J. Jance - Cruel Intent

“How come?” she asked. She more than half expected to hear that since he was living on his own, his senior-year GPA wasn’t good enough. That was what often happened when kids went off to live without parental supervision for the first time.

“Because he’s a fraud,” Leland declared forcefully. “A lying, cheating fraud.”

Ali was stunned. “You mean he’s not gay?”

“He may be gay,” Leland allowed. “Although I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced of that, either. My main problem with Ricky is that I’ve gotten to the bottom of the fruit-fly escapade. He’s a victim of a self-inflicted hate crime.”

“You mean he put those fruit flies in his own locker?” Ali asked.

“A friend of Ricky’s put them there at his insistence. He was at war with his father and was looking for a way to get thrown out of the house, and he certainly succeeded in that. Yes, he’s living on his own, but with that undeserved windfall from his court case, he doesn’t really need any scholarship help. That’s just my opinion, however. Go ahead and read all three dossiers. The final decision is yours, but I think either one of the two girls would make a better choice.”

Ali didn’t ask how Leland had uncovered all these details, but she was prepared to accept his considered opinion on the subject. Setting aside Ricky Farraday’s file, she spent the rest of the morning in the canopy-covered break room, working her way through the two remaining dossiers. Although both Marissa Dvorak and Haley Marsh were capable students, neither was performing at the valedictorian or salutatorian level, where scholarship help would have been much more plentiful. The two girls were solidly second-tier students.

Marissa Dvorak had been adopted as a ten-year-old from an orphanage in the Ukraine. Juvenile arthritis had left her confined to a wheelchair prior to her freshman year in high school. Lengthy hospital stays and prolonged absences had limited her academic achievement and had also contributed to a lower GPA than she would have had otherwise. Nonetheless, she was a serious student who gravitated toward classes in science and math. Her single extracurricular activity was the chess club, where she had easily walked away with the state championship.

According to what Leland had been able to learn from interviewing friends and teachers, Marissa hoped to attend the University of Arizona as a premed student with the eventual goal of doing medical research. For right now, her hopes and dreams were stymied by the fact that her parents, who ran a chain of dry-cleaning establishments, made too much money for her to qualify for most forms of financial aid other than student loans. Both she and her parents were reluctant to sign up for those-a situation Ali Reynolds understood very well.

Haley Marsh, along with her maternal grandmother, Nelda Harris, had moved to Cottonwood a little over two years earlier from Tuttle, Oklahoma. Haley had enrolled in Mingus Mountain as a very pregnant fifteen-year-old sophomore. Despite being an unmarried teenage mother, Haley had managed to maintain a solid 3.2 GPA for as long as she’d attended Mingus Mountain. Nelda, who worked as a school janitor in the afternoons and evenings, looked after the baby during the day while Haley was at school, and on weekends while Haley held a part-time job as a cashier at the local Target.

Faye Gerrard, Haley’s homeroom teacher and her junior-year English teacher, was the one who had brought Haley to Leland Brooks’s attention. “The girl is smarter than she knows,” Faye had told Leland. “What she’s lacking is self-confidence. I don’t think anyone else in her family has ever gone on to college. She’s somehow decided that since they didn’t, she won’t, either.”

Haley’s file left more questions than it offered answers. Where were Haley’s parents? Why weren’t they in the picture or even mentioned? And what about the baby’s father? Where was he? Who was he?

Ali Reynolds found it easy to relate to both girls. Like them, she had been a second-tier student. For her, receiving the Askins Scholarship was the one thing that had made going on to school possible. She suspected the same would be true for either Marissa or Haley. One would have to overcome tough physical realities. As for Haley? Ali knew that being a single parent and going to school wasn’t easy, but she also knew it could be done. Ali Reynolds herself was proof positive of that.

Marissa had a definite career goal in mind. The information on Haley gave no hint as to what her possible career choices might be, but Ali didn’t find that particularly alarming. After all, how many high school seniors already knew exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up?

Ali abandoned her spot at the picnic table when the workers came wandering outside for lunch. Relieved to leave the construction behind, she grabbed some lunch on the way and then stopped by a Hallmark store and searched until she found just the right card for Chris and Athena. After ordering a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to the high school gym in time for their engagement celebration, she headed for Cottonwood.

It wasn’t until she was alone in the car that she started thinking about Morgan Forester again-about Morgan and Bryan, about how the love two people once shared for each other could go horribly wrong. After all, when she had first met Paul Grayson, he had showered her with flowers, one arrangement after another, so many that her friends at work had teased her about being able to open her own flower shop. The onslaught of bouquets had started to dwindle shortly after their wedding, and the deliveries had ended completely long before Paul had ended up dead under that speeding freight train.

Ali was relieved when she arrived at Haley Marsh’s place, a modest duplex on the far-east side of Cottonwood. When Ali knocked, she heard a toddler, crowing and babbling, come racing to answer it.

“Get out of the way,” Ali heard a woman’s voice order from inside the house. “Let me open it.” Ali recognized the gentle drawl that betrayed the mother’s Oklahoma origins.

The child must have stepped aside because eventually the door opened. Haley Marsh was a petite blue-eyed blonde. One arm was filled with an overflowing laundry basket, while a wide-eyed child with chocolate-brown skin and a cap of curly black hair peeked shyly out from behind his mother’s leg. Looking at him, Ali estimated that he had to be right around two years old.

“Haley Marsh?” Ali asked. “My name is Ali Reynolds.”

Haley nodded, but she didn’t open the door to welcome Ali inside. “Mrs. Gerrard said you’d be dropping by today,” Haley said guardedly. “She mentioned something about your wanting to talk to me about a scholarship, but I haven’t applied for any scholarships.”

“May I come in?” Ali asked.

Haley sighed and set down her laundry basket. “I guess,” she said. “But the place is sort of a mess.” She hefted the child onto her hip and motioned Ali into the room. The crammed living room wasn’t really a mess so much as it was lived in. A playpen empty except for a collection of outgrown toys was jammed into one corner of the room along with a changing table. Baby gear and more toys were scattered everywhere. Half the dining room table was covered with stacks of folded laundry. An open schoolbook and a notebook of some kind lay on the other end of the table as though an afternoon study session had been interrupted by Ali’s arrival. A high chair, littered with the remains of the toddler’s afternoon snack, sat nearby.

Still holding the squirming child, Haley ushered Ali over to a sagging couch, then she took a seat on a nearby straight-backed chair. As soon as she was seated, the barefoot baby scrambled out of her lap and scooped up a tiny plastic truck from the floor. With a face-wide grin, he brought the toy to Ali and offered it to her. Ali accepted the proffered gift with a thank-you. The child clapped his hands in glee, said something that sounded very much like “truck,” and then dashed off in search of another one.