J. Jance - Hand of Evil

“I guess that remains to be seen,” she said.

The truth was, Ali left the title company office knowing she had money coming her way, but feeling more burdened by that fact rather than less. Ali briefly considered going by to see her parents, but decided against it. She usually enjoyed being around Bob and Edie Larson, but the last time she had seen them, her mother had been all over her about being “down in the mouth.” Edie had asked several pointed questions about what Ali was doing to “get herself back on track.”

Not wanting to risk being lectured by the parental units, Ali drove back home where she was delighted to see Chris’s Prius already parked in the driveway. Chris’s energy and cheerfulness were usually welcome antidotes for her current bout with unaccustomed torpor.

“Hey, Mom,” he said, looking up from the evening news as she walked in. With his blond hair suitably moussed and spiked, the six-foot-one Christopher could have easily passed for one of the new breed of weather reporters showing up on the tube. Chris had gotten in the habit of watching television news back in the old days when his mother was often on screen. Ali was pretty much over her own TV news addiction. Chris wasn’t. He sat on the couch with Sam stretched out next to his leg.

“My night to cook,” Chris told her. “Pizza’s on the counter in the kitchen.”

Ali had grown up in a household at the back of a restaurant. Her parents were both professional cooks. As a consequence learning to cook had never been a priority-she had never needed to. When she had been married the first time, to Chris’s father, she had cooked enough to get by, but that was all. When she had married Paul, she had moved into a place where yet another professional cook, Elvira Jimenez, had held sway over the kitchen. Besides, Ali’s news anchor duties had precluded her being anywhere near home during meal prep time.

The upshot of all that meant that not only was Ali not a capable cook, neither was her son. Between them, they subsisted on takeout and leftovers sent over from the Sugarloaf.

Ali went over to the counter and scooped up a napkin and a piece of still steaming pepperoni pizza. She stared down at the message book beside the telephone.

“Dave called?” she asked.

Dave was Detective Dave Holman, a fellow alum of Mingus Mountain High, where he had graduated a year before Ali. He had served in the U.S. Marine Corps and, along with his work as a homicide detective for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, he was still a member of the Marine Reserves. During the years Ali had been away from Sedona, Dave had established a firm friendship with her parents. Now he was her friend as well. Months earlier, during that awful time in California after Paul’s murder, Dave had been at Ali’s side every step of the way.

“Yup,” Chris said. “Wanted to know if you’d be home later. Said he’d like to stop by. I told him as far as I knew you’d be here. I also told him if he’s not too good to turn up his nose at pizza he’d be welcome to have dinner. Tuesday is the two-for-one special, so we have plenty.”

Pizza was their usual Tuesday night fare, and Chris usually spent the remainder of the evening playing city league basketball down at the high school gym. Much as Ali enjoyed her son’s company, she was also accustomed to having the house to herself on the evenings he played ball, taking advantage of the solitude to work on her blog entries and go through her readers’ comments. Tonight, if time allowed, she had planned to delve into Arabella’s diary. There was a part of her that resented the fact that Chris had seen fit to invite company over without consulting her first, especially when he had no intention of being at home.

“Oh,” Chris added. “And Gramps called. He wanted to know if you knew where Kip went.”

“Kip?” Ali returned. “I have no idea. He was here earlier this afternoon, but I haven’t seen him since.”

“That’s what I told Gramps-that since the credenza was there in the entryway, Kip must have come by. He said not to worry; something probably came up. I could hear Grandma grousing in the background-that Kip had probably fallen off the wagon and gone out and wrecked Grandpa’s precious Bronco. There’d be hell to pay if that happened.”

Bob Larson’s vintage Bronco was precious all right. Ali reached for the phone. “Did Grandpa want me to call?”

Chris unfolded his long legs from the couch, dislodged Sam, and came over to the counter where he collected another piece of pizza.

“Depends on how brave you are,” he said. “It sounded to me like he and Grandma were going at it pretty hot and heavy. If I were you, I’d wait awhile and give them a chance to cool off.”

Ali found a soda in the fridge and brought it to the counter. She was several bites into her pizza before she spoke again. “I signed the papers on the Robert Lane house,” she said.

“The sale went through then?”

“As long as the buyers sign, too.”

“Good,” Chris said. “I’m glad that’s all behind you.”

Except it wasn’t all behind Ali. Selling the house would go a long way toward allowing Ali to finally straighten out Paul Grayson’s financial obligation to his daughter-an out-of-wedlock child whose mother had refused, on religious grounds, Paul’s offer to pay for an abortion. That whole issue was still an unsettling obstacle to Ali as she attempted to move forward and consign her deceased husband to where he belonged-as a fading image in her rearview mirror.

Something in Ali’s facial expression must have betrayed what she was thinking. “Are you okay?” Chris asked.

“Of course, I’m okay,” Ali answered abruptly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Don’t bite my head off,” Chris replied. “And I asked because you don’t look okay. You look upset. You’ve been upset for weeks now.”

You’re almost as bad as my parents, Ali thought.

“I’m okay,” she repeated, but just because she said it didn’t necessarily make it so. She got up from the table, tossed the rest of her pizza into the disposal, and made a show of loading the few dirty dishes into the dishwasher. Once that was done, she went into the bedroom to get out of the tea-drinking attire she’d worn to Arabella Ashcroft’s house and into something a little more comfortable-a pair of well-worn sweats. When she emerged, Chris had disappeared.

Without knowing when Dave would show up, Ali was reluctant to start reading Arabella’s diary. Instead, she reached for her laptop, but before she had time to log on, the doorbell rang. Peering outside, she found Dave Holman standing on her front porch. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, he had turned away from the door and seemed to be staring off at the last of the sunlight on the distant red rock formations.

Determined not to let him gripe at her about her current emotional state, Ali opened the door with a flourish and was going to make some smart-mouthed comment. When she glimpsed the grim set of Dave’s lean, square-jawed face, she stifled.

“Come in,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

Stepping inside, Dave grimaced. “It’s that apparent?”

“Evidently,” Ali responded. “What’s up?”

“It’s Crystal,” he said. “She ran away.”

Crystal was Dave’s twelve-year-old daughter. Dave’s three kids-sixteen-year-old Rich and two daughters, including eight-year-old Cassie, lived with their mother, Roxanne, and her second husband, a time-share salesman with a none-too-sparkly reputation.

“From Lake Havasu?” Ali asked.

Dave gave Ali a look and then dropped heavily onto the sofa. “From Vegas,” he said. “They moved to Vegas the first of October, remember? Cassie and Rich seem to have adjusted all right, but not Crystal. Roxie called me about it just a little while ago.”