Cold Betrayal (2 page)

She may have been there for one minute or five, but in the end nothing at all happened. By then the snow had quit. Around her the night was still and quiet. The sky had cleared and the moon was out, revealing a layer of unblemished snow as far as Betsy could see.

Her fingers strayed briefly to the Medical Alert medallion Jimmy and Sandra had given her for Christmas. “You can’t be out there in the country all by yourself without some way of contacting help,” her son had insisted. “What if you fell and couldn’t get up?”

Betsy supposed he had been genuinely concerned about her. Unfortunately, Betsy regarded that remark as another stab at her independence. Ever since Christmas, however, Betsy had worn the medallion dutifully, if under protest, because she knew that if she ran into either her son or daughter-in-law while she was out and about and they discovered she wasn’t wearing it, there would be hell to pay. Wearing it meant less trouble than not wearing it.

Now, touching the medallion with her chilled fingers, she considered hitting the Medical Alert button, but she hesitated. After all, thanks to Princess, this wasn’t a medical problem. What Betsy really needed was her cell phone so she could dial 911. The trouble was, her phone was still in the bedroom on the nightstand next to her iPad and her clock.

Eventually Betsy’s breathing steadied and her heart stopped pounding. If she was going to suffer a heart attack, it would have already happened. As her breathing calmed, so did her brain. Who had turned on the burners? How had someone come into her house without her hearing them? Yes, she wasn’t wearing her hearing aids, but still. Why hadn’t Princess alerted her? The bedroom door had been closed, but a closed door was not a deterrent to a dachshund’s nose.

As for the burners? Betsy was sure they hadn’t been on when she went to bed. Someone must have come into her house while she was asleep and turned them on. Looking down at the dog in her arms, Betsy realized gratefully that Princess had most likely saved both their lives.

“Treats for you, baby girl,” Betsy promised, hugging the dog closer, “but only after we call the cops.”

Her feet were freezing. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to walk if she stayed outside any longer and hoping that the open door would have allowed some of the gas to dissipate, Betsy limped back into the house and placed the 911 call from the landline phone on the kitchen wall.

“Nine-one-one, what are you reporting?”

“Someone just tried to kill me,” Betsy managed, speaking into the phone.

“Pardon me?” the operator asked.

Damn
, Betsy thought. Had her teeth been in her mouth, they probably would have been chattering. As it was, they were still soaking in a dish on the bathroom counter. No wonder the emergency operator hadn’t understood what she said.

“Just a minute,” Betsy muttered.

“Wait,” the operator was saying. “Come back.”

By then Betsy had already dropped the phone. She left it hanging there, dangling on the cord, while she hobbled on pins-and-needle feet back to the bathroom. She retrieved her teeth, rinsed them, and shoved them into her mouth. When Alton had insisted on installing a telephone on the wall in the bathroom next to the toilet, Betsy had objected on the grounds of simple decency. Now, glad it was there, she grabbed the receiver.

“Ma’am,” the operator said. “Are you injured?”

“No, I’m not,” Betsy said, “but it’s not for lack of trying. Somebody just tried to kill me. Whoever it was came into the house while I was asleep and turned on the gas burners on my kitchen stove. If Princess hadn’t awakened me  . . .”

“Is the assailant still in the house?”

“No, just me and my dog. No one else is here. Whoever did it left before I woke up.”

“Are you all right? Do you require medical assistance?”

“Would I be talking to you on the phone if I wasn’t all right?” Betsy snapped, growing impatient. She was still chilled to the bone, and she resented being asked the same question over and over. “Of course, I’m all right. I want you to send a deputy. This is an attempted murder, and I intend to report it as such.”

“All right,” the operator agreed. “I’m sending a deputy to your location right now.”

•   •   •

Deputy Raymond Severson, who showed up half an hour later, was Tess Severson’s other son—the one not currently in rehab. Raymond was nice enough, but very young. He looked like he was barely out of high school. Betsy couldn’t help but wish they’d sent someone older and more experienced.

“What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Peterson?” Deputy Severson asked, stamping loose snow from his boots on the front porch while Princess danced circles around his feet, barking her head off. Betsy picked up the dog and tried, unsuccessfully, to quiet her.

“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

W
ould 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, either. 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.