A Last Goodbye

by J. A. Jance

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  Ali Reynolds leaned her head back against the pillow in the soaking tub and closed her eyes. With the help of the pummeling water jets, she let the rush of the past few days recede into the background. She and B. had made it. They were finally in Las Vegas. The rest of the wedding party was there, too. Back in November, when she and B. Simpson had first settled on a Christmas Eve wedding at the Four Seasons, it seemed entirely doable—a piece of cake. After all, how hard could it be?

  Because Ali and B. had chosen to be married in a hotel, much of the planning was done by simply cruising through the wedding planning pages on the Four Seasons website. Arranging the time, date, flowers, type of ceremony—including their preferred verbiage in the vows—was just a matter of making a few mouse clicks on her computer. Ditto for the menus. One was for what they were calling the rehearsal dinner despite the fact that there would be no rehearsal until the morning of the wedding. She also used the website to choose separate menus for both the reception and the post-ceremony supper. Ali stepped away from her computer, thinking that she had most everything handled. Unfortunately, she had failed to take her mother’s reaction into consideration.

  Preparations for Ali’s previous weddings had been well beyond Edie Larson’s geographic reach—­Chicago for the first ceremony and Los Angeles for the second. Caught up in running the family business, the Sugarloaf Café in Sedona, Arizona, 363 days a year, all Ali’s parents had been able to do on the two previous occasions was arrive in time for the rehearsal dinners and depart immediately after the nuptials.

  This time around, Ali wasn’t so lucky. Her parents, Bob and Edie Larson, were both retired now, having sold the restaurant. Bob had found plenty to do in retirement, but Edie, left with too much time on her hands, had hit the wedding planner ground at a dead run, a ­reaction for which Ali herself had been totally unprepared.

  In the past, Ali had found the term “bridezilla” mildly amusing, but when it came to dealing with an Edie who had suddenly morphed into what could only be called the bride’s “momzilla”? That wasn’t amusing in the least. To Ali’s surprise, Edie had whipped out her long-unused Singer sewing machine and set about stitching up a storm. In keeping with the season, ­Edie’s mother-of-the-bride dress was a deep-green velvet and probably the most sophisticated attire Ali had ever seen in her mother’s wardrobe.

  With her own dress safely in hand, Edie had gone on to tackle outfits for the twins, Ali’s grandchildren, Colleen and Colin, who would serve as flower girl and ring bearer respectively. Colleen’s dress was a ruby-red taffeta, and Colin’s tux, also homemade, came complete with a matching ruby-red taffeta cummerbund. Once that was finished, Edie took it upon herself to sew identical cummerbunds for all the men in the wedding party.

  Ali’s father, Bob, was not an official member because Ali’s son, Chris, would do the honor of walking her down the aisle. Even so, Edie had gone so far as to bully her husband into actually buying a tux as opposed to renting one so Bob would have one to wear to formal dinner nights on their next cruise. Edie had been in despair about Ali’s ever finding a suitable wedding dress, and her sense of dread deepened when her daughter abruptly removed herself from the wedding planning equation. For the better part of two weeks in early December, Ali avoided all the frenetic pre-wedding activity by, as Edie put it, “larking off” to England.

  That’s what Ali and B. had both expected her trip to Bournemouth would be—a lark. She went along for the ride when her longtime majordomo, Leland Brooks, returned home to the British Isles after living in self-imposed exile in the U.S. for the better part of sixty years. The trip was actually a thank-you from B. and Ali for Leland’s years of loyal service, including his having saved Ali’s life a month earlier in a nighttime desert confrontation with a kidnapper.

  Ali had expected that her responsibilities would entail providing backup in case any of Leland’s long-lost relatives decided to go off the rails. She was also there as the designated driver, since most car rental agencies didn’t allow octogenarians to rent vehicles.

  In a role-reversal variation on Driving Miss Daisy, Ali had taken the wheel of their “hired” Range Rover and driven Leland through the snowy English countryside from London to Bournemouth, Leland’s hometown, on the south coast of England. Together they even took a sentimental side trip to one of Leland’s favorite childhood haunts: Stonehenge.

  In a small fashion boutique in Bournemouth, Leland had helped Ali find the perfect dress for her third and, as she put it, hopefully last wedding. Even now, her lovely lace-adorned ivory silk knee-length sheath was hanging in its original clear plastic wrap in the closet here at the Four Seasons. Needless to say, Edie was greatly relieved to know that the wedding dress issue had at last been handled even if she hadn’t been allowed to make it or choose it.

  Still, the UK trip hadn’t been all been fun and games. As expected, some of Leland’s relatives proved to be problematic—especially his gossipy and troublesome cousins, Maisie and Daisy, who were more than happy to put their unwelcome noses where they didn’t belong, chirping away with a chorus of derogatory comments as they did so.

  In the course of the visit, Ali and Leland had determined that his father’s death decades earlier, long considered a suicide, was in fact a murder. Joining forces with both a local homicide inspector and also with the woman in charge of a company specializing in using DNA to identify war crime victims, Ali managed to solve that unsolved crime. Her solution wouldn’t have stood up in a court of law, but it removed the troubling weight of responsibility for his father’s death from Leland’s shoulders. In the process Leland was also reunited with a dear friend from his youth, Thomas Blackfield.

  Ali and Leland’s trip back from the UK had included an emergency detour to central Texas, where Ali and B. had come to the rescue of a brilliant young computer hacker named Lance Tucker, whose innovative skills had made him the target of any number of unsavory types, including more than one Mexican drug cartel. Now safely enrolled in college classes, Lance was one of the newest additions to B. Simpson’s cyber security company, High Noon Enterprises.

  • • •

  Rousing herself, Ali noticed that what had started out as very hot water in her soaking tub had cooled too much. Because she knew this one small bit of respite was all she’d have before diving into three days brimming with pre- and post-wedding festivities, Ali drained out some of the tepid water and added enough hot water to make it comfortable again.

  Getting the wedding party to Vegas had been a lot like herding cats. Leland, B.’s best man, and his out-of-country guest, Thomas, drove up in Leland’s brand-new Ford F-150 pickup truck, hauling his equally new Airstream Land Yacht. The Airstream was a welcome replacement to the much older fifth-wheel trailer that had long served as Leland’s residence. They were staying at an RV resort a few miles away from the hotel. Once the wedding was over and before returning to Sedona, they planned on doing some sightseeing, including, weather permitting, a leisurely stop at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, which Thomas was keen on seeing.

  Ali’s matron of honor and best friend happened to be a nun—a Sister of Providence. Sister Anselm had insisted on driving up alone in her Mini Cooper in case she received a call out in her role as a roving patient advocate. She had nixed the idea of staying with the wedding party at the Four Seasons
and had instead checked into a guest room at the Convent of Saint Mary, a mile or so off the Strip. Everyone else—Ali’s son and daughter-in-law, Chris and Athena; their two kids, Colleen and Colin; B. and Ali; and B.’s second in command at High Noon, Stuart Ramey, had flown up on board a chartered Citation X that had picked them up at the tiny airport on a mesa in the midst of Sedona.

  They had arrived earlier in the afternoon, flying to an FBO, a fixed-base operator, at McCarran International Airport. The FBO’s hangar was clearly visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Ali and B.’s penthouse suite. After checking into the hotel and seeing their rooms, not all of the guests were happy campers. Colin and Colleen were devastated when they discovered that their room, although just down the hall from Grandma Ali’s spacious suite, had no fireplace.

  “How’s Santa Claus ever going to find us?” Colleen had wailed tearfully. B. had put a stop to her temper tantrum by coming up with the brilliant idea that the twins could hang their Christmas stockings from the mantel in his and Grandma’s room on Christmas Eve and then come there the next morning to open them.

  “So much for having a peaceful honeymoon,” Ali told him wryly once he had negotiated the peace treaty and the mollified kids had gone back down the hall.

  “Don’t try to fool me,” B. told her with a grin. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  The kids’ problem had been easily solved. The same could not be said of Stuart Ramey’s. Ali had long suspected Stu of suffering from a high-functioning form of Asperger’s syndrome. Totally at ease in front of a computer terminal, he lived as a virtual hermit in the company’s headquarters building in Cottonwood, dining on take-out food that was delivered to his office, which looked more like a grubby room in a college dorm than it did a place of business.

  Eventually Ali had learned that Stuart’s solitary lifestyle and the reason he seldom left the grounds were both due to the fact that he had neither a driver’s license nor a vehicle. His fully guided trip to Paris, scheduled to happen in mid-January, would be the man’s second-ever airplane flight. His first had been today on the Citation X, riding from Sedona to Vegas. Stuart had spent most of the flight sitting tight-lipped and silent, both hands gripping the armrests while his face turned several interesting shades of green.

  Given all that, when B. had told Ali that Stuart would be attending the wedding, she was nothing short of astonished. She was even more so when B. mentioned that Stu had offered to play the organ for the ceremony as well as sing a self-accompanied solo version of the “Wedding Song.” Stuart Ramey could play the organ and sing? Who knew?

  But that wasn’t all Ali hadn’t known about the man. In addition to his fear of flying, Stuart was absolutely petrified of elevators. The latter deficit was apparent at the Four Seasons check-in desk when Stuart, still shaken from the plane ride, was handed the key to his room on the thirty-eighth floor. Glancing at the room number on the envelope, Stuart balked and said if he had to get there by elevator, he wasn’t going.

  The Four Seasons is located on the upper floors of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. A very patient hotel desk clerk had spent the next twenty minutes working out a peace agreement with her counterpart at the overbooked Mandalay Bay. Working together, they ultimately made it possible for Stuart to stay in a part of the building that was accessible by a series of escalators and only two flights of interior stairs.

  And then there was Ali’s father. Bob and Edie Larson weren’t especially religious, but they had always taken the commandment “Love thy neighbor” very seriously. For as long as Ali could remember, the Sugarloaf Café had been closed for regular business on both Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. Rather than having paying customers in, they opened their doors to the needy, serving up a full-course Thanksgiving feast to any and all comers. The people who could afford to make a donation did, and the ones who couldn’t didn’t. And Edie had made sure that Sugarloaf tradition continued even under its new ownership.

  Come Christmas, there was more of same. On Christmas Eve, while other people were focused on Santa Claus coming down chimneys, Bob Larson spent most of the night cooking up a movable feast of ham strata baked in disposable aluminum baking tins, along with trays of Edie’s sweet rolls. Early Christmas morning, the goodies would be packed into his aging Bronco and hauled to the makeshift campsite at the top of Schnebly Hill Road that was home to a ragtag group of destitute people, many of them veterans suffering from PTSD, who spent both winters and summers huddled around campfires in the trackless forest.

  • • •

  This year, due to the wedding, Bob would be out of town on Christmas Day. That meant that, for the first time ever, he would not be in charge of leading what he liked to call the “ham strata delegation,” and he was having a tough time letting go. Derek and Elena Hoffman, the Sugarloaf’s new proprietors, had assured Bob that they were more than happy to carry on his long-established traditions. Derek had even accompanied Bob to the campsite on Thanksgiving evening so Bob could show Derek how to find the place and introduce him to the erstwhile leader of the group.

  Even so, Bob was still worried. He wasn’t threatening to skip the wedding exactly, but he was making noises about skipping the wedding supper and renting a car so he could drive back home to Sedona a day early, in time to make sure the Christmas morning expedition went off without a hitch. The prospect of his possibly making an early departure meant that Bob and Edie weren’t exactly on speaking terms when they took their room keys and headed for the elevator lobby.

  As they disappeared into the corridor, Ali turned to B. “Whew,” she said in relief, resting her head on his shoulder for a moment. “It’s a good thing this is a small wedding. I don’t know how I’d survive a large one.”

  Up in their room, B. announced that he had rented a car and was taking Colin and Colleen out for a last-minute shopping trip so their parents could be surprised with gifts from the kids on Christmas morning.

  “Do you want me to go along?” Ali asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “I have some last-minute shopping to do for you, too. You stay here and rest.”

  Which was how Ali had ended up taking her ease in that immense soaking tub. The water had cooled down again. This time she stepped out of the tub and into the glassed-in shower, where she shampooed her hair and rinsed off the lingering soap bubbles from the soaking tub. By the time she finished drying her hair and putting on makeup, she started worrying about what was keeping B., because their dinner reservation was only half an hour away. She was just reaching for the phone to call him when she heard a key in the lock.

  Ali was surprised when the first person to enter the room was a bellman carrying several loaded shopping bags. Colin and Colleen followed the bellman while B. brought up the rear. Ali could see that he was cradling something in his arms, but at first, with the others in the way, she couldn’t see what it was.

  “Look what we found, Grandma,” Colin announced. “A puppy.”

  “A what?” Ali asked in disbelief.

  “A puppy,” Colleen agreed. “We were done shopping and were waiting for the valet to bring our car around when someone drove past, opened the door, pushed the dog out into the driveway, and took off.”

  “I was the one who caught him,” Colin announced proudly. “If it hadn’t been for me, he would’ve run out into the street and got runned over.”

  Ali strode over to the door to see for herself. B., who thus far had yet to say a word, was holding the dog with both arms. The animal in question was a reddish-brown long-haired miniature dachshund. The tiny dog was frightened and shivering.

  “You brought a dog up here?” Ali asked, still not quite believing her own eyes.

  Colleen put her hands on her hips. “Of course we did,” she said in a tone that indicated Ali’s question was barely worthy of a response. “We couldn’t just leave her in the car, could we? Are you and Grandma going to kee
p her, B.? And what are you going to call her?”

  “What we’re going to call is the pound,” Ali said firmly. “We can’t deal with a stray dog and a wedding, too.”

  “You can’t send her to the pound,” Colleen objected. “Do you know what happens to dogs that end up in places like that? It’s awful. A lot of them get put to sleep.”

  The bellman, having deposited the bags, returned to the entryway, where he stood looking back and forth between Ali and B. and waiting for his tip. Without a word, B. handed the shivering waif over to Ali and pulled a money clip out of his pocket.

  “Our dinner reservation is in just a few minutes,” he said to the bellman. “You’re sure the dog sitter will be here by then?”

  “You’ve hired a dog sitter?” Ali asked. She hardly believed her ears as each succeeding revelation topped the previous one.

  “I was afraid she might start barking when we left her alone in the room to go to dinner,” B. said quickly.

  The bellman nodded and pocketed his tip. “Thank you, sir. The sitter’s on her way here from Henderson right now. If she’s gets caught in traffic and ends up being late, don’t worry: One of us will come up stay with your little doggy until the sitter arrives. We told her about what happened and how you found her. She said she’ll stop at a pet store and pick up a collar and a leash on her way, and someone from downstairs should be up with your dog package in just a few minutes.”

  “A dog package?” Ali repeated.

  “If you want me to, I can ask the kitchen to send up a burger patty, fried with no salt. Salt’s bad for dogs, you know.”

  “Sure,” B. said, looking at Ali as he answered but nodding to the bellman. “A ground round patty would be great.”

  The bellman left with all of them still standing crammed in the entryway.

  “Okay, kids,” B. said, herding the children out into the corridor, “we’ll leave all the presents here for the time being so your parents can open them on Christmas morning. Right now, though, we’ll leave Grandma to look after the dog while I take you back to your room. You need to get ready for dinner.” To Ali, in a voice that pleaded for forgiveness, he added, “I’ll be right back.”