Holman is currently working on. Would you mind looking after her while I try to reach Dave?”
“Of course,” B. said smoothly as Ali made her exit. “Cream and sugar?”
By the time Beatrice answered, Ali was already through the swinging doors into the kitchen and pulling her phone from her pocket. She found Dave Holman’s cell phone number, still in her favorites file, and dialed it.
“Hey, Dave,” she said when the call switched over to voice mail. “Give me a call when you have a minute. I have someone here at the house who would like to speak to you about the Gemma Ralston case.”
Going back through the swinging doors, she crashed into B. coming the other way. “How’d it go?” he asked.
Ali shook her head. “Dave didn’t answer. I left a message. What are you doing?”
“I think our guest needs food more than she needs coffee. Your ‘partner’ offered to heat up a bowl of stew, which she gratefully accepted. Thank you for that, by the way,” he added. “I consider ‘partner’ to be a big step up.”
“We’ll see about your signing bonus later,” Ali said with a smile. “Now I’ll go entertain our guest while we wait to see how long it takes for Dave to call me back.”
9
Back in the library, Ali found Beatrice Hart seated next to the fire, sipping coffee from one of Ali’s delicate Beleme patterned cups. Beatrice glanced up worriedly as Ali resumed her seat.
“Sorry,” Ali said. “My contact didn’t answer. I left a message for him to call me back.” She didn’t mention that the contact was most likely the lead investigator on the Ralston case.
“Mr. Simpson offered me some stew, and I accepted. I hope you don’t mind,” Beatrice said.
“Not at all, but while we’re waiting for that return call, why don’t you tell me what you know about this Chip Ralston. Do you have any reason to make the leap from his being your daughter’s beau to his being a possible murderer?”
“Lynn met him because he was my late husband’s doctor-Horace’s doctor,” Beatrice explained. “Chip’s specialty is Alzheimer’s patients and their families, and I have to say, in that regard, he was a huge help to me and to Lynn. He helped us understand that Alzheimer’s is a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that all those stages are longer or shorter depending on the individual. When your life is spinning out of control, it’s reassuring to have someone telling you that what you’re experiencing is within the parameters of some kind of normal. Dr. Ralston did that for our family and does it for a lot of other families, too.”
“Sounds like a good guy rather than a bad guy,” Ali suggested.
Beatrice nodded. “Except that where I come from, doctors don’t become romantically involved with their patients or their patients’ families. He waited a while, I’ll give him that. He called me several times in the weeks after we lost Horace, ostensibly checking to see how I was doing, and he always asked about Lynn. Then one day he called when I wasn’t home. Before you knew it, they were going out.”
“I take it you don’t approve?”
“For one thing, it’s too soon. I know from asking around that Chip is still dealing with the aftereffects of divorce-a rancorous divorce-and Lynn is still in recovery mode, too. First there was her divorce, followed by that mess with Richard. Then her son, Lucas, my grandson, committed suicide. She lost her job and her house, and then Horace died. You put all that together, and it adds up to way too much. I told her she needed to give herself some time before she got involved in a serious relationship.”
Before Ali could comment, B. returned with another tray, this one loaded with a bowl of steaming stew and several slices of buttered bread. He set the tray on the coffee table in front of Beatrice and then sat down on the love seat next to Ali. Beatrice gave him a questioning look.
“He knows all about this,” Ali said, nodding in B.’s direction. “It was due to a background check from his computer security company that Brenda Riley found out the truth about Richard Lowensdale.”
“Oh,” Beatrice said, nodding. “I remember. The High Noon guy. So I guess I have both of you to thank that Lynn wasn’t hurt worse than she was.”
The man who had helped Ali in the trenches had been B.’s second in command, Stuart Ramey, but neither Ali nor B. corrected Beatrice’s understandable misapprehension.
Ali waited while Beatrice tasted a tiny spoonful of Leland’s stew, then said, “Delicious. You’re a wonderful cook.”
Ali nodded her thanks and asked the next question without bothering to correct Beatrice’s erroneous assumption about the stew. Sometimes it was simply better to let people be.
“You mentioned that Dr. Ralston was going through a rancorous divorce,” Ali said. “How did you know about that?”
“Because Lynn told me,” Beatrice answered. “The woman and her lawyers have taken the man to the cleaners. He ended up having to unload several properties in a disastrous real estate market. He also had to buy out her interest in his medical practice. That put him far enough behind financially that he had to go back home and live with his aging mother-not a good sign, if you ask me. According to Lynn, Chip’s pet name for his ex is ‘the green- eyed monster.’”
Ali managed to keep from smiling, and so did B. After B.’s own ego-damaging divorce, “green-eyed monster” was how he sometimes referred to his ex-wife, too.
“Did Lynn ever mention what caused the divorce? Was there any indication of domestic violence issues? For instance, did Chip ever voice any threats toward his ex?”
“Not as far as I know,” Beatrice answered. “Still, it strikes me as a strange kind of divorce. According to Lynn, Gemma treated Chip like dirt, and yet she stayed in close contact with Chip’s mother and his sister, Molly. I know a couple of times, when Lynn was staying over with Chip, Gemma dropped by to visit with either the former mother- in-law or the former sister-in-law. I don’t know how most divorces work or even how they’re supposed to work- Horace and I were married to each other for fifty-eight years-but you can bet that if I’d divorced him, I would have written his mother out of my life immediately. That’s what Lynn did with her former mother-in-law, too.”
“As far as you know, there was nothing unusual going on this week between Chip and his ex? No new crisis of any kind?”
“No new crisis,” Beatrice allowed, “just the ongoing one. From what Lynn has told me, I’m sure Chip resents the neverending financial difficulties from the divorce settlement. He’s a middle-aged man, and having to start over at that age is tough. Of course, there will be some money coming to him when his mother dies. I understand that his parents were very well-to-do. His father died relatively recently and suddenly. A stroke, I believe. Chip and his sister are their only kids. Not kids, of course. Their only heirs.”
Ali noticed that all the while Beatrice Hart was answering questions, she was stowing away the bowl of stew. She finished it off by sopping up the last of the gravy with the remains of a thick slice of Leland’s bread. She may have been worried about her daughter, but that hadn’t affected her appetite. B. was offering her a second helping when Ali’s phone rang. She excused herself and went as far as the dining room so she could answer with some assurance of privacy.
“Hey,” Dave Holman said. “I saw that you called, but I’ve been knee-deep in two different homicide investigations all day long. It turns out the county attorney has put a deal on the table for one of them, so it’s up to the lawyers to do their stuff. That means I’m on my way home and returning calls as I go. I trust you’ll forgive me for calling back without listening to your message. What’s up?”
Ali was sure she knew which investigations had kept him occupied all day, but she wasn’t at all sure how he would react to hearing the identity of the visitor sitting in her library and savoring Leland’s beef stew. “I was actually calling on behalf of someone, a woman named Beatrice Hart.”
“Lynn Martinson’s mother?” Dave demanded after a moment of stark silence. “How the hell did that happen?”
Although the name was one Dave clearly recognized, Ali thought it best to recount the whole story.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Dave said when Ali finished. “Who’s this Brenda Riley?”
“A friend of mine from back in my old news-broadcasting days. She’s originally from Sacramento. Now she and her new husband live in Ashland. She’s the one who got mixed up with the cyberstalker in California a couple of
