done.
Leland had taken Memorial Day weekend off, and the house seemed impossibly quiet without him. Ali went from room to room, turning on lights and music. She settled into one of the comfy armchairs in the library and picked up the textbook she was still studying. A few minutes later she was joined by Samantha, her sixteen-pound one-eyed, one-eared tabby cat. Sam clambered up into the matching chair, circled three times, then sank down silently to wait for bedtime.
Ali hadn’t made it through two whole pages when the phone rang. Checking caller ID, she answered with a smile in her voice.
“Hi, Mom,” she said. “What’s up?”
Ali already knew that once the barbecue ended, Bob Larson would have immediately reported the gist of his conversation with Ali to his wife.
“You should have told us about all this the minute it started,” Edie scolded.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” Ali said.
“Worry? Of course we’re worried,” Edie said. “One of those practical jokes could go way too far. Your father is right. You need to make friends of your enemies. Who’s the worst one of the bunch?”
Not a hard question to answer, Ali thought.
“That would be Holly Mesina,” she said. “She’s a clerk in the public office over in Prescott. She’s also best friends with the evidence clerk who’s out on administrative leave.”
“With Sally Harrison?” Edie Larson asked.
It came as no surprise to Ali that her mother would be tuned in to all the sheriff’s department’s goings-on. Ali sometimes wondered if running the Sugarloaf Cafe wasn’t merely a cover for Edie Larson’s real job of keeping track of everyone else’s business. She had an impressive network of unnamed sources, and her up-to-the-minute intelligence was often uncannily accurate.
“Didn’t Sally go to school with you?” Edie asked now. “I thought she graduated a year or so after you did.”
“I don’t remember anyone named Sally Harrison,” Ali replied.
Edie sighed. “Don’t be silly. Harrison is her married name. I believe her maiden name was Laird. That’s right. Sally Laird. Her father drove a dairy truck, for Shamrock. He was just as proud of his little girl as he could be. Never stopped talking about her, especially when she got elected homecoming queen.”
Given her mother’s hint, Ali did remember. The name Sally Laird made more sense than Sally Harrison did.
A cute little blond, Ali thought. Right about now, her father’s probably not nearly so proud of his darling daughter.
“Dad says you have to drive down to Congress tomorrow,” Edie continued. “What time are you planning to leave?”
Ali was somewhat taken aback by the seemingly abrupt change of subject.
“I’ll probably head out a little after eight,” Ali said. “I expect to drive down through Prescott. There’s road construction on Yarnell Hill, so I may come back home the long way around, through Wickenburg and over to I- 17.”
“All right, then,” Edie said. “Stop by the restaurant on your way out of town. I’m going to make a couple of extra trays of sweet rolls for you to drop off at the sheriff’s office in Prescott on your way through.”
Working together day after day, Edie and Bob Larson squabbled a lot, but they were definitely of a mind on most things, especially anything concerning their daughter. Clearly the two of them had decided that helping fix Ali’s difficulties at work was a project worthy of a team effort. Sugarloaf Cafe sweet rolls were legendary throughout the Verde Valley, where they routinely placed first when it came time to tally the votes in annual Best of Sedona contests. Ali knew that passing some of her mother’s rolls around the office would be a very effective tactic for keeping her departmental enemies close.
“I’ll also put my ear to the ground,” Edie Larson promised. “I may be able to learn something useful. But right now I’d better hit the hay. Since I’m doing extra batches of sweet rolls in the morning, I’ll need to get an early start.”
Ali knew Edie was usually in the restaurant baking rolls by four o’clock in the morning. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “I’ll stop by and pick them up.”
“Kill ’em with kindness,” Edie added. “That’s what I always say.”
Ali put down the phone. Leaving the book she had been reading facedown on the side table, she walked over to the shelf that held her yearbooks. Family finances had been so tough her senior year in high school that Ali hadn’t been able to buy one of her own, and she never expected to have one. Two years earlier, however, her best childhood friend, Reenie Bernard, had died tragically. In the aftermath of her death, Reenie’s less-than-grieving husband and his girlfriend had packed up all of Reenie’s worldly possessions and shipped them off to Goodwill. Fortunately, one of Ali’s friends had intervened and intercepted the castoffs before they could be unpacked and sold.
Reenie’s kids, eleven-year-old Matthew and eight-year-old Julie, had been sent to live with Reenie’s parents in Cottonwood. Since the kids’ grandfather was allergic to cats, their overweight kitty, the incredibly ugly Samantha, who had been mauled by a raccoon long before she came to live with Reenie’s kids, had been pawned off on Ali, supposedly on a temporary basis. Two years after the fact, that temporary arrangement was pretty much permanent. Sam had adjusted. So had Ali.
Months after their mother’s death, Ali had invited Reenie’s orphaned kids to spend the weekend at her house. They had spent the better part of three days going through the boxes of their mother’s goods, sorting out and repacking what they wanted to keep and getting rid of the rest. One of the boxes of reject books had held Reenie’s complete four-year collection of yearbooks.
The last evening of the three, Ali and Reenie’s kids had gone through the yearbooks one by one, with Ali recounting stories about things she and Reenie had done together back then, laughing at their exploits and the weird clothing and the even weirder hairdos.
“Until I saw this, I had forgotten all about that Halloween party our senior year,” Ali said, studying a photo in which she and Reenie had been dressed in sheets turned into Roman attire. Or maybe Greek.
“How come?” Matt had asked. “Don’t you have a book like this?”
Matt, the older of Reenie’s two kids, was red-haired, while his sister was blond. She was a lighthearted whirling dervish of a child. Matt was more reserved and serious, their mother’s death still weighed heavily on his spindly shoulders. Ali didn’t want to add anything more to his burden by mentioning how poor her family had been back then.
“I think I must have lost mine somewhere along the way,” Ali had lied.
“Why don’t you take this one then?” Matt asked. “I think Mom would like you to have it.”
It was true. Reenie would have loved for her best friend to have it, and Ali had been overwhelmed by the little boy’s instinctive generosity.
“Thank you,” she had said, brushing away a tear. “That’s very kind of you, but if you and Julie ever want it back, you’ll know where to find it.”
With night falling outside the library windows, Ali had returned to her chair with the yearbook in one hand. On the way past the other chair, she paused long enough to scratch Sam’s furrowed brows. Sam opened her one good eye, blinked, and then closed it again.
Back in her own chair, Ali browsed through the book, paying close attention to the photos of the people who had been seniors with her and trying to make sense of what she knew had become of some of them in the intervening years.
She paused for a long time over the smiling photo of her best friend, Irene Holzer. It was difficult to comprehend that less than twenty years later, Irene’s loving presence would have disappeared from the earth. Reenie had died in a horrific nighttime car wreck in a vehicle that plunged off a snow-covered mountain road. For a time, officials had ruled Reenie’s death a suicide. They maintained that her recent ALS diagnosis had caused her to decide to end it all as opposed to putting herself and her loved ones through the devastating progression of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Only Ali’s dogged persistence had proved Reenie’s supposed suicide to be something else entirely.
Leaving the senior class behind, Ali paged on through the remainder of the book. She recognized some of the underclassmen by both name and face, but she didn’t know as many of them and had no idea what had become of most of them either during high school or after.
