J. Jance - Edge of Evil

“Why?” Ali returned. “Do you know her?”

“I’ve heard of her. Remember Sally Majors, the girl I took to the senior prom?”

Ali remembered the photo her son had given her that year. He had stood in front of someone’s massive fireplace decked out in a white tux, pale pink shirt, and cranberry-colored cummerbund and tie. Standing beside him, dwarfed by his size, had been a tiny girl in a full-length cranberry gown that screamed designer label. Ali had always been struck not by the beauty of the gown, but by the unremitting sadness in the girl’s eyes.

“I remember her,” Ali said.

“Her father’s a worm,” Chris said. “He was getting ready to ditch his wife. Same thing. Younger woman. He was hiding assets, doing all kinds of underhanded crap. Sally’s mother hired Helga, and she nailed him. I ran into Sally at Starbucks a few months ago. She told me all about it.”

“Go Helga,” Ali said. But her heart wasn’t in it.

After that, she turned up the music and subsided into silence. As the miles rolled by, she was surprised that she didn’t feel more. Maybe, with all that had happened in the past few days, she was simply beyond feeling anything at all. That turned out to be wrong, however. Because when she finally did start feeling, what hit her first was anger-with a capital A.

“How old is this girl?” she asked finally.

“April?” Chris returned. Ali nodded. “A little older than I am,” he said. “Maybe mid twenties.”

“Oh,” Ali said.

So this was all part and parcel of what had happened to her on Friday night. If you were forty-five and female, you were expendable-professionally and personally. Over the hill. Useless. And nobody, not the people at the station and certainly not Paul, expected her to stand up on her own two feet and fight back. Well, they were wrong-all of them.

Chris pulled off I-10 in Blythe for gas and for something to drink, then they forged on. They stopped for a Burger King on the far west side of Phoenix before they turned north on Arizona 101. Chris downed all of his Whopper and more than half of Ali’s.

It was well after midnight when they turned off I-17 and headed toward Sedona. By then they were close enough that Ali figured it was okay to call her dad. When he answered the phone, it was clear he had been sound asleep.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re here.”

“We?” he mumbled.

“Chris drove me over.”

“Good then,” Bob Larson said. “If I had known he was coming along, I wouldn’t have worried.”

Another put-down from the male of the species, Ali thought. “Thanks, Pop,” she said. “See you in the morning.”

As they drove up Andante to Skyview Way, the waning moon was just starting to disappear behind the looming presence of the red rock formation known as Sugarloaf. When Chris stopped the car and they stepped outside into the graveled driveway, the air was sharp and cold, and their breath came out in cloudy puffs. With one accord they both glanced up at the star-spangled sky.

“I always forget how beautiful it is here,” Chris said. “I always forget about the sky.”

“Me too,” Ali said.

“You go unlock the door, Mom,” he said. “I’ll bring the luggage.”

Inside the heat was on. Lamps were lit in the living room and in one bedroom. There was a note on the fridge in her father’s handwriting. “Tuna casserole is ready for the microwave.”

Tuna casserole was Edie Larson’s cure for whatever ailed people. If there was a death in the family or if someone wound up in the hospital, that’s what Edie would whip up in her kitchen and dispatch her husband to deliver. Ali opened the refrigerator door and glanced at her mother’s familiar Pyrex-covered dish. Seeing the scarred turquoise blue veteran from some long ago era left Ali feeling oddly comforted.

Chris turned up behind her. “Your luggage is in your room,” he said. He reached past Ali and grabbed one of the sodas that had also miraculously appeared on the shelf. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing toward the covered dish.”

“Tuna casserole,” Ali answered.

“Great!” Chris exclaimed. “I love that stuff.” He grabbed it out of the fridge. “Want me to heat some for you?”

“No thanks,” Ali said. “I’m not very hungry. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go to bed.”

cutlooseblog.com

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

It’s five o’clock in the morning. When I typed the date and saw it was the Ides of March, I realized that it really is a time for bad news.

I know you’ve been writing to me. There are 106 e-mails in my in-box. From the subject lines, I know they’re not spam, either. No one is offering to sell me low-cost prescription drugs. No one is advertising Viagra. They’re all e-mails to me, and I’ll get around to reading them in a little while. I may even finally have a chance to answer them, but first I need to tell you what’s happened because, since you’ve been reading the posts, you deserve to know what’s going on.

My friend Reenie is no longer lost-she’s dead. Her vehicle went over the edge of a cliff during a snow storm. Her body was thrown from the wreckage. Neither she nor her SUV were located until late yesterday morning. I wanted to come here, to Arizona, to be with her family-her husband, her two young children, her parents, and her sister-and to help them as they face this grueling ordeal. I’m under no illusions that my presence here will change anything, but that’s what friends do-they come and they sit or they talk or they do nothing or everything. Sometimes friends just are.

Yesterday afternoon my son, my wonderful twenty-two-year-old son, took time away from his classes at UCLA to drive over to Sedona with me. We arrived after midnight at the home my Aunt Evelyn left me two years ago. When we arrived, the heat was on and so were the lights. There was tuna casserole, milk, and sodas in the fridge and coffee in the canister on the counter next to the coffeepot. (Have I mentioned that I also have wonderful parents? They run a diner just down the road, and when Chris wakes up, we’ll go there for breakfast.)

Over Christmas Chris installed a high-speed Internet connection here, and he also hooked up a wireless network. That means I can take my laptop and work anywhere in the house, so I’m working at the dining room table with my coffee cup near at hand.

The sun is up, and the view across the valley is beautiful. Because of the recent rains, everything is green and that makes Sedona’s red rocks that much more visible in contrast. It’s a lovely scene, but I’m not looking forward to being out in it. I’m sure this is going to be a long day and a tough one. I don’t know what I’ll say to Reenie’s husband or to the rest of her family. I’ve already heard hints that the authorities are exploring the possibility that Reenie committed suicide rather than face up to the awful reality of dying of ALS. I can’t accept that. I won’t accept that. Reenie was a fighter. Her daughter is only six; her son is nine. No matter what, I can’t believe that she would choose to turn away from spending every possible moment with her precious family. Ill or not, I can’t imagine she would abandon them even one single instant before she had to.

Bottom line, I suppose, is that I can’t accept that she would willingly abandon me, either. How’s that for being selfish?

But it’s not just selfishness on my part either. The last communication I had from her was a handwritten note she mailed last week, postmarked on the day she disappeared. In it she said she was in for a bumpy ride. To me that sounds like someone saying she knows it’s going to be tough but that she’s signed on for the duration. It doesn’t sound like someone who was looking for an easy way out. Reenie is one of those people who always did things the hard way-from staying too long in an untenable first marriage to finishing college long after all her contemporaries had graduated. Yes, everything I’ve read about ALS says it’s a daunting adversary with no cure and very little going for it in the way of treatment options, but my friend Reenie Bernard has always been a scrapper and a fighter. She’s never been a quitter.