by J. A. Jance
Bryan had barely driven away when Ali’s phone rang. “Liam didn’t take much of a nap,” Nelda Harris told her. “We’re on our way.”
Switching gears, Ali left the house and went straight back to the Sugarloaf. It was long enough after the lunch rush that the place wasn’t crowded. She corralled the corner booth—the one that offered the most privacy—and asked her mother for a high chair.
“Whose baby?” Edie Larson asked.
Ali wasn’t eager to go into detail. “A friend’s” was all she said.
Nelda arrived a few minutes later. She walked through the restaurant with Liam following behind. He carried a miniature truck in each hand and grinned happily when he saw Ali.
Nelda nixed the high chair in favor of a booster seat and then hefted Liam into that. “He gets in less trouble if he has a truck in each hand,” she observed.
Ali’s mother followed them to the table, bringing along the one-page children’s menu and a pack of four Crayolas. When she returned a few minutes later, she beamed at Liam, who was busily coloring, and handed Nelda a package of oyster crackers. “What’s Mr. Handsome here having today?” she asked. He looked back at her with his wide-eyed killer smile.
For lunch, Nelda asked to share a grilled cheese with the baby. Ali, still full from breakfast, ordered nothing but coffee. As Edie pocketed her order pad, she gave Liam an affectionate pat on the head. “This kid is cute as a button,” she said. “I’ll bet he takes after his daddy.” As Edie walked away, she didn’t glimpse the dismay that flashed across Nelda’s face at the well-meaning remark. Ali did and knew that her mother had stepped in it. So that’s it, she thought. Something to do with the father. Some kid knocked Haley up and then declined to do the right thing.
Since Edie had already broached the subject, Ali went ahead and followed up. “I suppose this is the same old story,” she said. “The boy gets off scot-free, and the girl is left holding the bag and the B-A-B-Y.” Ali didn’t know exactly how old Liam was or how much he’d be able to understand. Spelling some of the critical words seemed like a good thing.
For a moment, rather than replying, Nelda busied herself with doling out a few of the oyster crackers to Liam. “It wasn’t quite like that,” she said at last. “It was actually a lot worse. Do you remember what I asked you about this morning?”
“You mean about good and evil?”
Nelda nodded. “I think most people believe that good comes from good and evil comes from evil, but that’s not necessarily true. My husband, Liam, was one of the nicest people who ever lived. And I consider myself a good person, too, but our daughter, Patsy, was pure evil. Still is pure evil. And yet Haley is her daughter. And Liam here is her grandson.”
Liam took that as a cue to toss a handful of crackers over his head. And when his grandmother—his great-grandmother, Ali realized—chided him about it, he gave her a grin punctuated by tiny white teeth. Shaking her head, Nelda gathered up the crackers and gave him the menu and the Crayolas.
Ali sensed that this was the reason Nelda Harris had driven here—to tell Haley’s story, whatever it might be. Now, though, with Nelda seeming to have second thoughts, Ali realized that it must be worse than a teenage affair gone bad. It must be a case of rape, Ali theorized. She knew from her years in the news business how difficult it could be for rape victims and their families to discuss such things.
“What happened?” Ali asked gently.
Nelda bit her lip. “She was a problem from the day she was born,” she said at last. “We tried to love her, but it wasn’t easy. She was a colicky, cranky baby who never slept. And once she got to school, she was a biter and a fighter. By the time Patsy was a teenager, she was completely out of control.”
When Nelda first started speaking, Ali had thought she was referring to Haley. It wasn’t until that last sentence that Ali understood Nelda was talking about her own daughter rather than Haley, her granddaughter.
“Patsy dropped out of high school her sophomore year,” Nelda continued. “Nothing we said made any difference. As far as she was concerned, she had learned everything there was to learn. Besides, she had taken up with an older guy—a married older guy, a long-haul truck driver named Wally Marsh. Patsy had two abortions before she was twenty. By then Wally had divorced his wife. He and Patsy got married, and the next thing we knew, Haley arrived on the scene.”
There was a short pause in the narrative while Edie delivered Nelda’s grilled cheese and poured more coffee. Nelda cut half the sandwich into pieces and then passed those to Liam, who stopped coloring long enough to mow through them.
“I knew before Patsy ever delivered that she’d be a terrible mother, and she was. She had this strange idea that as soon as she had the baby, Wally was going to straighten up and fly right. He didn’t.”
“Yes,” Ali said. “As my father likes to say, once a cheat, always a cheat.”
“And now Patsy was stuck at home with a baby while Wally was right back to doing his cheating with someone else. So Patsy came up with this harebrained idea of going to school and becoming a truck driver, too. I’m sure she figured that once she was out on the road with Wally, it would be that much easier to keep an eye on him. She came to me and asked me if I’d look after Haley so she could get her license.
“Liam and I talked it over. We knew what kind of a person she was—mean and vindictive. Liam said that if she ever got mad at us, she’d take Haley away and we’d never see her again. We told Patsy that the only way we’d look after Haley was if she made it official—if she and Wally signed over their parental rights to us. We told her they could have visitation privileges, but they needed to make us Haley’s official guardians. And that’s what happened. They both signed the paperwork, and then off they went while we set about raising Haley.”
“From what I see, you did a good job of it,” Ali said.
Nelda nodded. “We still had the farm then. Patsy always hated living there, but Haley loved it. She worshipped her grandpa—followed him everywhere, rode on the tractor with him. And when he got sick, she sat with him for hours on end. Just sat with him, telling him stories that she made up on the spot.” A tear appeared in the corner of Nelda’s eye. She brushed it away with the back of her hand.
Liam peered at her with a look of concern. “Owee?” he asked.
“No, honey,” she said. “Grandma’s fine. Just eat your sandwich.” As he returned his attention to the food, Nelda returned to her story. “At first Patsy and Wally came to visit every month or so, but then their visits started getting farther and farther apart. By the fourth year, they came for Haley’s birthday and for Christmas, and that was it. But it didn’t matter, not really. By the time she was five, she barely knew them. Liam and I were her parents, the only ones who mattered.
“But we started hearing rumors about Patsy and Wally—that things were going haywire with them. Tuttle’s a small town. Wally’s first wife still lived there with his two sons. First we heard that Patsy and Wally were having marital difficulties of some kind. The next thing we knew, Wally was shot dead at a truck stop near Dallas. It turned out that they had been doing land-office business, hauling drugs along with their other cargo. Wally had been ready to settle down and buy a farm somewhere. He bought the farm all right. Patsy and her new boyfriend, Roger Sims, saw to it. All the ugly drug dealing came to light during the trial, and Patsy and Roger both got sent up twenty-years to life for second-degree murder.
“The whole thing nearly killed poor Grandpa,” Nelda continued after a pause. “He wanted to pull up stakes, sell out, and move somewhere else, somewhere far away. We came here looking for a place to move. We went to Prescott for the Fourth of July rodeo and even up to Jerome because he wanted to see a ghost town. But he loved Cottonwood. We both did, and we were thinking about coming here to live when he got sick. Lung cancer. I knew as soon as we got the diagnosis that moving away wasn’t an option. Besides, as I told him at the time, what Patsy did or didn’t do was no reflection on us, and the
people who thought it was weren’t worth bothering with anyway.”
Ali was struggling to keep track of this long, convoluted story while wondering how any of it could have contributed to Haley’s turning down the scholarship.
“So for a long time, we just tried to keep going. Liam was getting sicker and sicker. It was all I could do to take care of him and Haley and look after the farm, too. Unlike her mother, Haley was good as gold—sweet and loving—and a huge help. When we lost Liam, she was only twelve, but she took care of me more than I took care of her. I don’t know how I would have made it if she hadn’t been there.” Nelda sighed. “I don’t know how other people deal with having a child in prison. The way I did it was I pretty much put Patsy out of my mind. I guess I sort of thought they put people in prison to be punished and learn their lessons so they won’t make the same kinds of mistakes again. When they come out, they’re supposed to be rehabilitated, right? And then two years after Liam died, the year Haley turned fourteen, who should turn up on my doorstep but Patsy. They had let her out on good behavior. And because she was so needy and because she was my child and because I’m a good person, I let her come home.”
“Except she wasn’t rehabilitated,” Ali suggested quietly.
“No,” Nelda agreed sadly. “She wasn’t.”
“Drugs?” Ali asked.
Nelda nodded. “Lots of drugs. She was using them and selling them right there in my house. In my own house. How could I have been so stupid? How could I not have known? Of course, Patsy was never that smart. And when she ran short of money, she paid off her dealer with the only other thing of value she had—Haley.”
Ali was dumbfounded. “No.”
“Yes,” Nelda said. “It was late November. I was trying to get ready for the holidays. A friend of mine and I drove up to Oklahoma City to go shopping. Haley was supposed to go with us, but for some reason she wasn’t feeling that well. She was in bed, asleep, when this big guy came waltzing into her room and told her she was his for the day because her mother owed him money. That’s how it happened.”
“Haley was raped?”
Nelda nodded and whispered as if hoping Liam wouldn’t hear. “I came home and found her in bed, bleeding and terrified.”
“Where was her mother?”
“Patsy took off. It’s a good thing, too. If I could have found her, I would have plugged her on the spot. I took Liam’s old forty-five out of his desk drawer and put it in my apron in case she came home. Then I called the cops. And then we had to go through that whole awful rigmarole—the hospital, the testing, the interviews, the photographs. Haley was only fourteen, fourteen and a half.”
Ali did the math. Haley would have been fifteen when her baby was born, and she was seventeen now. That meant little Liam was slightly past two.
Nelda dissolved into tears. While Liam patted his grandmother’s arm consolingly, Ali looked around the room. Other than their table, the Sugarloaf was empty. Jan Howard was gone. Edie and Bob Larson were evidently hiding out in the kitchen.
Nelda smiled at Liam through her tears while Ali wondered how much of the brutal story was soaking into Liam’s agile little brain.
“What happened then?” Ali asked.
“They arrested Patsy and charged her with rape. She tried to get off by turning state’s evidence, but that didn’t work. They arrested the guy, too. He was a repeat offender, and they’re both in prison now. He’s not supposed to get out for the next forty years. Patsy’s sentence is added on to what’s left of her other one. She won’t ever get out.”
“Then Haley turned up pregnant.”
Nelda nodded. “At the time, nobody told us about the morning-after pill. They probably should have, but they didn’t, and we didn’t know to ask. When we realized she was pregnant, I tried to talk her into having an abortion, but she wouldn’t. She told me it was against her religion, and that’s reason enough not to have one. But that’s also when I decided to sell out and move away. Yes, I know, I had told Liam that what those people thought or said didn’t matter, but when it came to Haley and the baby, I didn’t want them to have to put up with all that crap. We sold the farm, auctioned everything, and came here. There wasn’t much money. We had mortgaged everything to the hilt while Liam was sick. Fortunately, I was able to get work once we got here. It’s the perfect job, actually, since I work when Haley’s in school, and she works at Target when I’m home on the weekends.” Nelda glanced at her watch. “Speaking of which, I’m going to have to go soon or I’ll be late for work.”
“What about the scholarship?” Ali asked.
“I know how smart Haley is, and I want her to go on to school, but she won’t hear of it,” Nelda said. “She thinks that after all the years of looking after first her, then her grandfather, and now little Liam, it’s time for me to have some time off.”
Ali nodded. “That’s pretty much what she told me. That she wanted to move out and live on her own. She’s already got a job lined up.”
“I know about the job,” Nelda said. “At Target, but I want her to do better than that. Look what happened to me. I don’t have any education, either. That’s why I’m stuck working as a janitor. It was the best job I could get, and I’m glad to have it—at least I have some benefits. But I don’t want her to hit my age and be stuck in the same kind of rut. I know you said she’s only one of the candidates—one of the finalists—for that scholarship. I hope you’ll think about giving it to her and helping me talk her into taking it. I don’t want her to end up like me.”
Ali reached across the table and took the older woman’s hand. “Scholarship or not,” she said, “Haley Marsh could do a lot worse than being just like you.”
“What in the world was that all about?” Edie wanted to know after Nelda and Liam had driven away and Edie was sweeping up leftover oyster crackers.
“She’s the grandmother of one of my scholarship candidates,” Ali said.
“My goodness,” Edie said. “A senior in high school who already has a baby that old? Are you sure that’s the kind of person you’d want to be one of your recipients?”
“Yes,” Ali said after a moment’s reflection. “I’m pretty sure she is.”
Still overwhelmed by the sheer weight of Nelda Harris’s story, Ali left the restaurant with only a few minutes to spare. At the stroke of three, she pulled up in front of Marissa Dvorak’s modest home in one of Sedona’s least fashionable neighborhoods. A homemade wooden wheelchair ramp wound back and forth from the front gate to the side of the large front porch, where a dark-haired girl in a wheelchair sat waiting. She waved shyly as Ali exited the Cayenne.
“Ms. Reynolds?” she asked.
“Yes,” Ali answered. “Alison Reynolds.”
When Marissa held out her hand in greeting, Ali saw that the fingers were bent at a severe angle. The skin on her wide face was pulled taut across features distended by steroids, but her smile was utterly sincere, and her excitement was only barely under control.
“When Mr. Brooks called to set up this appointment, I went online and did some checking on you,” Marissa said. “I think I know what this is about.”
“And what would that be?” Ali asked.
“An Askins Scholarship, maybe?” Marissa asked hopefully.
Since Haley had already turned down the scholarship, Marissa should have been the last finalist. Had it not been for Nelda Harris’s emotional plea, Marissa would have been the hands-down winner. Now Ali wasn’t so sure. “How about if we go inside and talk this over?” she suggested.
The subsequent interview couldn’t have been more different from the one with Haley Marsh. Marissa was thrilled beyond measure. She was eager to go on to college. She already had a letter of acceptance from the University of Arizona and had banked several advanced-placement classes, but with two younger children at home—also adopted—Marissa and her family had been worried that her going to college could only come with a huge burden of student loans.
Partway through the interv
iew, Ali made up her mind. Haley Marsh was conflicted. Yes, she was certainly deserving and had been victimized by dreadful circumstances, but was it reasonable to attempt to push her into accepting a scholarship she didn’t really want? And even if coercion worked, was it fair to herd her into going to college against her own wishes? On the other hand, Marissa Dvorak was an equally deserving young woman, one who was thrilled at the prospect of receiving a scholarship. She already knew where she wanted to go and would be happy to accept some help in getting there.
“You mean you can just say so?” Marissa asked when Ali told her the scholarship was hers. “You can decide just like that?”
“Actually, I can,” Ali said. “Of the three finalists, you’re the most viable. If it’s all right with you, we’ll make the official announcement in a press release sometime in the next week or so. In the meantime, you’re welcome to let people know, especially your parents.”
“They’re not going to believe it.”
“You’re a remarkable young woman,” Ali said. “I think they will.”
Ali went on to tell Marissa about the terms of the scholarship—how much she would get and the GPA she’d need to maintain to receive it in subsequent years. When Ali left the house at four-thirty, she felt a real sense of relief and accomplishment. Months earlier, when Arabella Ashcroft had first broached the subject of Ali taking over the administration chores on the Askins Scholarship, Ali had been reluctant. Now, having seen firsthand the tremendous difference the award would make in smoothing the road for Marissa, Ali felt thankful to be involved.
As late as it was, Ali went straight home to Andante Drive, where she was astonished to find Leland Brooks’s Mazda pickup still parked there. Several scatter rugs, freshly laundered and hung out to dry, decorated the rail on the front porch. From inside, she heard the wail of a vacuum cleaner. She opened the door and found the furniture pushed to one side of the room while Leland vacuumed where it had once stood. When she shut the front door, he turned off the noisy machine and faced her.