J. Jance - Edge of Evil

Chris responded with an enthusiastic affirmative. Chris, Dave, and her father wandered into a spirted discussion of which teams were likely to make it to the championship and which ones wouldn’t. Meanwhile Ali was left to consider how easily men’s conversations-regardless of whether the participants were friends or strangers-immediately devolved into sports talk. It was one of those annoying male traits, an auto-cloaking device designed to keep each of them from knowing anything personal about the others.

Right now mindless chatter was keeping Ali from learning more about what really mattered-whatever it was that had befallen her friend Reenie.

“Hey, sport,” Bob said to Chris. “What say we hit the slopes for a while this afternoon, assuming your grandmother will give me time off for good behavior.”

Chris glanced questioningly at Ali. “It’s fine with me,” she said. “I’m on my way to Flagstaff. I have no idea when I’ll be back.”

“Your grandfather can have the afternoon off,” Edie agreed, “but only if he gets his tail back in the kitchen and finishes up the rest of breakfast.”

Waving his wife’s good-natured nagging aside, Bob retreated to the kitchen. Meanwhile, Ali’s phone rang once more. She could see from the display that Paul was calling again. Leaving her place at the counter, she went out to the parking lot to take the call.

“What?”

“What?” Paul repeated. “Not even hello? Not even good morning? Why didn’t you call me back?”

“April,” Ali said bluntly. “I believe her name is April.”

“My administrative assistant,” he said. “What about her?” He was cool, wonderfully cool.

“I hear she has plans to get married soon-to you,” Ali told him. “And then there’s Charmaine as well-something about your skinny-dipping with Charmaine. Tell her she’s fired by the way. I don’t think I want to have anything more to do with her.”

Paul paused but only for a moment before going on the counterattack. “Who’ve you been talking to?” he wanted to know. “What kind of nonsense is this?”

“It doesn’t matter who my unnamed sources are,” she returned. “And it’s not nonsense.”

“I asked you to talk to that attorney of yours-Marvella or something like that. Did you do it?”

“Marcella,” Ali corrected. “And, yes, I talked to her all right. She told me that you’d made some pointed suggestions to one of her firm’s managing partners about what kind of good things they could expect if they convinced me to drop my wrongful dismissal case. But I’m not dropping it, Paul, and they’re not dropping me, either. If the old guys at the station get to stay on the news desk, then the old girls should get to stay on as well. What’s fair is fair. Now let’s talk about April and Charmaine.”

“Come on, Ali,” Paul returned. “Forget them. They’re not important. Those women mean less than nothing to me. You should know that by now.”

“Actually,” Ali returned, “I don’t know anything of the kind. “‘Those women’ as you call them may not mean anything to you, but they do to me. What they’re saying is that it’s over between us, Paul. Totally and completely over. I’ll be consulting a divorce attorney later on today-a lady who’s associated with Marcella’s firm. Her last name is Myerhoff; first name is Helga. You may have heard of her.”

There was a pause. Helga Myerhoff’s name packed some weight in certain circles. Ali knew beyond a doubt that Helga had handled divorce proceedings against more than one of Paul’s philandering pals.

“Ali Bunny…” he began.

“Don’t call me that!” she snapped.

“Ali, be reasonable. We can fix this. Or if we can’t we can do this amicably. There’s no need to…”

“I don’t want to fix it,” she interrupted. “And I’ve no intention of being amicable. The way you work, I’m quite certain that wouldn’t be in my best interests.”

Much to Ali’s surprise, she remained amazingly dispassionate. She should have been in tears. She should have been devastated. But there was part of her that felt nothing but relief.

“Look, Paul,” she said. “It’s clear that our marriage has been on its way out for some time now. Maybe I was too busy to pay attention and figure out what was really going on. But I’m not too busy now, because, as you may have noticed, I’ve recently lost my job. That means I have the luxury of paying attention and I’m not liking what I’m finding-April and Charmaine included.

“And don’t hassle me about not returning phone calls. You didn’t return mine over the weekend until you were damned good and ready. Was April off with you wherever you were? Or was it Charmaine, since she didn’t bother to come to work on Monday? Is that why you didn’t call me back?”

“Be reasonable,” Paul insisted. “I’m sure we can get to the bottom of all this.”

“Get to the bottom of what?” she demanded. “The fact that you’ve been going around with your pants unzipped and screwing everything in sight?”

Paul sighed. The sigh was supposed to mean that she was being unreasonable. And demanding. “Just tell me when you’ll be home,” he said.

“You’re not listening to me,” she returned coldly. “I won’t be coming home. My friend Reenie is dead. I came to Sedona to be with her family and with mine. I plan on staying as long as I want to.”

“But what about…”

“You have April and Charmaine,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”

Ali had hung up the phone and was about to step back inside, when the blaring headline in a newspaper vending machine for the Flagstaff Daily Sentinel caught her eye: LOCAL WOMAN DIES IN SNOWY CRASH. Searching through her coat pocket she came up with enough change to purchase a copy.

The Coconino County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the death of Misty Irene Bernard, age forty-five, Executive Director of the Flagstaff YWCA, who died over the weekend when her Yukon plunged off Schnebly Hill Road and rolled several hundred feet. Ms. Bernard, who was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident, was thrown from the vehicle.

Ms. Bernard was reported missing late Friday, twenty-four hours after she failed to return home from a doctor’s appointment in Scottsdale. Coconino County Sheriff’s Office investigators have been trying to trace her activities from the time she left Flagstaff on Thursday until her body was located near the wreckage of her vehicle on Monday.

Investigators tracing Ms. Bernard’s movements have so far been unable to determine why she would have attempted to drive the little traveled treacherous route between Flagstaff and Sedona during a snowstorm so severe that it forced brief nighttime closures on both I-40 and I-17.

People close to the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity suggested that, after receiving a dire medical diagnosis, she may have committed suicide. Evidence of both drug and alcohol use were found at the scene, but toxicology reports won’t be available for several weeks. An autopsy is scheduled for sometime later this week.

Married to NAU history professor, Howard M. Bernard, the dead woman is survived by her two young children and her parents, longtime Cottonwood residents, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Holzer. Bernard, an NAU graduate, had worked for the YWCA for the past ten years and had served as executive director for the past five.

Funeral services are pending.

Ali recognized the cold journalese of the article. It was impartial. It gave the facts. It said both too much and too little. It did nothing to capture the wonderful resilient character Reenie Bernard had been. It did everything to dismiss her-turning her into a statistic by implying that she had died primarily because she had failed to fasten her seat belt-as if a plunge off Schnebly Hill Road were in any way survivable.