by J. A. Jance
“Thank you, Alonzo,” Ali told him. “You’re very kind, and I really appreciate it.”
“Now, what would you like for breakfast?”
“Hard-boiled eggs, I think, along with toast and some bacon,” she told him. “If I’m going to make it through this day on the amount of sleep I got the last two nights, I’d better have some protein in my system.”
Ali went back to the bedroom to shower and dress. By the time she emerged again, breakfast was on the table. She left the house on Manzanita Hills Drive a good half an hour after her usual departure time. On her way, she called Shirley to let her know she was en route. There was very little traffic, and she used part of her half-hour commute time to call Chris.
“How are things?” Ali asked when her son answered. Prior to having Siri dial his number, she’d already decided that with twins and a newborn to look after, Chris and Athena had enough going on in their lives at the moment without the further complication of knowing what was happening concerning Ali’s parents. To that end she was determined to edit that bit of information out of the conversation.
“Athena’s great, but Logan had some breathing issues overnight,” Chris replied. “That means the doctors want to keep them one more day. Hopefully we’ll be homeward bound tomorrow sometime. Right now the twins and I are having breakfast.”
“Is there anything you need me to do, anything at all?”
“No, Mom,” he replied. “Thanks for offering, but we’ve got this.”
Ali couldn’t help smiling. Two months prior to the birth of her son, Ali’s first husband and Chris’s father, Dean Reynolds, had died of glioblastoma. Left as a very young widow with a newborn, Ali had raised Chris mostly as a single mom, and yet he’d turned out to be this terrific human being, one who was a great husband, an even better dad, and as far as she knew an excellent teacher as well. What more could she have asked?
“Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll let you go.”
Driving along, Ali was tempted to call her mother, just to check on her. After all, in terms of loving care, Ali owed her big. Edie Larson had been there for her in every way when she’d brought Chris home from the hospital. Ali had no idea how she and Chris would have survived those first challenging months on their own if her mom hadn’t been there helping. Now Ali desperately wanted to return that favor, but she worried that if she showed too much of a sudden interest in what was going on with her folks, her mother would bristle. So instead of calling her mom, Ali resorted to calling Edie’s best friend and co-great-grandmother, Betsy Peterson.
“I just found out about what’s been happening,” Ali said when Betsy answered.
“So Edie finally got around to spilling the beans, did she?” Betsy returned. “I’ve been telling her for months that she needed to bring you and B. up to date on Bob’s condition.”
Focused on the word “months,” Ali felt a lump form in her throat. This has been going on that long? she thought.
“Word’s out now,” Ali replied after a moment. “As you may have noticed, my mother has quite a stubborn streak.”
“You don’t say,” Betsy said with a laugh.
“That’s why I’m calling,” Ali continued. “Just because my mom needs help doesn’t mean she’ll break down and ask for it. I’m hoping to use you as a backstop for keeping an eye on things.”
“In other words, you want me to be your spy?”
It seemed best to be straight up about all this. “Exactly,” Ali admitted. “So what has been going on?”
Betsy paused as though reluctant to reveal any telling details, but finally she did. “There have apparently been a couple of incidents of… well… shoving.”
“You mean Dad actually pushed her?”
“Yes,” Betsy responded, “during one of his angry outbursts.”
Ali was dismayed. The idea that things had deteriorated to the point of physical violence was nothing short of shocking.
“Sometimes he doesn’t know who she is,” Betsy continued. “Other times he’ll be his old self and sharp as a tack. Most of the time he refuses to go to the dining room because he doesn’t want to eat with ‘all those strangers,’ although he’s known most of the people who live here for years. That means, of course, that your mom isn’t able to socialize nearly as much as she used to or needs to either. Not only that, she has to cart his food and dishes to and from their unit. She’ll give him his meds, and he’ll pretend to take them, but later on he’ll spit them out. She’s found the pills hidden behind the cushion of his chair or buried under leftovers when she goes to clean his plate.”
Betsy fell silent, as if feeling she’d said more than she should have. As far as medications were concerned, Ali knew that her father had been on high-blood-pressure meds for years and also something for his prostate, and probably more besides. One thing was certain, however—taking any prescribed medication on an intermittent basis was not a good idea. At this point Ali was feeling more alarmed than ever, but she didn’t want to let on for fear of spooking this invaluable resource into silence.
After a very long pause, Betsy resumed. “I’ve been trying to tell Edie that she shouldn’t try to handle all this on her own, but I haven’t been able to make the slightest headway. She’s been so deep in denial that everything I say falls on deaf ears.”
“She probably won’t listen to me either,” Ali said, “but with your help at least I’ll have a better idea of what’s really going on and whether there’s a crisis looming.”
“Well, then,” Betsy said, “you can count on me to keep an eye out and report in if something untoward happens. It’s the least I can do, but tell me, have you heard anything from the kids?”
“I just got off the phone with Chris,” Ali told her. “Logan evidently experienced breathing difficulties overnight. That means the doctors are keeping both Athena and the baby for another day, but they should be home tomorrow.”
“They’re keeping her overnight for a second night? That’s mighty big of them,” Betsy sniffed. “The very idea that they’d kick a woman out the day after having a C-section is ridiculous.”
The same thought had occurred to Ali, but she had filtered that nugget of medical Monday-morning quarterbacking out of her conversation with Chris. In the background of the call, Ali heard what sounded like a doorbell ringing.
“I need to answer that,” Betsy said quickly, “but you just go on about your business, Ali. As I said, if I spot anything amiss with your folks, I’ll call you on the double.”
“Thank you so much,” Ali told her. “I really appreciate it.”
Ali drove on, but with a less troubled heart. The situation with her parents was seemingly much worse than she had suspected, but with Betsy’s help Ali would at least have access to information that hadn’t been spun out of all recognition by Edie Larson’s determination to keep their difficulties to herself. Right that moment it was the best Ali could hope for. By the time she arrived in Cottonwood, however, she knew she had to put personal concerns aside for the time being in order to concentrate on work.
“Have we heard from Harvey McCluskey?” Ali asked Shirley as she entered the office.
“Nope,” Shirley answered, “not a word.”
“That’s par for the course,” Ali replied. “Based on previous experience, I’m guessing he’ll wait until the last minute.”
Once inside her office, Ali set worries about her late-paying tenant aside in favor of tackling the stack of applications, résumés, and Frigg-created dossiers, each of which contained massive amounts of information.
During Ali’s senior year in high school, she and her best friend, Irene Holzer, had found themselves in the principal’s office for attempting to promote a senior ditch day in protest of the sudden and what they felt to be unwarranted midyear dismissal of the school’s beloved football coach. Ali had found out years later that the dismissal had been absolutely justified, although the grubby details of Coach Majors’s illegal gambling activities were never made pu
blic. At the time, though, sitting in the office and waiting to be read the riot act, Ali remembered Reenie saying something to the effect that the infraction would probably end up as a black mark in what kids back then referred to as their “permanent record.” Later Ali had come to realize that the whole idea of a permanent record was nothing but a convenient fiction used to trick kids into toeing the line.
Now, however, with the advent of social media, the idea of having a permanent record had become all too real. As Ali sorted through the résumés and dossiers, what turned out to be permanent records on each of the applicants gradually emerged, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. If you happened to be looking for a job with a cybersecurity firm, for instance, maybe posting videos of yourself playing volleyball on a nude beach in California wasn’t such a good idea. And maybe showing Facebook montages featuring you and your pals toking up at high school pot parties wasn’t a great strategy either. Smoking pot might or might not have been illegal in that locale at the time, but what fellow partygoers seemed to consider hilarious antics didn’t demonstrate the presence of much common sense, and at High Noon common sense counted for everything. The pot smoker had graduated from college with honors but not without picking up a pair of DUIs along the way. And then there was the young woman who had posted a spiteful after-Christmas rant saying that since her grandparents’ political leanings disagreed with hers, she was writing them out of her life forever.
All three of those applicants had outstanding academic records and top-notch GPAs, but the kinds of grandstanding and irresponsible behaviors they exhibited in private made them all no-gos in Ali’s mind. High Noon was a small company that operated as a well-oiled machine, primarily because the people involved dealt with one another on the basis of goodwill and mutual respect. Given that, was it a great idea to bring people on board who were not the least bit ashamed of posting their histories of bad behavior on the Internet? How would people like that conduct themselves on a daily basis with fellow employees and customers alike? Ali dropped all three applications into the discard heap.
She was still up to her eyeteeth in the process when Shirley tapped on her door. “Gus Robbins, the security installer, is here,” she said.
The High Noon campus had all kinds of outdoor security cameras, and High Noon’s interior space had even more. Recently, however, several of the tenants in other parts of the compound had asked for additional interior surveillance. Leaseholders were responsible for whatever systems they wished to install inside their individual office spaces, but it was up to High Noon to provide protection for the common areas, including lobbies, hallways, and restrooms.
To that end Ali had taken it upon herself to go looking for the right product and vendor. She wanted something more subtle than the eye-in-the-sky look preferred by retail establishments, so she’d chosen a newly designed system that operated on a Wi-Fi arrangement and consisted of a small camera located inside an innocuous-looking plastic cube. Placed on a wall next to an interior door in a corridor, it was capable of delivering high-def motion-activated videos of the entire length of the hallway. A few keystrokes on the controlling keyboard allowed the operator to move the focus up or down the hallway as needed.
“Wasn’t he supposed to be here earlier?” Ali asked.
Shirley nodded. “He was due this morning.”
“Better late than never, I suppose,” Ali said. “Send him in, and ask Cami to please join us.”
Gus Robbins wasn’t especially impressive. He turned out to be a very young guy sporting freckles and a puny effort at a goatee. He seemed nervous and ill at ease, and the uniform he wore didn’t do much to convince Ali he was a knowledgeable professional. When Cami showed up, he looked wary. As Ali explained to Gus that he would be working with Cami regarding any glitches or hiccups in the program, the poor guy looked downright terrified. Once they went off to work on the security installation, however, Ali returned to the job-applicant issue.
By four o’clock in the afternoon, she was finally finished, but she was also suffering a severe eyestrain headache. As she cleared her desk in preparation for going home, a frowning Stu Ramey appeared in her doorway. He stepped inside her office, closing the door behind him, and took a seat in one of her visitor chairs. As he sat down, he slid a single piece of paper across the table in her direction.
“What’s this?” Ali asked, picking it up.
“A letter of recommendation,” he answered. “My writing skills aren’t always the best, and I wanted you to take a look at it before I send it along.”
To Whom It May Concern:
A number of years ago, I was Mateo Vega’s immediate supervisor when he was employed by Video Games International. He came to the company shortly after graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in computer science.
I found him to be a dependable worker and a quick study when it came to learning new skills. I think you’ll find him to be a valuable addition to your team.
Regards,
Stuart Ramey
Ali looked up from the paper with a puzzled frown on her face. “It’s a good letter,” she said, handing it back. “But Video Games International? That was a long time ago.”
Stu nodded. “A very long time ago,” he agreed, “sixteen years at least.”
“So why send out a letter of recommendation for someone who hasn’t worked with you for more than a decade and a half? Wouldn’t he be better off with a recommendation from a more recent employer?”
Shifting in his seat, Stu looked uncomfortable. “Mateo called me earlier and asked,” he told her. “If you don’t want me to send it out with High Noon’s name attached, I can delete it.”
“I don’t understand,” Ali said. “Why would I think it necessary for you to remove High Noon’s name?”
Stu sighed. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Like I said in the letter, Mateo came to VGI right after he graduated from the U Dub. He was all the things I mentioned—dependable, bright, and a good worker. He seemed like a great guy, but then one Monday a couple of months after he came to work for us, he didn’t show up on the job. And he didn’t call in either. It was several days later before I finally heard from him. He called to say he was dealing with a personal matter and wouldn’t be coming back to work.”
After a pause Stu continued. “Eventually I learned that he’d been involved in an altercation of some kind with his girlfriend over that weekend, and she ended up dead. This happened at about the same time the whole thing at VGI blew sky-high and B. and I ended up coming back home to Arizona. I never heard anything more about how things turned out with Mateo until he called this afternoon. He told me he didn’t kill the girl but that he accepted a plea deal, from first-degree murder down to second, in order to avoid a possible life sentence. He was let out on parole in May of last year after serving sixteen years of a sixteen-to-life term. According to him he’s spent the last year trying to get a job in the IT world, but no one will give him a chance.”
“How did he know where to find you?” Ali asked.
“He said he saw B.’s name and High Noon Enterprises mentioned in that scientific trendsetter article from last month. He did some googling, found High Noon, and learned that I was working here. He called this afternoon on the off chance that maybe I’d be willing to give him a letter of reference.”
“Which you’ve already written,” Ali observed.
Stu nodded. “Mateo was a bright kid,” he said. “Not in Lance Tucker’s league, of course, but still very smart. I hate to think of him wasting his whole life working on the loading dock at some charity thrift shop. It sounds to me as though he’s paid his debt to society and is trying to get his life back on track. If I can give him a helping hand after all these years, why not?”
Ali couldn’t help thinking about that angry young woman hoping to work for them who was busy ghosting her grandparents.
“Why not indeed?” she agreed. “And there’s no need to delete High Noon’s name from the
letter. It sounds like this is someone who could use a second chance, and having our name on the letter of reference might give him more of a boost.”
“Thanks, Ali,” Stu said, rising to his feet. “I’ll send it off, then.”
“Wait,” Ali told him. “Before you go, take these.” She handed him the file folder containing the paperwork on the four remaining applicants. “These are the four who made the next cut. Give them to Cami. She’s the only one who knows B.’s schedule backward and forward. Tell her to work with these folks and make travel arrangements for them to come in for interviews.”
“Will do,” Stu said. “Are you heading out?”
Ali nodded. “Yes, I am. It’s been a very long couple of days, and I’m in desperate need of some beauty sleep.”
|CHAPTER 8|
OAK CREEK VILLAGE, ARIZONA
As Stuart Ramey headed back to Oak Creek Village that evening, he was feeling decidedly uneasy. Yes, he’d written that letter of recommendation for Mateo. Given Stu’s own personal history, how could he do otherwise? He had been in desperate straits and living in a homeless shelter when B. Simpson had reached out and offered him not only a lifeline, he’d offered him a life.
Stu tended to take what people said to him at face value, and he was beginning to understand that wasn’t always wise. What if Mateo’s story turned out to be different from what he’d let on? What if he hadn’t been wrongly accused and was indeed a killer? And then there was the problem with his credentials. In the letter, Stu had said Mateo had been a hard worker, and that was certainly true—back then.