J. Jance - Deadly Stakes

Molly rolled her eyes. “Gemma couldn’t come to dinner with us,” she said shortly. “She’s dead!”

Doris seemed remarkably unfazed by her daughter’s blunt response. “Really?” she asked, frowning. “I didn’t know that. Are you sure? When did that happen? Why didn’t someone tell me about it?”

“Someone did tell you about it.” Shaking her head in weary resignation, Molly turned from Doris to Ali. “As you can see, talking to my mother isn’t going to do you much good, so I guess you’ll need to talk to me. Go ahead and have a seat.” She motioned Ali into a nearby chair, then returned to her mother. “Are you tired, Mama? Do you want to go to bed?”

“Oh, no,” Doris Ralston said. “Not at all. I’ll just sit here and wait for your father to come home. I can’t imagine what’s keeping him.”

Ali remembered Beatrice Hart saying that Chip’s father had died fairly recently of a stroke, but evidently not in Doris’s rewritten version of reality. For the next half hour, Alzheimer’s was the elephant in the living room while Ali conducted her interview. Doris’s son, Chip, may have been the family expert in all things Alzheimer’s, but if he was on his way to prison for murdering his ex-wife, then the responsibility for caring for their ailing mother would fall to Chip’s sister, Molly.

“You’re your mother’s primary caregiver?” Ali asked.

Molly nodded. “Ironic, isn’t it, considering Chip’s line of work, but it turns out my perfect brother is far too busy taking care of other people’s families to worry about his own. That’s why our father wanted me to do it, and yes, it’s pretty much up to me.”

“I spoke to both Ms. Martinson and your brother. Neither one of them mentioned your mother’s situation.”

“There are a number of family scripts at work here, Ms. Reynolds. In our family, my brother was always destined to follow in our father’s footsteps and become a surgeon. I was supposed to go to college long enough to find myself a suitable husband, so I could emulate my mother by staying home and being a wife and mother. All of that blew up for them when I dropped out of school and my brother ended up turning his back on surgery in favor of becoming a psychiatrist. I’ve never quite understood it, but for some strange reason, in my father’s view, my sins were somehow more forgivable than Chip’s.

“When our mother started going downhill, our father made it his business to keep everybody in the dark as much as possible.”

“You’re saying he concealed her symptoms?”

Molly nodded. “And made excuses for her. You have to give the man credit. He did an excellent job of running interference for a very long time. I suspect that the pressure involved in keeping up appearances and maintaining the pretense that she was okay may have contributed to his stroke. I know he and Chip had a big blow-up about Mother’s situation the week before Daddy died. Chip dropped by the house unexpectedly and got a glimpse of what was really going on. When he tried to talk to our father about it, Daddy threw him out of the house.

“I’m sure the truth about Mama’s condition would have come out eventually, but it was a shock to have it coming to the fore when we were dealing with Daddy’s death.”

“At the time of your father’s death, your brother wasn’t living in the casita?”

“No, the divorce proceedings were already under way, but I don’t think anyone realized that Chip would end up being broke and in need of a place to live. Months earlier Daddy had drawn up the papers to give me a durable power of attorney. At the time I thought it was just a precaution. I didn’t realize until I came home after Dad had his stroke how bad things really were with Mama.

“My husband and I were going through a rough patch right then, so it wasn’t a big hardship for me to stay on and help out. I moved into my old room because it made looking after Mama that much easier than living anywhere else. Later on, when Chip needed a place to stay, he got around me by talking to our mother and asking to use the casita. Naturally, she said yes. I finally went along with the program, but only on the condition that Chip would agree to abide by my father’s wishes.”

“Which were?”

“That Chip have nothing to do with my mother’s care.”

“So he hasn’t been backstopping you on that?”

“I don’t need backstopping,” Molly declared. “I’m fully capable of taking care of Mama on my own, and I don’t need some self-proclaimed ‘expert’ telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.”

That last comment brought Molly’s previous comment about what was forgivable and what was not into clear focus. In sorting out the care of frail and aging parents, what had once been a case of ordinary sibling rivalry between Molly and her brother had morphed into something more toxic. Out in the world, Dr. Charles Ralston may have been a well-respected Alzheimer’s expert, but as far as his sister was concerned, that expertise counted as nothing but unwelcome interference. Ali was smart enough to recognize that as far as families went, this was probably not an isolated situation.

“Your mother’s illness and your brother’s divorce must have come to pass at the same time,” Ali observed.

“Pretty much,” Molly agreed, “and now we have this whole new crisis. I still can’t believe Gem is dead.”

“I understand you and she were friends?”

“And have been for years,” Molly said with a nod. “We were roommates our freshman year in college, and we’ve been friends ever since, through good times and bad. I’m the one who introduced Gemma to Chip, so I guess you can lay the whole mess at my door.”

“You and Gemma stayed friends even after she and Chip divorced?”

Molly nodded. “From my perspective, husbands tend to come and go with amazing regularity, but friends are friends forever. I couldn’t just erase Gemma from my life on Chip’s say-so, and neither could my mother. You adored Gemma, didn’t you, Mama?”

“Gemma?” Doris asked vaguely. “Oh yes. Lovely girl. Just lovely. Did we talk today? On the phone, I mean. We usually do, you know. She calls me every morning, first thing.”

Molly shook her head. “See there?” she said. “It’s hopeless.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “I can see that. When did you last see Gemma?”

Ali’s question was directed at Molly, but Doris was the one who answered. “It was tonight, wasn’t it? I’m sure Gemma was here just a little while ago.”

“No, Mama,” Molly said patiently to Doris. “That’s not right. She didn’t come by today.” To Ali, she added, “The last time I saw Gem was on Monday afternoon. We played tennis in the afternoon, and then we had a drink in the bar afterward.”

Under the circumstances, Ali thought tennis sounded like an excellent idea. Considering the caregiving burden Molly Handraker was facing at home, the thought of being out in the sun and hitting something, or even just hitting at something, would be welcome.

“How was Gemma that day?” Ali asked. “Did she seem upset about anything? Worried? Out of sorts?”

“No, not at all. We played down at the club-the country club. She beat me in straight sets. She had a lot more time to play tennis recently than I did.”

“Which country club?” Ali asked.

“Paradise Valley,” Molly answered, as though any other choice were ludicrous. “I don’t remember the exact time. Three-thirty or so, I think. They’ll have exact time at the reservation desk. We met there, played, stopped in the clubhouse for a drink or two, and then I came home. I had some help to look after Mama that night, so I didn’t have to rush. But that was the last time I saw her. On Tuesday, she had a tennis date with another friend of ours-Valerie Sloan.”