Deadly Stakes

The door to the greenroom opened, and a tiny black-haired woman bounded through it. “All right,” she said. “I’m Carol, Scene of the Crime’s producer. We’re ready to rumble. Ms. Martinson, how about if we take you first?”

“Sure,” Lynn said, rising to her feet. “Is my makeup all right?”

Carol gave Lynn an appraising look. “We’ll do a few additions and corrections before we turn on the cameras, but you look all right to me.”

As Carol led Lynn out of the room, Ali turned on her iPad and switched over to her downloaded copy of A Tale of Two Cities. It was the latest in her self-imposed task of reading some of the classics-all those books she had heard about in school over the years but had never read. It was either that or sit there and worry about her mother’s political campaign.

Right that minute, reading seemed like a more productive use of her time-better than worrying. Either Edie would be tough enough to survive in the ego-bruising world of small-town politics, or she wouldn’t. However it went, there wasn’t much Ali could do about it.

2

Standing at the gas pumps at the 7-Eleven on Camelback, A. J. Sanders felt conspicuous as he pumped twenty bucks’ worth of regular into his Camry. He kept waiting for someone to ask him why he wasn’t in school. It seemed obvious to him that he was ditching school, and he waited for someone to notice, but the clerk took his money without so much as a raised eyebrow. There were two patrol cars sitting side by side at the far end of the parking lot, but the cops paid no attention to him as he pulled onto the street and merged into traffic.

He might have felt less self-conscious if he had done it before, but he hadn’t. Halfway through the first semester of his senior year, this was the first time ever he had ditched school. He sincerely hoped he’d get away with it. Other kids did it all the time. Why not him?

A.J. already had a note from his mother-one he had carefully forged-folded up and waiting in his wallet for him to turn in to the office tomorrow morning when he returned to Phoenix’s North High. As long as he was back in town this afternoon in time to make it to his four o’clock shift as a stocker at Walgreens, he’d be fine.

The school probably wouldn’t call his mother to check on him, but the manager of the Walgreens, Madeline Wurth, was his mother’s best friend from the time they were in grade school. If he missed a shift, Madeline would be on the phone to Sylvia, A.J.’s mother, before he could blink an eye. That was how he had gotten the job-Maddy and Sylvia were friends-but Madeline ran a tight ship. She didn’t tolerate unexplained absences or tardiness. The one time A.J. had shown up fifteen minutes late because someone had a tire-slashing spree in the North High parking lot, Madeline had called his mom before he had a chance to change the tire, change his clothes, and get to work.

So, yes, he could most likely get away with missing school, but he wouldn’t ever get away with missing work, because if Madeline called Sylvia, the jig would be up. His mother would find out he’d been lying to her for a very long time. That was the last thing he wanted-for his mother to find out about the lies. He didn’t want her to know, because if she did, he was certain it would break her heart.

A.J. got onto the 51 and then drove north to the 101 and finally onto I-17 again heading north. His father had given him simple directions. Take I-17 north to General Crook Trail. Take that exit west for six tenths of a mile. Walk north approximately fifty yards. Find the boulder with the heart painted on it. Dig there, behind the boulder.

His father. That was the problem. A.J. had an ongoing relationship with his father, and his mother had no idea.

Until a little over a year ago, it had been just the two of them-A.J. and his mom. His mother’s favorite song, the one she had played and sung to him for as long as he could remember, was Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World.” She had played it when he was tiny and she was driving him back and forth to the babysitter’s. Later, when he was old enough to learn the words, they both sang along. A.J. and his mommy-the two of them and nobody else.

When he was in first grade, A.J. noticed that other kids had both a mommy and a daddy, and he had started asking the big question: Where is my daddy? Sylvia never said anything particularly bad about A.J.’s father. The worst thing she ever said was that he was “unreliable.” When A.J. was six, the closest he could come to sorting it out was that you couldn’t count on his father to do what he said he would do or be where he said he would be. Still, that didn’t seem like a good enough reason not to have a daddy.

In Sunday school he found out that the Virgin Mary was Baby Jesus’ mother, but Joseph wasn’t exactly His father. Somebody called the Holy Spirit was. For a while A.J. thought that might be the case with him, too. Maybe his father was some kind of ghost, and that’s why no one could see him and why there weren’t any pictures of him.

By then he had a friend, a kid named Andrew who lived down the street. He didn’t have a daddy, either. Andrew said that was because his parents were divorced, but he had a picture of his father that he kept in the drawer of his bedside table. A.J. wished with all his heart that he had a picture in his drawer, too. Not that he didn’t love his mommy, but he had this feeling that something important was missing from his life, and he wanted it with all his heart.

By the time A.J. was in third grade, he had sorted out that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy weren’t real, and he was pretty sure there was no such thing as a Holy Ghost, either, at least not as far as he was concerned. Besides, he was almost nine and other possibilities had arisen that were both more interesting and more ominous.

Andrew maintained that A.J.’s father was dead, while Domingo, who lived down the block and was a year older than A.J. and Andrew, suggested that perhaps A.J.’s father, like Domingo’s uncle, had been shipped off to prison.

“When Uncle Joaquin went to prison,” Dommy explained, “my grandmother took his picture off the wall in the living room, threw it in the garbage, and said he was no longer her son.”

That simple statement had caused a knot of worry to grow in the pit of A.J.’s stomach. Maybe something similar had happened to his father. Maybe A.J. had done something wrong and his father had decided that he no longer wanted a son.

By fourth grade, A.J. was a genuine latchkey kid with his own house key and two hours to fill after he got home from school and before his mom came home from work. Some kids might have gotten into trouble. A.J. didn’t because he didn’t have time. He was far too busy. His mother made sure he went out for tee ball and Little League, for soccer and Pop Warner football. When it came to football, A.J.’s mother was the only mother who knew enough about the game to be one of the coaches rather than just sitting in the bleachers on the sidelines.

For most of his after-school activities, A.J. was able to make it to practices on his bicycle. For games that were farther away, his mother managed to organize complicated car-pool arrangements. On weekends when the dental office where Sylvia worked as a receptionist was closed, she did a lot of the driving to make up for what she couldn’t do during the week. During the summers, there were day camps and swimming lessons at the YMCA, along with two weeks of camp with the Boy Scouts, usually somewhere in the White Mountains.

So most of the time, A.J. was too busy with sports and school to spend much time getting into trouble or thinking about what he was missing. By the time he hit high school, he’d come face-to-face with the reality that, although he had participated in any number of sports, he wasn’t outstanding at any of them. He would never be big enough or strong enough to make a name for himself as a football player. He wasn’t tall enough for basketball or fast enough for soccer. As for swimming? Forget it.

With only a high school diploma and a certificate from a business school, his mother had made enough to scrape by and keep a roof over their heads, but there wasn’t much room in her budget for extras. From an early age, Sylvia Sanders made it clear to her son that he would need a college degree and that college didn’t come cheap. Since an athletic scholarship was out of the question, an academic one was the only possibility. That made keeping his grades up essential. His mother also made it clear that while they were saving for college tuition, his having a car at his disposal was a no-brainer.

“It’s not just the expense of buying a car,” Sylvia had explained when he brought up the subject two weeks