J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent (52 page)

“You’re right,” she said grudgingly to her husband. “She wants to go. The night supervisor said it’ll take forty-five minutes or so for an attendant to get Elizabeth out of bed and dressed. They’ll bring her down to the front entrance.”

Jane paused and gave Jonathan a searching look. Then she turned to Ali. “I suppose my husband has been running off at the mouth and giving you my whole life history?”

“I did no such thing,” Jonathan protested. “I told them that was up to you.”

Jane sighed. She tossed her purse onto the coffee table and then sat down on the couch. “I could just as well, I suppose,” she said. “My version will be mercifully shorter than Elizabeth’s will be. Do you mind getting me a cup of tea, Jon? I think I’m going to need it. And maybe our guests would like some more cocoa.”

“Would you care to help me?” Jonathan asked Crystal.

To Ali’s surprise, Crystal leaped willingly to her feet and followed Jonathan into the kitchen.

J
ane waited until the door swung shut behind them. She sighed again. “I suppose you can tell I don’t much like talking about this,” she said. “It’s painful to have to acknowledge that you were unwanted. Not entirely unwanted. Elizabeth Hogan wanted me, and I bless her for it, but she was the only one who did.”

Puzzled, Ali nodded but said nothing.

“The man you know as my father, Kip Hogan, was a native of Kingman. Both his father’s people and his mother’s, the Brownings, came from there as well. Kip’s father and grandfather both worked for the railroad. His dad was a brakeman who died in a train accident when Kip was only three. As for his mother? Since the family name was Browning, when their first child turned out to be a girl, they decided to name her Elizabeth Barrett. It was supposed to be a joke, but Elizabeth ended up having the last laugh. She was the first girl in her family ever to go to college. She went to Flagstaff back when Northern Arizona University was still the Northern Arizona State Teacher’s College. She graduated from there with a teaching certificate and eventually a full-fledged degree in English. She went back home and taught English at Kingman High School for her entire career.”

“Hence Rudyard Kipling Hogan,” Ali offered.

Jane nodded and smiled apologetically. “Exactly. So Kip grew up there. He was a typical teacher’s kid, which is to say he was a born hell-raiser. He never even finished high school. Instead, he dropped out and volunteered for the army, then got shipped to Vietnam. Elizabeth always told me he was different when he came back—different—but at first he seemed to be okay. He came back home and hired on with the fire department. That’s where he was working when he met my mother.”

“Amy Sue,” Ali said.

Jane gave her a shrewd look. “Yes,” she said. “Amy Sue Laughton Hogan. She said she was from Virginia, but that was probably a lie. Everything else she said was a lie, so why would that be any different? She showed up in town on a Greyhound bus with nothing but a couple of suitcases. She rented herself a room, went to work in one of the local dives, and set her cap for Kip Hogan. And voilà, next thing you know, she tells him she’s pregnant. By then, he’s trying to be the man, so he trades shifts, takes two days off from work, and off they go to Vegas to get married. That was July fourth, 1973.”

The kitchen door swung open. Jonathan came in with his tray, two cups and saucers—a new one for Ali and one for his wife, and no Crystal.

“That poor little girl is starving,” he said to Ali. “I’m making her some toast and cheese. I hope you don’t mind.”

Having fed her one meal on the way here, Ali wondered if Crystal had a hollow leg. Jane Braeton, on the other hand, sent a grateful smile in her husband’s direction. Seeing it, Ali realized that keeping Crystal in the kitchen was a ploy on Jonathan’s part, a way of giving his wife some privacy in order to tell a story she most likely wouldn’t want to relate in front of a thirteen-year-old girl.

Jane waited until Jonathan returned to the kitchen before she continued. “They were in Vegas on their honeymoon when a train derailed coming through Kingman. A tanker loaded with liquid propane was involved, and the resulting BLEVE was huge.”

“The what?” Ali asked.

“A boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion,” Jane explained. “On July fifth a rail car loaded with liquid propane caught fire and blew up. It was Kingman, Arizona’s darkest day. Eleven firemen and one civilian were killed. Several others—firemen and police officers—were seriously injured, and ninety-some-odd civilian bystanders also suffered burns.”

Ali remembered the story now but only vaguely. She had been in junior high when it happened. For days the fire had been headline news all over Arizona. Geographically Sedona was a long way away from Kingman. Eventually the story had faded, but Ali understood that for a small town like Kingman, one which had suddenly lost a whole troop of its finest young men, the fire had to be a tragedy whose tentacles still held.

“So, when all hell broke loose, Rudyard Kipling Hogan was off in Vegas honeymooning with his brand-new wife,” Jane went on. “They headed back as soon as they heard the news and arrived while the fire was still burning. Kip went to the site and looked at the damage, but he never even suited up. Instead, he left again without a word and without even bothering to unpack his suitcase. He didn’t give a damn if Amy Sue was pregnant or not. He left her that very day and never came back. Elizabeth always said it was because of the guilt—that he couldn’t stand the idea that he was alive when his friends were dead.”

“So your parents were married for two days?” Ali asked.

“Let’s just say that Kip and Amy Sue were married for two days,” Jane allowed. “Elizabeth told me that she was shocked and disappointed when her son took off like that. He left Amy Sue with nothing—no money for rent, no place to stay, no car, nothing. Even though Kip wasn’t prepared to do the right thing, Elizabeth was. She let Amy Sue move in with her, and everything was peachy keen until I was born a good month or so earlier than anyone except Amy Sue expected. Once I was there in the hospital nursery for all to see, it was pretty clear that Rudyard Kipling Hogan wasn’t my father.”

“So your mother was white then?” Ali asked.

Jane paused, sipped her tea, and then nodded. “Apparently,” she said. “I did some checking after the fact. I’m pretty sure Amy Sue was already pregnant on the day she arrived in Kingman. She targeted Kip to be her fall guy, her baby’s daddy. The problem was, he was the wrong color, and by the time she figured that out, it was too late. She stayed in the hospital for three days after I was born and didn’t even bother giving me a name. She came home to Elizabeth’s house long enough to drop me off. She left the house in the middle of the night that first night without saying good-bye to anyone. I’ve never heard from her since. I have no idea if she’s dead or alive.”

Tears welled in the corners of Jane Braeton’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Ali murmured.

Jane shook her head as if shaking off the momentary sadness that had overtaken her. Then she continued. “For the longest time, Elizabeth didn’t even let on to anyone that Amy Sue had bailed. She was afraid if people found out, some busybody from social services would decide she was too old to be raising a baby and take me away.”

“And she’s the one who named you?” Ali asked.

Jane allowed herself a bleak smile. “Right. Jane Eyre Hogan. Who else but an Elizabeth Barrett Browning would name me that? Elizabeth hired a former student of hers, a Mexican lady named Roseann Duarte, to look after me. And those are the people who raised me, Elizabeth Hogan and Roseann. Elizabeth was never my mother, but she’s the only mother I’ve ever known. She took care of me, loved me, and saw to it that I got a good education. My husband is right. I do owe her, and that’s why we’re doing this. That’s why we’re going to the hospital tonight, and that’s the only reason—not because some stranger’s name is on my birth certificate.”

Jane looked at her watch and stood up. “We should probably get going.”

Crystal emerged from the kitchen with Jonathan right behind her. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked. “I can help with the wheelchair, whatever.”

Jane shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Jonathan agreed. “You and Elizabeth do what you have to do, but drive carefully.”

“I will,” Jane said. “I always do,”

Crystal was strangely subdued on the drive back to the hospital. Lost in her own thoughts, Ali let her be. Having heard Kip’s story through Jane Braeton’s point of view, Ali felt a whole lot more empathy for the man. He had come home from Vietnam damaged. Even without knowing that Amy Sue was playing him for a fool with her shotgun wedding routine, the added trauma of surviving the fire in which so many of his buddies had perished had been more than Kip could handle. His fragile ego had shattered, and he had spent decades wandering in the wilderness until Bob Larson had offered him a way out.

“They’re nice people,” Crystal said.

At first Ali thought she meant Bob and Edie Larson.

“I mean, they asked us in and gave us food and everything. While we were out in the kitchen, he was asking me about school. Did you know Jane is a teacher?”

“No,” Ali said. “I didn’t.”

“English,” Crystal said. “Junior high.”

That figures,
Ali thought.
What else would someone named Jane Eyre do?

“Kip Hogan ran away, too, didn’t he?” Crystal said thoughtfully.

“Yes.”

“How old was he?”

“I’m not sure,” Ali said. “I don’t know how old he is now. He was probably in his twenties or thirties.”

“So grown-ups run away sometimes, too.”

“Yes.”

“And his family is still mad at him about it.”

“Mad and hurt both,” Ali said.

“How come?”

“How come they’re mad?” Ali asked.

“I mean how come he ran away?”

Since Jonathan Braeton had respected his wife’s right to privacy, Ali could hardly do less.

“There was an accident,” she said. “An accident and a huge fire and lots of firemen died. Kip was working in the fire department at the time, and a lot of the people who died were friends of his.”

“So he was mad at himself for not dying, too?” Crystal asked.

Coming from someone Ali had dismissed as being totally self-absorbed, it was a very perceptive question.

“Pretty much,” Ali said.

“But nobody did anything to him? Nobody hurt him?”

“I don’t think so,” Ali said. “You heard what happened. Even after all these years, his mother’s on her way to the hospital right now to see him.”

“So, she still loves him.”

“So it would seem.”

“Oh,” Crystal said.

Ali’s phone rang. A glance at the readout told her it was Dave Holman. She tossed the phone to Crystal. “It’s your dad,” Ali said. “Why don’t you talk to him.”

“Hi, Daddy,” Crystal said. “We’re on our way back to the hospital. We just finished talking to Kip Hogan’s daughter.”

Not exactly,
Ali thought.
But close enough.

“She was nice,” Crystal said. “And so was her husband. She’s going to pick up Kip’s mother from somewhere and take her to the hospital so she can see him. Where are you? Really? A big fire? Will it be on the news?”

“What’s on the news?” Ali asked.

Crystal waved her hand for Ali to be quiet.

“Are you coming back to the hospital then?” There was a pause followed by Crystal’s disappointed, “Oh. Okay. Here she is.” Crystal shoved the phone in Ali’s direction. “He wants to talk to you.”

“What fire?” Ali demanded.

Crystal didn’t answer. Dave did. “We managed to locate Curt Uttley’s Explorer, or what’s left of it anyway, but I’m afraid we were a day late and a dollar short. The Explorer was parked in the garage of a house that burned to the ground late this afternoon.”

“Whose house?” Ali asked.

“The house belongs to some well-to-do guy from Minneapolis named Karl Gustavson. He bought it for his son, Jason, who’s going to school at ASU. According to the neighbors, the kid lives there with two roommates.”

“What happened?”

“Gas leak. At least that was what the Tempe Fire Department had said on a preliminary basis. Now they’re saying that there could have been some explosives involved as well.”

“Does Lee Farris know you’re there?”

“He wasn’t happy about it when I turned up a few minutes after he did, but he’s over it now.”

“How bad a fire?” Ali asked.

“Very,” Dave said. “The home is gutted, a complete loss. One of the firefighters told me they know of at least one fatality. We’re waiting for someone to go inside and check. Right this minute, what’s left is still so hot and so unstable that no one can get near it.”

“If no one’s been inside, how do they know there’s a fatality?”

Dave sighed. “Believe me,” he said, “there are ways to tell. I had planned on coming back to the hospital, but right now, I don’t know when I’ll get away. Depending on the time, I’ll either come there or else go straight back to Prescott.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ali said. “Crystal is with me, and we’ve got it covered.” She closed the phone.

“He always does that,” Crystal said. “The cases he’s working on are always more important than we are.”

Ali couldn’t help leaping to Dave’s defense. “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Crystal replied. “Coach Curt is dead. If Dad doesn’t care about me either, I could just as well go back to Vegas.”

Ali had no idea how to respond to that. If Coach Curt was a preferred alternative to going home to Vegas, Crystal’s family life back home with her mother had to be far worse than anyone knew.

It was almost ten by the time they returned to St. Francis Hospital, where they discovered that getting inside the facility at night was a lot more difficult than it had been during the day. A seemingly humorless security guard had set up a check-in stand just inside the sliding lobby doors. All visitors arriving between the hours of 10
P.M.
and 6
A.M.
had to present valid identification, sign in, list the name of the patient they intended to visit, and be issued a visitor’s pass. Since Crystal was only thirteen, she had no photo ID available.