Authors: J.A. Jance
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.
For the first time Ali understood that in addition to being drunk, Arabella Ashcroft was also nuts—totally, completely, and certifiably crackers.
Ali had been standing in the middle of the living room. Now she took a tentative step toward the kitchen counter—and the telephone.
“Where are you going?” Arabella asked.
“I need to call someone,” Ali said. “You need help, Arabella. Maybe Mr. Brooks could come get you.”
“No, no calls. Mr. Brooks has helped me quite enough through the years. That’s why my mother hired him, of course—to look after me and to keep me out of trouble. I have to say, he’s done a splendid job of it most of the time, but he’s always been at a bit of a disadvantage since he never knew the full story.”
Ali glanced at her watch. It was twenty past six. If she was late to dinner, someone was bound to notice. Dinner was scheduled for six-thirty, and Edie Larson expected people to be present and accounted for when food was served. All Ali had to do was stall for time. Eventually her mother would call. Edie might even dispatch a search party.
“What is the full story?” Ali asked.
“About Bill Junior? No one would believe what he was doing to me,” Arabella said. “Even my mother didn’t believe it. The one person who did was Miss Ponder.”
The only clue that the conversation had taken a sudden six-decade detour was the mention of Arabella’s old governess. “Wait a minute,” Ali said. “You told me the other day that you hadn’t told your mother.”
Arabella looked puzzled. “Did I? Of course. Why wouldn’t I? That’s what I told myself over the years, too—that she must not have known. When you tell people and they don’t believe you, it hurts too much, so I convinced myself otherwise and didn’t think about it very much. I just ignored it. When Miss Ponder went away, Mother told me at the time that she’d been fired because Father caught her stealing something. She said Miss Ponder went back home to New Jersey. I didn’t find out until years later that she was dead. Murdered.”
“And you think your brother was somehow responsible for her death?”
“I know it,” Arabella said fiercely.
“You know it how?” Ali asked. “Did he tell you himself?”
“No.”
“Was he ever arrested or questioned in regard to that case?”
“I doubt it,” Arabella said. “Not by the police. There wasn’t time. When Mother told me Miss Ponder’s body had been found, I wrote Bill Junior a letter. He and my father were both flying high in those days. They had a number of big deals on the table. When I told Bill Junior I knew what he had done and that I was going to find a way to go public, he didn’t like it at all.”
“You were going to blackmail him?”
“After what he’d done to me, why not? He came to see me to try to talk me out of it. That’s when he went off the cliff.”
“He came to the Mosberg?”
“Not officially. I had gone AWOL and hitched my way to San Francisco. I had Bill Junior meet me there. He was taking me for a little ride when he went off that cliff.”
“You somehow sent him over the edge?” Ali asked.
“Absolutely. Who else was going to do it? I took care of him once and for all.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure. We’d both been drinking. People who are drunk do a lot of stupid things.”
“How did you get back to the hospital?”
“I don’t know. I hitchhiked, probably. Someone must have given me a ride. Dropped me off outside the gate. When questions were asked, the hospital covered for me—covered for themselves actually. They didn’t want anyone knowing I’d been off wandering about on my own when Bill Junior died. But somehow, after all these years, Billy finally figured it out.”
“And when he came to you looking for money, you took care of him, too,” Ali said.
“In more or less the same way. I was waiting for him when he came to his apartment in Scottsdale. He’d been out jogging. I held a gun on him and had him drive out to South Mountain Park. He didn’t have either a cell phone or a wallet with him and I thought that way the cops might have a harder time identifying him. He was convinced I was going to shoot him. I thought so, too, but then he somehow managed to get the gun away from me. When he tried to drag me out of the car, I slammed the door on his hand, put it in gear, and drove until he shut the hell up.”
Drunk, crazy, and dangerous as hell,
Ali thought.
“So why are you telling me this, Arabella?” she asked. “Are you planning on taking care of me, too?”
As Ali asked the question, she wondered if she shouldn’t try to make a run for it. The front door was only a few feet away, and Arabella Ashcroft was no spring chicken. If Ali could make it out the door and down the hill to one of the neighbor’s, maybe she’d be able to duck inside and use a phone to summon help. On the other hand, there was always a chance that running might prove more dangerous than staying where she was.
“I guess I hoped that if I told you the whole story, maybe you’d help me,” Arabella continued. “I really do admire cutloose. At one time I thought I could do some good by sharing my story with others. I’ve been working on writing it down for months, but that’s not going to happen now. What Bill Junior did to me didn’t just destroy my childhood, Ali. It destroyed my whole life. By the time he was done with me, sex was all I was good for—sex and revenge. Once those were gone, I wasn’t good for anything.”
In Arabella’s despairing words, Ali was afraid she was catching a glimpse of what might be Crystal Holman’s grim future, as well—unless someone did something to change it.
“How do you expect me to help you?” Ali asked.
Arabella frowned. “After you talked to me this afternoon, I thought I’d come here and have you help me locate an attorney so I could turn myself in, but now I’ve changed my mind. There’s something else I need to do first.”
“What?” Ali asked.
The phone rang. Ali jumped and so did Arabella. Before Ali could move toward the phone, Arabella had reached into the still-opened briefcase and retrieved a handgun that she pointed in Ali’s direction.
“Answer it,” Arabella ordered.
“Hello,” Ali managed.
“Why are you still at home?” Chris wanted to know. “You should be here. Everybody else is. Grandma and Athena are dishing up.”
“I’m on my way,” Ali managed. “I’ll be there in a little while.” She put down the phone.
“Good girl,” Arabella said with a smile. “You are on your way. In fact, I think the two of us are on our way.”
“On our way where?” Ali asked.
“Just a little trip together,” Arabella said. “We’ll know when we get there. As you have so kindly pointed out, I’ve had a bit too much to drink. That being the case, you should probably drive.”
Holding the gun with one hand, Arabella tucked the flask into her bra. Then she used the other hand to return the jar to the briefcase, which she clicked shut.
“Shouldn’t you have wrapped that?” Ali asked.
Arabella picked up the briefcase and rattled the contents. “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’ll be fine. Let’s go. We’ll take the Rolls. Get in on the passenger side and then slide over. I’ll sit in the back.”
As they moved toward the front door, Ali once again considered making a break for it. When she opened the door, though, her ears were assailed by the pneumatic
blat, blat, blat
of a bouncing basketball. That meant that Gabe, the eighth-grader who lived down the street, was out in the driveway dribbling endlessly and shooting baskets. Ali couldn’t do anything that would endanger him or anyone else. And once behind the wheel, Ali realized she wouldn’t be able to risk driving erratically and provoking a traffic stop, either. No telling what Arabella would do if an officer approached the vehicle. Without a cell phone or any way to summon help, all Ali could do was play a waiting game and hope that eventually the booze would do its work.
Ali complied wth her marching orders while Arabella, puffing slightly, clambered into the back. Ali cringed as the briefcase landed heavily on the floor behind her with the jar rattling loosely around inside it.
“Here,” Arabella said. “Put this on. It’ll look better.” She dropped Leland Brooks’s short-billed cap into the front seat. “And the key is there in the ignition.”
Only someone who wasn’t used to driving would make that kind of mistake with a Rolls,
Ali thought. When she turned the key, the perfectly tuned engine purred to life. It took a moment to fasten her belt, adjust the seat, and locate the headlight switch. Nothing was familiar.
“Where to?” Ali said finally, pulling out of the driveway.
She caught a hint of gin as Arabella took another hit from the flask. “When you get to the bottom, turn left.”
As soon as Ali turned onto the highway, she saw the Sugarloaf Rock and below it the café. The lights were out, but there were several cars still in the parking lot. She caught a glimpse of her father’s Bronco, somehow repaired and returned from the garage in a surprisingly timely fashion. She saw her mother’s Alero, Chris’s silver Prius, Dave’s battered Nissan, and two more vehicles Ali couldn’t quite identify. Earlier she had dreaded going there and having to tell Dave the latest piece of Crystal’s bad news.
Now, though, Ali could easily imagine the crowded living room of her parents’ cramped house, and that was exactly where Ali Reynolds wanted to be, seated along with everyone else in a humble living room masquerading as a dining room and breaking bread with people she loved. That wasn’t to be. Instead of being there and being able to meet the young woman who might become Chris’s wife, Ali was stuck in a bright yellow Rolls-Royce, being held captive by an armed old woman who was certifiably crazy.
Just like Detective Marsh said,
she thought ruefully.
Definitely inserted and definitely in danger.
“Where are we going?” Ali said.
“Just drive out to the freeway,” Arabella told her. “I’ll tell you what to do once we get there.”