by Jance, J. A.
Sam had arrived in Ali’s life in what was supposedly a temporary fostering situation with no official papers of origin. Ali hadn’t particularly liked cats in the beginning, but Sam had grown on her. Their temporary situation had now stretched into years. Sam’s vet estimated her to be somewhere in her early teens, which meant she was verging on feline elderly. Her sixteen-pound body could no longer deliver the graceful leaps that had once carried her to the top of the running clothes dryer, her favorite snoozing perch during the day.
Leland Brooks’s concession to Sam’s diminished mobility was a kitchen step stool he placed next to the dryer, an aid which she deigned to use on occasion, but only when no one was looking. Ali had done her bit to solve Sam’s mobility difficulties by placing a set of pet steps next to the bed in her bedroom. That way Sam could make it on and off her favorite spot on the bed without having to suffer the indignity of being lifted up and down.
With Sam purring contentedly at her side, Ali checked her e-mail. There were more than a dozen lined up and waiting, but she chose to open only four.
The first one came from her mother:
Your father is acting like a kid. He bounces out of bed at the crack of dawn and doesn’t go to sleep until all hours. I can’t believe he’s the same man I’ve been married to for all these years.
I think he’s sad that today is our last full day on the ship. So am I, but I’m like an old dray horse, and I’m ready to get back in harness. See you tomorrow. There’s a chance we may be able to switch our reservation to an earlier flight.
Next up was an e-mail from someone named Robert Dahlgood with a subject line that said, “Velma Trimble.”
Years earlier when Ali had retreated to Sedona in the aftermath of the end of her marriage and the loss of her job, she had started a blog called cutlooseblog.com. Velma Trimble had been one of her blog’s most ardent fans. During the dark time Ali had been dealing with Paul Grayson’s death, Velma had taken a cab from her home in Laguna Beach and had come all the way across Los Angeles to Ali’s hotel in Westwood in hopes of offering her assistance.
As a result of that selfless action despite the age difference between them, Ali and Velma had become good friends in a way that was not unlike Ali’s friendship with Sister Anselm. When Velma had been diagnosed with breast cancer at age eighty-eight, her son had opposed her seeking treatment. Ali had encouraged it, and the treatment had worked. In the intervening years, Velma had managed to take a round-the-world first-class private jet tour with another new friend, Maddy Watkins.
Now, though, Velma’s cancer had returned. Expecting bad news, Ali opened the e-mail from Velma’s nephew with a sense of dread.
Dear Ms. Reynolds,
Robert Dahlgood here. I’m not sure if you remember me, but my aunt, Velma Trimble, asked me to be in touch with you.
I regret to inform you that her situation is deteriorating rapidly and she is now receiving hospice care at her home in Laguna Beach. The nurses are able to manage her pain, which is a real blessing.
I’m helping her put her affairs in order, and she is most interested in meeting with you and would like very much to do so in person. I know that a request of this kind is a major inconvenience, but as you know, once Velma sets her mind to something, she is not easily dissuaded.
If you could see your way clear to come see her any time in the next few days—time is of the essence—I would be eternally grateful. If it’s not possible, I certainly understand and will be glad to pass along that information in hopes I can convince her to settle for some other arrangement.
Sincerely,
Robert Dahlgood
Considering what Velma had done on Ali’s behalf years earlier, Ali could hardly ignore this very real plea for help. She wrote back immediately:
Dear Robert,
I’m so sorry to hear this. I have a prior commitment that will keep me stuck here in Sedona until tomorrow at the earliest. I may be able to fly over tomorrow evening or Sunday morning. I’ll let you know.
Please tell Velma that I’m thinking about her and that I’ll be there as soon as I can.
Ali
Next Ali opened the e-mail from Brenda Riley. What she read there left her feeling both relieved and anxious. On the one hand she was delighted that Brenda was evidently working at putting her life back together. That was a good thing, but the idea that she was writing a book about Richard Lowensdale was worrisome.
Ali was well aware that without the information contained in the High Noon background check, Brenda wouldn’t have known the man’s real name, to say nothing of the names of his former employers. If Brenda was writing a book about her experience with him as well as that of “other women” in his life, there was a chance that B.’s company might well be pulled into some kind of unsavory drama. On the other hand, doing background checks was part of High Noon’s bread-and-butter business.
In the end, Ali simply forwarded Brenda’s request to B. with a subject line that said, “What do you think?”
The last e-mail she opened was one from B., written to her during a lunch break at his conference in D.C. Ali scanned it quickly and then marked it unread because by then it was past time to be dressed and ready for tea.
Sister Anselm was already seated by the gas log fireplace when Ali entered the library a few minutes later. A driver from the Phoenix archdiocese had dropped her off for tea on the condition that Leland Brooks agree to take her the rest of the way back to Jerome once the visit was over.
They passed a pleasant hour together in front of the fire, sipping English breakfast tea, nibbling on Leland Brook’s tiny egg salad and cucumber sandwiches, and downing still-warm scones slathered with clotted cream.
In the course of their conversation, Ali mentioned her dying friend’s request that Ali come visit her. “You’re the one with the Angel of Death moniker,” Ali said to Sister Anselm. “I know you deal with ill and dying people all the time, but how do you handle it? How do you know what to do or say? I know Velma has a son. Why is she asking for me to be there instead of him?”
Sister Anselm’s blue eyes sparkled cheerfully behind her gold-framed glasses as she answered Ali’s question.
“You don’t know that,” Sister Anselm said. “The son may very well be at her side when the time comes. When someone in a family is dead or dying, it’s been my experience that one of two things may happen. Occasionally, long-standing quarrels and fissures in families are suddenly and inexplicably healed. In other families, relationships that may have seemed untroubled in the past sometimes splinter completely due to some invisible fracture that has long lain hidden beneath an otherwise placid surface. When I’m summoned in this fashion, I always set off on the journey trusting that I’ve been called there for a reason and that I’ll be able to offer comfort to those in need.”
“But going there at a time like this feels like an intrusion somehow,” Ali objected.
“The nephew indicated that your friend wants you there, right?”
Ali nodded. “She specifically requested that I come. I told the nephew that I’d fly over to California either tomorrow or the next day.”
“Go as soon as you can,” Sister Anselm advised. “A lot of the time, loved ones are in denial and think they have more time than they actually have. Whenever you go, Ali, do so in the knowledge that what you’re doing places you in your perfect place to do the perfect thing, whatever that may be.”
Ali smiled at her friend. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Sister Anselm said forcefully. “I certainly do.”
When Leland left to take Sister Anselm home, Ali retreated to her bedroom once more.
An instant message from B. told her he was off to a conference banquet and wouldn’t be available until much later. He also told her he had alerted Stuart Ramey about Brenda’s request for a background check and that Stuart would be working on the problem.
Ali knew that her parents were due to be back home on Saturday afternoon an
d that they would be on duty at the Sugarloaf bright and early on Sunday morning. With that in mind, Ali made arrangements to fly out of Phoenix to LAX Saturday night. After her conversation with Sister Anselm, leaving sooner rather than later seemed like the right thing to do.
Once all the travel arrangements were in hand, Ali tried calling B. His phone was still off, so she sent him an e-mail bringing him up to date on Velma Trimble’s situation as well as her travel plans. After that, Ali took to her bed in the company of the Count of Monte Cristo. Within minutes, the book was facedown on Ali’s bed covers, and she was sound asleep.
15
Scotts Flat Reservoir, California
Brenda Riley awakened confused and frightened in a terrible moving darkness. Somewhere nearby her cell phone was ringing, but she couldn’t reach it, couldn’t answer. Her hands were bound behind her. Her feet were bound too. There was a strip of something fastened to her face, and she was desperately cold.
She realized she had to be in the trunk—the large trunk—of a moving vehicle. She could hear the rush and scrape of pavement under the tires, but she had no idea where she was, where she was going, or how she came to be there.
Her memory was fuzzy. Foggy. She vaguely remembered being at home in the morning. After that she had gone to her meeting, her usual Friday noon meeting. And then she was supposed to meet someone for lunch, but right that minute, Brenda couldn’t recall the woman’s name. She had no idea of what had happened to her or how much time had elapsed. What she did know for sure was that she needed to pee desperately.
Brenda tried moving her legs and managed to make a few feeble thumps with her feet. It didn’t do any good. The car kept on moving and her sudden movement, compounded by the cold, made her need to urinate that much more critical. If the person driving the vehicle heard the racket from the trunk, it made no difference, at least not at first, but then the car seemed to hesitate. It turned off the pavement onto a rough gravel track of some kind.
As the vehicle came to a stop, Brenda’s heart filled with dread. Moments later, the engine died. With a thump, the trunk release was engaged and the lid opened automatically. For a moment she was astonished by how bright the night sky was overhead. After the impenetrable darkness, the stars above were more brilliant than she had ever seen.
She heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel. A moment later a woman’s face appeared in the starlit night. In that moment of clarity, Brenda recognized her. Mina Blaylock, the mystery woman on Richard’s list.
Brenda struggled against her bonds, tried to say something. “Please, let me out. I need to use the bathroom.”
For an answer, Mina reached inside. Brenda saw the hypodermic in her hand. She tried to dodge out of the way, but she couldn’t. The needle plunged deep into the muscle of her upper arm. That was one of the reasons Brenda was so cold. Her arms were bare. Where was her coat? Where was her blouse? Brenda tried to struggle, but she couldn’t escape the woman’s fierce gloved grip. At last Brenda lay still.
“Good,” Mina said. “That’s better.”
She reached inside the trunk again. As Brenda watched, Mina took Brenda’s purse out of the trunk. With the purse gone, so was Brenda’s cell phone and so was any hope of summoning help. Next Mina wrenched off Brenda’s shoes.
“Where you’re going, you won’t be needing your purse anymore, and you won’t need shoes either.”
Dimly, Brenda heard a sound from somewhere nearby. Mina heard it too. She looked over her shoulder, then slammed the trunk lid shut. There were more footsteps, hurried ones this time, then the engine turned over, and the car moved. As darkness enveloped her again, Brenda realized that her prison was now lit with an eerie reddish glow leaking into the trunk from the taillights outside the car. She wondered how much time had passed, enough to turn day into night.
Brenda considered briefly about the kind of substance that had been in the hypodermic. Moments later, however, she felt her heartbeat speed up. For a time she had difficulty catching her breath. Then, gradually, the drug overwhelmed her and she drifted into unconsciousness once again, unaware and unembarrassed that when she lost control of her mind, she also lost control of her bladder.
16
San Diego, California
The trip from the Scotts Flat Reservoir to San Diego took more than ten hours. Mina stopped for gas only once, in Bakersfield. She worried that Brenda might awaken when the vehicle came to a stop and start bumping and thumping around in the trunk. Fortunately that didn’t happen.
Maybe she’s dead, Mina thought. Considering how much Versed Mina had plugged into Brenda’s system, death by overdose would have been a likely outcome. Parking at the pumps, Mina stood for a moment listening. When there was no sound from the trunk, she hurried into the gas station, where she used the restroom and paid cash for her fuel as well as for bottled water and a collection of energy bars.
Back outside, there was still no sound from the trunk as Mina filled the gas tank and drove away. Once she was on I-5 heading south, Mina kept herself awake by thinking about Richard Lowensdale.
When Mina waved the hammer in front of Richard’s face, he must have known that it wasn’t an empty threat. He had fallen still and silent just as Mina had known he would. That was what most people did when they were faced with an unanticipated threat: they complied.
That was exactly what Mina’s family had done all those years earlier when a gang of marauding Serbs had invaded their home in Bosnia. In hopes of surviving, they too had done exactly what they’d been told. Not imagining that people who had once been their neighbors would turn against them, Ermina’s family had allowed themselves to be herded into the living room, where a gang of armed thugs had opened fire and gunned them down.
That was the first defining moment of thirteen-year-old Ermina Vlasic’s life. Hidden in the stone cellar under the barn with her flickering candle and her precious books, she had heard the arriving vehicles first and then the shouting and finally the gunfire. Staying hidden was the only thing that saved her life that day. And only later, long after silence returned and as the sun set, she finally crept out of the cellar and went in search of her family.
She had found them, slaughtered in a bloody heap in the darkened living room, all of them riddled with bullets. Crumpled and dead, they had been left where they’d fallen to send a message to other Croats in the neighborhood—leave or die. It was a scene that was forever indelibly inked in her consciousness, and standing there in the carnage she had made the first decision of her new life: she decided to leave.
Leaving her loved ones where they lay, Mina went to her room, packed a bag with a few clothes and as many books as she could carry, and went in search of help. It was a group of Bosnian Serbs who had murdered her family. Ironically, it was another group of Serbs, a family whose farm was just down the country road, who took her in, cared for her, and who finally took her to the orphanage that had eventually led her to her adoptive home in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Mina had always supposed that was the difference between her and people like Richard Lowensdale and Mark Blaylock. She was tough. But for the first time in as long as Mina had known Richard, he had surprised her. He had stood up to her. She had thought he would cave, but he hadn’t. In the grand scheme of things, the fifty thousand dollars she had paid Richard was chump change, but it was Mina’s chump change.
Had she been able to keep on looking, Mina probably could have found Richard’s stash, but by then Mina’s other guest, treated with a hefty dose of Versed and bound with the same transparent packing tape she had used on Richard, had been left alone in the trunk of her parked Lincoln on a city street for far longer than she should have been. Still Mina waited until it was over, until Richard’s pitiful struggles ceased completely, before she rose from the chair and walked away.
And even though she walked away without her money, Ermina Blaylock had left Grass Valley with something unexpected—a grudging respect for Richard Lowensdale.
There
was very little traffic as she made her way up and over the Grapevine, but by the time she hit L.A., rush hour was starting. Just past eight o’clock in the morning, Mina pulled into the shipping/receiving bay of Rutherford International in Clairemont Mesa Business Park and closed the rolling garage door behind her.
She had given Mark a strict set of instructions. Once he finished installing the programming fix, she had told him to pack the UAVs in shipping containers and put them in the shipping/receiving bay. When they weren’t there, Mina’s heart went to her throat.
What if Mark had betrayed her? What if he had unloaded the UAVs to someone else?
Then she turned on the lights in the assembly area. Much to Mina’s relief, the UAVs were there, locked in the parts cage. They appeared to be properly boxed and labeled, so maybe moving them to the shipping bay was the only part of Mark’s to-do list that he had ignored.
Luckily Mina had her own cage key on her key ring. It was inconvenient for her to have to do all the moving and lifting herself, but she finally managed to lug all the boxed UAVs into the shipping bay. When she popped open the trunk of the Lincoln, a cloud of urine-permeated air rose up out of the trunk. It struck her as funny that she had cut off Richard’s fingers without a qualm but the smell of Brenda’s having wet herself made Mina want to gag.
Brenda was still asleep. After donning her gloves, Mina used a box cutter to slice through the tape imprisoning Brenda’s ankles, although she left her wrists firmly bound. Then, after removing the tape from Brenda’s mouth, Mina shook the unconscious woman’s shoulder.
“Wake up!” Mina ordered. “We need to get you out of there.”
Brenda’s eyes popped open. She looked around fearfully. “Where am I?” she rasped. “What’s happening?”
“I need you to walk with me,” Mina said. “It’s not far. Let me help you.”
She reached into the trunk, grabbed Brenda’s shoulder and wrestled her into a semi-sitting position.