Cold Betrayal (3 page)

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Ali glanced over her shoulder at the scatter of files that littered her desk. They contained information on students from various Verde Valley high schools, all of whom had been nominated as possible recipients of that year’s Amelia Dougherty Scholarship. The scholarship was named in honor of Anna Lee Ashcroft’s mother, and students receiving those highly sought awards would have the benefit of a four-year full-ride scholarship to the in-state institution of higher learning of their choice. Years earlier Ali herself had been the first-ever recipient of an Amelia Dougherty Scholarship. Now, through a strange set of circumstances, she was in charge of administering the program from which she had once benefited.

The rules of the award stated that the recipient had to have graduated from a high school in the Verde Valley. At the time Ali had been granted her award, there had been only one of those—Mingus Mountain High in Cottonwood. Now there were three, all of them with scores of deserving students.

Knowing that she held the futures of some of those students in her hands, Ali took her selection responsibilities seriously. In the beginning, Amelia Dougherty scholarships had been awarded to female students only. Ali had widened the scope to include both boys and girls, making her selection task that much more complicated.

Teachers at the various schools were encouraged to nominate students for the award. Once the recipient was chosen, he or she would be invited to tea at Ali’s home—usually toward the end of March or early in April—to receive the award in the same way Ali had been given hers, at a celebratory afternoon tea. Awarding the scholarships that early in the academic year gave recipients who might otherwise not have attempted to enroll in college a chance to do so. In the past several years Ali had expanded the tea attendees to include as many previous recipients as were able to attend.

This year a total of seventy-three nominations had come through the application pipeline. Leland, operating as Ali’s boots-on-the-ground intel agent, had tracked down information on all the nominees and she had winnowed those down to the twenty-four files that were now on her desk. Ali had spent days conducting personal interviews with the last ten finalists. This morning she had been up for hours poring over the individual files. All the students were deserving. Much as she wanted to help all of them, there was a limited amount of money at her disposal. One by one she had moved most of the files into what she called the “almost but not quite” heap. At this point only two remained in the semifinal category.

“It’s been slow going,” she admitted, “but I’m almost there.”

On the surface, Sedona was considered to be both a tourist mecca as well as an enclave of privilege, but the downturn in the economy had taken a huge bite out of the tourism industry in Sedona just as it had everywhere else. The people who had been hit hardest were the “locals”—the blue-collar workers who waited tables, cleaned hotel rooms, tended bars, manicured yards, and worked in kitchens. Many had lost their livelihoods, their homes, and, in some cases, all hopes for their children’s futures. Ali had it within her power to make a huge difference in someone’s life.

Leland nodded sympathetically. “I don’t envy your having to choose,” he said, “but results are the final judge. Your previous choices have been nothing short of remarkable.”

That was true. Ali’s very first scholarship recipient had graduated magna cum laude and was now a second-year teacher down in Phoenix. The next year’s choice, due to graduate in May, had already been accepted into law school, having found additional scholarships to help pay for her graduate studies. None of Ali’s recipients had dropped out of school, and they had all maintained high enough GPAs to continue in the program from year to year. Two were working on nursing and premed programs at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“Any front-runners at the moment?” Leland asked.

Ali stood up, retrieved the two semifinalist folders, and sat back down with them in hand.

“Natalie Droman,” she said, reading the name off the top file.

Leland nodded knowledgeably. “The girl from Cottonwood whose father has been diagnosed with ALS. Considering your own history with ALS, that’s only to be expected. On the other hand, Natalie is an exceptional student regardless of what’s going on in her family.”

Years earlier, long before Ali had met Leland, her best friend from high school, Misty Irene Bernard, had died in a one-car motor vehicle accident when her aging Yukon had taken a deadly plunge off a snowbound cliff on Schnebly Hill Road. Because Reenie had been diagnosed with ALS a short time prior to the incident, her death had been categorized as a suicide until Ali had managed to prove otherwise.

She looked questioningly at Leland. “You have an encyclopedic knowledge of each of these kids, don’t you?”

“I do my best,” he agreed.

“And you’re right,” Ali added. “Natalie is an exceptional student.”

“And the other one?”

Ali smiled and waved the remaining file in Leland’s direction. “That would be your personal favorite, I presume,” she answered. “Mr. Raphael Fuentes.”

Athena, Ali’s daughter-in-law who taught math at Sedona High School, had been the first of three teachers to nominate Raphael. His parents were divorced. His mother, left with three kids to raise, struggled to make ends meet with the help of sporadic child support and what she earned working as a receptionist in a small insurance agency. Raphael’s father, whose engineering career and income had been seriously impacted by “outsourcing” was, as a result, unable to help his son financially, but he was nonetheless in the picture enough to pressure Raphael about going after an engineering degree.

There were several serious problems with that. Although Raphael was a good kid, his math skills were mediocre at best, and he had zero interest in engineering. His heart’s desire was to attend Cordon Bleu and become a chef, a goal that his mother liked but couldn’t help him achieve and one his father regarded with derision.

“Considering your own history,” Ali added, mimicking what Leland had said earlier, “it’s not too surprising that you’d be rooting for Raphael.”

Leland Brooks knew as much as anyone about swimming against the tide of parental disapproval. His interest in cooking wasn’t the only reason he had joined the Royal Marines as soon as he was old enough to sign up. He had spent most of the Korean War serving as a cook and had devoted his lifetime since then to honing his cooking skills and using them to good effect.

“I would like the lad to have an opportunity to better himself,” Leland said. “But, of course, your policy has always been that the scholarships go to students attending a state-run college or university. Unfortunately, even though there’s a Cordon Bleu branch in Scottsdale, it’s nonetheless a private institution.”

“It is private,” Ali agreed. “But it’s also a two-year program as opposed to a four-year one, making the total cash outlay not that different.”

“I’m sorry,” Leland apologized. “I shouldn’t presume to lobby one way or the other.”

“Why not?” Ali said with a laugh. “You’ve been part of this process since the very beginning, first for Anna Lee and Arabella and lately for me. Why shouldn’t I have the benefit of your opinion?”

“It’s not my place,” he said.

“It is if I say so,” Ali countered. “So how about if you set about issuing invitations to the tea?”

“Invitations as in plural?” Leland inquired.

“Yes,” Ali said, making up her mind. “You’ve convinced me. This year we’ll award two scholarships—one to Natalie and one to Raphael.”

“Excellent,” Leland said enthusiastically, standing up and gathering the coffee cups. “I’ll consult your calendar and see to it right away. I assume you’d like me to use the Montblanc stationery Mr. Simpson gave you for Christmas?”

“Yes, please,” she said. “And use my pen, too. You’re far better at using fountain pens than I am.”

Ali’s cell phone rang just then, and her daughter-in-law’s name appeared in the caller ID screen.

“Hey, Athena,” Ali said when she answered. “What’s up?”

“I need your help.” Ali was surprised to hear Athena sounding close to tears. An Iraqi War vet and a double amputee, Ali’s daughter-in-law was not the tearful type.

“Why?” Ali asked. “Is something wrong?”

“I just got off the phone with my grandmother,” Athena said. “Gram has always been my rock. I’ve never heard her as upset as she was just now on the phone.”

“What’s going on?”

“Gram says someone tried to kill her last night. Someone came into her house while she was asleep. They turned on the gas burners on her kitchen stove without lighting them. The whole house filled up with gas. If it hadn’t been for Princess, Gram’s little dog, they both might be dead by now.”

“Look,” Ali said, “if we’re talking attempted homicide here, your grandmother needs to report the incident to a local law enforcement agency and let them investigate it.”

“That’s part of the problem,” Athena answered. “She already did that—at least she tried to. They pretty much told her she’s nuts. They claim she’s so old and frail that she probably turned the burners on herself and doesn’t remember doing it. They didn’t even bother sending someone out to check for prints. You’ve met Gram. Did she strike you as nuts?”

Ali did know Athena’s grandmother. In fact, Betsy Peterson was the only member of Athena’s family who had bothered to show up for Chris and Athena’s wedding. Athena was estranged from her parents, Jim and Sandra, who, in the aftermath of Athena’s divorce, had, for some strange reason, cast their lot with their former son-in-law along with his new wife and baby.

The summer following Chris and Athena’s wedding, soon after discovering they were expecting, the newlyweds had taken a trip to Minnesota. Ali had hoped that the visit, including the prospect of the fast-approaching arrival of grandchildren, would help smooth over whatever had caused the estrangement. The hoped-for reconciliation hadn’t happened, and the arrival of the twins had made no difference in the status quo, either. Ali had never been made privy to the gory details of the trip to Bemidji. Once Chris and Athena returned to Sedona, they had been completely closemouthed about it. Ali gathered from their silence on the topic that things had been difficult, but she had resisted the temptation to pry.

“That’s the other part of the problem,” Athena continued. “Donald Olson, the Beltrami County sheriff, and my folks are great pals. They went all through school together, and they belong to the same Rotary group. That might influence the way the incident is being treated. Do you think you could speak to Sheriff Olson and find out what the deal is?”

“It’s not my place,” Ali said.

“Please,” Athena begged. “Can’t you just say that you’re my mother-in-law. I’m concerned about Gram, but since I’m stuck in school and can’t call, I told Gram I’d ask you to do it for me. Besides, it’s true. I can’t call. I have to get back to class.”

“What’s the name of the county again?” Ali asked.

“Beltrami.”

“Give me your grandmother’s number, then,” Ali conceded. “I should probably talk to her about this before I go poking my nose into a hornet’s nest.”

Athena reeled off the number. Ali jotted it down on the outside of Raphael Fuentes’s file folder. After hanging up, she sat with the phone in her hand for some time before finally breaking down and punching in the number.

“Athena?” Betsy asked when she answered the phone. She sounded anxious.

“No,” Ali explained. “It’s Ali Reynolds, Athena’s mother-in-law. We met at the wedding.”

“Of course,” Betsy said. “I remember you. When I saw the unfamiliar number on caller ID, I thought maybe Athena was calling me back from a phone at school.”

“I just finished speaking with her,” Ali replied. “She told me a little about what happened last night. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“If the local authorities won’t lift a finger, I can’t imagine what you can do from all the way down there in Arizona.”

There were no awkward pauses in Betsy’s replies. If she was operating with a few screws missing, Ali would have thought there’d be at least a momentary bit of confusion or hesitation about who Ali was or where she was. Ali had been impressed by the woman when she had met and interacted with her at the wedding. Betsy Peterson had seemed sharp enough back then, and Ali’s first impression now was that she hadn’t lost any ground.

“What do the local authorities say?” Ali asked.

“They insist I’ve lost my marbles. They claim I turned on the gas burners on my own stove my own darned self and never bothered to light them. The deputy they sent out overnight somehow got the idea in his head that I had tried to use the stove-top burners to warm up the house—something I would never do, by the way. Even if I had been that dim, I certainly would have been smart enough to light them. I’ve had that same stove top for almost thirty years, from back when my husband and I first moved in here. It’s the stove Alton insisted we get for that very reason—that there were no pilot lights. The burners all have to be lit by hand. I hated them then, and I hate them now, but there’s no sense tossing the stove out on the scrap heap since it still works perfectly.”

“It’s cold there, I take it?” Ali asked.

“Not that cold,” Betsy answered. “It’ll probably get all the way up to the twenties today, but we had a blizzard last night, so we’ve got at least six inches of new snow on the ground.”

In the twenties with six inches of snow sounded cold to Ali. “But not so cold that you would have turned the burners on to warm the place up?”

“I have central heating and cooling,” Betsy replied indignantly. “Doesn’t anyone understand that? Why on earth would I try heating the house with the burners on the kitchen stove. It makes no sense at all. It’s not something I would do.”

“You said it snowed. If someone came and left, wouldn’t he have left tracks?”

“The snow was just starting when I got home from bingo. If there were any other tracks, they’re completely covered over. The only tracks Deputy Severson seemed to be interested in were mine. He was all hot and bothered that I went outside in the snow in my bare feet. I was afraid the house was going to be blown to smithereens, but he thought I should go back to the bedroom to put shoes on? My idea was to get the hell out.”