Cold Betrayal (17 page)

Harold, Betsy’s neighbor, had come by late in the afternoon the day before, apologizing for his tardiness in getting her driveway plowed and her walkway and wheelchair ramp shoveled and deiced. With her coat on and her purse on her arm, Betsy was happy to use the cleaned-up ramp to walk out to Sandra’s Volvo. Cataracts or not, once in the passenger seat, Betsy had no difficulty in seeing the tight-lipped expression on her daughter-in-law’s face as she jammed on the gas and shot past Joe’s van.

“I can’t believe you’d go off like this and leave a complete stranger working in your house.”

“He’s not a complete stranger,” Betsy said. “He’s a friend of Athena’s.” That was close enough to the truth to sound plausible.

“Oh,” Sandra fumed. “I suppose that explains it.”

Betsy took her own sweet time in the grocery store and the pharmacy both, using her magnifying glass to examine labels and making a show of having trouble making up her mind. She couldn’t resist. Having Sandra pacing in the background and checking her watch was just too much fun. With a little thought she was able to stretch her errands until well into the afternoon.

When Betsy finished shopping, she insisted they stop by the café. Betsy ordered a roast beef sandwich and Sandra her cup of black coffee. Only then did Sandra finally get down to business and broach the conversation Betsy had been expecting.

“Donald came by and talked to James last night,” Sandra said. “They’re both very concerned about you, you know. We all are.”

Betsy knew exactly where all this was going, but she played dumb. “Concerned?” she asked innocently.

“Of course we’re concerned,” Sandra said. “It’s one thing for you to lose your hearing aids or misplace your glasses, but it’s quite another to have the kind of episode that ends up involving law enforcement.”

“Ah,” Betsy said, as if only now realizing what this was all about. “The situation the other night where Donald Olson thinks the burners on my stove came on either by magic or else all by themselves. Which is wrong, of course. I think someone tried to murder me.”

Sandra didn’t actually say that she doubted Betsy’s version of the story, but the message came through nonetheless. “That’s what has us so worried—that you’ll have a moment of forgetfulness or confusion and come to some kind of harm. James wants you to go see Dr. Munson and have a complete evaluation.”

Betsy considered that last comment in silence. Elmer Munson was another one of Jimmy’s good pals. He had earned a certain reputation among some of her fellow bingo players down at the VFW as the go-to guy in town when recalcitrant parents needed to be brought to heel by their baby-boomer offspring. In fact, some of the more outspoken retirees suspected that Munson had been the driving force behind having his own mother declared incompetent.

Betsy’s food came. She tried a taste of it before she replied. The sandwich was just the way she liked it, thinly sliced beef on a piece of plain white Wonder bread instead of on a slab of whole-wheat cardboard some restaurants tried to pass off as “healthy eating.” And the rich brown gravy slathered over the top was thick and tasty.

“When exactly would you and Jimmy like me to schedule this checkup?” Betsy asked at last.

The whole time they had been together that day, Betsy had noted a kind of nervousness in Sandra that she had never exhibited before. Jimmy didn’t like rocking boats, and Betsy wasn’t surprised that her son had sent Sandra to do the dirty work rather than facing the music himself. No doubt Sandra had expected Betsy would object to the very idea, but Betsy’s apparent willingness to consider it sent a look of relief flashing across Sandra’s face. Betsy found that look more disturbing than the whole Dr. Munson scheme.

Sandra reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. “James already called Dr. Munson’s office and booked an appointment for you,” she said, sliding the card across the table. “Monday afternoon—two-thirty. I’ll be glad to pick you up and bring you into town for the appointment if you like.”

Which was no doubt Sandra’s way of making sure Betsy didn’t ditch the appointment.

“Oh, no,” Betsy said casually, pretenting to examine the handwritten time on the back of the card and then slipping it into her own pocket. “That’s not necessary. I don’t like causing you any inconvenience, especially since you were kind enough to bring me into town today. I’ll call Marcia. She’s always happy to earn a little extra cash by driving me around. With this much notice, she’ll have no difficulty working me in.”

Sandra took the rejection in stride. “If you want to have Marcia pick you up, that’ll be fine,” she said with a smile. “All the same, I’ll plan on being at the appointment, too. For moral support, you know.”

“Of course,” Betsy agreed with a nod. “For moral support.”

13

A
li was still shaken when she left the hospital a few minutes later. She had no doubt that Sister Anselm’s critically injured patient had been on her way to Flagstaff hoping for help from Ali’s good friend Irene Bernard when she ran away from home. But Reenie had been dead for years. How was it possible that the injured girl hadn’t known that Irene Bernard was no longer available to help her?

Hoping for answers, Ali got in the Cayenne and drove straight to the YWCA. She parked in a visitor’s space near Irene’s Place, the domestic violence shelter that Reenie had founded and championed and that was now named in her honor. Ali was always struck by the irony in that because Irene had died as a result of an act of senseless domestic violence, too, albeit from an unexpected source.

Ali rang the security bell and identified herself before being allowed inside. She went straight to the office of Andrea Rogers. At the time of Reenie’s death, Andrea had been Irene Bernard’s assistant. Now she was in charge. In the intervening years, Andrea had honed both her public-speaking and management skills. Like Reenie, Andrea spent a good deal of her time out in public raising both awareness and needed funds. Like her predecessor, Andrea took an active and personal interest in every traumatized family that showed up on the shelter’s doorstep.

When Ali tapped on the doorframe of Andrea’s office, she looked up as if annoyed with the interruption. Recognizing her visitor, annoyance changed to beaming welcome.

“Well, if it isn’t Ali Reynolds,” Andrea said, hurrying from her cluttered desk to envelop Ali in a welcoming hug. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Intent on her errand, Ali didn’t let herself get sucked into a long exchange of pleasantries. “I need your help,” she said. “I’ve just come from St. Jerome’s. We’ve got a critically injured but so far unidentified young woman there along with her injured newborn baby. When I was going through the victim’s effects, I found a scrap of paper with the name Irene on it along with a telephone number. When I tried calling, the phone was answered here.”

“Here at the shelter?”

“I didn’t realize it at first,” Ali explained. “When the call was answered, all the operator said was ‘May I help you?’ It wasn’t until after I asked for Irene specifically that she offered to put me through to the shelter. That’s when I realized I had reached the YWCA.”

“Sharing the switchboard with the YWCA during daytime hours saves us a bunch of money,” Andrea answered. “And we teach the operators who pick up on our line to answer with a simple ‘May I help you?’ Sometimes after domestic violence victims call us, someone else—often an angry husband—will call, too, because he’s busy going through his wife’s phone records, trying to find out what she’s been up to. A simple ‘May I help you?’ allows us to hide the fact that the wife—and most often it is a wife—is someone who’s come to us looking for help.”

Andrea paused and sighed. “As for using Irene’s old number as our hotline number? We did that as a tribute to her—to honor what she stood for. When Irene was running the show, she often took those calls herself. This way she’s still taking them.”

It was clear from the sadness in Andrea’s voice that Ali Reynolds wasn’t the only one who still grieved Reenie Bernard’s passing.

Andrea straightened her shoulders. “This young woman you told me about, the one in the hospital. Is she a victim of domestic violence?”

“From what we know of the investigation, she was injured in a traffic accident. She ran into traffic and was hit by a passing vehicle while in the process of running away from a difficult home situation. So the answer to that is a possible yes.”

“What about the driver or the car who hit her?” Andrea asked. “Sometimes so-called accidents aren’t accidental.”

“Indications are the driver is a complete stranger.”

“What makes you think she might have called here?” Andrea asked.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Ali admitted. “What we do know is that she had a slip of paper with Irene’s name and phone number on it hidden in her pocket.”

“Come with me, then,” Andrea said. “Let’s go check.”

Talking as she walked, Andrea led Ali into the corridor. “We log in the numbers of all incoming calls placed to our hotline. That way, occasionally in crisis situations, we know where to send law enforcement assistance. Having that information is also helpful when we need to track down an offender who is trying to reach one of our residents in violation of a protection order.”

Ali and Andrea left the shelter and entered the YWCA part of the building through a locking door that clicked shut behind them. In a side office just off the main entrance, a young woman sat at a desk laden with old-fashioned PBX telephone equipment.

“Hey, Debbie, this is Ali Reynolds, a friend of mine and a good friend of Irene Bernard’s as well,” Andrea announced. “Mind if I take a look at the logbook?”

Debbie handed over a simple spiral notebook, which was anything but high tech. The day of the month was written on the top of the page. The current page had only one listing—Ali’s. It included the time, her cell-phone number, and the word “Irene” followed by a question mark. That was all the information the operator had gleaned before Ali had ended the call.

She turned back to the previous page. That one listed five calls. As soon as she saw the last one on the page, Ali felt her heart skip a beat. A call from a 928 area code had come in at 4:56. The 928 designation meant it had originated from a phone purchased and activated somewhere in northern Arizona. But the telling detail, the one that took Ali’s breath away was the final notation on the line: “Irene?”

“It’s here,” Ali murmured to Andrea. “She did call yesterday; at least she tried to.”

“Is there a problem?” Debbie asked with a frown of concern. “Which call are you talking about—the one for Irene?”

Ali nodded.

“That’s so weird,” Debbie said. “I’ve had two calls like that in the past two days—someone who asked for a person named Irene rather than the shelter.”

“The second call was from me this morning,” Ali said. “What happened the first time?”

“I started to explain that was the name of the shelter rather than a person, but the caller, a young woman from the sound of it, hung up before I had a chance. I passed the information on to Mrs. Young, the resident assistant in the shelter, in case she called back overnight. According to this, she never did.”

“Beverly Young is our overnight housemother,” Andrea explained. “Calls are transferred over to her office in the shelter once the switchboard closes for the night. That way we have someone on-site for people needing assistance during nonbusiness hours.”

Ali thanked Debbie for her help and then keyed the phone number into the message section of the phone.

“I don’t recommend your calling,” Andrea cautioned as they walked back toward her office. “In a volatile situation, a call from an outsider could make things that much worse.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, but since Jane Doe is already in the hospital in critical condition, I’m not sure how it could get any worse.”

“You’d be surprised,” Andrea answered.

Good to her word, once Ali was back in the Cayenne, she didn’t call. Instead she e-mailed the number to Stuart Ramey with a simple request:

Can you give me a name and address to go with this number?

Her e-mail announcement chimed before Ali made it back to the parking lot at St. Jerome’s. The message was from Cami, Stuart’s assistant, rather than from the man himself:

Mr. Ramey is busy right now. He asked me to handle this. The phone leads back to someone named Tsosie Begay. The address listed is a post office box in Chinle, AZ. If you need anything else, let me know.

Cami

Ali sat in her idling car for a full minute after reading Cami’s e-mail. Begay was a well-known Navajo name, and the phone number was more likely to lead back to the source of the blanket rather than to one of Jane Doe’s family members. After giving it some thought, Ali went ahead and dialed. The phone was answered by a soft-spoken woman. “Begay residence.”

“Hello,” Ali responded. “My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m calling for a Mr. or Mrs. Begay.”

“I’m Evangeline Begay,” the woman said in a voice that gave nothing away.

Ali took a deep breath before launching off. “I’m looking into a phone call that was placed from your number to a phone located in Flagstaff late yesterday afternoon. It may be connected to a young woman who was injured in a traffic accident last night. We’re trying to identify her.”

“You said the girl was injured?” Evangeline asked. “How?”

“She was hit by a vehicle north of Flagstaff. I’m attempting to locate her family.”

“She was running away,” Evangeline said.

“We’ve surmised as much, but we’re trying to locate her relatives. At the time she was injured, she was wrapped in a blanket—a Navajo blanket.”

“One of mine,” Evangeline answered. “All she had on was a jacket. It was snowing and cold, so I gave her my blanket to keep her warm, help keep her safe. Is she all right? What about her baby?”

“As far as I know at this moment, they’re both still alive,” Ali said. “But can you give me any idea of where she’s from?”