orange juice, and a glass of milk. Then, pushing her plate aside, she gave Ali a single questioning look before she, too, went to work.
It turned out that, under Edie’s and Jan Howard’s tutelage, Crystal was a much quicker study than Ali would have anticipated. By the time Bob Larson turned up, a little before nine, she had learned to do a credible job of busing tables and running the dishwasher back in the kitchen.
As soon as Bob saw Ali working behind the counter, he came straight to her station. “What are you doing here?” he wanted to know.
“Pinch-hitting for Mr. Lazy Bones,” Ali returned.
Just then Crystal pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen and emerged carrying a tray loaded with clean glasses.
“And who’s that?” Bob wanted to know, nodding in her direction.
“You should probably ask Mom about her,” Ali suggested. “She can tell you the whole story.”
“If she’s speaking to me, that is,” Bob said mournfully.
“She turned off your alarm clock,” Ali said. “She fixed it so you could sleep in. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.”
Without another word, Bob turned and headed for the kitchen. “Have you heard anything from Kip?” Ali asked after him.
Bob stopped and shook his head. “Not a word,” he said, then disappeared through the swinging door. A few minutes later Edie emerged. She had shed her cooking apron and had changed into a clean sweatshirt of her own. “You two go on home now and get some sleep,” she said, collecting Ali’s order pad. “I’ll take over from here.”
Shortly after that, Ali and Crystal headed out the door. Crystal was still wearing her uniform sweatshirt, a gift from Edie. As Ali climbed into the Cayenne, she felt as weary as she remembered feeling in years. Once they got to the house, Ali gave Crystal a stack of bedding and directed her to the sofa. Then she handed her one of Chris’s T- shirts to use as a nightshirt. Ali was in the bedroom pulling on her own nightgown when her cell phone rang.
“I’m just coming into Flagstaff on I-40,” Dave said. “How are things?”
“Well, I’m certainly glad to know you took my advice and slept overnight in Vegas,” Ali said. She walked over to the alarm key pad and turned it on. “Crystal and I just finished up helping out with breakfast at the Sugarloaf. Now we’re hoping to get some sleep.”
“Crystal helped out at the restaurant?” Dave asked. “Are you kidding?”
“You’d be surprised how far hunger goes in producing willing compliance,” Ali told him. “You can come by here a little later to pick her up, but give us a couple of hours before you do. Neither one of us has had much sleep.”
“That makes three of us,” Dave said. “I’ll go home, then, too. Give me a call when you’re ready. That way you can wake me up instead of the other way around.”
“How’s Roxie taking all this?”
“Long story,” Dave said. “Let’s not go into it right now.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Ali was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Sometime later a ringing telephone jarred her awake. “Ms. Reynolds?” a stranger asked.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Your EMS operator. Your system is alarming. Could you please give me your password, and are you all right? Do you need us to summon some assistance? I see on my screen that someone has gained access to your home through the front door…”
Ali reeled off her password and scrambled out of bed, pulling on her robe as she went. She hurried out into the living room. Crystal’s blankets and pillow lay abandoned on the sofa. Her clothes and shoes were nowhere to be seen. Obviously Crystal had taken off on her own. Where the hell had she gone?
“It wasn’t someone coming in,” Ali told the operator. “It was someone going out-a guest going out who had no idea that opening the door would set off the alarm.”
“You’re all right then?”
“I’m fine,” Ali said.
“You’ll key in the end-alarm code then?”
“Yes,” Ali said. “Yes, I will.” And she did. Then she threw on a tracksuit and a pair of tennies and raced outside to the Cayenne. She caught up with Crystal halfway down the hill and pulled up beside her. Seeing Crystal in one of Chris’s ski jackets didn’t improve Ali’s frame of mind.
“There’s nothing like being an ungrateful pain in the ass,” Ali told her. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
“To see my friends,” Crystal returned.
“It’s a school day,” Ali said. “Your friends are all in school. At least they
“I’ll walk over and see my dad then,” Crystal said. Defiance seemed to be the order of the day.
“Not in my son’s ski jacket, you won’t,” Ali said. “Now, either get in the car or I call the cops and have you arrested for petty theft.”
“You wouldn’t,” Crystal said.
“Yes, I would,” Ali told her. “I don’t know what makes you think people don’t mean what they say. Do you see the phone in my hand? Do you see me dialing nine-one-one?”
Crystal favored Ali with a long stare. Finally, with a disparaging shake of her head, she flounced around the front bumper to the Cayenne’s passenger side door and climbed in.
“Take off the jacket,” Ali said, once Crystal was inside.
“Why should I?”
“Because I told you to.”
“But it’s cold,” Crystal objected.
“Too bad,” Ali returned.
Crystal removed the jacket and then flung it into the backseat. “Besides,” she added. “I was just borrowing it. It wasn’t really stealing.”
“You didn’t have my son’s permission to take it,” Ali pointed out. “That makes it stealing the same way taking food or money for sex-even sex you don’t think is sex-is called prostitution.”
When Ali glanced in Crystal’s direction again, she noticed that for the first time the girl’s tough-as-nails demeanor seemed to have crumpled a little.
“Don’t tell my father I took it,” she whimpered suddenly as tears sprang to her eyes. “Please don’t tell him about the other, either-about, you know, the hitchhiking.”
Ali knew full well that Crystal’s running away had been a cry for help. Something was definitely wrong in this young woman’s life. But Ali also knew that she was dealing with a master manipulator, and she had no intention of being routed by this sudden case of deliberately staged waterworks. She didn’t relish having to tell Dave what his darling daughter had been doing, but someone was going to have to tell him-and Ali’s first choice for that job was Crystal herself. Things were never going to get better for Crystal unless she accepted some responsibility for her own actions.
“If you don’t want me to tell him, then you’d better,” Ali said.
“I can’t,” Crystal said softly.
“Why not?”
“Because when he finds out what I’ve done, he’ll probably kill me.”
“And most of the parents I know wouldn’t blame him if he did,” Ali returned. “Seat belt,” she added.
This time Crystal fastened hers without a murmur of objection, so maybe they were making progress. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Where you said you wanted to go,” Ali countered. “To see your father.” And they headed into town.
Forced to move out of his house in the aftermath of his divorce, Dave Holman had taken up residence in the basement apartment of an old house on Sky Mountain. His landlady, a well-to-do widow with a penchant for traveling, was happy to have a dependable tenant to look after the place while she was off on one of her year’s several cruises or staying for months at her flat in London. Dave, on the other hand, was glad to rent from someone who was seldom around and who gave him very little grief.
