Left for Dead (3 page)

At the door the driver handed her off to a uniformed maid who led her into an ornate room that looked more like a museum or a hotel lobby than part of a house. There were huge paintings on the walls and groupings of furniture. At the far end of the room was a woodburning fireplace, alive with a roaring fire. A man stood as if posing for a photo shoot in front of the mantel. Holding a champagne flute in one hand, he watched as the maid led Breeze into the room.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The guest of honor has arrived. Let me take a look at you.”

Breeze wasn’t stupid. She knew why she was there, and it wasn’t as anybody’s guest of honor. The man carefully set his drink down on a table in front of the fireplace and then moved toward her. Breeze had become fairly adept at estimating johns’ ages. This one was at least sixty and very ugly. The bulbous red nose spoke of too much booze, the leathery lizardlike skin of too much sun, and the narrow eyes of too much meanness.

He stopped directly in front of her and stared her up and down. “Not bad,” he said at last. “Better-looking than I expected.”

Breeze was accustomed to this kind of frank appraisal. Even so, the way his eyes trailed over her body made her nervous.

“I’m forgetting my manners,” he said, giving her a leer. “Can I offer you some champagne?”

That was one of Chico’s rules: DO NOT DRINK WITH THE JOHNS! Not even champagne, even though a sip of champagne sounded very good right about then.

“No, thank you,” Breeze said.

“Lunch, then?”

“That would be nice,” she said.

He turned to the maid, who had retreated to the doorway, where she stood, awaiting further instructions. “You can bring lunch upstairs to the library,” he said.

Breeze had never been in a house with an actual library. Why someone would eat food in a library, she didn’t understand. Libraries were for books. Dining rooms were for eating.

“This way,” he said, reaching out and putting a proprietary arm around Breeze’s waist. “I wouldn’t want you to trip and fall on one of those amazing heels.”

With his arm still around her waist, he led her up a long curving staircase. There were thick rugs on the floors. There was more colorful artwork on the walls of the long upstairs hallway. The room he led her into was indeed a library. Three walls were covered, floor to ceiling, in shelves loaded with leather-bound books. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the entire Valley of the Sun. Breeze stood there staring while yet another uniformed maid rolled a linen-covered serving cart into the room.

There was a small table in the middle of the room. With deft movements, the maid covered it in a snowy white cloth and then set it for two, laying out as sumptuous an array of food as Breeze Domingo had ever seen.

“Since you won’t have any champagne,” her host said, “would you care for some iced tea?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Sugar?”

“Please.”

She took the icy glass gratefully and swilled down the tea. That was the last thing she remembered for a very long time.

10:00
A.M
., Friday, April 9
Sedona, Arizona

In the late morning, on a cold but bright Friday in early April, Ali Reynolds
sat outside on her patio in Sedona, Arizona, ninety miles north of Phoenix. An outdoor heater hissed nearby, keeping the chill at bay. Around her, Sedona’s iconic red cliffs glowed in the distance, but on this particular morning, Ali was immune to the view. Instead, she tried desperately to focus on the table in front of her, spread with a dozen paper-filled folders. Ali had been scrutinizing each of the files one at a time for the past hour and was more than ready for a break. She just couldn’t concentrate.

How had she, intrepid reporter turned L.A. anchorwoman, then murder suspect, widow, and police academy graduate, wound up administering a private charitable fund as her primary duty in life? Surely she was too young to be put out to pasture.

“I’m going in to check on Sister Anselm’s cassoulet,” Leland Brooks said, stopping in front of the table on his way past. “While I’m there, would you care for some coffee?”

Leland was Ali’s majordomo, her butler, her right hand, and her elderly but spry man Friday. Since Ali’s return to Sedona, Sister Anselm, a Sister of Providence who lived in nearby Jerome, had become one of Ali’s dearest friends. In the process Sister Anselm and Leland Brooks had become friends as well.

Sister Anselm served on the board of an organization that helped people dealing with substance abuse issues in several northern Arizona counties. On the second Saturday of each month, after a regularly
scheduled board meeting in Flagstaff, she would often stop off in Sedona to enjoy one of Leland’s signature meals. Cassoulet, a savory stew that the good sister had loved during her childhood in France, was one of her personal favorites. Even though it took Leland the better part of two days to make the stuff, he was always eager to serve it to such an appreciative guest. Sister Anselm had told him that eating it “transported” her back home.

All morning long, enticing aromas had leaked out of the kitchen and blown across the patio, setting Ali’s mouth watering.

Looking up, she smiled. “The cassoulet smells delicious, even out here,” she told him. “And coffee would be great.”

Leland Brooks and Ali's newly remodeled house on Sedona’s Manzanita Hills Road had come into her life as a package deal. Leland, a displaced Brit and a Korean War veteran, had managed the place for decades for its former owner, Arabella Ashcroft, and for Arabella’s mother, Anne Marie Ashcroft, before that. When Ali purchased the property with the intention of restoring it, she had kept Leland on, supposedly for the duration of the restoration process.

The remodeling project was long since over. The house, a gem of midcentury-modern architecture, had been returned to its original glory but updated to twenty-first-century building codes and fully stocked with modern-day appliances and computer-driven convenience. In the meantime, what Ali and Leland had both envisioned as a temporary employment situation had become more or less permanent.

During the Ashcroft years, Leland had occupied the servants’ quarters just off the kitchen. Now he lived in his own place, a fifth-wheel trailer parked on the far side of the garage, while Ali had the remodeled house to herself. Leland did the cooking and oversaw the cleaning. He had finally admitted that, at his stage of life, he could perhaps use a little help with the more rigorous chores. Nonetheless, he demanded perfection of all visiting crews of cleaners, window washers, and yard people, and having them available had allowed him to dive headfirst into a long-postponed project of creating a lush English garden in Ali’s front yard.

When Ali had mentioned Leland’s proposal to her parents, Bob and Edie Larson, her father immediately voiced his adamant disapproval. As far as he was concerned, putting a garden like that in the high desert of Arizona would be a colossal waste of time, effort, money, and
water, but Ali was determined, and so was Leland; Ali because she’d always dreamed of having her very own “Enchanted Garden,” and Leland because he’d promised the house’s original owner that he’d complete her beloved project. During the “Arabella years,” when Anne Marie’s daughter had inherited the house and the butler, plans for the garden had been scrapped due to Arabella’s lack of interest. Now, with Ali in charge, Leland was determined to bring Anne Marie’s ambitious vision to fruition.

As far as gardening was concerned, Ali was well aware of her own personal limitations, one of which was having a perpetually black thumb. She had killed more indoor ficus plants than she cared to count. Initially, she’d been wary of such an undertaking, but it soon became clear that Leland was prepared to take the entire project in hand.

Leland had looked after Anne Marie’s troubled daughter for years after Anne Marie’s death, though his primary loyalty had always been to the family matriarch. When Leland first showed Ali the original garden plans, hand-sketched by Anne Marie on what was now wrinkled, yellowed sketch-pad paper, Ali knew what they needed to do.

She agreed to the project but on the condition that Leland’s role would be strictly supervisory. That was why, for the better part of the past week, a crew of strapping young men had been busily digging trenches and turning the soil, first to install the irrigation system and then to prepare the garden plot for planting. After that would come the pouring of the foundation for the garden’s centerpiece, a statue of a bighorn sheep created by Ali’s son, Christopher. Only when the statue was in place would it be time to plant the colorful array of growing things that Ali and Leland had selected while trudging through what had seemed like miles of aisles at Gardeners World in Phoenix.

Once Leland disappeared into the house, Ali turned her attention back to the folders on the table in front of her. The materials included both printed and handwritten (often barely decipherable) letters of recommendation from various teachers, employers, and friends stating why one particular girl or another should be the recipient of this year’s Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship.

Almost thirty years earlier, when Ali had received her own invitation from Anne Marie Ashcroft to come to tea at this very house,
she’d had no idea that the scholarship program even existed, much less that she was a candidate. She had been quietly nominated by her high school English teacher, and receiving that unexpected scholarship had enabled Ali to attend college when she couldn’t have done so otherwise. Now, through a twist of fate, she was in charge of doling out those same scholarships to a new generation of deserving girls, and although it was a job she loved, it was hardly enough to keep her busy full-time.

That morning Ali had started with a field of twelve semifinalists. She stacked ten of the folders on one side of the table and put those of the two finalists on the other.

Rubbing her eyes and stretching her shoulders, Ali looked off across a valley punctuated with Sedona’s striking red-rock cliffs as Leland emerged from the house carrying a tray laden with coffee and a plate of freshly baked shortbread cookies.

“How’s the selection process coming along?” he asked, unloading the tray and depressing the plunger in the French press. Leland came from a class-conscious English background. It had taken more than a little persuading on Ali’s part to convince him to join her for an occasional cup of morning coffee. Leland was of the opinion that “familiarity” constituted a serious breach of employee/employer etiquette, but as Ali had pointed out, he wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and he wasn’t in Kensington Gardens, either.

Ali pushed the two finalists’ folders over toward the spot where Leland had deposited his cup and saucer.

“I’ve narrowed it down to these two,” Ali said. “Olivia McFarland and Autumn Rusk.”

Leland nodded. “Excellent choices,” he said. “They would have been mine, too.”

During the previous months, as the nominations arrived, Ali had deputized Leland to be her “feet on the ground” and to discreetly gather “intel” on the nominees. Leland had been an unobtrusive presence in Verde Valley communities for many years, and his sleuthing had unearthed quite a few things about the various girls’ backgrounds and family situations that were absent from the official school records.

For instance, Olivia’s 3.5 GPA at Mingus Mountain High School was solid enough, but it might have been much higher if Olivia hadn’t been charged with caring for her three younger siblings—two brothers
and a baby sister—while their widowed mother worked two jobs to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Ali also couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to the younger children if Olivia were given a scholarship that took her away from home. Would receiving the award, a positive for Olivia, turn into a negative in the lives of her younger siblings? For that matter, would she even accept it?

Autumn Rusk also came from a single-parent home. In the economic downturn, her once prosperous family life had disappeared right along with her father’s job. After the job was gone, the house went next, and after the house, the marriage. Autumn and her mother had moved from their upscale home in Sedona to a modest rental in Cornville, where Autumn’s mother had resumed her long-abandoned career as a hairdresser.

The chaos in their lives had impacted Autumn’s schoolwork, especially during her junior year, when she moved from Sedona High to Mingus. As a senior, she was back hitting the books and making headway in raising her GPA to its former level, but it was a tough road.

Three years before, faced with two equally deserving girls, Ali had opted to choose them both. Those two girls, Marissa Dvorak and Haley Marsh, were now juniors, attending the University of Arizona in Tucson and doing well academically and personally. In Ali’s wallet, right along with photos of her own twin grandkids, she carried a school picture of Haley’s bright-eyed son, Liam, grinning a five-year-old grin that was already minus one front tooth.

Giving someone an Askins scholarship meant a multiyear commitment from the endowment. The economic downturn that had cost Anthony Rusk his job had adversely affected the scholarship fund as well. And though it had received two recent generous donations that made up some of the investment shortfall, Ali wasn’t sure she could justify giving two scholarships this year.

Leland poured the coffee and took a seat. “I don’t envy your having to make the decision,” he said, as though reading her mind. “But if you’re thinking of awarding two scholarships, perhaps it’s time to consider doing some kind of fund-raising effort.”

“Long-term, you’re probably right,” Ali agreed, “but for right now I need to settle this so the girls and their families can make plans of their own.”

When coffee was over, Ali returned to the file folders. By lunchtime she had made up her mind. She would invite both girls to the traditional tea but would meet with them separately. The scholarship for Autumn, who was interested in nursing, would be to any four-year institution of higher learning within the state of Arizona, renewable annually provided she maintained an acceptable GPA.