“Who won?” Ali asked.
“We did.”
“You don’t sound very happy about it?”
Athena took a deep breath. “There’s good news and bad news,” she said. “For one thing, when I got home tonight, there was an e-mail waiting for me from Gram, which was a huge surprise. I’ve been trying for months to get her back online. How did you do that? So then, when I called to tell her congratulations, she said something weird—a couple of things, really. She told me I need to go see Stu and have him take a copy of my thumbprint. What’s that all about? And while I’m there, she says Stu is supposed to take 3-D photographs of me, too. Why? What’s going on?”
“It’s probably something to do with the security system we installed for her,” Ali said. “But if the e-mail from your grandmother is the good news, what’s the bad?”
“I just got off the phone with my dad. He says he wanted me to know that he and Mom have scheduled what he called an ‘evaluation appointment’ for Gram on Monday.”
“What kind of evaluation, physical?”
“Mental,” Athena answered bleakly. “Dad told me that with everything that’s going on, he and Mom think it’s time to take that ‘next step,’ as he called it. That if Gram’s turning on stove burners and forgetting about doing it or mixing up her meds, she’s no longer capable of living on her own. What astonished me is that Dad says she agreed to go for the evaluation. Why would she do that? If I were in her shoes, I’d tell the people trying to lock me up to go piss up a rope.”
“I get the feeling that your parents aren’t particularly close to your grandmother,” Ali said. “Is that the case?”
“More my mother’s problem than Dad’s. And Mom is most likely the mover and shaker behind all this. That’s just how she operates. She can be a super-manipulator at times, and my father goes along with whatever she wants because that’s what he does. He doesn’t like to make waves as far as Mom is concerned, even when she treats him like crap. Which she always has, by the way, for as long as I can remember.”
In the last two days, Ali had learned more about what made her daughter-in-law tick than ever before, and she suspected those insights had been offered more because Ali had turned off her asking mode in favor of simply listening.
“Growing up in that kind of family dynamic must have been tough,” Ali offered.
Even over the phone she heard the catch in Athena’s throat. “Yes,” she agreed softly. “It was.”
“Okay,” Ali said. “You asked for High Noon’s help, and you need to let us do just that. Your responsibility in all this is to do exactly what your grandmother asked—get the photographs and thumbprint taken as soon as you can, tomorrow if possible.”
“You don’t think it can wait until the weekend?”
“Sooner is better than later.”
“All right,” Athena agreed. “I’ll see if my assistant can handle practice tomorrow. Maybe I can run up there after school.”
“Do that,” Ali said. “In the meantime, what’s the doctor’s name again—the evaluation doc?”
“Munson,” Athena answered. “Dr. Elmer Munson.”
“Okay,” Ali said. “Let me follow up on this. Don’t worry. Your grandmother has some good people in her corner. She’s not in this on her own, and neither are you.”
By the time Ali turned off I-17, there was a small strip of snow on either side of the pavement, but that was only the remnant of what had been plowed off the night before. The rest of the snow had melted into the desert. After years spent living in Chicago, that was one of the things Ali really appreciated about living in Sedona. It was a place where snow was relatively rare and usually stayed on the ground no more than a day.
Out of freeway traffic, Ali dialed Stu’s number and wasn’t surprised to hear that he was still up and working.
“Tell me about needing Athena’s thumbprint and the photo,” she said. “I’m assuming it’s got something to do with the surveillance system.”
“The photo does,” Stu answered. “If Athena shows up at her grandmother’s house, her image will be one of the ones that doesn’t trigger an alarm. The thumbprint is something else. Mrs. Peterson had all her personal passwords, including her banking passwords, in a notebook in her bedroom. Joe Friday pitched a fit about that. He’s established a secure cloud account for her to use for storing passwords. Betsy wants Athena to be the only other person with access to all her passwords.”
“She’s probably not wrong about that,” Ali said, “especially considering what Athena told me just now. I want you to find out everything there is to know about Athena’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. James Peterson of Bemidji, Minnesota. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that one or the other of them is up to no good.”
“Why?”
“They seem to have launched a concerted effort to have Betsy declared incompetent. She told me yesterday that Athena is the only beneficiary named in her will. That means if she dies, Jim and Sandra Peterson get nothing, but if they can make a competency hearing work in their favor, they may be able to gain control of her funds right now.”
“How deep do you want me to go?” Stu asked.
“Deep,” Ali answered. “And while you’re at it, take a look at someone else—a Dr. Elmer Munson, also of Bemidji.”
“Who’s he?”
“The doctor doing the evaluation,” Ali answered. “Call me a conspiracy nut if you want, but I have a feeling there’s something rotten in Bemidji.”
Minutes after ending the call to Stu, Ali was home. Bella had evidently heard the garage door. She was stationed just inside the kitchen door and scampered around Ali in ecstatic short-legged circles. Straightening up from greeting the dog, Ali spotted a note from Leland on the kitchen counter. She had tried calling him earlier in the afternoon to let him know she’d be coming home late. When he didn’t pick up, she had left a message. His note said: “Couldn’t tell from your voice mail if you’d eaten or not. Just in case, there’s a pasty waiting in the warming drawer.”
That was welcome news. The pasty Ali had eaten at lunchtime was now far too many hours in the past. She took the warm one out of the oven, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat down at the table to eat, sharing only a few morsels of pie crust with the dog.
Half an hour later, after taking Bella out for one last walk, Ali and the dog headed for the bedroom. Ali didn’t bother pretending to pick up Pride and Prejudice. She was beyond Jane Austen’s reach tonight. And she didn’t try to boot Bella off the bed, either.
She went to sleep as soon as she turned out the light, but she didn’t stay asleep. In one dream after another, her friend Irene Bernard was there, surrounded by a group of pregnant girls, all of them wearing crowns of braids on the tops of their heads. In the dreams, Ali was the only one who knew the girls were dead. Reenie had no idea.
18
After a night of ragged sleep, Ali wasn’t exactly at her best at eleven the next morning when she arrived at Bishop Gillespie’s residence in Phoenix and was ushered by his assistant into a book-lined study. The old-fashioned library table that served as a desk was situated in front of a metal mullioned window that looked out on a spacious lawn of winter-hardy green grass. Except for a wrought-iron gate on the drive, the lawn was completely surrounded by a thick hedge of twenty-foot-tall oleanders and punctuated by towering, fully skirted palm trees. Off in the distance was the distinctive hump-shaped rock formation that gave Camelback Road its name.
Bishop Gillespie, seated in front of a gas-log fireplace in what Ali assumed to be an original Stickley Morris chair, watched with interest as Ali paused long enough to enjoy the view.