life, he was about to have the kind of sex he’d read about in books and seen in movies-something that would literally knock his socks off.
He had shown up early, a good twenty minutes before he was expected, but beautiful blond Suzie Q hadn’t showed. Anxious minutes had ticked off one by one while he waited and waited. Worried that she might have been in an accident somewhere along the way, he would have loved to call her, but she had never given him her number. “Better not,” she had counseled in an instant message. “Too dangerous.” So he hadn’t been able to call, and without his computer, he couldn’t e-mail or instant-message her. Instead, he had waited for the better part of two hours. When construction workers at some of the other houses on the street had started giving him funny looks, he had driven away.
At first he’d had a hard time deciding where to go. Having left word at the office that he was on his way to Tucson, he couldn’t very well show back up without some kind of explanation. He couldn’t go home, either. Eventually, he’d made his way back to a truck stop in Eloy. There he’d sat at the counter and swilled several cups of coffee and thought about the call of the open road. What would life be like if he had become a trucker instead of an auditor? He tried to see himself at the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler with nothing ahead of him but mile after mile of blacktop. What if he didn’t have to come home each night to a woman who barely tolerated his presence?
Unable to stand the suspense any longer, Matt had driven back to the office and told his supervisor that his appointment had been canceled at the last minute. In the privacy of his cubicle, he logged on to his personal e-mail account. His department maintained a zero-tolerance policy on personal e-mail, so he didn’t send or open any, but he did scroll through his new mail, looking for a message from Susan. Nothing.
After work, he had hurried home, gone into his study, and fired up his home computer, where he had been disappointed to find there was still no e-mail from Susan, and she wasn’t listed on his buddy list.
He had immediately dashed off a quick note:
Where are you? What happened? Did I go to the wrong place? Are you all right?
That one seemed too brusque. Unable to unsend it, he had written another:
I can understand it if you changed your mind. There’s no harm in that. I just want to know that you’re okay. I was afraid something bad had happened to you-that you’d been in a car accident and that you were hurt or in a hospital. Please let me know.
And then a third:
Please, please, please get back to me. The silence is killing me.
Matt had sat at his desk for a long time, staring at his computer screen and hoping in vain to hear the sound of an arriving message. Finally, startled by how much time had passed, he had hurried out to the kitchen to start dinner. He had just put the chicken pot pies in the oven and was starting to fix the salad when Jenny arrived.
“Dinner’s still not ready?” she asked. “Did you forget that I have book club tonight?”
Matt had forgotten all about her meeting, but he had been thrilled to hear about it. If she was going out, that would give him a little peace and quiet for the evening, and maybe, with any kind of luck, a chance to hear back from Susan Callison. Just a single kind word from her, that was all he wanted.
Now, though, it was one o’clock in the morning. Jenny was back home, asleep in the bedroom, and snoring like a steam engine. Matthew Morrison was wide awake. Susan still hadn’t replied.
Monday-night shifts were usually fairly quiet in the ER. Sometimes Peter could even duck into the lounge and grab a nap. But not that night. The place was a zoo all night long, from the beginning of his shift to the end. It took some doing for him to manage to dispose of the damning needle as well as the bloodstained scrubs, booties, and hanky. Once that was done without anyone in the ER being the wiser, he felt a rush of euphoria. Soon, however, it seemed as though the nervous energy that had sustained him through the day abandoned him completely. Fatigued beyond bearing, he could barely stay focused on what needed to be done. When his shift ended two hours late, Peter scared himself by almost nodding off a couple of times on his way home from the hospital. When he got there, he did the only thing he could do: He stripped off his clothes, fell into bed, and fell sound asleep.
By that time, a bedraggled Matt Morrison was already in his cubicle. He had never been much of a drinker, but this morning, lack of sleep had left him feeling like he’d overdosed on Captain Morgan rum and Coke. Matt felt sick to his stomach. His head ached. His ears rang. All because Susan hadn’t gotten back to him.
By now he had sent her a dozen different messages. As each interminable moment of Matt’s workday ticked by, he knew with heartbreaking certainty what he had already known in the driveway of that model home in Red Rock- he would never again hear from Suzie Q. Susan Callison was the one good thing that had ever happened to Matt Morrison, and now she was over-completely over. For Matt, the saddest part about his erstwhile affair was that it had ended before it even started.
Making love would have been nice. Matt would have liked the sex part, but that wasn’t the point. What he had really wanted was a connection-a honest, loving, human connection-to someone who, unlike Jenny, might somehow learn to care for him the same way he cared for her.
For a brief time, Suzie Q had held out that tantalizing possibility. It hurt him to think that what had almost been within his grasp had disappeared from his life. Without ever actually touching him, Susan Callison had wounded him deeply and had left a permanent hole in Matt’s heart.
Staring blankly at the wall of his cubicle, Matt wondered if he’d ever get over it. Maybe, he thought. Then again, maybe not.
On Tuesday morning, Ali didn’t bother making coffee at home. Instead, she drove straight to the Sugarloaf Cafe and took a seat at the counter, where her mother, coffeepot in hand, was holding forth on the previous week’s local school board election, where her slate of candidates had won walking away.
Edie Larson glanced in her daughter’s direction. “Ali’s here,” she called to her husband, who waved from his workstation in the kitchen. Edie hurried down the counter and filled Ali’s mug. “From the look on your face, I take it I’m in trouble again,” Edie said.
Ali suspected that it wasn’t just the expression on her face that had alerted her mother. It was more likely Chris had stopped by the restaurant on his way to school to give his grandmother a heads-up on the engagement- ring situation. Ali tackled her mother straight on. She was glad Chris was close to her parents, but she worried that sometimes being close went too far.
“Why would that be?” Ali demanded. “Could it have anything to do with the fact that you and Dad knew all about the engagement situation, including the ring, and never said a word to me?”
“Chris asked us not to,” Edie said. “He and Athena wanted to surprise you.”
“I was surprised, all right,” Ali said.
“Chris came to your father asking for advice about a ring,” Edie explained. “Naturally, your father mentioned it to me. Evie’s diamond wasn’t doing anybody any good just lying around in my jewelry box, so I suggested he use that. End of story.”
Ali realized that her parents had always regarded Christopher as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Things could be a lot worse. At least her parents cared, which was a lot more than could be said for Chris’s other grandparents.
“What would you like?” Edie asked, changing the subject and writing on her order pad as she spoke. “Eggs over easy, bacon, no hash browns, biscuits?”
Because Ali was still a little provoked with her mother, she was tempted to order French toast out of spite-just to prove her mother wrong for a change-but for today eggs, bacon, and biscuits were what she actually wanted. She loved her parents dearly, but there were times when she could have used more distance.
Edie tore Ali’s order off her pad and slapped it on the wheel in the kitchen pass-through. After delivering someone else’s breakfast, she returned to Ali. “Have you talked to Bryan yet?” she asked.
Ali shook her head. “No,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I don’t really expect to. I’m sure he has plenty of other things to deal with.”
“Dave’s on the case?”
Ali nodded. In the old days, when Dave Holman had been an almost daily visitor at the Sugarloaf, Edie wouldn’t have needed to ask that question. She would have had the answer straight from the horse’s mouth. Now that Dave had his girls with him, he was evidently eating most of his breakfasts at home.
“People are really up in arms about what happened,” Edie said. “The idea that someone could be murdered like that in broad daylight in her own front yard is appalling. And having those poor little girls be the ones who
