Last Goodbye

Book : Ali Reynolds Series

by J.A. Jance

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance brings her trademark breakneck pace to this fun and exciting e-novella, where fan favorite Ali Reynolds takes on double responsibilities as both sleuth and bride. Ali Reynolds is finally getting married to her longtime love B. Simpson. They wanted a simple Christmas Eve wedding, but nothing is ever simple with Ali. Even as a motley crew of her friends—Leland Brooks, Sister Anselm, and others—descend on Vegas, the bride-to-be finds herself juggling last-minute wedding plans and a mystery in the form of a stray miniature dachshund. Ali’s grandson rescues the little dog, but Ali’s not in the market for a new pet right before her honeymoon, and leaves no stone unturned in hunting for the dog’s owner. But what she finds is more than just a shaggy dog story…Bella’s elderly owner has vanished, and her son seems to be behind it. So it’s Ali and B. to the rescue—and still making it to the church on time!

Release date: November 24, 2014

Publisher: Pocket Star

Print pages: 64

Sample

A Last Goodbye
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 keep 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.”

Dumbfounded, Ali stood there holding the dog as the door slammed shut behind them. Unaware of Ali’s dismay over her arrival, the little animal heaved an exhausted sigh, snuggled into the crook of Ali’s arm, and closed her eyes. Colin had said the dog was a puppy. True, she was no bigger than a puppy—not more than seven or eight pounds—but she was most certainly not a baby. The dog was old enough to have a sprinkling of white hair on her muzzle.

The doorbell rang, startling both Ali and the dog, who jerked briefly and then returned to her slumber.

“Bellman,” a male voice announced from outside in the corridor. “Dog package.”

When Ali opened the door, a different bellman stood there holding the promised goods, which included a bed that was three times too big for the tiny dog, two equally huge dog dishes—one for water and one for food—and a cellophane-wrapped bag of dog treats. Those at least appeared to be small enough for a very small dog to tackle.

“Heard what happened,” the bellman said as he proceeded to arrange the items in the room. He placed the dog bed near the window, then unrolled a plastic mat and put it next to the bed. He set down the food dish at once but held on to the water dish long enough to fill it with a bottle of water he pulled out of his pocket. Once full, the water dish was placed on the mat as well.

“Had no idea how small she was,” the bellman observed once he was finished. “Would you like me to go downstairs and see if I can find smaller dishes?”

“No,” Ali said. “These will be fine.” Still holding the dog, Ali pointed at her purse. “If you’d just hand me that . . .”

“No, ma’am,” the bellman said. “You don’t need to worry about no tip. It ain’t just everybody who’ll go out of their way to rescue a poor little mite like that. If there’s anything else you need, you be sure to give us a call.”

After the bellman had left, Ali carried the slumbering dog over to the love seat by the window. The animal was so tiny, it felt like holding a baby. When Ali ran a hand down the dog’s side, she noticed that her ribs protruded in a way that indicated she might not have had enough to eat for a very long time.

Sitting there with the dog in her lap, Ali realized that this wasn’t something she had done often. Growing up, she hadn’t had pets. Her parents had maintained that running a restaurant and having pets didn’t mix. That didn’t mean she’d never had a pet, however. A few years earlier she had been drafted as the temporary caretaker of an aging cat, Samantha, after her good friend Reenie Bernard was murdered. Reenie’s children had adored the ugly, one-eyed cat dearly and had wanted to take Sam with them. Unfortunately the kids’ new living arrangement with Reenie’s parents as their court-appointed guardians precluded that. Their grandfather was allergic to the creature. As a result, Ali’s supposedly temporary fostering arrangement morphed into being permanent.

Despite initial misgivings on Ali’s part and reservations on Samantha’s part, too, the two of them finally sorted out their differences. The cat was won over to her new household as much by Leland Brooks’s patient kindness as by Ali’s. But a dog? A dog was a different story entirely, and Ali didn’t think she wanted to go there.

A key card slid into the lock. The door opened and B. entered. “I know what you’re going to say,” he said sheepishly.

“A dog?” she replied. “On our honeymoon? Are you serious?”

“See?” he said. “Just as I expected.”

“But, B.,” she argued, “this isn’t our dog. She belongs to someone. We’ve got to find her owner.”

“She’s got no collar and no tag, and she’s not going back to the asshole who threw her out of the car,” B. declared with a trace of anger in his voice that Ali had never heard before. “You should have seen what happened. If Colin hadn’t been quick on his feet, that dog would have been out in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard and run over in two seconds flat.”

Ali shook her head. She could imagine what Athena would say when she heard that her son had been darting through traffic in an effort to rescue an abandoned animal. B. had never had children of his own. His dealings with Colin and Colleen were his first efforts at either parenting—or grandparenting, for that matter. Ali knew that Athena was inordinately strict when it came to enforcing what she called “parking lot rules,” which meant that the children had to be holding hands with an adult at all times. B.’s version of parking lot rules were abysmal.

“What do you propose to do with her?” Ali asked, looking down at the sleeping dog, who had yet to move a muscle.

B. grinned. “First off, we’re going to go to the non-rehearsal rehearsal dinner. The concierge tells me that there’s an all-night veterinary clinic a few miles from here on Sahara. When we go out later to get the marriage license, we’ll stop by the clinic on the way and have her wanded. If she has a chip, we’ll have her back home with her real owner—most likely not the same asshole who threw her out of his car—sometime later tonight. No fuss, no muss.”

Ali said nothing as B. disappeared into the bathroom to shower and change. Moments later the doorbell rang again. “Room service,” someone called.

When Ali opened the door, a uniformed waiter stood outside, resting a meal tray on his shoulder. “May I come in?”

Still holding the dog, Ali stepped aside. “Certainly.”

The waiter deposited the tray on the desk. On it was a single plate covered by a stainless-steel cloche, the kind of thing servers usually whip off plates in fine dining establishments. “Would you like me to serve this?” he asked, handing her a pen and then holding the bill folder open so she could sign the check without having to relinquish the dog. She scribbled her signature and room number and added a generous tip.

“No, thank you,” she said. “We’ll manage.”

B. came out of the combination bathroom and dressing room, showered, shaved, and dressed for dinner, complete with a suit and tie.

“What was that?”

“The dog’s dinner arrived,” Ali said. “I guess it’s up to you to serve it.”

When B. uncovered the meat patty, he found that it had been grilled perfectly, medium rare. Like the bed and the dishes, the patty appeared to be much too big for such a tiny dog. Wielding a knife and fork, B. cut the meat into minute pieces. Rather than putting the small portion of food into the immense food bowl, B. went into the bathroom and returned with a small stainless-steel soap dish.

“This is a little closer to her size,” he said.

After B. placed the makeshift dog dish on the mat, Ali carefully put the dog down in front of the food. She sniffed at the meat with arch disdain. Then, turning up her nose and without eating even a morsel, she stepped over to the water dish and lapped up a little.

“Whatever she’s used to eating,” Ali surmised, “this obviously isn’t it.”

The dog went over to the dog bed and gave it a sniff or two as well. Then, turning her back on that, she walked over to the king-size bed. The mattress was high enough from the floor that it should have been completely beyond her reach, but it wasn’t. From a four-footed standing start she leaped up onto the bed with a practiced grace. Once there, she made her way to the head of the bed, where she immediately burrowed under the pillows and disappeared from sight.

Ali and B. stared at the spot where the dog had vanished, then looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Evidently dog beds aren’t her thing, either,” Ali observed when the giggles finally subsided. “If she stays overnight, it may turn out that you and the dog get the foldout bed and I get the real one.”

B. nodded. “I suppose that’s only fair.”

The doorbell rang again. Ali felt as though it hadn’t stopped ringing since she stepped out of the tub. When she opened the door, a slender, silver-haired, seventysomething woman stood in the hallway, holding a PetSmart bag along with a purse that was large enough to hold the dog. “I’m Mrs. Hastings,” she announced. “The pet sitter.”

By then it was time for B. and Ali to head downstairs. Like parents dealing with a new babysitter, they showed Mrs. Hastings where the dog had disappeared and then quickly brought her up to date on as much as they knew about the animal.

“What do you call her?” Mrs. Hastings asked.

“We don’t call her anything, because we don’t know her name,” Ali said. “We’re still trying to find her owner.”

“That’s probably wise,” Mrs. Hastings replied. “Once you name them, they’re as good as yours.”

Ali didn’t want to think about that. “Sorry,” she said. “We’ve got to run.”

Their dinner reservation was in the steakhouse. The table had originally been set for twelve, but the number was reduced to eleven when Stuart Ramey called down to say he wasn’t feeling up to joining them in the dining room.

“What if he bails on the ceremony tomorrow?” Ali asked B