by J. A. Jance
“Ali,” Crystal said, peering through the crack. “Dad’s not here. He got called out on a case.”
Ali didn’t bother asking what case. She already knew. Well into the first forty-eight hours after Morgan Forester’s homicide, there could be little doubt that the officers charged with solving her murder—Detective Dave Holman especially—would be working pretty much round-the-clock.
“I’m not here to see your father,” Ali announced. “I come bearing gifts. My mother baked a pie for your dad and you. I’m here to drop it off.”
“A pie?” Crystal asked, undoing the chain and opening the door the rest of the way. “From the Sugarloaf?”
“Absolutely.”
“Can we eat it?” Crystal asked eagerly. “Or do we have to wait until Dad gets home?”
“I don’t see your father’s name on it,” Ali said. “Just don’t eat it all.” She waved at Cassie, Dave’s younger daughter, who had appeared beyond her older sister’s shoulder and was hovering in the background.
“Do you want to come in for a while?” Crystal asked.
“No, thanks,” Ali said. “I appreciate the invitation, but I need to get home, and you and Cassie should probably go to bed.”
“I know, I know,” Crystal grumbled. “It’s a school night.”
A few months earlier, Crystal had been in full-bloom adolescent rebellion. The idea that she was concerned about getting to bed at a decent hour on a school night struck Ali as remarkable progress.
“Right,” Ali said. “A school night.”
She was happy to leave it at that.
Back home on Andante Drive, Ali was sitting with Sam purring in her lap, and still thinking about her mother’s performance, when Christopher arrived home. He looked unhappy.
“Nice party,” Ali said.
Chris gave his mother a disparaging look. “Thanks,” he said. “But Athena’s all bent out of shape about it.”
“She is? How come?”
“Because Grandma managed to turn it into a circus,” Chris said.
She did, Ali thought. And I was right to be worried.
“It was supposed to be this casual, fun time with our friends,” Chris continued. “By the time Grandma finished her baking spree, it turned into something else entirely. Athena didn’t make a fuss about it at the time, but she’s worried that Grandma will try to hijack our wedding into some kind of huge event. That’s not us, Mom. It’s not what Athena and I want.”
“What do you want?” Ali asked.
“Something small,” he said. “Something private and nice.”
Ali had suspected as much. “Here’s the deal,” she explained. “Back when Mom and Dad got married, times were tough, and they couldn’t afford much of a wedding. There were the two of them, Aunt Evie and her then-boyfriend, and a justice of the peace. That was it—the five of them. I’m afraid Mom has been trying to make up for that deficit ever since. It’s a total blind spot for her. I doubt she even realizes she’s doing it. When your father and I got married, she tried to pull the same stunt with us. If I’d let her have her way, our wedding would have been an out-of-control extravaganza.”
“But you stopped it?”
Ali nodded.
“How?”
“By putting my foot down and taking control,” Ali told him. “You and Athena will have to do the same thing. Tell your grandmother no and mean it.”
“But how can you stop something when you don’t even see it coming?” Chris asked. “By the time we got to the gym tonight, the food was already there. Mountains of it.”
Ali understood far better than Chris that food was the coin of her mother’s realm. That was how Edie dealt with the vicissitudes of life, with both the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies. Arriving babies or returning soldiers were greeted with cakes and cookies and immense bread puddings. Hospital stays called for soups or casseroles. Rounds of chemo meant plenty of mashed potatoes and bowls filled with red Jell-O. Deaths and funerals brought back the soup/casserole theme.
“Try turning it into a chess game,” Ali advised her son. “You win at chess by anticipating what your opponent is going to do several moves in advance. You’ll need to learn to anticipate what your grandmother is going to do as well, then you’ll have to come up with suitable countermeasures.”
“Easier said than done,” Chris grumbled.
“Don’t be so grumpy about it,” Ali said. “After all, that’s what you get for being the apple of your grandmother’s eye. You and Athena will have to sit Mom and Dad down and have a serious talk with them, but in order to make it stick, you’ll have to present a united front, diplomatic but absolutely firm. By the way, Athena was exceedingly diplomatic tonight,” she added. “She came in with her bags of groceries, but as soon as she saw what Mom had brought, she deep-sixed the grocery bags. I never heard her say a cross word.”
“There were plenty of cross words for me,” Chris complained. “As far as Athena was concerned, the whole engagement-party extravaganza was my fault.”
“Dealing with difficult relatives is one of the hazards of getting married,” Ali said. “And your grandmother isn’t the only one who’ll pull that kind of stunt. It turns out I’m putting together a little extravaganza of my own.”
Chris rolled his eyes. “What kind?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Don’t tell me you’re cooking.”
“Be nice,” she told him. “But don’t worry. Leland will be supervising the cooking, if not doing most of it himself. So this is my official notice that you and Athena are invited, as long as you don’t have any other plans.”
“Okay,” Chris said. “Sounds good. We’ll be there.”
“Wrong,” Ali said with a laugh. “We’re talking Rules of Engagement 101 here, Chris. Don’t fall into the old trap of making unilateral holiday decisions. If you want to be happily engaged and end up happily married, you won’t accept any invitations without first consulting your significant other.”
“You mean I should ask Athena and then let you know?”
“Exactly,” Ali said. “If you know what’s good for you.”
“If she’s even speaking to me,” Chris added gloomily. He went off to bed then, leaving Ali absently petting Sam and reflecting on the conversation.
Where do I get off dishing out marital advice to anyone? she wondered. When it comes to being married, my own track record isn’t much to write home about. For instance, when she had told Chris he needed to put his foot down about his grandmother hijacking the wedding plans, it had been a case of “do as I say” rather than “do as I do.” Or did. Back when she and Chris’s father had been in a similar situation, Ali hadn’t exactly confronted the problem head-on. Instead, once the wedding arrangements had threatened to careen out of control, she and Dean had taken the path of least resistance and eloped to Vegas. No fuss; no muss. Edie had been furious, but despite the instant wedding, Ali and Dean had been a match made in heaven—right up until his death from cancer a few short years later.
Ali’s much later wedding to Paul Grayson had been far more to Edie’s liking. It had been a splashy Beverly Hills social event even in a milieu where outsize weddings were the order of the day. Edie and Bob Larson, a little out of their depth, had sat proudly in front-row seats when Paul, dressed in an impeccable tux, had stood in front of several hundred other invited guests and had solemnly vowed to love, honor, and obey.
In spite of all the lavish arrangements, Ali had learned, to her regret, that it had all been for show. Paul hadn’t meant a word of what he’d said, and he’d made a mockery of his wedding vows. In the dark of the night, sitting there alone with her aging, scruffy cat, Ali couldn’t help feeling a small chill tingle her spine as she realized Morgan Forester had done the same thing. She, too, had made marital promises that she had been unwilling or unable to keep. And now the young wife and mother was every bit as dead as Paul Grayson.
Ali went to bed a short time after that, but it took hour
s before she fell asleep. Awakening the next morning to the sound of Chris’s car pulling out of the driveway, she wandered out to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.
While she had been lying awake, she’d kept going back to Morgan Forester’s involvement with the Internet dating site Singleatheart.com. What had compelled a supposedly happily married woman to sign up for something like that? And what kind of people had she hoped to meet there?
Other cheaters, no doubt, Ali thought. Other people whose word couldn’t be trusted. So why had Morgan thought one of them would have more to offer than her hardworking husband, Bryan?
Without necessarily making a conscious decision, Ali retrieved her computer and dragged it over to the dining room table. Within a matter of minutes, she had surfed over to the Singleatheart website. At least she had arrived at the welcome page. In order to see more than that, she would have to register. To simply surf through the site or post a profile would cost a hundred dollars. To make a connection with one of the profiled parties was an additional four hundred.
Ali hesitated. She had no interest in posting a profile, but she wanted to know more about the people who had. She waffled briefly, but before long, her natural curiosity won out. In order to register, she had to provide both her name and a screen name. Fortunately, Babe, her Cutloose handle, worked very nicely. Her names, along with a working credit-card number and billing address, allowed her to log on.
Her browser was set to limit pop-up ads, but once Ali was inside Singleatheart, her computer screen was immediately besieged by a cascade of competing images. Unremittingly explicit sexual scenes sprang to life on either side of her screen. As a news broadcaster, Ali had done two separate news stories related to commercial porn sites. She had expected a dating site to be somewhat less graphic, but it wasn’t. There were ads for sex toys that came in more varieties, shapes, colors, and sizes than she ever could have imagined. The lingerie for sale was outrageous, and the ads promoting it were even more so. This was a long, long way from eHarmony!
The middle of the screen contained an old-fashioned Mercator projection of the world with an arrow and a guide that advised visitors to click on a particular location in order to narrow their search. By the time she landed on the map for Arizona, she was told that the section contained 2,364 profiles. That many? she thought. Just in Arizona?
Ali whistled aloud. At a hundred or five hundred bucks a pop? You didn’t have to be a math whiz to realize that Singleatheart meant big business. Even if you disregarded the lower-priced subscribers who were website visitors only, the people who ran Singleatheart were raking in piles of Internet dough.
Ali poured herself another cup of coffee and prepared for what she thought would be a long search, but she found what she was looking for almost immediately among the list of Arizona-based female profiles: the screen name Morgan le Fay.
From Camelot, Ali thought, drawing on her knowledge of Aunt Evie’s extensive collection of musical comedies. Like the fairy princess who caused all the trouble by packing off Merlin.
It took some time for her air card to download the profile, which consisted of several paragraphs of printed bio-style material along with a video clip. When that one finally opened, Ali saw a young woman sitting in a wooden swing, probably on the very porch where Morgan Forester had been murdered. She was a blond beauty with fine features, a winning smile, and an air of absolute innocence. Had Ali not heard what Billy Barnes had told Dave Holman about Morgan, Ali might have believed that look. Instead, she hit the play button, and the taped image of Morgan Forester began to speak:
“My grandmother loved records. Not CDs, but the old-fashioned black vinyl ones that played on phonographs. One of her favorites—one she listened to when she was washing dishes or doing the ironing—was done by a woman named Peggy Lee. I came into the house one time and found my grandmother sitting on the sofa crying with a record playing in the background. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me, ‘Oh, honey, it’s just so sad.’ ‘What’s so sad?’ I asked her. ‘This lady and her song,’ she said. ‘She’s singing about her life.’
“I loved my grandmother to pieces. It worried me that something could make her that upset, so I made it my business to find out which song it was that bothered her so much. ‘Is That All There Is?’ Eventually, my grandmother divorced my grandfather and came to live with us. She brought her records with her. I still have that one by Peggy Lee, and now I understand it. Too well. I’m living that same kind of life.
“If you asked any of my friends, they’d be surprised. They all think I have the perfect life, and maybe I do. I have a nice house, a nice car, good kids, and a nice husband, but it seems like nice is not enough. I keep asking myself the same question: Is this all there is?
“My husband and I started dating while we were still in high school. From the time I first knew him, he dreamed of having his own business. At first he worked construction for other people. When he was able to go off on his own, we both thought his dream—our dream—had come true. Now that he’s successful, it’s more like a nightmare. That’s all he thinks about all day long—his business. He lives, eats, and breathes his job. Yes, I’ll admit he brings in good money, but what good is money if we never do anything together or if we never have any fun?
“As far as I can see, I’m nothing more to him than a live-in cook and babysitter. Don’t get me wrong. I love my two girls. And I guess I even still love him a little. But I’m looking for something more. I want someone who will look at me and value me for the person I am. Someone who will see that I’m more than an attractive doormat in a very nice house. I don’t want to go to my grave still asking Peggy Lee’s old question, because I believe with all my heart that there is something more out there for me. Something better.”
For a long time after the clip ended, Ali sat staring at Morgan Forester’s features, slightly distorted but frozen in place on the computer screen. The whole thing left Ali feeling incredibly sad. The vital and attractive young woman who had filmed that clip was no more. The life she’d had—with her boring but hardworking husband and challenging seven-year-old daughters—really was all there was or ever would be, just like in the song. It sounded like Morgan had fallen out of love with her husband and was looking for more than a quick roll in the hay. But then she could be lying about that, too, Ali thought.
Whatever Morgan had wanted, or however much she had cheated on her husband, it seemed clear that she had cheated herself even more. Her craving for temporary excitement had robbed her of a lifetime of joy—of watching her children grow up and become adults themselves; of watching them marry and have children of their own. The real tragedy of Morgan Forester’s life was that she had missed it.
How could a few tawdry sexual encounters have been worth all that? Ali wondered, although Morgan couldn’t have known that she was putting her entire existence at risk.
When Ali had watched the tape of Dave’s interview with Billy Barnes, it had struck her as odd that Billy would have such intimate knowledge about Bryan and Morgan Forester’s private lives. Some men might go around pounding each other on the back and bragging about their various sexual exploits, but Ali couldn’t see Bryan admitting to anyone—especially one of his employees—that his marriage was going south and that his wife was screwing around on him. If Bryan hadn’t admitted any of that to Billy, how did Billy know so much? And why was the man so outspoken in his antipathy toward his boss’s dead wife? And why had he taken it all so personally?
Ali had been about to exit the website. Now, though, working on a hunch, she clicked back to the navigation page and pulled up the list of Arizona would-be bachelors, the men who were stalking the Internet in hopes of hooking up with like-minded women, sexual partners who were willing to play around with no strings attached.
This time the search took slightly longer, but as soon as she saw the screen name Billy Boy, she knew she was on the right track. After a few more clicks, there he was—Billy Barnes himself. His run-
of-the-mill profile contained no film clip, just a still photo and a laudatory bio that made Billy sound like a well-to-do contractor in his own right rather than a guy working for someone else. Ali also remembered noticing that Billy wore a wedding ring, but that was hardly a surprise. After all, this site was a place for people who were single at heart as opposed to being single really.
Was it possible that Morgan and Billy had hooked up and had a fling? If so, it would have been a stunning double betrayal—an unfaithful wife deliberately carrying on an affair with a man who was both her husband’s friend and his employee. If it had happened, and if Bryan had somehow caught wind of it, would that—along with the missing cabinet deposits—have been enough to push him over the edge and set off a murderous rage?
But did it really happen? Ali wondered. Am I leaping to conclusions here?
The fact that both Billy and Morgan were members of Singleatheart didn’t necessarily mean that they’d been involved. But still, it was possible, and it meant that if nothing else, Billy knew about Morgan’s posting.
I know, Ali told herself. When I get to the other house, maybe I’ll ask Billy Barnes about this outright and see what he has to say.
Just then, though, her phone rang.
“Good morning, madam,” Leland Brooks said. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but it seems you have an unexpected guest. Mr. Jackson is here.”
“Mr. Jackson,” Ali repeated. “As in Jacky Jackson, my agent?”
“I believe that is correct,” Leland said. “He evidently came into Phoenix on an early flight from L.A. and drove straight here to see you.”
“Without calling in advance?”
“So it would seem,” Leland replied with a sigh.
Ali knew that Leland Brooks held an exceptionally low opinion of people who failed to observe the niceties of polite behavior. In his book, showing up uninvited and unannounced at someone’s home was a serious faux pax. Social anathema was more like it.