Ali stepped onto the porch, where the front doors could clearly benefit from some of Kip Hogan’s newly acquired refinishing skills. The varnish was faded and peeling. This time, when she rang the bell, no uniformed maid appeared. Instead, the door was opened by the white-jacketed, white-haired man who, in a somewhat different outfit, had also delivered Ali’s invitation earlier that morning. Seeing him this way confirmed Ali’s earlier suspicion that this was the selfsame butler who had served tea on Anna Lee Ashcroft’s screened porch all those years earlier. Back then, as a high school senior, Ali had thought of him as downright ancient. Years later, he didn’t seem to have changed all that much.
“Good afternoon, madam,” he announced with a stiff but polite half bow. “So good of you to come. Miss Arabella is waiting in the living room. Right this way, please.”
The foyer was familiar but surprisingly chilly. The entryway rug was the same one Ali remembered. Back then she hadn’t been all that impressed by it. Now she realized she should have been. It was a fine old Aubusson, thin and threadbare in spots, its intricate designs faded and worn down by decades of use. Ali recalled that a massive crystal vase had stood on the inlaid wood entryway table facing the door, and a similar-size vase stood there now. On Ali’s previous visit, the vase had brimmed with a huge bouquet of fresh-cut flowers. Now it stood empty and forlorn. A thin film of dust fogged the surface.
The butler turned to his left, pushed open a pair of heavy double doors, and led Ali into a living room that, although still spacious, seemed much smaller than Ali remembered. The furniture and rugs, though, were virtually unchanged-at least the fabrics and placement were the same-but again Ali noted subtle differences. Thirty years ago the silk-upholstered couches and chairs and polished wood end tables had been evidence of a stylish elegance. Now, like the well-used rug in the foyer, these things, too, had a dated and somewhat shabby air. For a moment Ali felt as though she had wandered into a time capsule-a museum diorama devoted to some long faded glory-rather than into a house occupied by living, breathing inhabitants.
All those small details, taken together, left Ali thinking that perhaps Arabella Ashcroft had fallen on hard times. Yes, there was a shiny Rolls-Royce stowed in the garage and it might well tool around town driven by a trusted family retainer who filled in as butler and chauffeur and probably chief cook and bottle washer as well, but the look of the place made Ali wonder if there weren’t times when Arabella Ashcroft had difficulty finding the wherewithal to fill the gas tank. Maybe, in the course of all those intervening years, there had been a complete reversal of fortunes between the well-to-do, sophisticated Ashcrofts and the awkward, small-town girl who had benefited from their largesse.
The living room was considerably warmer than the foyer had been, and the air in the room was alive with the sharp scent of mesquite wood smoke and the crackle of a roaring fire. Roving wintertime burn bans may have caused most of Sedona’s wood-burning fireplaces to morph into ones fired by gas, but not this one.
At the far end of the room, two overstuffed leather chairs sat in front of the immense river rock fireplace. What appeared to be a tree-size log blazed on the hearth. A gray-haired woman, dwarfed by the huge chairs, sat upright in one of them. In front of her, on a rolling cart of some kind, was the one thing in the room that didn’t quite fit-a sleek white computer monitor. Coming closer, Ali recognized the computer as an iMAC. The computer was almost identical to the one in Chris’s room and included a wireless keyboard and mouse.
“Ms. Reynolds,” the butler announced with all due ceremony.
The woman immediately moved the computer aside. Smiling and looking for all the world like her mother, Arabella Ashcroft stood to meet her arriving guest, pulling a shawl around her shoulders with one hand and offering the other one in greeting. Her dark gray hair was pulled back in a simple French roll. She peered at Ali through thick, eye-distorting horn-rimmed glasses. She wore a pair of slacks and a blue cashmere sweater with a matching cardigan. Her outfit was topped by a single strand of pearls. Ali guessed that the pearls, unlike Aunt Evie’s, were real, and she didn’t doubt for a minute that the sweater set had cost a bundle at one time, too. As they shook hands, however, Ali noticed that the wrist of one sleeve of the cardigan had been carefully mended. Not even Ali’s thrifty mother did that kind of mending anymore.
“My goodness,” Arabella exclaimed, staring at Ali for a long moment. “How extraordinary! I had forgotten how much you resemble your Aunt Evelyn!”
Ali Reynolds was Scandinavian on both branches of her family and had inherited a full complement of tall, blue-eyed blondeness that had served her well in her television news career. And she was accustomed to being told how much she resembled her mother just as Arabella Ashcroft favored hers. Ali wasn’t nearly as used to being told she looked like her Aunt Evelyn.
“Since my mother and Aunt Evie were twins, I don’t suppose that’s too surprising,” Ali observed with a smile.
“No,” Arabella agreed. “I suppose not. Please, sit down.”
Ali sat and so did Arabella. During that previous visit, Arabella had lingered in the background while her mother did the talking. Now it appeared as though Arabella had come into her own and moved out of Anna Lee’s shadow.
“Evie and I were good friends at one time,” Arabella continued wistfully. “We drifted apart the way friends sometimes do. Still, I was terribly saddened to hear of her passing.”
The fact that Aunt Evie and Arabella Ashcroft had once been friends was news to Ali, but surprise was quickly overtaken by a renewed sense of loss. Growing up Ali had felt blessed to have two mothers rather than one. Edie Larson and her never-married sister, Evelyn Hansen, had not only looked alike, they had worked together on a daily basis as partners in the Sugarloaf. In many ways-including their devotion to Ali-they had been very much alike, but they had also been subtly different.
Edie Larson was always the solid, practical one of the pair-quiet and down to earth. Edie never took shortcuts. She cooked everything from scratch, and her recreational reading consisted almost entirely of cookbooks. She liked to see art films-tea-and-cookies films, as Bob called them-and documentaries occasionally, but that was about it.
Aunt Evie had been a vivacious and outgoing Auntie Mame kind of character. She was someone with eclectic tastes, a fondness for practical jokes, and a real sense of fun. She had loved movies and books-all kinds of movies and all kinds of books. She had read voraciously, everything from potboilers to highbrow literary fiction. She had devoured musicals and knew the lyrics to countless Broadway hit songs. Even though Ali had been living in California at the time Aunt Evie had succumbed to a massive stroke, Ali had felt her lively aunt’s loss more than she would have thought possible. To this day Ali’s MP3 player was filled with the songs and music from Aunt Evie’s huge collection of tapes, records, and CDs. Chris had spent most of a previous Christmas vacation loading them into his mother’s player.
Hearing Aunt Evie’s name mentioned in passing brought back afresh the pain of losing her. “I miss her, too,” Ali said.
“I’m sure you do.”
Arabella turned to the waiting butler. “You may bring the tea now, Mr. Brooks.”
“Very well, madam,” he said, nodding his assent. With that, he turned and disappeared the way he had come, silently closing the heavy double doors behind him.
“So,” Arabella said.
Ali remembered that other long-ago interview. Anna Lee had begun hers in exactly the same way, but back then, Ali, dressed in her unaccustomed finery, had been ill at ease and unsure of what she should say. This time she was far more confident.
“I’ve been terribly remiss,” Ali said at once. “I should have stopped by years ago to thank both you and your mother for what you did for me when you awarded me that wonderful scholarship. I want you to know that your single act of kindness made a huge difference in my life.”
Arabella waved aside Ali’s gratitude. “It’s not necessary,” she said. “Not at all. You may have been our first scholarship recipient, Ms. Reynolds, but you certainly weren’t the last. My mother derived a lot of enjoyment from the process, and so have I.”
“Ali. Please call me Ali.”
“And you must call me Arabella. I have to say that searching out possible scholarship winners is a bit like having a new treasure hunt every single year,” the woman continued brightly. “We’ve resisted having a formal application process. Mr. Brooks works with me on this, you see. The two of us are a team. We track down deserving students and ferret them out on our own by talking to teachers and students and by asking questions in the community. That way we don’t end up having to ignore a deserving student just because of some hard-and-fast
