Touched by the offer, Ali smiled. 'Thanks, Mom,' she said. 'I'll be fine. Really.'
'And you'll call and let us know how it's going?'
'I promise.'
Kip returned with her car keys, and Ali took her leave. She stopped by the bank and picked up some cash. She had a particular pet charity that she wanted to help along while she was in L.A., and she knew a cash gift would be most welcome.
A little less than an hour after leaving the bank, Ali was past the most worrisome stretch of the Black Canyon Freeway and headed into Scottsdale. At the time she had left her evening news gig in L.A., she had ditched her old newscasting wardrobe and her California persona like a snake shedding a cast-off skin. For as long as she'd been in Sedona, she'd worn her hair in a less than stylish ponytail and limited her wardrobe to what was comfortablemostly sweatshirts and worn jeans. Now, though, facing courtroom appointments and the prospect of more than a little public notoriety, Ali understood that she needed to dress and look the part. Not only did she pick up several outfits, she stopped into one of Scottsdale's upscale salons for some much needed pampering, including a haircut along with a spa-style mani/pedi.
Properly attired, coiffed, and accessorized, Ali felt ready to face what she had come to think of as her California ordeal. She headed west in late-afternoon, rush-hour traffic and soon found herself stuck in a jam of speeding eighteen-wheelers, all of them driving blindly but hell-bent-for-election into the setting sun. Tired of trying to stay out of their way, Ali pulled off at the first rest area she saw. There, sitting at a shaded picnic table, she opened her cooler. Not only was her father's carefully prepared food there, so was a collection of plastic utensils. With noisy traffic rushing by in the background, Ali savored her combination lunch/dinner of fried chicken and honey-slathered biscuits. Then, feeling fatigued and still not wanting to face into the blazing sunset, she returned to the Cayenne, locked the doors, lowered her seat back, and allowed herself the luxury of a nap.
She slept far longer than she expected. It was dark when she woke up, but she felt refreshed. Once back on the road, Ali was relieved to realize that traffic was noticeably lighter, and she was grateful she'd had the good sense to wait out the setting sun rather than driving into it.
Ali realized that that was one of the wonderful things about traveling on her own. She could eat when she was hungry, sleep when she was tired. It wasn't necessary to take anyone else's needs, wants, or opinions into consideration. Yes, being back on her own was definitely growing on Ali Reynolds.
She took her mother's advice to heart. When she stopped for gas in Blythe, she stopped at a roadside restaurant for coffee as well. She was halfway through the second cup when her phone rang.
'Well,' Helga Myerhoff said in her distinctly gruff and smoky voice. 'Have we girded our loins?'
Helga, sometimes called Rottweiler Myerhoff, had a not-undeserved reputation for being one of the Hollywood elite's premier divorce attorneys. With Helga's help and with the added impetus of Paul wanting a fast divorce as opposed to a cheap one, Ali had a generous divorce settlement coming to her, one that gave her pretty much everything she wanted. Between them Helga and Ali had, in fact, taken Fang to the cleaners.
Ali laughed. 'They're girded, all right. New duds, new haircut, killer nails. Believe me, I'm ready.'
'Good,' Helga said. 'And you're staying at the Westwood on Wilshire?'
'That's right,' Ali answered. 'I'm booked there through Tuesday. Marcella has a wrongful dismissal deposition coming up on either Monday or Tuesday. I'm staying over for that as well.'
Marcella Johnson and Helga both worked for the same high-end legal firm, Weldon, Davis, and Reed, but the two women had wildly divergent styles and areas of expertise. Helga specialized in divorce cases. Marcella focused on employment issues. Ali counted herself fortunate to have not one but two dynamic attorneys on her team.
'Don't worry about tomorrow,' Helga said. 'We're in good shape on this and I'm pretty sure it'll go through without a hitch. Still, though, until everything's signed, sealed, and delivered, our agreement in principle could conceivably go south.'
'Paul won't let that happen,' Ali said with a laugh. 'Not with his shotgun wedding set for Saturday. If something goes wrong with his walking April Gaddis down the aisle, there'll be hell to pay.'
'You're all right then?' Helga asked.
Everyone seemed to be concerned about how Ali was holding up through all this. Why didn't anyone believe her when she said she was fine? She said it again, one more time and for the record.
'I'm fine, Helga. I wish people would stop worrying about me.'
'Getting a divorce is stressful,' Helga said.
'No,' Ali corrected. 'Compared to being married to a jerk, getting a divorce is easy.'
'All right,' Helga said. 'See you in court, ten A.M. sharp. Judge Alice Tennant is very old-fashioned. She doesn't brook tardiness from anybodyattorneys or plaintiffs.'
'Ten sharp,' Ali repeated. 'I'll be there.'
Leaving Blythe, Ali turned up the volume on her MP3 player and sang along with the tunes from one musical comedy after another, from
Crossing into California, Ali felt a strange disconnect. She had gone there years earlier with a new husband and a new job, following what had seemed then to be an American dream. Now, coming back to L.A. for the first time since that dream had exploded in her face, she realized that she was, literally, yesterday's news. Her job and her connection to her prominent network-exec husband had made her part of the L.A. in crowd. This trip was the exact opposite. As an antidote, she turned up the music even louder.
Sometime around midnight, shortly after passing the exit to Twentynine Palms, Ali saw a whole phalanx of emergency vehicles surging eastbound and toward her on the freeway. Worried that debris from some unseen accident might litter the road ahead, Ali slowed, but then, one by one, the approaching vehicles veered off on what she knew to be the Highway 111 exit angling toward Palm Springs.
The emergency response was so massive that Ali found it worrisome. Wondering if maybe a plane had gone down, Ali turned off her original cast recording of
'The Riverside Sheriff's Department is investigating a possible train/vehicle collision on the eastbound tracks approaching Palm Springs. Emergency vehicles have been dispatched to the area and a CALTrans spokesman is suggesting that the area be avoided until further notice.'
Relieved to hear that whatever was wrong didn't involve a problem on the freeway, Ali punched the 'resume' button on her cruise control and took the Cayenne back up to speed. Then she switched off the news and went back to listening to King Arthur's bored and disaffected knights singing their rousing rendition of 'Fie on Goodness.'
As she drove past the Highway 111 interchange, the emergency vehicles had mostly stopped, forming a long, unbroken string of flashing red and yellow lights that erased the starlight and cast an eerie pulsing glow on the surrounding desert.
Ali drove on, thinking about trains and cars and what happens when one crashes into the other. In her days as a newbie television reporter, Ali had seen plenty of incidents like that, ones where people seemingly determined to opt out of the gene pool had decided, for one incredibly stupid reason or another, to try to outrun a speeding train, leaving behind a trail of bloody carnage and shattered metal. Sometimes the incidents included groups of teenagers playing a deadly game of chicken. Others drove onto the tracks deliberately and with the full intention of ending it all. Regardless of their motivation, the people in the vehicles usually didn't survive. Sometimes the engineers on the trains didn't make it out alive, either. The ones who did often lived out their days with a lifelong burden of guilt.
'At least this time it's got nothing to do with me,' she breathed aloud as she headed west toward Banning and Beaumont and the sprawling city of Los Angeles glowing far in the distance. 'And thank God I don't have to report on it, either.'
CHAPTER 2
