J. Jance - Deadly Stakes

Edie smiled. “You don’t have that excuse anymore.”

“No, I don’t,” Ali agreed. “I guess I’ll give them a call and see if they’ve gotten someone else to handle it.”

“When does B. get in?” Edie asked.

“He’s due back from Hong Kong tomorrow afternoon.”

“Does he know about the election?” Edie asked.

Ali nodded. “I sent him a text while you were giving your concession speech. He said you gave it the old college try and that he’s proud of us both.”

“We did give it a good try, didn’t we?” Edie said. “We certainly did.”

There was a hint of sorrow in her voice that belied her words, and Ali suspected that her mother was maintaining that stiff upper lip for her daughter’s benefit.

“Get some rest, Mom,” Ali advised. “I’ll spend the morning pulling together the rest of the financial reports-paying the last few bills, that sort of thing.”

“Is the campaign going to end up owing a lot of money?” Edie asked.

“No,” Ali said. “No worries there. The outstanding bills amount to only a couple of hundred dollars.”

Most of Edie’s campaign had been done the old-fashioned way-expending shoe-leather and building yard signs-rather than buying television and radio airtime. “Edie for Mayor” campaign workers had done plenty of walking, but they hadn’t spent much money, which was more than could be said for their opponent. According to federally mandated campaign finance reports, Ali had learned that the newly reelected mayor of Sedona had won that two-hundred-vote margin by spending almost two hundred thousand dollars in campaign funds, most of it his own money.

“That’s a relief, then,” Edie said. “I wouldn’t want to be out busting my butt and asking for donations to retire campaign debt. People hate donating to lost causes. On that note, I think I’ll head for the barn.”

With that, her mother got up. Edie walked across the lobby with her shoulders back and her head held high. It was an impressive act, one that might have fooled someone else, but not her daughter. Ali saw right through it to the disappointment underneath, and it broke her heart that there wasn’t a thing she could do about it-not a single thing.

Lynn Martinson was grateful that her mother was out of the house for most of the afternoon. Weather in the Valley of the Sun had cooled off enough that Beatrice Hart and some of her seventysomething pals had decided to play a round of golf, and for a daughter who had misplaced her cell phone once again, that was good news.

For as long as she could remember, Beatrice had poked fun at Lynn about being a scatterbrain, and that criticism wasn’t entirely wrong, but what once was good-hearted teasing had taken a more serious turn. In the aftermath of Lynn’s father’s long struggle first with dementia and later with Alzheimer’s, Beatrice was on full alert for signs that a set of missing car keys or an AWOL cell phone were harbingers of a first downhill slip that might signal the full-scale unstoppable slide that had taken her husband’s life.

Lynn had noticed that the phone was missing much earlier that morning. When she had arrived home from Chip’s place, the phone wasn’t in its customary spot in a zippered pocket in her purse. That she often spent the night at Chip’s house was a bone of contention between Beatrice and her daughter. Lynn may have been in her forties, but Beatrice’s opinions about “living in sin” weren’t something she kept to herself. Lynn chafed under the criticism, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Economic necessity dictated that until she was able to find a job, living with her mother was her only real option.

There was the hope that Chip would pop the question, but in terms of living arrangements, he was in much the same boat. His high-priced divorce had left him in a financial bind that would take several years to unravel, and at age fifty, he was back home with his eightysomething recently widowed mother, living in a casita, a former maid’s quarters, that had been built behind his parents’ longtime Paradise Valley home. Chip’s mother didn’t like Lynn’s sleepovers any more than her mother did.

To keep from rocking parental boats, Chip and Lynn, cast in the role of aging, lovestruck teenagers, had little choice but to sneak around. There was no privacy to be had in the small two-story tract home Lynn shared with her mother on West Willows Lane, so she usually went to Chip’s place, arriving after his mother went to bed and leaving early the next morning. Lynn knew that if she left Chip’s place by five-thirty, she could be back home before her own mother went out to the front yard to retrieve the morning newspaper.

It was after Lynn was upstairs in her room that she first discovered that her phone was gone. Lynn had put her keys in her purse and reached for her phone so she could call Chip and tell him she had arrived home safely, but the phone wasn’t anywhere to be found. She had searched the entire bag, digging all the way to the bottom. In the process, she unearthed year-old gas receipts, lint from a clutch of deteriorating tissues, an almost empty compact, and several dead tubes of lipstick. When she turned the emptied carcass over and dumped it onto her bed, a few stray coins came out, but no phone.

Lynn’s next thought-a perfectly logical one-was that in rushing around to come home, perhaps she had left the phone at Chip’s place. When arriving there, she routinely deposited her purse, keys, and cell phone on the entryway table, a place where they’d be easy to find the next morning as she was leaving. She used her mother’s landline to call her own number, thinking if it rang somewhere in his apartment, Chip would hear it and answer. When her phone switched over to voice mail, she dialed Chip’s cell phone.

“It didn’t ring here,” Chip said once she had explained the situation. “Are you sure you had it with you last night?”

“I’m sure.”

“Maybe it’s not turned on,” Chip suggested. “If you accidentally hit the off switch, or if the charge ran down, it wouldn’t ring, and I wouldn’t hear it.”

“I took it off the charger last night when I was heading for your place,” Lynn told him. “It should have had plenty of battery power, and I would have remembered turning it off.”

“Probably fell out in the car somewhere,” he concluded. “Maybe it slipped down between the seats or it’s on the floorboard and slid under the car seat. Have you looked there?”

“Not yet. I called you first. I’ll look there next.”

“Sorry you lost your phone,” he said, “but I’m glad to hear your voice. I miss you already.”

The words made Lynn smile. “I miss you, too,” she replied.

Beatrice emerged from the bedroom in time to hear the last comment. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “Isn’t it a little early for the lovebirds to be at it again? Don’t you have something better to do than to stand around whispering sweet nothings?”

While her mother bustled around the kitchen making breakfast, Lynn went into her room and searched there, even though she was sure she’d had the phone in the car on her way to Chip’s the night before. She tried calling her cell again, in case Chip was right. No dice. Then she remembered that she had stopped for gas on the way home. It was one of those places where you got a free wash with a fill-up.

The car had seemed dustier this morning than she remembered. She had opted for the free wash. It could be that the phone had fallen out while she was dealing with that, or else with the self-service gas pump, or maybe she had left it on the counter when she went inside to pay. Pulling the receipt out of her wallet, she located the gas station’s phone number and called. The clerk reported that she hadn’t seen an abandoned cell phone anywhere, not on the counter and not out by the pumps. If someone had found a lost cell phone, they hadn’t bothered turning it in.