lobby than a hospital. Renovations had not yet made their way to the ICU waiting room. It was as small and unremittingly grim as all the other hospital waiting rooms in Ali’s experience. It was also surprisingly chilly.
There were only three people gathered in the room, no doubt prepared to maintain a long, overnight vigil. The first, Sandy, sat at a small table in the middle of the room. A Bible lay open on the table in front of her, but her chin rested in her hand and she appeared to be dozing. The second was a middle-aged woman, a few years older than Ali, who sat in the farthest corner of the room, knitting frenetically. The only sound in the room came from the industrious click of her needles. The third occupant, a balding, potbellied man, sat on a stiff-backed chair staring up at a wall-mounted television. The set was on and tuned to CNN, but the volume was muted. The lips of the broadcasters moved but nothing emerged. The only news available was whatever scrolled silently and with endless repetition across the bottom of the screen. Still, the man watched it with avid attention, as though his very life depended on what he saw there.
Something alerted Sandy to the newcomers’ arrival. She blinked awake and made as if to rise, then glanced down at her watch and subsided back into the chair.
“Hi, Ali,” she said wearily. “Thanks for coming back. I must have dropped off for a couple of minutes. It’s too soon to go back in. They only allow visitors in to see patients for ten minutes at a time once every hour.”
Ali looked around the room. “Where’s your brother?” she asked. “I thought he was coming to be with you.”
“Phil’s heart’s in the right place,” Sandy said, excusing him. “But he’s never been very dependable.”
“Is this her?” Elizabeth Hogan asked from behind Ali. “Is this Rudy’s girlfriend? Move me closer, please, Jane. I want to get a look at her.”
While Jane Braeton obliged, Sandy sat up straighter in her chair and tried to smooth her hair. “Rudy?” she asked.
“This is Elizabeth Hogan,” Ali explained. “Kip’s mother, and Jane Braeton.”
“So you’re Kip’s daughter?” Sandy asked, looking questioningly at Jane Braeton.
Jane glanced in Ali’s direction and shook her head. “Not really,” she replied.
She had parked Elizabeth’s chair so the old woman’s knees were almost touching Sandy’s. Elizabeth leaned forward. Once again she moved her head from side to side as if trying to find a place where Sandy’s face would be in focus.
“Has Rudy been good to you?” she asked.
“You mean Kip?”
“My son, yes.”
Sandy’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, he’s been very good to me, Mrs. Hogan. And he wouldn’t have gotten hurt and wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t been defending me. That’s why those punk kids attacked him. I feel like this is all my fault.”
Elizabeth reached out and touched Sandy’s knee. “I’m sure that’s not true,” Elizabeth said kindly. “These things happen and they’re nobody’s fault. What do the doctors say?”
“To me, very little,” Sandy replied. “After he came out of the OR, Ali’s mother talked them into letting me come up here to wait. They’ve let me go in to see him, but since I’m not a blood relative or his wife, they won’t tell me anything about his condition. What I do know is he hasn’t regained consciousness yet, and that’s probably a bad sign.”
Elizabeth nodded. “You may be right,” she agreed. “It isn’t a good sign, but let’s go see about getting some real information, Janie. Which way is the nurses’ station?”
Sandy pointed. Watching Jane and Elizabeth’s progress toward a glassed-in window, Ali noticed the red- lettered sign posted above it: NO CELL PHONES NO EXCEPTIONS. Since Ali’s computer air card was essentially a cell phone, technically that meant no Internet access, either.
Crystal plucked an extra blanket from a stack on a table by the doorway. Then, stuffing her earphones in her ears and turning on her iPod, she curled up in a chair as far from everyone else as she could manage.
Meanwhile Sandy studied the two women who were speaking in low tones to the woman stationed behind the glass partition. “She’s the charge nurse,” Sandy explained. “What about the one pushing Elizabeth’s chair? Is she a nurse, too?”
Ali simply shook her head and didn’t really answer. “Long story,” she said.
The other woman in the waiting room checked her watch, put down her knitting, and went over to the swinging door that led back to the unit. She paused. “Are you coming?” she asked the man in front of the silent television set.
“Not right now,” he said. “You go ahead. But you need to think about what the doctor said,” he added. “You need to think about letting him go.”
A look of absolute fury washed across the woman’s face. “No,” she said. And then again, more fiercely. “No!”
Abruptly she turned and disappeared behind the swinging doors. The man stayed where he was and as he was, still gazing up at the TV, oblivious to the fact that the discord between him and his wife had been witnessed by a roomful of strangers.
“They’re divorced,” Sandy whispered to Ali. “It’s their son. Motorcycle accident. He and Kip had the same surgeon.”
Jane Braeton turned away from the window and gestured for Sandy to join them. As Sandy left the table, Ali sat down next to where she’d been sitting. Part of a discarded
A homicide victim who had been dragged behind a vehicle and whose body was found on a deserted roadside in South Mountain Park on Tuesday morning has been identified by the Maricopa Medical Examiner’s officer as California real estate developer William Cowan Ashcroft, III.
The familiar name leaped out at Ali from the printed page. William Ashcroft? As in Arabella’s nephew, William Ashcroft, the one she had called Billy? Instinctively Ali reached for her phone, but then, mindful of both the cell- phone-use prohibition and the lateness of the hour, she left the phone where it was and returned to the article.
Phoenix Police Department spokesman Shannon Willis said that Mr. Ashcroft had been visiting the area on business for a number of weeks prior to his death. So far detectives working on the homicide have acquired few leads.
Mr. Ashcroft was reported missing by his business partner on Wednesday after he had failed to appear at a meeting scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Anyone with knowledge of the victim’s activities in the days prior to his death is asked to contact the Phoenix Police Department.
The words brought back Arabella’s mysterious phone call from earlier in the afternoon, the one where she had suggested things had changed and it was no longer necessary for Ali to read the diary she had entrusted to Ali two days earlier. Billy-the nephew who had tried to extort Arabella’s money-was dead. Was that what had changed Arabella’s mind?
Without a moment’s hesitation, Ali reached into her bag and extracted the small, leather-bound volume.
Since so much had happened between the time Ali had read the first entry, and now she reread it. She expected that other entries would deal with the incest situation in detail. They did not. Going on, Ali was surprised to discover that most of the month’s worth of entries that existed in an otherwise blank book dealt primarily with Arabella’s birthday present, her prized parakeet, Blueboy.
Evidently Miss Ponder, the governess, had been enlisted to help in the process of teaching Blueboy to talk. She had also encouraged Arabella to do some research into the proper care and feeding of parakeets-covering their cages at night, making sure that their water and feed were fresh, cleaning the cages-something Arabella had clearly prided herself in doing on her own. The Ashcroft household Arabella had grown up in appeared to be long on servants and short on loving familial connections. In that world of old-fashioned educated-at-home wealth, the arrival of a blue-feathered parakeet had been a cause for celebration in the life of what must have been a very lonely little girl.
