J. Jance - Hand of Evil

Ali looked around, expecting to see Mr. Brooks and the Rolls lingering in the background. The yellow Rolls was exactly where she expected it to be. Mr. Brooks was nowhere in evidence.

“I’m sorry,” Ali said. “I’m on my way out. I’ve been invited to dinner.”

“This won’t take long,” Arabella returned. “I wanted to show you something.”

Good manners trumped good sense. Ali stepped back and motioned Arabella into the house. As she wafted in, so did a cloud of gin.

“Where’s Mr. Brooks?” Ali asked.

“I’m afraid he’s otherwise engaged at the moment,” Arabella said.

“You drove here yourself?”

When Arabella set the briefcase down on the coffee table, there was a distinct rattle as though loose contents were rolling around inside. Apparently unconcerned by possible breakage, Arabella smiled conspiratorially in Ali’s direction. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I do drive occasionally. It’s a lot like riding a bicycle. I’m sure I could still do that, too.”

She’s drunk, Ali thought, but there was a singular glitter in Arabella’s eyes that made Ali wonder if Arabella was operating on something more powerful than booze.

“Are you going to offer me a drink?” Arabella asked. “I know you had a martini with me the other day. I find teetotalers very annoying, don’t you?”

The same goes for drunks, Ali thought. It seemed to her that Arabella had already had plenty. “Sorry,” Ali said. “I believe you’ve had enough.”

Arabella sighed and shook her head. “You sound just like Mr. Brooks, but that’s all right. Not to worry.” Popping open the lid of the briefcase, she pulled out an old-fashioned silver flask, unscrewed the lid, and took a drink. “BYOB,” she added. “A premixed martini. Not chilled, but definitely shaken, and better than doing without. I believe in being prepared.”

Ali was losing patience. “Arabella, I don’t want to be inhospitable but as I told you, I was just leaving. What is it you wanted to show me?”

“Evie always said you were smart,” Arabella said. “And, of course, the only way to help you without giving away the game was to help others, too. So all those other scholarship winners have you to thank, but you’re not being smart now. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. Neither did Billy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Ali. Didn’t you just finish telling me to go to the cops and confess all my sins or you’d do it for me?”

“I tried,” Ali said. “They didn’t seem particularly interested.”

“But they will be,” Arabella said.

Once again she lifted the lid on the briefcase. When she pulled out a bag with a Crown Royale insignia on it, Ali thought she was about to help herself to another drink. But the bag didn’t hold a bottle of booze. Instead, Ali found herself staring at a lidded jar-a wide-mouthed canning jar filled with a not quite clear liquid. In the dusky light of the living room it took a moment or two for Ali to make sense of the pallid shape suspended inside the glass.

“My God!” she exclaimed. “Your brother’s hand!”

“Right you are,” Arabella agreed. “Give the girl a gold star. So you know all about that then?”

Ali wasn’t sure she knew “all” about anything. But she knew enough. And she remembered Deb Springer saying that Bill Junior had kept his amputated hand with him-at all times.

“How did you get it?” Ali asked.

“Maybe he gave it to me,” Arabella said. “Or maybe I took it. But does it really matter? Come on, Ali. If that worthless nephew of mine was bright enough to figure it out, surely you can, too.”

“Are you saying you were there when Bill Junior died? When he went off the cliff?”

“Was I?” Arabella laughed. “Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t.” Clearly she regarded this as some kind of game, and she appeared to be enjoying herself immensely.

“But you told me the other day you had nothing to do with his death; that you were out of the country at the time he died.”

“I’ve said a lot of things over the years,” Arabella admitted. “The older I get the harder it is to keep all those stories straight.”

“Like passing off your years of treatment at the Mosberg Institute by saying you were going to finishing school?”

Arabella gave Ali an appraising look and then took another hit from her flask. “So you know about the Mosberg?” she said. “Yes, I was there. As for treatment? There wasn’t a lot of that going on in those days. My father sent me there because he thought I was psychotic. He was probably right about that, by the way. I was psychotic, but just because someone’s crazy doesn’t mean she’s stupid, too. It didn’t take long for me to figure out how the system worked.”

“What system?” Ali asked.

“Sex was the coin of the realm at the Mosberg. Thanks to my big brother, sex was something I knew a whole lot about. All I had to do was spread my legs and I could have whatever I wanted. ‘You don’t want electroshock therapy today, little lady. What would you like instead?’ Or how about, ‘You want a weekend pass? What have you got to trade?’ And it turned out, I had plenty to trade. There were guys lining up to take the crazy girl into town. I was a hot date. Of course, that was long before the arrival of birth control pills. Much to the director’s chagrin, I’d had to have three abortions by the time I was eighteen. That’s when they finally fixed me.”

“Fixed you?” Ali asked.

“With a hysterectomy,” Arabella replied.

Ali was aghast. “At age eighteen?”

Arabella shrugged. “They did me a favor. After that I could do whatever I wanted. It was a lot easier not to get caught.”

The story was appalling; so was Arabella’s nonchalant delivery. The problem was, Ali couldn’t figure out if Arabella was telling the truth this time or if she was simply spinning yet another web of lies.

“Where was this place?” Ali asked. “When was it?”

Arabella shrugged. “In California,” she said. “Outside a town called Paso Robles. After the fire, Mother brought me here to Arizona-to a facility near where Carefree is now. That one was a lot nicer, but it closed. The people who owned it sold it to someone who turned the place into a resort-very posh, I understand.”

Ali had already learned a good deal about the fatal fire at the Mosberg Institute, but she wanted to hear the story in Arabella’s words. “There was a fire?” Ali asked.

“Oh, yes,” Arabella said. “At the Mosberg. A terrible fire. A nurse died in it and one of the patients. I knew the nurse. I never met the patient.”

Something about the way Arabella said the words sent a chill of recognition through Ali’s body. “Did you have anything to do with the fire?” Ali asked.

“Me?” Arabella responded. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

“Did you?” Ali pressed.

“I suppose it’s possible. I might have had something to do with it.”

“And what about Billy?” Ali asked. “Did you have anything to do with what happened to him?”

Arabella sighed. “If only he hadn’t looked so much like his father. That was a real shock to the system.”

“He looked like Bill Junior?”

“Amazingly so. When Mr. Brooks brought the man into the living room, seeing him took my breath away. For a moment I thought Bill Junior had come back to life and that his hand had grown back, too.” She unscrewed the lid on her flask, took another sip, and giggled. “That would have been something, wouldn’t it? If his hand had grown back, but of course it hadn’t-it was still safe and sound and put away right where I’ve kept it all these years.” She patted the briefcase affectionately.