other.
Molly unlocked the oversize double doors and led the way into the house. Ali trailed behind them. She was surprised that no interior alarm sounded. What looked like a security control panel was right next to the door, but Molly and Doris bypassed it without stopping. They walked through a spacious entryway into a large, comfortably appointed living room-an old-money room-where the highly polished hardwood floor was dotted with aged but entirely authentic Navajo rugs. The chairs and tables were genuine Mission, and the lamps were equally genuine Tiffany. Above a massive and mostly unnecessary fireplace was a full-length oil painting of a much younger Doris Ralston clad in a sapphire evening gown.
As Molly eased her mother down onto a long leather sofa, Ali couldn’t help noticing that although the two women resembled each other, mother and daughter were anything but a matched pair. Doris Ralston looked to be somewhere in her eighties, decidedly frail but utterly fashionable. She was dressed in a classic St. John’s knit that was probably at least a decade old, as were her low-heeled pumps, but her thinning white hair was carefully combed, and her liver-spotted hands were beautifully manicured.
Molly, somewhere in her forties, with a mane of wavy auburn hair, was a younger image of her mother’s good looks, but with a harder edge. Years of smoking were beginning to carve an indelible mark into the curve of her cheeks. In her choice of clothing, Molly Handraker diverged from her mother’s in every way. The skimpy tank top she wore over possibly surgically enhanced breasts didn’t quite meet the top of her low-rider jeans. The denim of the pencil-thin pants was suitably worn in all the right places, but Ali suspected that the wear in the denim came from that-actual wear-rather than the artificially preworn look available new at Old Navy. Her stiletto boots were far more of a fashion statement than they were practical. The outfit was topped by a short sequined denim jacket.
Once Doris was seated, Molly stripped off the jacket and dropped it on a nearby chair before joining her mother on the couch.
“Remind me,” Doris said, nodding and frowning in Ali’s direction. “Who is this again, and what’s she doing here?”
“She’s a writer,” Molly answered brusquely. “She’s here to talk about Gemma.”
“What about Gemma?” Doris asked, looking around the room with a puzzled expression, as though the object of her search might be hiding behind or under one of the room’s massive pieces of furniture. “Did she call me today? Wasn’t she supposed to come to dinner with us tonight? I do so enjoy her company.”
Molly rolled her eyes. “Gemma couldn’t come to dinner with us,” she said shortly. “She’s dead!”
Doris seemed remarkably unfazed by her daughter’s blunt response. “Really?” she asked, frowning. “I didn’t know that. Are you sure? When did that happen? Why didn’t someone tell me about it?”
“Someone did tell you about it.” Shaking her head in weary resignation, Molly turned from Doris to Ali. “As you can see, talking to my mother isn’t going to do you much good, so I guess you’ll need to talk to me. Go ahead and have a seat.” She motioned Ali into a nearby chair, then returned to her mother. “Are you tired, Mama? Do you want to go to bed?”
“Oh, no,” Doris Ralston said. “Not at all. I’ll just sit here and wait for your father to come home. I can’t imagine what’s keeping him.”
Ali remembered Beatrice Hart saying that Chip’s father had died fairly recently of a stroke, but evidently not in Doris’s rewritten version of reality. For the next half hour, Alzheimer’s was the elephant in the living room while Ali conducted her interview. Doris’s son, Chip, may have been the family expert in all things Alzheimer’s, but if he was on his way to prison for murdering his ex-wife, then the responsibility for caring for their ailing mother would fall to Chip’s sister, Molly.
“You’re your mother’s primary caregiver?” Ali asked.
Molly nodded. “Ironic, isn’t it, considering Chip’s line of work, but it turns out my perfect brother is far too busy taking care of other people’s families to worry about his own. That’s why our father wanted me to do it, and yes, it’s pretty much up to me.”
“I spoke to both Ms. Martinson and your brother. Neither one of them mentioned your mother’s situation.”
“There are a number of family scripts at work here, Ms. Reynolds. In our family, my brother was always destined to follow in our father’s footsteps and become a surgeon. I was supposed to go to college long enough to find myself a suitable husband, so I could emulate my mother by staying home and being a wife and mother. All of that blew up for them when I dropped out of school and my brother ended up turning his back on surgery in favor of becoming a psychiatrist. I’ve never quite understood it, but for some strange reason, in my father’s view, my sins were somehow more forgivable than Chip’s.
“When our mother started going downhill, our father made it his business to keep everybody in the dark as much as possible.”
“You’re saying he concealed her symptoms?”
Molly nodded. “And made excuses for her. You have to give the man credit. He did an excellent job of running interference for a very long time. I suspect that the pressure involved in keeping up appearances and maintaining the pretense that she was okay may have contributed to his stroke. I know he and Chip had a big blow-up about Mother’s situation the week before Daddy died. Chip dropped by the house unexpectedly and got a glimpse of what was really going on. When he tried to talk to our father about it, Daddy threw him out of the house.
“I’m sure the truth about Mama’s condition would have come out eventually, but it was a shock to have it coming to the fore when we were dealing with Daddy’s death.”
“At the time of your father’s death, your brother wasn’t living in the casita?”
“No, the divorce proceedings were already under way, but I don’t think anyone realized that Chip would end up being broke and in need of a place to live. Months earlier Daddy had drawn up the papers to give me a durable power of attorney. At the time I thought it was just a precaution. I didn’t realize until I came home after Dad had his stroke how bad things really were with Mama.
“My husband and I were going through a rough patch right then, so it wasn’t a big hardship for me to stay on and help out. I moved into my old room because it made looking after Mama that much easier than living anywhere else. Later on, when Chip needed a place to stay, he got around me by talking to our mother and asking to use the casita. Naturally, she said yes. I finally went along with the program, but only on the condition that Chip would agree to abide by my father’s wishes.”
“Which were?”
“That Chip have nothing to do with my mother’s care.”
“So he hasn’t been backstopping you on that?”
“I don’t need backstopping,” Molly declared. “I’m fully capable of taking care of Mama on my own, and I don’t need some self-proclaimed ‘expert’ telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.”
That last comment brought Molly’s previous comment about what was forgivable and what was not into clear focus. In sorting out the care of frail and aging parents, what had once been a case of ordinary sibling rivalry between Molly and her brother had morphed into something more toxic. Out in the world, Dr. Charles Ralston may have been a well-respected Alzheimer’s expert, but as far as his sister was concerned, that expertise counted as nothing but unwelcome interference. Ali was smart enough to recognize that as far as families went, this was probably not an isolated situation.
“Your mother’s illness and your brother’s divorce must have come to pass at the same time,” Ali observed.
“Pretty much,” Molly agreed, “and now we have this whole new crisis. I still can’t believe Gem is dead.”
“I understand you and she were friends?”
“And have been for years,” Molly said with a nod. “We were roommates our freshman year in college, and we’ve been friends ever since, through good times and bad. I’m the one who introduced Gemma to Chip, so I guess you can lay the whole mess at my door.”
“You and Gemma stayed friends even after she and Chip divorced?”
Molly nodded. “From my perspective, husbands tend to come and go with amazing regularity, but friends are friends forever. I couldn’t just erase Gemma from my life on Chip’s say-so, and neither could my mother. You adored Gemma, didn’t you, Mama?”
“Gemma?” Doris asked vaguely. “Oh yes. Lovely girl. Just lovely. Did we talk today? On the phone, I mean. We usually do, you know. She calls me every morning, first thing.”
