Hand of Evil ar-3 Read online

  “I don’t remember that he did,” Bob replied.

  “Believe me, if there’d been an unexplained call on the phone bill, your father would have remembered,” Edie told Ali in a pained whisper. “He goes over every line of every bill every month, but he couldn’t be bothered with asking whether or not Kip had a driver’s license? As soon as the cops leave, I think I’m gonna kill the man and be done with it.”

  By the time Edie’s rant was over, the cops were ready to leave. “This doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on, but we’ll see what we can do,” Kenny said. “You say your Bronco’s still up at Franco’s Garage?”

  “It’s still there,” Bob answered. “Along with the goods Kip was supposed to drop off at the homeless encampment up on the Rim. They evidently weren’t good enough for the creep who took my tools, gas can, and spare tire.”

  As the two cops left, Edie followed them to the door and locked it behind them. She went over to the booth where Bob was still sitting with Sandy, who had burst into tears. “Where could Kip be?” Sandy wailed. “Something terrible has happened to him. I’m sure of it.”

  Edie slipped into the booth next to her and put her arm around Sandy’s shoulders. “I’m sure the cops will do everything they can to find him,” she said kindly. “Won’t they, Bob?”

  “Absolutely,” Bob agreed, but only after Edie nudged his ankle under the table. “Of course they will.”

  Sandy turned her tearstained face in his direction. “Do you think so?” she asked. “Really?”

  “Definitely,” Bob declared with what sounded like absolute confidence. “No doubt about it.”

  A few minutes later, when Bob stood up to walk Sandy out to her vehicle, Edie turned to her daughter. “So, where’s your charge?” she asked.

  “Dave’s home now,” Ali said. “I dropped her off with him.”

  “Does he know what she’s been up to?” Edie asked.

  “Crystal’s supposed to tell him.”

  “What if she doesn’t?” Edie asked.

  “Then I’ll probably have to,” Ali allowed. “I don’t want to be stuck in the middle of it, but I’ll do it if I have to.”

  Edie clicked her tongue. “It’s going to break Dave’s heart when he has to take her to a doctor to have her tested for STDs.”

  Ali looked at her mother in surprise. She had always been baffled by her mother’s uncanny ability to see everything and know everything, and the fact that Edie Larson was conversant on the subject of sexually transmitted diseases seemed to be another case in point.

  “Crystal told you what she’d been up to?” Ali asked.

  “She didn’t have to tell me a thing,” Edie Larson returned. “All I had to do was look at her. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

  By four that afternoon, Ali had made several calls to California. Then with Sam curled contentedly on the couch beside her, Ali was ready to reply to Velma Trimble’s e-mail:

  Dear Velma,

  I’m so sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. Things have been crazy around here. I’ve spoken to several doctors in your general area. The one that’s getting the highest marks is a concierge medical practice in Costa Mesa called Cancer Resource Specialties. I guess you’d call them a cancer care clearing-house.

  You pay a set fee to join their practice, and none of that fee would be covered by either insurance carriers or by Medicare. Cancer Resource then provides routine medical care. After all, people with cancer still get the flu. On the cancer front, however, they arrange for referrals to appropriate specialists all over the country. They help organize appointments with oncologists, arrange for scans and MRIs, put patients in touch with surgeons, pain management specialists, and whatever else may be needed. In other words, you pay them to know all the stuff you need to find out right now when you don’t have the time or the energy to track it all down on your own.

  The woman who started Cancer Resource is an internist named Dr. Nancy Cooper. I met her several years ago at a luncheon and found her to be very impressive. She got involved when she realized how dealing with the ins and outs of a cancer diagnosis can simply overwhelm both the patient and the patient’s family. Her whole focus is trying to coordinate care and smooth out some of those rough spots.

  As I said at the beginning, this service is relatively

  expensive, but I have no doubt it’s well worth whatever she charges. Her fee scale is listed on her Web site. Check it out. If this is more than you can afford, let me know and I’ll see what other options may be available.

  ALI

  With that out of the way, it was only natural for Ali to turn to the blog. The cutloose mailbox was brimming over with comments, all of them dealing with her last post, the one she had written just after she had learned of Crystal’s disappearance. Without knowing the girl had been found, Ali’s readers were still hanging in limbo-still waiting to hear. Scanning through the outpouring of commentary, Ali was interested to see that responses often touched on opposite sides of the same story.

  Dear Babe,

  My father was an abusive drunk. My mother was a doormat who would never say a word when he lit into us kids with a belt or a spoon or whatever else came readily to hand. I thought nothing could be worse than staying where I was, so when I was fifteen I ran away from home. How wrong I was. By the time I was eighteen I’d had three abortions and was strung out on heroin. I’m clean and sober now, but I also have hepatitis C and am HIV positive. My father sobered up years ago. My younger sister says he’s a different person now. She thinks I should come home-that I should forgive him and let bygones be bygones. It’s not fair. He got his life back. Mine is over. I hope your friend finds his daughter before it’s too late. I hope it’s not his fault that she ran away.

  DAWN

  Ali studied that one for a long time. There was so much hurt in the words, she hardly knew where to begin in crafting a response:

  Dear Dawn,

  The life you have is the life you have, and it isn’t over until it’s over. Don’t give up too soon. And your sister may be right. Forgiving your father may make it possible for you to forgive the other person in your life who needs forgiveness-yourself.

  I think your comment is an important one, and I’d like to post it on the blog, but I won’t do so without your express permission. Please let me know.

  BABE

  The next one came from the parent of a missing child.

  Dear Babe,

  I’ll be praying for the girl’s safe return. My daughter Sally disappeared when she was twelve-on January 11, 1966-forty-one years to the day before your friend’s daughter went missing. That’s why, when I read your post, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. We still don’t know what happened to our Sally or if she’s dead or alive. Part of me knows that she’s dead-has always known that she’s dead. But another part of me still hopes that someday the front door will slam open and she’ll be standing there saying, “Mama, I’m home.”

  Please let us know if your friend’s daughter returns safely.

  LOUANN

  Ali posted that comment and skimmed the rest. More comments came clicking in while she was reading. In the end, there were so many that it simply wasn’t feasible to respond to them all individually. She replied in her post instead.

  CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

  Wednesday, January 11, 2006, supplemental

  The response to my last post about my friend’s missing daughter has been absolutely overwhelming. Thank you all for your concern, for your prayers, and for your kind comments.

  First and most important I want you all to know that what was lost has been found. My friend’s daughter is home. She’s safe. And, externally at least, she doesn’t seem to have been harmed. However she did run away from home. Why she did that remains to be seen, and I’m sure she and her family will be addressing that and other issues in the course of the next few days-and most likely for sometime after that as well.

  She was found and brought home las
t night, but things were so hectic today that I didn’t get around to picking up my computer until just now. When I did so, I was utterly stunned by the huge number of messages I found there. As always, the thing that astonishes me is the number of people I’ve heard from who wrote to express their concerns, people who have dealt with similar problems in their own lives. Of the messages I’ve skimmed I’ve posted only the one from LouAnn.

  The sheer volume of mail on this topic precludes me from answering each of them on an individual basis. I’ll be posting more and responding individually when appropriate and as time allows.

  Babe, posted 4:55

  P.M

  .

  By then it was late afternoon. When Chris came home after school, he went directly to the kitchen to dish up and zap a bowl of his grandmother’s beef stew. “The last I knew you were heading out to find Dave Holman’s missing daughter,” Chris said while he waited for the microwave. “How did that work out?”

  “Not all that well,” Ali said. “I brought her home here, and while I was sleeping this morning, she tried to sneak off in one of your ski jackets.”

  “As in steal?” he asked.

  “Exactly,” Ali replied.

  “So she wasn’t particularly grateful.”

  “You could say that,” Ali agreed. “Not particularly.”

  “How old is she again?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “And you did get my jacket back?” Chris asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So where is she now?”

  “I dropped her off at her dad’s.”

  Chris grinned. “So, now she’s his problem.” He pulled his bowl out of the microwave. “I don’t remember ever being quite that difficult.”

  “I don’t remember it either,” Ali said. “Because I don’t think you ever were that difficult-not even when you were sixteen, which, as I remember, wasn’t a banner year.”

  “Does that mean the next time I leave the kitchen a mess, I’ve got some slack coming?” he wanted to know.

  “Get out of here,” Ali said. She plucked a small pillow off the couch and threw it at him. Sam, who disapproved of pillow fights, disappeared into the bedroom while Chris, bowl in hand, headed for the basement studio they had carved for him out of what had once been Aunt Evie’s two-car garage. Later, Ali heard him head out for the evening. She didn’t ask him where he was going, and he didn’t offer to tell her.

  In the deepening twilight, Ali helped herself to her own bowl of stew. Only after dinner had been eaten and cleared away and with the house quiet once more, did she realize that she no longer had any viable excuse for avoiding Arabella Ashcroft’s diary. By agreeing to take the volume with her, she had tacitly agreed to read it-whether or not she wanted to-and it was time to start.

  Ali adjusted the living room lights and turned on the gas log in the fireplace. Then, after retrieving the diary from her purse, she settled onto the leather sofa. She had no more than sat down when Sam joined her there, snuggling up against her leg and purring noisily. Comforted by the big cat’s solid presence, Ali opened the gold-embossed book. Shuffling through the book, she found that the vast majority of the pages were blank, but the pages that had been used were covered in a blocky, immature cursive. Ali turned to the first one.

  Happy birthday to Me,

  Happy birthday to Me,

  Happy birthday dear Bella.

  Happy birthday to me.

  Because it is my birthday and I’m nine whole years old today. And I got just what I wanted for my birthday-a

  bright blue parakeet. I think I’m going to call him Blueboy, and I’m going to teach him to talk. Parakeets can talk, you know, almost as well as parrots, you just have to know how to teach them. I would have taken a parrot, but mother says they’re a lot bigger and a lot more trouble.

  I didn’t really want a diary, but Miss Ponder gave it to me anyway. Miss Ponder hasn’t been here very long, but she’s the nicest governess I’ve ever had. The others were all stiff or mean or old, and they never gave me any presents. Miss Ponder isn’t mean at all and the way she listens when I talk makes me want to tell her stuff I wouldn’t tell anyone else. Like the fact that I want to be a writer when I grow up. That’s why she gave me this diary. She says writers need lots of practice before they can actually write books and that lots of famous writers started out by keeping a journal. Or a diary. So that’s what I’m doing. Starting out.

  That initial diary entry wasn’t at all what Ali had expected. She had thought she’d encounter something terribly graphic or terribly grim or both, and she hadn’t wanted to inflict those gory details on herself. She didn’t really want to know exactly how little Arabella Ashcroft, incest survivor, had been victimized by her older brother. What Ali had discovered instead, was a profound and completely unexpected connection between herself and the nine-year-old child who had penned those innocently bittersweet words some six decades earlier.

  Ali Larson had been around nine years old when she, like Arabella, had been bitten by a similar ambition. Ali Larson had decided in fourth grade that she wanted to be a writer. And through some combination of luck and determination, and with the timely help of Arabella’s mother, Ali had done just exactly that-she had become a journalist. And now she was writing every day in her blog with people reading what she had written and, more important, responding to it in very personal ways

  For whatever reason, Arabella’s ambitions had never come to fruition. And maybe that’s what this was all about. Maybe that was one of the reasons Ali had been put in touch with Arabella at this juncture in their lives. Maybe, even at this late date, Ali Reynolds could somehow help Arabella Ashcroft realize her long-buried dream. Or perhaps Ali was involved with Arabella, just as she was with Velma T, in order to sort things out between these two aging women and their interfering younger relatives-Velma’s son and Arabella’s nephew.

  Before Ali managed to turn to the next entry in the diary, her phone rang. “What am I going to do with her?” Dave Holman asked.

  He sounded exasperated beyond bearing. Having spent several long hours with Crystal Holman, Ali knew the girl came complete with a tangle of complications, none of them with easy answers. Before Ali tried to reply, though, she needed to know which one of Crystal’s many thorny issues Dave’s question addressed. Was it primarily due to Crystal’s being a runaway? Was it about her precocious and generally blase attitude toward sexual activity and the need to have her checked out for possible STDs? Maybe the real answer was all of the above.

  “It’s like I don’t even know her anymore,” Dave went on. “She’s not the same kid she used to be. She won’t look me in the eye. When I ask her questions, she won’t give me a straight answer about anything.”

  “Did you ask her why she ran away?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “All the usual BS,” Dave replied. “She hates her new school. She doesn’t have any friends. Her teachers are stupid. Gary Whitman is a jerk. Her mother likes Richey better than she likes her. It’s all pretty typical teenage angst. My God, Ali. I know I wasn’t the easiest kid to deal with when I was her age, but I never pulled anything like this.”

  Listening to Dave’s recitation of what Crystal had told him, Ali couldn’t help thinking about Arabella Ashcroft. She had been molested and had never told anyone, most especially her parents. Would things have been better for Arabella if she had told? And did anyone else have the right to tell Dave about what was going on with his daughter if Crystal couldn’t bring herself to do it? Yes, Crystal was a child, but even children had a right to some privacy.

  As for Dave? He was an experienced homicide cop, used to interrogating crooks and getting them to answer tough questions. Evidently his tried-and-true questioning techniques weren’t working very well on his own daughter.

  “Did you talk to her about hitchhiking?” Ali asked. “About how dangerous it is?”

  “Are you kidding? I talked about that
until I was blue in the face,” Dave returned. “But I don’t think she was listening. I tried to explain to her how lucky she was that something terrible hadn’t happened to her on the way here.”

  Something terrible did happen, Ali thought. She lost her innocence. She sold her body for a ride, and the damage to her self-respect will probably last a lifetime.

  “Did she tell you about the guy who hit her?” Ali asked.

  “She said it was a boyfriend, and that she’s broken up with him now,” Dave continued. “But she’s still threatening to run away, especially if I’m going to take her back to Vegas. So what happens when I have to go to work in the morning, Ali? I’m due to testify in court tomorrow or the next day. The county courthouse is in Prescott. That means I have to be in Prescott as well. What do I do with Crystal while I’m gone? Lock her up in the house? And if she were to let herself out, all she’d have to do is walk down to the bottom of the hill and stick out her thumb. She’ll be long gone in a matter of minutes.”

  “You’re right to be worried,” Ali said. “But since you have to work, and since Roxie is the one with custody, couldn’t she or Gary drive down from Vegas to pick Crystal up?”

  “They have jobs, too,” Dave replied. “Besides, Roxie has taken the position that this whole thing is somehow my fault, that I must have encouraged Crystal to run away. Now that Crystal’s here, Roxie says it’s my responsibility to get her back home. While I was talking to Roxie on the phone, I could hear Gary talking in the background, muttering something about ‘custodial interference.’”

  “You think they’ll try to make some kind of official issue out of this?”

  “I’d bet money on it,” Dave said. “The sooner I can get it handled, the sooner it’ll go away, but the earliest I’ll be able to drive back up to Vegas will be Saturday morning-unless the court appearance finishes up earlier.”

  “Does Crystal want to go back?” Ali asked.

  “What do you mean?” Dave asked.

  “When I picked her up last night, I got the impression that she was hoping to come live with you on a permanent basis.”