by J. A. Jance
“Do you remember hearing anything about a tile delivery scheduled for today?” he asked.
Ali didn’t. What she did remember was spending what had seemed like weeks of her life narrowing her choices down to the particular kind of Italian limestone tile that was to be laid in all three baths.
“What about it?” Ali asked.
“A driver from Contract Transportation just called here looking for Mr. Forester. He’s bringing a load of tile up from Phoenix and is on his way to Manzanita Hills. He says he can’t unload it without having someone on hand to sign for the delivery. He’s currently unable to locate Mr. Forester.”
“Because Mr. Forester happens to be in jail at the moment,” Ali supplied.
“Yes,” Leland agreed. “I thought it best not to mention that. The driver told me that since your name is on the invoice, along with Mr. Forester’s, you can okay the delivery in his stead.”
“I can,” Ali agreed. “Unfortunately, I’m halfway to Cottonwood right now. What about you? Could you sign for it for me?”
“If that’s what you’d like, I’ll be happy to do so,” Leland said. “But I’ll have to drop off the carpet shampooer first. It’s due back before nine. The carpet is quite damp at the moment, so it’s just as well that I’ll be out of the house for a while. That’ll give it a chance to dry a bit. Is there anything else you need me to do?”
“Not right this minute, but I’ll need your help this afternoon. We should probably both plan on being back at Manzanita Hills later on today. Detective Holman told me that someone from the sheriff’s department will be executing a search warrant there, looking for incriminating evidence they believe Bryan Forester may have hidden somewhere on the property. We’ll need to be there to let them in.”
“Very well,” Leland said. “I have all the keys. I’m more than happy to handle that for you as well.”
“Thank you,” Ali said. She was incredibly grateful to have the unflappable Mr. Brooks backstopping her every move. “Depending on what happens in Cottonwood, I should be back in plenty of time for the search warrant.”
A few minutes later, when Ali stopped in front of Nelda Harris’s duplex, the woman herself hurtled through the front door and came rushing to meet her.
“We’re not having a good morning,” she said, gripping Ali’s hand. “Not at all. Thank you so much for coming.”
“Where is she?”
As Nelda led the way into the house, Ali’s ears were assaulted by the sound of wailing. Liam was clearly unhappy. “They’re both still in her room,” Nelda said, pointing toward a closed door. “She won’t come out.”
Ali went over to the door and tapped on it. When nothing happened, she tapped louder. “Haley?” she said. “It’s Ali Reynolds. I’m here with your grandmother. We need to talk.”
“Go away,” Haley said, raising her voice to be heard over Liam’s screeching. “I don’t want to see you, and I don’t want to talk.”
“What’s wrong with Liam?” Ali asked. “He sounds upset. Is he all right?”
“He’s tired. He needs a nap. He didn’t sleep last night, and neither did I. Now go away and leave us alone.”
Ali felt her heart constrict. She remembered those early years when Chris had been little and when everything to do with him had fallen on her shoulders. She’d had some help from babysitters during the day, but she also recalled those long sleepless nights when Chris had cried for hours on end and hadn’t cared at all that his weary mother needed to stagger off the next day to school where she’d had to fight to stay awake during class.
“Please come out, Haley,” Ali pleaded. “Let’s all talk about this. Your grandmother is here to help you, and so am I.”
There was a pause filled only by Liam’s plaintive wailing. At last the bedroom door inched open to reveal Haley standing there in a pair of sweats with her sobbing child perched on one hip. Without a word to Ali or her grandmother, Haley marched into the kitchen, filled a sippy cup with milk, and then went over to the couch. When she sat down, Liam reached for the cup.
“Help me with what?” Haley demanded as Liam settled back against her. “With him? Have a ball. Welcome to my stupid life. And you think we should talk? What’s there to discuss? I thought the two of you had it all figured out, that you’d decided everything about my future without bothering to consult me.”
As Liam drank from the cup, a sudden silence filled the room. He hiccupped a little and then handed the cup back to his mother. Exhausted, he leaned against her and stared up at her chin. Within a matter of moments, he fell fast asleep.
“Great!” Haley exclaimed. “Maybe I can sleep now, too.” She slammed the still-full cup down on the end table beside her, whacking the cup hard enough that a few drops of milk spurted out, but the noise wasn’t loud enough to disturb the sleeping baby. Without a word, Nelda picked up the cup and put it in the fridge, then went back over to the table and sponged up the spilled milk.
“So talk,” Haley muttered defiantly, staring at Ali. “Isn’t that what you came here to do—to tell me what a terrible mother I am and order me around?”
“I didn’t come here to tell you anything,” Ali said. “I came here to help. And believe me, I know how hard it is to think about going to school when you’ve been up all night with a fussy little one.”
“Sure you do,” Haley retorted. “Other kids get to go to football games and basketball games and dances. I get to come home, do homework, and take care of Liam. That’s it.”
“Once you go to work, it’ll be the same thing,” Ali pointed out. “You’ll go to work. You’ll come home. You’ll take care of your baby. How will that be different from what you’re doing now? And how would it be different if you were going to school instead of going to work?”
“I wouldn’t have to do homework, for one thing,” Haley said. “And I wouldn’t have to put up with all the other kids at school. You don’t have any idea what it’s like. Neither does Grandma. School is hell. The kids treat me like I’m some kind of freak because I have a baby. They’re all busy talking about what it’ll be like when they go off to school—what school it’ll be, what dorm they’ll live in, what clothes they’ll take along, who their roommates will be, stuff like that. As far as I know, none of the schools have dorms for girls with babies.”
That one exchange was enough for Ali to get it. Haley Marsh’s disinclination to go on to school or accept the scholarship had far less to do with ability or ambition than it did with her having been treated as a social outcast in high school. She had claimed she wanted to stop going to school and to get a job in order to give her grandmother a break. Maybe that was partially true, but it wasn’t the whole story. Haley wanted to give herself a break as well.
Meanwhile, Haley turned away and ducked her head, letting a screen of long blond hair obscure her face. Ali wondered what else the girl was hiding.
“High school is hell,” Ali agreed quietly. “There’s nothing as mean as high school girls when they turn on someone who doesn’t fit in.”
Ali paused, waiting for Haley to respond. She didn’t. Instead, she ducked her head even lower, but Ali caught sight of the single tear that rolled down Haley’s cheek and dripped onto her shirt. Ali saw it; Nelda didn’t. And in that moment, Ali understood something else about Haley Marsh. During the last two years, she had somehow managed to conceal her desperate social status from her caring and loving grandmother.
“The kids at school treat you like crap?” Ali asked.
Haley looked up and met Ali’s gaze. “Pretty much,” she admitted.
“College is different,” Ali said. “For one thing, not everyone is the same age. It’s a bigger pond with a lot more fish, so it doesn’t matter so much if you don’t fit in with one group, because there are plenty of others. And some of the people you meet there will already have kids. I did.”
“But you were married, weren’t you?” Haley asked. “That’s a lot different.”
“Not as different as you
might think,” Ali told her. “By the time my son was born, my husband had been dead for two months. He died of a brain tumor. Admittedly, I wasn’t a freshman at the time. I already had my B.A. and was working on my master’s, but still, going to school and looking after a baby was desperately hard. Going to high school with a baby must have been awful, and going to college would be tough. I won’t try to pretend otherwise.”
Haley nodded. “But at least you had a husband,” she said wistfully. “You weren’t doing it all alone.”
“You’re not alone, either,” Ali pointed out. “You have a grandmother who would do anything for you and has been doing it all along. You also have your son. Regardless of how Liam came into being, you chose to have him, didn’t you?”
There was a pause before Haley nodded.
“You could have had an abortion,” Ali added. “Under similar circumstances, I think many people would have, but you didn’t. Why not?”
“Because I don’t believe in abortion,” Haley said quietly. “It’s against my religion.”
“You also could have given him up for adoption,” Ali suggested. “But you didn’t do that, either, and why not? Because no matter what, he’s your baby, and you love him, all of which means that you really are a good mother.”
Haley ducked her head again, and another tear dribbled onto her shirt.
“But part of being a good mother is being good to yourself, Haley,” Ali continued. “I didn’t come here today to tell you what to do about going on to school or to beg you to accept a scholarship you don’t want, but I did come to tell you something important. Your grandmother came to me to see me yesterday for one reason and one reason only. She loves you. She wants you to have a chance to live up to your potential. And why does she want you to do that? Because she wants you to give your son a better life than her daughter—your mother—gave you. By being good to you, your grandmother is being good to herself.”
“You know about all that, then?” Haley asked. “About my mother? Grandma told you about what happened?”
“Yes,” Ali said with a nod. “She did. She also told me that you have Liam because you chose to have Liam. Having him and keeping him were the only possible decisions open to you, but you need to remember that was a choice, Haley, a conscious choice made by you and nobody else. I’d like you to feel empowered by that decision instead of feeling trapped by it. I don’t give a rat’s ass what the girls at Mingus Mountain think about you. What’s important is what you think about yourself.”
“But you still want me to go to college.”
“No one is telling you to do anything, but I am asking that you think about it—that you think about the kind of life you want to live with that little boy of yours. And when you make up your mind, let me know.”
Ali stood up and collected her purse. Haley didn’t move to accompany her; neither did Nelda. At the door, Ali turned back. “Regardless of what you decide, Haley, I want you to know that I think you’re a pretty remarkable human being. And so is your grandmother. Your bitchy classmates may not be impressed, but I am.”
Outside in the bright winter sunshine, Ali started her vehicle with the clear knowledge that if Haley changed her mind and accepted the scholarship offer, Ali had just committed to doing two scholarships as opposed to one.
And if that’s what happens, so be it, Ali thought. If I decide to do two, it’s entirely up to me.
Turning on her Bluetooth, Ali punched Leland Brooks’s number into her phone. When the call went directly to voice mail, she left him a message. “You must be busy. I’m on my way back from Cottonwood,” she said. “Just checking on that load of tile. Hope you got it signed for and unloaded. If you need anything, call me.”
She was still driving when her phone rang. This time, when she expected to hear Leland Brooks’s voice, the caller turned out to be B. Simpson. With the flip of a switch, Ali moved from Haley’s difficulties to her own.
“What are you doing up already?” she asked.
“Fortunately, I don’t need much sleep. What was keeping me awake was you.”
“Me?” Ali echoed. “How come?”
“I Googled you,” B. said. “And now I’ve got a question.”
Ali cringed. There were any number of things a Google search of Ali Reynolds might bring to light. “What’s that?” she asked.
“Who’s the big baseball nut in your family?”
Ali knew at once where that was going. Being teased about the “other” Allie Reynolds, a famed New York Yankees pitcher from the late forties and early fifties, was something that had plagued Ali for a very long time, from the moment she’d first married Dean. From even before she had married Dean.
“I’m a one-L one-I Ali,” she pointed out. “The other one happens to be a two-L and an IE Allie. Besides, Reynolds is a married name, not a maiden one, so even though my father does happen to be a baseball nut, his preferences had nothing to do with it.”
“I thought maybe it was your first husband—that he married you because he was a fan.”
“What else did you find out?” Ali asked.
“That you carry a gun,” B. said. “One of the articles I read, or maybe even a couple of them, mentioned something about that. Is that true?”
“Yes, it is,” Ali said. “I carry a Glock. I have a license to carry it, and I know how to use it, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. What if the guy who killed Morgan Forester is also our identity thief?”
That question was followed by a quiet intake of breath on B.’s part. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
Over the next few minutes, she brought him up to date with everything that had gone on over the course of the morning. In telling B. about the possible connection between Morgan’s killer and the Foresters’ destroyed computer files, Ali succeeded in convincing herself as well.
“If you’re right about this, the killer already knows way too much about you,” B. said when she’d finished. “And it probably is a good thing you’re armed and dangerous, but we have to bring Detective Holman in on all this.”
“We don’t have any real proof that the two bad guys are one and the same.”
“We don’t have any proof that they’re not,” B. insisted. “And if we even suspect that there’s a connection, we need to let him know.”
“All right,” Ali agreed. “I’ll call him as soon as I get off the phone with you. But what about those two thumb drives? I offered them to Dave, and he dissed them, assuming that Bryan had already gone through them and deleted whatever he didn’t want seen. But what are the chances that they’re also infected and something will overwrite all the files on the next computer someone uses to try accessing them? I was looking at Bryan’s files earlier, and there didn’t seem to be any problem, but…”
“Were you off-line at the time?”
“Yes.”
“I should probably take a look at both of those drives,” B. said. “If there’s a Trojan lurking in them, maybe I can disable it before it does any damage. Right now, though, I’m still working on that encryption problem. I think we’re getting close, and I don’t want to walk away from it. Could you maybe drop the thumb drives off here at the house?”
“Where is that?” Ali asked.
“The Village of Oak Creek,” he said. “Overlooking a golf course.”
“Which one?”
“The one by the Hilton.”
“Okay,” Ali said. “I’m on my way.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, right now.”
“So where are you?”
“Just coming into Sedona from Cottonwood. Why?”
“Do me a favor,” he said. “I’m famished. I haven’t taken the time to go have breakfast, and there’s no food here—plenty of coffee but no food.”
“What do you want?” Ali asked.
“One of your dad’s meatloaf sandwiches.”
“Done,” Ali said. “Meatloaf it is.”
CHAPTER 13
On his wa
y down from Sedona, Dave Holman had notified the Scottsdale police of his impending arrival and of the possible connection between their case and his. Driving to the address he’d been given in the far northern reaches of Scottsdale, Dave was surprised to find himself in a neighborhood of relatively modest tract homes that had been built years before far more affluent housing had grown up around them. The garage door of the house stood open, but the opening was strung with yellow crime-scene tape, and a pair of uniformed officers were stationed outside.
Led inside by one of the uniforms, Dave introduced himself to Scottsdale homicide detective Sean O’Brien and to Matthew Morrison’s widow.
“I still don’t understand why you won’t let me use my car,” a surprisingly poised and dry-eyed Jenny Morrison was saying. “After all, since Matthew died in his Toyota, I don’t see what any of it has to do with my Acura. How can I go about planning a funeral if I can’t even drive my car?”
An aggrieved widow rather than a grieving one, Dave thought. Someone who’s far more concerned about being able to drive her car than she is about finding out what happened to her husband.
“As I explained earlier,” Detective O’Brien said, “for right now, the entire garage is considered part of the crime scene until we have a chance to have our CSI team process it—”
“But there wasn’t any crime,” Jenny insisted. “I’m telling you, what happened to Matt has to be an accident. He would never commit suicide or do anything at all that would attract this kind of attention. Not on purpose. It’s totally out of character.”
“So what do you think happened?” Dave asked.
“Who the hell are you?” Jenny asked.
“Detective Holman,” Dave said, handing over his ID. “Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. We’re working on a related case. Now, getting back to your husband—”
Jenny shrugged impatiently. “He called me yesterday afternoon at work and left me a message. He said there’d been some kind of problem at work and that he would be late getting home. Once he got it straightened out, he must have had a drink or two with a colleague on his way home. He passed out in the car without ever turning off the engine.”