J. Jance - Hand of Evil

“I know,” Ali said. “Richey and your mother came by earlier and told me you were heading back.”

There was a pause. “They did? They came by your house?”

Crystal sounded almost as surprised and offended as her brother had been.

“Your mother was somehow under the impression that wedding bells were about to ring for your father and me.”

“I’m sorry,” Crystal said. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“As I told you the other day, your father and I aren’t in that kind of a relationship. I told your mother as much. How are you?”

“They all ganged up on me and they’re making me go back home,” Crystal said. “Even though I don’t want to. Even though I hate it.”

“Why?” Ali asked. “Why do you hate it so much?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does matter, Crystal,” Ali told her. “Your parents both care about you, and I’m sure they want you to be happy. I don’t know what the laws are in Nevada. You may be old enough to have some say in your custodial arrangements. But if you’re fighting with all the adults in your life, if you’re not going to school, and if you’re running away every time you get a chance, people aren’t going to pay attention. Your parents won’t, and neither will a judge.”

“You think a judge might listen to me, really?” Crystal asked. “That he’d let me come stay with my dad?”

Or she, Ali thought. “A judge might,” she said, “but only if you meet them halfway.”

“You mean only if I behave.”

“Well, yes,” Ali said. “Arrangements like this don’t happen overnight, and you’d better behave. For your sake and everyone else’s.”

“I’ll try,” Crystal said finally.

“Has anyone told your mother what’s been going on?” Ali asked. “As in what’s really been going on?”

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

“You need to tell her,” Ali said.

“It’s bad enough that my dad knows,” Crystal whispered. “Do I really have to tell my mother?”

“Yes, you really do,” Ali insisted. “She loves you. She’ll want to protect you. She’ll want to protect you from yourself.”

“I’ve gotta go,” Crystal said abruptly. “Thank you for everything.”

“You’re welcome…”

But Crystal was already gone.

“Good-bye,” Ali murmured into her empty receiver. “Travel safe.” Before she could put the phone down, though, it rang again.

“Ali?” her new caller announced. “It’s Deb Springer again. Is this a bad time?”

“No,” Ali told her. “It’s fine.”

“I’ve been racking my brain ever since we got off the phone, and I finally came up with it. The Mosberg Institute.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of the place where they sent Arabella Ashcroft. And it wasn’t the Bay Area, it was located in Paso Robles. I believe it started out as a home for the criminally insane. By the time Arabella went there, it had become a bit more upscale, but it was still a dreadful place. I can’t imagine sending a child of mine into a world of electroshock therapy, ice baths, and God knows what else. I’m sure it wasn’t at all like those posh rehab places they have up and down Malibu these days. But about the Mosberg, I’m fuzzy on the details. I believe it’s closed now, but I seem to remember there was some kind of fire there, and I think several people died.”

The very mention of ice baths and shock treatments caused Ali to shiver. If that had been Arabella Ashcroft’s reality at age nine, no wonder she would have objected to Billy Ashcroft threatening to have her locked up again.

Ali thanked Deb for her help, ended her phone call, and was about to enter Mosberg Institute into her search engine, when she heard Chris’s Prius pull up outside. She closed her computer with a snap.

It was time to turn away from some of the Ashcroft family carrying-ons and pay attention to her own.

Larry Marsh returned from the evidence room to find Hank on the phone, apparently on interminable hold.

“So where are we?” he asked.

Hank impatiently waved him to silence. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks so much. If he could call me back with that information, I’d really appreciate it.” Hank put down the phone. “Still tracking with the VA,” he explained. “What about you?”

“I read the diary,” Larry Marsh answered. “It could be Ali Reynolds is right and there is something there.”

“What do we do about it?” Hank asked.

“Let’s order up everything available on the other two Ashcroft characters. You take Senior. I’ll take Junior, and we’ll see what gives. We should probably do the same thing for Arabella while we’re at it.”

For the better part of the next two hours the only sounds coming from their cubicle were the click of computer keys and the whir of their printer. It didn’t take long for Larry to hit pay dirt.

“Look at this,” he said. “It’s from a column in the L.A. Times. It squares with what Ali Reynolds said and also with what was in the diary: ‘We are saddened to report that over the holiday weekend, Bill Cowan Ashcroft Junior’s hand was severely injured as a result of a tree-cutting accident at his father’s Brentwood Estate. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery. No further details about his condition are forthcoming at this time, but we certainly wish Bill and his family well.’”

“A tree-trimming accident?” Hank repeated. “With a father richer than God he has his son out cutting trees instead of a gardener? Sounds bogus to me.”

“Right. They came up with the tree story so no one would hear the real one, as in I was messing with my baby sister and she came after me with a knife. When it comes to having the story show up on the news, having a close encounter with an ax is a lot more palatable than the baby-sister angle.”

By then, Hank had finished with Bill Senior and had moved on to Arabella. “What are you finding on her?” Larry asked.

“Not much at all,” Hank told him. “No driver’s license that I can find. No marriage. No kids. No divorces, and almost zero press. The Ashcroft menfolk were publicity hounds. And Arabella’s mother, Anna Lee Askins Ashcroft, was a big deal in her own right. There are articles about her participation in museum galas and plenty of opera and symphony events. Once she moved to Arizona, she was even a big-time supporter of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Compared to the rest of the family, Arabella’s interaction with the public is damned near nonexistent.”

“If she doesn’t have a valid operator’s license, who drives that Silver Cloud we saw in her garage?” Larry asked.

“Arabella Ashcroft is the registered owner all right, but the insurance company lists Leland Brooks as the only driver.”

“That would be the butler?” Larry asked.

Hank nodded. “The butler/chauffeur. He’s been with the family for years. The mother, Anna Lee, died in 1995 after outliving Bill Senior by a dozen years. Since then it’s just been Arabella and the butler.”

Ali had always valued her close relationship with Chris, and the idea that she had been kept in the dark about a potentially serious girlfriend came as a shock. Ali had raised her son alone and had prided herself on the fact they had remained close through those difficult years of teenage angst when many mother/son relationships had run aground. As Chris came into the house and paused to hang up his jacket, it struck Ali as totally unfair that at the moment she knew far more about the details of Crystal Holman’s tempestuous life and intimate relations than she did about what was going on with her very own son.