Cold Betrayal

by J. A. Jance

  “As I told the 911 operator, someone came into my house while I was asleep, turned on the gas burners on my stove, and left them running without lighting them,” Betsy explained. “Whoever did it tried to kill me and would have succeeded if Princess here hadn’t woken me up. When I opened the bedroom door, the whole house reeked of gas. If I’d had a gas hot water heater instead of an electric one, the whole house might have blown sky high.”

  “You’re saying whoever did this broke in?” Deputy Severson asked.

  Betsy wasn’t feeling especially charitable about then. “How would I know how he got in?” she demanded. “Isn’t that your job?”

  For the next hour or so, Severson took his time examining the locks on the front and back doors and peering at the windows both inside and out. The locks on the doors appeared to be undamaged. None of the windows were broken, either.

  Betsy had used the time before the deputy’s arrival to give Princess a treat and towel her dry; then she put in her hearing aids and got dressed—complete with a pair of thick wool socks over her still tingling feet. In the time that was left, she, too, had checked for signs of a break-in and had found nothing amiss—not one thing.

  “No sign of a break-in,” Deputy Severson concluded at last after completing his outdoor inspection and coming back into the house. “You believe the doors were locked?” he asked.

  Betsy nodded. “I know they were,” she said.

  “That means that if someone entered the house without your knowledge, they must have used a key. Does anyone besides you have a key to the residence?”

  “My son has one, of course. At my age, there’s always a chance of waking up dead and someone would have to come get me, but Jimmy wouldn’t turn on the burners and risk burning the house down. That’s utterly ridiculous.”

  “There’s another problem here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s only one set of tire tracks in the driveway, Mrs. Peterson, and those belong to my patrol car. I can’t see any sign that anyone else has been here, although there is one set of bare footprints coming and going from the back door.”

  “Those are mine,” Betsy told him. “After I turned off the gas, Princess and I went outside.”

  “In your bare feet?” Deputy Severson asked, peering at her closely.

  “Of course I went out in my bare feet. If the house was about to blow up, I wasn’t going to waste time going back to the bedroom for my shoes. That would have been nuts.”

  “I suppose so, Mrs. Peterson, but unfortunately, that leaves us with only one other possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  The deputy sighed. “Is there a chance you turned the burners on yourself and just don’t remember doing it? Maybe you were going to make yourself a hot drink before you went to bed and then changed your mind.”

  Furious, Betsy leveled a withering look in his direction. “My dear boy,” she said scathingly, “I do occasionally make myself a cup of cocoa before bed, but when I do so, I use only one burner at a time, never all four at once.”

  “It’s been cold as hell all week,” he suggested, perhaps still hoping to give her an ego-soothing way out. “You said you were in town earlier this evening. Maybe you turned the burners on after you came home in hopes of warming the place up.”

  “I’ll have you know the house was already warm when I came home from bingo,” she fumed. “And why on earth would I turn on the stove burners to warm up the kitchen when I have a perfectly functioning thermostat right there on the wall? If the room had been cold—which it wasn’t—that would have been a completely inefficient way getting the job done. I may be old, Deputy Severson,” she added, “but I’m certainly not stupid.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the deputy agreed. “Of course not. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “You can go straight out to your car, get your crime scene kit, and dust the kitchen for prints. I want to know who turned on those burners.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Peterson,” Deputy Severson replied. “That’s not up to me. My job is to turn in a report. Once I do that, someone upstairs decides if any further investigation is warranted. If that happens, the CSI team wouldn’t be here until much later this morning. As for the knobs on the stove? I wouldn’t count on their finding anything. After all, you turned off the burners yourself.”

  “You let the sheriff know that I expect someone to show up here to go over the kitchen and the rest of the house as well,” Betsy said, escorting him to the door. “And I expect them to be here bright and early.”

  She slammed the door shut behind him. And then, just for good measure, she turned the alarm back on before she went back to bed. She didn’t sleep.

  1

  Would you care for coffee, madame?”

  Ali Reynolds glanced up from her file-littered desk as the French doors between her library office and the living room swung open. Leland Brooks, her aging majordomo, entered the room carrying a rosewood tray laden with a coffeepot as well as cups and saucers for two. It had taken years for Ali to convince Leland that when it was just the two of them at home alone, their sharing a cup or two of midmorning coffee wasn’t some terrible breach of employer/employee etiquette.

  “Yes, please,” Ali said, rising from the desk as he placed the tray on the coffee table set in front of the burning gas-log fireplace. Before she could settle into one of the room’s two upholstered wingback chairs, she had to move her recently acquired miniature dachshund, Bella, to one side.

  Bella, an unexpected wedding surprise, had been found abandoned in a hotel parking lot in Las Vegas. Ali and B. Simpson, her new husband, had taken time away from their wedding activities to locate the dog’s owner, a woman named Harriet Reid. After suffering a debilitating stroke, Harriet had left her beloved dog in the care of her ne’er-do-well son, Martin, who not only had mistreated the dog—locking her in a closet by day and in his garage by night—but also had abandoned her, shoving the terrified creature out of a moving vehicle and speeding away in the midst of a busy parking lot. Only lightning-quick action on the part of Ali’s grandson, Colin, had saved the dog from certain death.

  At the time Bella was found, she’d had no collar or tag, but she had been chipped. Unfortunately, the phone number listed in the chip company’s records led to a disconnected telephone line. Undaunted, B. had utilized the talents of his second in command at High Noon Enterprises, Stuart Ramey, to locate the dog’s ailing owner. In the process, they discovered that not only had the son mistreated the dog left in his care, he also was systematically emptying his mother’s bank accounts. An anonymous tip to an elder abuse hotline had put a stop to that.

  Bella had been part of B. and Ali’s family for just under three months. In the beginning, unused to having a short dog underfoot, they’d had to resort to putting a bell on her collar. With persistent effort, they had convinced her to spend at least part of the night sleeping on a chair positioned next to their bed rather than in the bed itself. During the day, Bella’s preferred place to be was on a chair anywhere her people were. In this case, since Ali was working in the library, Bella was there, too.

  With Bella’s long body stretched out between Ali’s thigh and the arm of the chair, Ali waited while Leland poured coffee. She noticed that his hand shook slightly as he passed the cup and saucer. The delicately shaped Limoges Beleme cup jiggled a bit, but not so much that any of the coffee spilled into the saucer.

  Ali was glad Leland had seen fit to use her “good” dishes. Her mother’s good china had been displayed but mostly untouched from the time her parents married until they moved into an active-­retirement community. At that time the whole set, with only a single dinner plate missing, had been passed along to their grandson, Ali’s son, Christopher. Chris and his wife, Athena, with two young twins in the house, didn’t use their inherited dishes for everyday, eithe
r. Ali suspected the set would be passed on to yet another generation still mostly unbroken and unused.

  Leland, seeming to notice the tremor, too, frowned as he set his own jittering cup and saucer down on the glass-topped table.

  “Sorry about having the shakes like that,” he muttered self-­consciously. “Comes with age, I suppose.”

  “It does,” Ali said with a smile as Leland settled into the matching chair opposite her own. “In that case, you’ve earned those tremors in spades.”

  In a very real way, eightysomething Leland had come with the house on Manzanita Hills Road in Sedona, Arizona. He had served in the same majordomo capacity for decades for the house’s two previous owners, Anna Lee Ashcroft, and her troubled daughter, Arabella. When Ali had purchased the aging midcentury modern home with the intention of rehabbing it, Leland had stayed on to oversee the complicated task of bringing the place back to its original glory. That remodeling project was now years in the past. Once it was completed, Leland had also played a vital role in creating the lush English garden out front—a garden Anna Lee had once envisioned but never managed to bring to fruition.

  Years past what should have been retirement age, Leland simply refused to be put out to pasture. Ali had seen to it that the heavy lifting of cleaning and gardening were now done by younger folks. Leland stayed on, making sure those jobs were done to his stringent standards, but he had yet to relinquish control of his personally custom-designed kitchen to anyone else. There Leland Brooks still reigned supreme.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  Ali glanced over her shoulder at the scatter of files that littered her desk. They contained information on students from various Verde Valley high schools, all of whom had been nominated as possible recipients of that year’s Amelia Dougherty Scholarship. The scholarship was named in honor of Anna Lee Ashcroft’s mother, and students receiving those highly sought awards would have the benefit of a four-year full-ride scholarship to the in-state institution of higher learning of their choice. Years earlier Ali herself had been the first-ever recipient of an Amelia Dougherty Scholarship. Now, through a strange set of circumstances, she was in charge of administering the program from which she had once benefited.

  The rules of the award stated that the recipient had to have graduated from a high school in the Verde Valley. At the time Ali had been granted her award, there had been only one of those—Mingus Mountain High in Cottonwood. Now there were three, all of them with scores of deserving students.

  Knowing that she held the futures of some of those students in her hands, Ali took her selection responsibilities seriously. In the beginning, Amelia Dougherty scholarships had been awarded to female students only. Ali had widened the scope to include both boys and girls, making her selection task that much more complicated.

  Teachers at the various schools were encouraged to nominate students for the award. Once the recipient was chosen, he or she would be invited to tea at Ali’s home—usually toward the end of March or early in April—to receive the award in the same way Ali had been given hers, at a celebratory afternoon tea. Awarding the scholarships that early in the academic year gave recipients who might otherwise not have attempted to enroll in college a chance to do so. In the past several years Ali had expanded the tea attendees to include as many previous recipients as were able to attend.

  This year a total of seventy-three nominations had come through the application pipeline. Leland, operating as Ali’s boots-on-the-ground intel agent, had tracked down information on all the nominees and she had winnowed those down to the twenty-four files that were now on her desk. Ali had spent days conducting personal interviews with the last ten finalists. This morning she had been up for hours poring over the individual files. All the students were deserving. Much as she wanted to help all of them, there was a limited amount of money at her disposal. One by one she had moved most of the files into what she called the “almost but not quite” heap. At this point only two remained in the semifinal category.

  “It’s been slow going,” she admitted, “but I’m almost there.”

  On the surface, Sedona was considered to be both a tourist mecca as well as an enclave of privilege, but the downturn in the economy had taken a huge bite out of the tourism industry in Sedona just as it had everywhere else. The people who had been hit hardest were the “locals”—the blue-collar workers who waited tables, cleaned hotel rooms, tended bars, manicured yards, and worked in kitchens. Many had lost their livelihoods, their homes, and, in some cases, all hopes for their children’s futures. Ali had it within her power to make a huge difference in someone’s life.

  Leland nodded sympathetically. “I don’t envy your having to choose,” he said, “but results are the final judge. Your previous choices have been nothing short of remarkable.”

  That was true. Ali’s very first scholarship recipient had graduated magna cum laude and was now a second-year teacher down in Phoenix. The next year’s choice, due to graduate in May, had already been accepted into law school, having found additional scholarships to help pay for her graduate studies. None of Ali’s recipients had dropped out of school, and they had all maintained high enough GPAs to continue in the program from year to year. Two were working on nursing and premed programs at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

  “Any front-runners at the moment?” Leland asked.

  Ali stood up, retrieved the two semifinalist folders, and sat back down with them in hand.

  “Natalie Droman,” she said, reading the name off the top file.

  Leland nodded knowledgeably. “The girl from Cottonwood whose father has been diagnosed with ALS. Considering your own history with ALS, that’s only to be expected. On the other hand, Natalie is an exceptional student regardless of what’s going on in her family.”

  Years earlier, long before Ali had met Leland, her best friend from high school, Misty Irene Bernard, had died in a one-car motor vehicle accident when her aging Yukon had taken a deadly plunge off a snowbound cliff on Schnebly Hill Road. Because Reenie had been diagnosed with ALS a short time prior to the incident, her death had been categorized as a suicide until Ali had managed to prove otherwise.

  She looked questioningly at Leland. “You have an encyclopedic knowledge of each of these kids, don’t you?”

  “I do my best,” he agreed.

  “And you’re right,” Ali added. “Natalie is an exceptional student.”

  “And the other one?”

  Ali smiled and waved the remaining file in Leland’s direction. “That would be your personal favorite, I presume,” she answered. “Mr. Raphael Fuentes.”

  Athena, Ali’s daughter-in-law who taught math at Sedona High School, had been the first of three teachers to nominate Raphael. His parents were divorced. His mother, left with three kids to raise, struggled to make ends meet with the help of sporadic child support and what she earned working as a receptionist in a small insurance agency. Raphael’s father, whose engineering career and income had been seriously impacted by “outsourcing” was, as a result, unable to help his son financially, but he was nonetheless in the picture enough to pressure Raphael about going after an engineering degree.

  There were several serious problems with that. Although Raphael was a good kid, his math skills were mediocre at best, and he had zero interest in engineering. His heart’s desire was to attend Cordon Bleu and become a chef, a goal that his mother liked but couldn’t help him achieve and one his father regarded with derision.

  “Considering your own history,” Ali added, mimicking what Leland had said earlier, “it’s not too surprising that you’d be rooting for Raphael.”

  Leland Brooks knew as much as anyone about swimming against the tide of parental disapproval. His interest in cooking wasn’t the only reason he had joined the Royal Marines as soon as he was old enough to sign up. He had spent most of the Korean War serving as a cook and had devoted his lif
etime since then to honing his cooking skills and using them to good effect.

  “I would like the lad to have an opportunity to better himself,” Leland said. “But, of course, your policy has always been that the scholarships go to students attending a state-run college or university. Unfortunately, even though there’s a Cordon Bleu branch in Scottsdale, it’s nonetheless a private institution.”

  “It is private,” Ali agreed. “But it’s also a two-year program as opposed to a four-year one, making the total cash outlay not that different.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leland apologized. “I shouldn’t presume to lobby one way or the other.”

  “Why not?” Ali said with a laugh. “You’ve been part of this process since the very beginning, first for Anna Lee and Arabella and lately for me. Why shouldn’t I have the benefit of your opinion?”

  “It’s not my place,” he said.

  “It is if I say so,” Ali countered. “So how about if you set about issuing invitations to the tea?”

  “Invitations as in plural?” Leland inquired.

  “Yes,” Ali said, making up her mind. “You’ve convinced me. This year we’ll award two scholarships—one to Natalie and one to Raphael.”

  “Excellent,” Leland said enthusiastically, standing up and gathering the coffee cups. “I’ll consult your calendar and see to it right away. I assume you’d like me to use the Montblanc stationery Mr. Simpson gave you for Christmas?”

  “Yes, please,” she said. “And use my pen, too. You’re far better at using fountain pens than I am.”

  Ali’s cell phone rang just then, and her daughter-in-law’s name appeared in the caller ID screen.

  “Hey, Athena,” Ali said when she answered. “What’s up?”

  “I need your help.” Ali was surprised to hear Athena sounding close to tears. An Iraqi War vet and a double amputee, Ali’s daughter-in-law was not the tearful type.