at her watch before picking up the coffee mug. “My son’s late getting home,” she said. “He’s usually here by now.”
“That would be Alexander?” Ali asked, removing her iPad from her briefcase-size purse and opening the cover.
Sylvia nodded. “I call him A.J.,” she said.
“This must be terribly difficult for both of you.”
Two new tears squeezed out of Sylvia’s eyes and coursed down her cheeks. “A.J. barely knew his father. I did my best to protect him from all that. . notoriety. Now, though, all the details are bound to be back in the papers. In fact, that’s what Betty Noonan was asking about.”
“And she is?” Ali asked, deftly typing notes on the iPad’s flat-screen keyboard.
“The reporter I told you about. From the
Ali had spent years as a television journalist. In this day of shrinking print newspapers and equally shrinking newspaper budgets, she wondered why the murder of a lowly halfway-house janitor would be important enough for a news editor to send a reporter on a three-hundred-mile one-way trip. Obviously, there was more to James Mason Sanders than anyone was letting on.
“You said James Sanders was your husband,” Ali repeated. “Does that mean you never divorced?”
Sylvia nodded. “We’re Catholic,” she said simply. “If he had ever asked me for a divorce, I suppose I would have given it to him. After all, except for those first few months, we’ve lived apart the whole time. He never asked, and I never bothered. I thought the less said about that whole situation, the better off we’d be. Having all of this come to light now that A.J.’s a senior seems worse somehow. Maybe if I’d been more open about it when he was younger. .”
“Open about what?” Ali asked. “About A.J.’s father going to prison for counterfeiting?”
She already knew the answer, but that was part of the drill. If you knew what interviewees were supposed to say, it was a lot easier to see if they were telling the truth or lying.
“We started dating when we were in high school,” Sylvia explained. “He went off to college while I was a junior. He got in to a fraternity at ASU. When he was a sophomore, one of his buddies came up with the stupid idea of trying to print money. It was just a lark. They wanted to see if they could get away with it. I don’t think any of them thought of the long-term consequences. If they’d been serious about it, they would have made hundreds instead of twenties. When they got caught, two of them hired big-shot defense attorneys and got off completely, and the third one paid a fine. James was the one left holding the bag. He’s the one who went to prison.” Sylvia paused, her gaze far away. “We found out I was pregnant just before the whole thing blew up. We got married right away, but we ended up living with his grandparents in Tempe because we couldn’t afford to rent a place on our own. James was willing to work, but no one would give him a job. A.J. was born while James was out on bail awaiting trial, and he was only three months old when his father was sent to prison.”
“For what was essentially a first offense and a victimless crime,” Ali said.
“The prosecutor didn’t think it was victimless,” Sylvia said.
“It must have been tough being left on your own with a baby.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Sylvia agreed, “but we weren’t completely adrift. My parents helped, and so did his. It was an inheritance from James’s grandparents that made it possible for me to buy this house.”
“Are you still in touch with his parents?”
“No,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “His father died a number of years ago. His mother remarried and moved to Sun River in Oregon. I called her earlier today to let her know what happened. She and her husband are leaving later today to drive down.”
“Pardon me for saying this,” Ali said, “but it’s clear to see that you still cared about the man. When he got out of prison, why didn’t he come to live with you?”
Sylvia bit her lip. “I asked him not to,” she said finally. “I was trying to keep my son away from someone I thought would be a bad influence. Maybe it was wrong, but I thought A.J. would be better off with no father at all than with a father who’d spent years of his life in prison. Kids can be so mean about stuff like that, and I didn’t want A.J. to be bullied.”
Ali felt a rush of sympathy for this solitary woman who had damned herself to a life of loneliness in hopes of sparing her son. Ali had spent enough time as a single mother to know the drill-the unrelenting responsibility of having to make all the decisions on her own, all the while hoping against hope that those decisions were the right ones. And now that James Sanders’s murder was in the public eye, all of Sylvia’s efforts to dodge the unsavory past had gone for nothing.
“Since your husband’s body was found in much the same location where the other victim, Gemma Ralston, was found, some people seem to be making the leap that he was somehow connected to what happened to her.”
“I know about the other victim,” Sylvia said. “The detective told me. I have no idea what James was doing there the night he was killed, but I do know he didn’t go there to kill someone. For one thing, the James Sanders I knew wasn’t a killer, but even if he was, he wouldn’t have done something like that there! Never.” Sylvia sounded like she was close to losing it.
Ali gave her a moment. “You sound certain of that.”
There was a long pause before Sylvia answered. “I am certain,” she replied, “because I know that place all too well. We were kids back then. We were horny. We went skiing up in Flagstaff with a bunch of our friends. On the way home, we stopped off at that very place-the turnoff to General Crook Trail. If we’d had more money, we might have gone to a motel. Instead, we found a likely place to pull off the road. Later on we figured out that’s probably where it happened-where I got knocked up. So, no. Even if James turned out to be a cold-blooded killer- which he wasn’t-I refuse to accept that he would have chosen that particular place to murder someone.”
Just then a car door slammed shut outside the house. Several times during the conversation, Sylvia had glanced unobtrusively at her watch. She charged out of her chair and hurried toward the entryway as the front door banged open.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “I’ve been worried sick. Maddy called to see how you were doing and was surprised to learn that I thought you had gone to work.”
Sylvia returned to the living room accompanied by a rangy young man, a kid in his late teens who, at five-ten or so, was a good head and a half taller than she was. He was good-looking and carried what looked like a heavy book bag slung over one slender shoulder. Ali realized this had to be A.J. He reminded her of her own son back when Chris was a senior in high school.
“I needed some time to think, is all,” he said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“Were you with that girl?”
A.J. seemed to bristle. His ears turned red. “What girl?”
“Sasha something or other,” Sylvia said. “A black girl. Maddy tells me she comes by the store when you’re working. She always buys something, but she seems to like hanging out wherever you happen to be stocking shelves.”
“Maddy Wurth needs to mind her own business,” A.J. declared, “but like I said, I was by myself. I needed to think!” At that point, he caught sight of Ali and stopped short. “Who’s this?” he demanded.
Sylvia leveled a look in her son’s direction that, without saying a word aloud, let A.J. know that he needed to mind his manners.
Ali stood up and handed A.J. one of her cards. “My name’s Ali Reynolds,” she said.
A.J. glanced at the card, then back at Ali. For a fleeting moment, an odd look appeared on his face, something akin to panic. By then his mother had turned away from him, but Ali caught the expression before he managed to stifle it. By the time Sylvia sat back down, A.J. had recovered enough that the strange expression had been wiped clean.
“Are you a cop?” he asked.
“No, I’m a writer,” Ali explained. “I’m working on a story about the woman who died, but I’m also trying to piece together what happened to your father.”
“You think he’s the one who killed her?” A.J. asked.
“I’ve spoken to the lead investigator on the two cases. He seems to think that because of your father’s
