funeral services are pending.
Ali recognized the cold journalese of the article. It was impartial. It gave the facts. It said both too much and too little. It did nothing to capture the wonderful resilient character Reenie Bernard had been. It did everything to dismiss her-turning her into a statistic by implying that she had died primarily because she had failed to fasten her seat belt-as if a plunge off Schnebly Hill Road were in any way survivable.
Offended, Ali hurried back into the restaurant. She almost ran into Chris who was on his way out, grinning and dangling a set of car keys in one hand.
“What gives?” she asked.
“Since you’re on your way to Flagstaff, Gramps is lending me his SUV so I can run a few errands,” Chris said. “I’ll see you later tonight, after we finish skiing.”
Ali was surprised. Her father had purchased the Bronco new in 1972. He had babied it along for more than thirty years and over 300,000 miles, and he hardly ever relinquished the keys to anyone else. “You must be pretty special,” she said. “Whatever you do don’t wreck it.”
Ali went inside and back to her spot next to Dave Holman. By then he had finished his breakfast and was in the process of pulling several dollar bills from his wallet. She dropped the newspaper in front of him.
“I don’t care what the newspaper says,” Ali told him, “I still don’t think she committed suicide.”
Dave shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just because something’s in the paper doesn’t make it true or false. You of all people should know that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
“Look,” he said. “You’re a journalist. I’m a police officer. That means most likely we’ll never be pals. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Sounds good to me,” she told him.
Leaving both his money and the bill on the counter, Dave got up and walked away. Edie Larson came back over to where her daughter was sitting. “More coffee?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” Ali said. “Are your customers always that obnoxious?”
“Which customers?”
“That one,” Ali said, pointing at Dave, who was getting into his vehicle outside.
“Dave? He’s a little surly on occasion,” Edie said. “His life hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses lately. Don’t take it personally. What about you? Are you all right? You look awfully pale.”
Ali had no desire to discuss the contents of her phone conversation with Paul. And she didn’t want to mention being chewed up and spit out by Dave Holman, either. Instead, Ali shoved the newspaper with its visible headline across the counter to her mother. Edie glanced at it and nodded.
“Oh, that,” she said. “I read it this morning while I was waiting for the rolls to rise.”
Ali stood up. “I’m going to head on up to Flag,” she said. “I want to see if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“You do that,” Edie said. “And be sure to let Howie and the kids know that we’re thinking about them.”
Back outside, Ali slipped off her coat. The sun was warming the chilly air, and the Cayenne’s heated seats-a laughable accessory in southern California-would keep her more than toasty. Standing there, next to the car, she looked at the mountains on the far side of Sedona. First came the layers of red rock formations standing out against the more distant green. But higher up, much closer to the rim, the landscape was still shaded white with snow. And there, snaking down the side of the mountain, as thin as a gossamer thread from a spider web, was the line that Ali knew to be Schnebly Hill Road. The place where Reenie had died.
Shivering, but not from cold, Ali climbed into the Cayenne and turned on the engine-and the heated seat. The she took her MP3 player out of her pocket and scrolled through the playlist.
She searched through the index until she found “Tell Me on a Sunday,” one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s less well-known shows, but one Ali had seen on the trip to London with her mother and Aunt Evie.
It had been a one-woman show-ninety solid minutes of music masterfully sung by a former BBC television news presenter turned actress-the irony of that similarity wasn’t lost on Ali now. Nor was the similarity in content. The play had consisted of a litany of songs, telling the story of one heartbreaking romantic breakup after another.
“And here’s another one,” Ali said aloud as she turned on the music and headed for Flagstaff. There was one song in particular that hit her hard when one of the character’s supposed friends shows up eager to spill the beans about her partner’s latest indiscretion, to which she responds, “I knew before.”
But I didn’t, Ali thought. She had assumed that she and Paul had both been working hard on their careers, building something together. With that erroneous assumption now laid to rest, Ali wondered how much else in her life was little more than a mirage-smoke and mirrors and special effects. Unfortunately, she and the lady singing the songs about dashed hopes and dreams had all too much in common.
To an outsider it might well seem as though she had made up her mind to call a divorce attorney too hastily in the overwrought and emotionally charged atmosphere of having just heard about April and Charmaine. In actual fact, Ali had been thinking about just such an eventuality for a very long time, and well before her trip to London, which was one of the reasons the musical had affected her so much when she first heard it on stage. And now that it was time for Ali, too, to take action, she was surprised to find herself clearheaded, calm, and focused. She would deal with Paul and with the station’s firing her all in good time, but for the moment she would do what she had said she would do-she would be there for Reenie’s family for as long as needed.
The route to Flagstaff up through Oak Creek Canyon was only twenty-nine miles long, but with road crews out in force sanding the icy spots, it took Ali over an hour to arrive at Reenie and Howard Bernard’s unremarkable ranch-style house on Kachina Trail. It was a newer house, with one of those towering front-entry facades that had little to do with the rest of the house and everything to do with needing to use a ladder whenever it was necessary to change the bulb in the porch light.
The last time Ali had been to Reenie’s house had been Christmas two years ago. Back then the entire yard had been covered with a layer of new fallen snow and the whole place had been festooned with strings of red and green chili-shaped Christmas lights. There had been lights and decorations everywhere, including a beautifully decked-out ten-foot-tall tree in the middle of the living room window.
Ali parked behind a bright red Lexus with Arizona plates. There was snow in the yard this time as well, but it was several days old and turning gray. Near the corner of the front porch an armless, featureless snowman had dwindled away to sad, shapeless lumps. His forlorn appearance seemed a harbinger of what Ali could expect once she entered the house.
She was making her way up the icy sidewalk when a snowball flew past her ear and smacked harmlessly into the trunk of a nearby tree. Following the snow-ball’s trajectory, she went around to the side of the house where she found nine-year-old Matt, bare-headed and in his shirt-sleeves, forming another snowball in red, cold-roughened hands.
“Truce,” she called when she saw him. “It’s not fair to hit someone who’s unarmed.”
Matt dropped the snow in his hands and came toward her. In the past, he would have thrown himself ent
husiastically into Ali’s arms. This time he approached her cautiously as if unsure of his welcome. He stopped several feet short of where Ali stood and observed her with a silent but penetrating look. “Did you hear about our Mom?” he asked.
Ali nodded. “Yes.” she said. “Yes, I did. Your Aunt Bree called me. That’s why I’m here.”
“What did she tell you?” he asked. Seeing the hurt in Matt’s eyes was almost more than Ali could stand. He was only nine-far too young to be carrying around this kind of heartbreak.
“She told me your mother died in a car wreck,” Ali said. “That the car she was driving went off Schnebly Hill Road in the middle of a snowstorm.”
“Dad said it was an accident,” Matt said after a pause. “But I read the newspaper. It said she probably killed herself. Do you think that’s true? Dad said she was sick-that she was starting to get sick-but she wouldn’t leave us like that, would she? I mean, if she killed herself, does that mean she didn’t love us anymore?”
Those were questions Ali could answer with absolute honesty. “I don’t think your mother would leave you on purpose, either,” Ali said. “She wasn’t like that. And of course she loved you, Matt. She loved you very much.”
“But if it isn’t true, how can the newspaper say it, then?” Matt asked.
By being irresponsible, Ali thought. “We have to let the investigators do their job,” she said. “So should the newspapers.”
“But what if Julie finds out?” Matt asked. “What if someone tells her?”
“I won’t,” Ali declared. “You don’t have to worry about me. I would never tell Julie anything of the kind.
Matt heaved a sigh of relief. He came to her then, leaning his small frame against her and letting Ali comfort him. He was cold, and his hands and feet were soaking wet. “You’re freezing,” she said. “We need to get you inside.”
“No,” Matt said. “Aunt Bree’s in there, braiding Julie’s hair. She’s not very good at it, and Julie keeps crying and crying. That’s how come I came outside-to get away. I didn’t want to listen anymore.”