medications. I also drive her wherever she wants to go.”
“It sounds pretty all-encompassing,” Larry Marsh said.
“Of course it is,” Leland Brooks returned with a smile. “I’m a butler.”
As the Rolls turned off the highway onto a small, single lane road that wound through the West Clear Creek Wilderness, Ali was beginning to wonder if they should have bought gas at the same time they stopped for those Big Macs. But at least here, in the middle of nowhere, if she decided to overpower Arabella and take her down, no one else could possibly be hurt. She was still hoping that, at some point, Arabella would simply fall asleep.
“Punishment,” Arabella announced from the backseat. “That’s what’s important. If your friend’s abuser gets punished, that helps. A little. You see, I took care of what Bill Junior did to me. And I took care of what he did to Miss Ponder. But what about the others?”
“What others?”
“The ones I don’t know about,” Arabella said. “There must have been others. Those are the ones I think about when I can’t sleep. He was never punished for any of those. But that’s also why he kept his hand, you see. I think that was his way of trying to punish my mother for what I had done to him. That’s why I have it. I did it for her.”
“Did your mother know you had Bill Junior’s hand?”
“I doubt it,” Arabella said.
“When it comes to punishment, what about you?” Ali asked, glancing at Arabella in the rearview mirror. “Should you be punished for what you did?”
“I suppose,” Arabella said. “But I don’t want to be locked up again. Mother promised me that I never would be.”
“Did she know what you had done?”
“Maybe,” Arabella said. “Probably.”
“Your mother wasn’t a judge and jury,” Ali said. “She had no right to make that promise.”
“But she did,” Arabella insisted. “And I believed her. Here we are.”
They entered a small clearing. Ali looked around, expecting to see a small, snug cabin, but she saw nothing. No outline of a building; no flashes of headlights off windowpanes. But then there was something-a gleam in the dark. She pulled closer. What she saw was her headlights reflecting back off what remained of half a wall.
“There’s nothing here,” Ali explained. “There’s no cabin.”
“I know,” Arabella said. “It burned down last summer. Vandals.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“We’re going to sit here for a while,” Arabella said. “We’re going to sit here and let me think. Then I’m going to say goodbye.”
CHAPTER 19
It was after ten by the time the two detectives left Arabella’s house and headed back to Phoenix.
“Damn,” Larry Marsh complained. “It annoys the hell out of me to think that Arabella snowed us completely.”
“Sounds like she snowed everybody, Mr. Brooks included. And don’t forget Alison Reynolds and Billy Ashcroft. She told Billy she was dead broke. According to Brooks, that’s not the case at all. The money may not be liquid, but it’s there. She told Ali Reynolds all about this mysterious diary of hers, one you’ve even seen, but her butler never saw it. How can that be? My guess is we could hook Arabella up to a lie detector, ask her questions all day long, and have her come up with two or more contradictory answers to every question without ever having any of them register as a lie. If she’s crazy, she probably doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction, to say nothing of right or wrong.”
“Which will make her damned hard to convict.”
“In my book she’s a person of interest in four different homicides-Billy and Bill Junior as well as the firebug and the nurse at the Mosberg. What’s kept her from knifing poor old Brooks in his sleep all this time?”
“Enlightened self-interest,” Larry said with a mirthless chuckle. “If she did that, who would bring her her morning coffee?”
As Larry drove south on I-17, Hank called Dave Holman to check on the APB. “Still no word?”
“None,” Dave said. “As long ago as they left, they could be anywhere by now-through Phoenix or Flagstaff and halfway to California or New Mexico. If they’re still on the move, we should have found them.”
“How’s Ali’s family holding up?” Hank asked.
“About how you’d expect. I’m here at the house with her son and his girlfriend. Her parents went home to go to bed. After what went on at the hospital last night, everybody’s pretty much strung out,” Dave said. “But she saved my daughter’s life, and now we’ve got to save hers.”
Ali and Arabella sat in the Rolls with the engine running for the better part of the next half hour. Several times, when Ali tried to say something, Arabella insisted on silence. “I told you,” she said. “I need to think.”
Ali was thinking, too. With the sweat trickling down her sides and with her stomach in a knot, she was appalled by their complete isolation. They had seen no lights on the way down the narrow road, no other signs of habitation.
Last night, in the hospital, she hadn’t had time to be scared. Jason had been there-a mortal threat to everyone he met-and Ali had simply reacted. This was different. As the minutes crept by, one by one, Ali thought she understood how condemned prisoners must feel on the night they’re due to be executed.
“All right then,” Arabella said finally, emerging from her trancelike silence. “Here.”
Ali turned to look as Arabella held up the jar. “I told you I came to say good-bye. Now get out of the car and take this over there to where the porch used to be.”
Ali was shocked to see Arabella was handing her the jar.
“No,” Ali said. “I won’t touch it.”
“Yes, you will,” Arabella insisted. “Have you forgotten I have a gun?”
Ali hadn’t forgotten about the gun, not for a single moment.
“All right.”
Leaving the headlights on and the engine still running, Ali took the jar and got out of the car. Her legs seemed ready to collapse under her and the jar was surprisingly heavy, but she held it to her breast. She didn’t want to drop it; didn’t want to be splattered by the awfulness inside.
Picking her way across uneven ground, she made her way toward the nonexistent cabin. On either side of the clearing she could make out patches of snow. Ahead of her the denuded concrete pad of the house glowed against the surrounding blackness. Shivering with cold and revulsion both, Ali walked as far as what looked like the footprint of a porch.
“Set it down,” Arabella ordered. “Set it down right there and step away.”
Ali did as she was told. As she moved toward the Rolls, she saw Arabella assume a military stance, holding the tiny pistol in a two-handed grip. Petrified, Ali plunged to the ground. She was already facedown in the dirt when the sound of the gunfire pierced the silence of the bitterly cold night.
Behind her, the glass jar exploded into a million pieces. For a long moment, Ali huddled on the ground while the sound of that single gunshot reverberated in her ears. She lay there holding her breath, wondering if she’d been hurt by any of the flying glass and waiting for the next shot-which didn’t come. Finally she looked up to find Arabella
