Deadly Stakes

“Dennis,” he repeated. “Who’s that? Your boyfriend? Your husband?”

She didn’t answer; she was gone. The light went out of the bright green eyes. Open and empty, they stared sightlessly into the blazing sun. For a moment, waiting to see if she would breathe again, A.J. found it hard to breathe himself. When she didn’t, he dropped both the cell phone and the open water bottle and fell to his knees beside her, agonizing about what he should do. He wondered if he should try to revive her, but compressing her chest would have meant burying his hands in the bloody mess, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.

A.J. was a month and a half past his seventeenth birthday, but this was the first time he had ever seen a dead person. Sure, he’d seen pretend dead people in movies and on TV shows, but never like this. He knelt there, sick and dizzy, as the breakfast burrito he had eaten at a fast-food joint in Black Canyon City threatened to erupt from his gut and the spilled water disappeared into the parched earth.

A.J. stayed where he was, swaying on his knees, until he could breathe again; until he could quell his roiling stomach; until the sharp stones biting into his kneecaps got his attention. Then he staggered upright.

He needed to think, and he needed to put some distance between the dead woman and himself. When his head cleared, he had only one thought-to get away. Once the emergency responders got there, to say nothing of the cops, there would be all kinds of questions: Was A.J. the one who had placed the 911 text? Who was the woman, and who was he? If he didn’t know her, what was he doing there? Why wasn’t he in school? Eventually, the whole story would come out-the lame story about his father’s fool’s errand to find a buried treasure. If that emerged, so would all of A.J.’s other secrets-the ones he’d been carefully keeping from his mother.

Half sick to his stomach, he made it back to the car. Because he wasn’t thinking straight, he did something incredibly stupid. He turned the key in the ignition, shifted into gear, swung the Camry into a tight U-turn, and drove away. He was opening the metal gate to let himself back onto the highway intersection when he realized he had left the shovel behind. He was tempted to go back and get it, but he didn’t dare. Out here in the middle of nowhere, he had no idea how long it would take for emergency responders to arrive, but he was sure they were well on their way. If he went back for the shovel, they’d find him at the crime scene, and then he’d be stuck answering all those difficult questions. So he went through the gate, closed it behind him, got back in his car, and drove like a bat out of hell.

He hadn’t gone over a mile on the freeway when he saw the flashing lights of an approaching state patrol car speeding north on I-17. As the cop car flew past, siren blaring, A.J. breathed a sigh of relief. He had made the right decision in not going back for the shovel. Had he done so, they would have caught him there for sure.

That was what he was thinking as he drove back to Phoenix with plenty of leeway for making it to work on time. No one had seen him come or go, and as long as he didn’t tell anyone about it, no one was likely to find out. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. As far as his mother knew, he was at school, and when he turned in his excuse tomorrow, school would think he had been at home with a sore throat.

It wouldn’t take long, however, for A. J. Sanders to realize how wrong he had been. It turned out that leaving the scene of the crime was the worst possible thing a Good Samaritan could have done, and once the cops did come looking for him, his entire future would be hanging in the balance.

5

Edie Larson’s election-night party in the rec room at Sedona Shadows should have been a disaster. After all, by the time the TV station in Flagstaff started scrolling election results across the bottom of the flat-screen TV on the wall, there was already a two-hundred-vote margin. As later results came in, that deficit narrowed, but not enough. The looming loss didn’t seem to bother Edie, and it had zero effect on her high spirits. It looked to Ali Reynolds as though her mother were having the time of her life.

One of Bob Larson’s new friends, a fellow resident from Sedona Shadows, was providing the music. Mike Baxter, a mostly retired DJ, played his music the old-fashioned way-on vinyl records. He had been widowed after fifty-three years of marriage, and his kids had suggested that taking care of the family home was probably too much for him. Mike correctly read the situation and realized that his kids weren’t nearly so worried about upkeep on the old place as they were about seeing it turned into ready cash. They had wanted him to hand it off to an overeager residential developer who just happened to be his son’s good pal. Resisting what he regarded as underhanded pressure, Mike had opted to sell the place to someone else, back when suburban Chicago property values were booming. He then departed the Midwest, taking with him a neat profit in real estate as well as his primo collection of vinyl records, gathered one by one over sixty-plus years. Once in Arizona, he settled happily into a new downsized life that included several years with a new wife.

For years Mike had supplemented his retirement income by spinning the old records at events for those he liked to call golden-agers. The music he brought had nothing to do with YMCA, rap, or disco and everything to do with crooners like Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, and Rosemary Clooney as well as the pioneers of rock and roll. Widowed a second time, he downsized yet again. This time he left the heat of Phoenix in favor of cooler Sedona. Even though he was on his own, he had taken a two-bedroom unit in Sedona Shadows. One bedroom was for sleeping, and the other was reserved for his record collection.

Once a week now, Mike did a Saturday-afternoon Sock Hop for the benefit of the facility’s residents and any members of the public who cared to venture inside. His sidekick in the operation was Ali’s dad, Bob Larson, who handled the electronics and the sound system while Mike handled the platters and the patter. Over the months the two of them had become good friends, and it had been Mike’s idea that there should be music at the election-night party.

Ali had thought that was a good idea when she hoped for a victory celebration. It had turned out to be an even better way to celebrate defeat. So were the several cookie sheets of Sugarloaf Cafe sweet rolls Edie had ordered from the new owners of the diner that once was the Larson family’s livelihood. Edie herself cheerfully dished them out to everyone who showed up at the party, even though Ali suspected some of the attendees hadn’t been among Edie’s supporters.

The sweet rolls were gone, but the party was going strong. Bob and Edie had again taken to the dance floor when Ali’s son, Christopher, stopped by to chat with his mother while his four-year-old son, Colin, snoozed on his shoulder.

“Grandma seems to be taking this all in stride,” Chris observed. “How are you doing?”

Ali shrugged. “Losing by fewer than two hundred votes is a respectable loss,” she said. “I think we’ll be able to hold our heads up. It’s not like we took a complete drubbing.”

“You look tired, though,” Chris said. He was a great son, but diplomacy had never been his strong suit.

Ali kissed the tip of Colin’s nose and then smiled at Chris. “That’s because I am tired,” she said. “Running a political campaign is hard work. Truth be told, I think your grandmother had a lot more fun running for office than she would being in office, because then she would have to deal with all the various oddball factions out there.”

“You mean like the anti-contrails folks?”

“That’s one,” Ali said.

Chris laughed. “Grandpa says he thinks they’ll try outlawing gravity next.”

Ali laughed, too. “Grandpa’s opinions are part of the reason it would be tough for your grandmother to hold office. She’d have to learn to deal with one extreme out in public and the other extreme at home. It probably would have driven her nuts.”

Just then Ali’s daughter-in-law, Athena, showed up with Colin’s twin sister, Colleen, in hand. Colleen, the far more gregarious of the two, was going strong at nine-thirty and had to be led from the dance floor.

“Do we have to go home?” she demanded. “I’m having fun.”

“Yes, we have to go home,” Athena said firmly. “Preschool tomorrow.”

Colleen made a face but didn’t make a fuss. She looked up at Ali. “Sorry Grandma didn’t winned,” she said.

Ali smiled at her granddaughter without trying to straighten out that pesky irregular verb. “No, we didn’t, sweetie,” she said, leaning down to collect some night-night love. “Maybe next time.”

As Chris and Athena left, Dave and Priscilla Holman took their places. Dave, a Sedona native, was the chief homicide detective for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Years earlier, when Ali had come back home to