Ali dropped the Bronco off at Nick’s and then stopped by Sedona Shadows, where she returned the keys to her father. “How’d it go?” Bob asked.
“It went fine,” Ali answered. “He managed to get a driver’s test appointment today and passed with flying colors. Thanks for your help.”
“Glad to do it,” Bob said.
Ali suspected he would have been far less happy if he’d known the extent of the gear grinding agony during Stu’s driving lesson. Ali was only too happy to go on her way without providing any of those gory details.
Back at the house, Bella greeted Ali with a tornado of unadulterated miniature dachshund enthusiasm, as though Ali had been gone for days on end rather than mere hours. Bella was picky when it came to choosing humans. Alonso was okay in her book because he, more often than not, provided food. B. was someone the dog merely tolerated. Ali was the one member of the family with whom Bella had bonded.
Ali gave herself the luxury of a leisurely soak in her jetted tub before heading into the kitchen to raid the fridge. Tucked away among several containers of leftovers was one loaded with two-day-old lasagna. Alonso Rivera may have been born in Mexico, but he had spent twenty years in the US Navy cooking on submarines. That experience had made him fluent in all kinds of foods, but his take on Italian dishes was superb. Ali liked to tease him by saying he was a Mexican Italian American.
When B. wasn’t home, Ali often read her way through dinner. Once her food was heated, she took her plate and her iPad and settled into the breakfast nook with Bella curled up on the bench seat next to her. For the last couple of years, she had been on a self-imposed literary journey, reading through the classics that she felt she should have read but had never quite gotten around to actually reading. Her good intentions on that score had stumbled to a fitful halt a hundred or so pages into James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a read that had not yet been resumed and probably never would be. Recently she had been treating herself to some of the authors she had loved as a girl—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. She had enjoyed the latter so much that she was currently rereading Rebecca.
This time, as she encountered the fictional Mrs. Danvers, Ali couldn’t help but be reminded of Arabella Ashcroft, the hopelessly crazed woman who had been the previous owner of this very house. The house on Manzanita Hills Road may have been a crumbling ruin when Arabella lived here, but it had also been her Manderley—a midcentury modern and completely outdated Manderley. With help from Leland Brooks, Arabella’s longtime butler and aide-de-camp, Arabella’s house had become Ali’s house, and Leland had become Ali’s aide-de-camp staying on for years. Her working partnership with Leland had ended only a month earlier when he had finally retired from service. Alonso had been hired to step into the vacuum left by Leland’s sudden but not wholly unexpected departure.
Ali had just finished the last bite of lasagna and pushed her plate aside when a text came in from Shirley:
Made it to bingo but not in time to get one of the handicapped spots. Mother is NOT happy with me, but I do have some good news. I stayed late because the inspector from the building department showed up at the last minute. I thought you’d want to know that he says he’ll sign off on the final inspection, so whenever Stu and Cami get back home with that truckload of computers, the new space should be good to go.
Ali reread the text, not quite believing what it said. Before leaving the office that afternoon she had placed a call to the Yavapai County Building Department over in Prescott, asking if it would be possible to expedite the inspection schedule for their remodel. She had been told that the inspection staff was shorthanded and overbooked and that there was no way any of them would be coming to Cottonwood before the middle of the following week at the earliest. And yet someone had come by after all? Today? How was that possible?
Picking up her phone, Ali dialed Shirley’s cell. “Great news about the inspection,” Ali said when Shirley answered. “How’d you manage to get it done so soon? I was told it wouldn’t happen before next Wednesday, if then.”
“Just lucky, I guess,” Shirley replied. “Steve Barris, the inspector, showed up all hot to trot sometime after four. I finally had to chase him out the door right at five so I could pick Mom up in time for bingo. Before he left, though, he said we passed, and he’ll sign off on the permit.”
“That’s a good deal,” Ali told her. “Thanks for letting me know.”
Once Shirley hung up, Ali cleared her place and put the dishes in the dishwasher, all the while mulling over what Shirley had said. Her call to Abby Henderson at the building department had been one of the last calls Ali had made prior to leaving the office, so it had probably been sometime between three and three thirty when Abby had told her there was no way to hurry the inspection process. So what had changed so much in the course of the next hour, Ali wondered, that the inspection had already taken place?
Before leaving the kitchen, Ali made herself a mug of hot tea to carry with her into the library. It would have been easy to hit the hay early, but she wanted to stay up late enough to say good morning to B. when he woke up in London. She wanted to bring him up to speed on everything that had happened in the course of the day, but more than that, she wanted to apologize for being short with him earlier. They had both been stressed and frustrated and had taken it out on each other.
Conducting married life while being numerous time zones apart wasn’t always smooth sailing. Despite her good intentions, she was sound asleep with the iPad on her lap when the phone rang.
“We’re on the ground in Burbank,” Cami said. “Thought you’d want to know. Lance just dropped us off at the hotel.”
“That’s good news,” Ali said. “I’ve got some good news on this end, too. The county building inspector came by this afternoon, so we’ll be cleared to occupy the new space as soon as you get back.”
“We may make it back sooner than you thought,” Cami said. “According to Lance, he’s got a whole crew coming to help with the dismantle and load-out.”
“How’s Stu doing?” Ali asked.
“So-so,” Cami answered.
“Because of the flight?”
“No, because he’s worried about controlling Frigg.”
“He’s probably not wrong to be worried,” Ali said with a short laugh. “Maybe we should all be worried about her.”
Call waiting sounded in Ali’s ear with B.’s photo showing on the screen. “Oops,” she told Cami. “Gotta go. B.’s on the other line.” She switched over to the other call. “Good morning. You’re up early.”
“I am so ready to be home,” he said. “Thank you for figuring out a way to make that happen. BA is claiming the whole thing had to do with a power supply problem, but I’m still thinking ransomware. They’ve started resuming flights, but Heathrow remains a zoo. It’s going to take days to untangle this mess. Sorry if I was a whiny brat.”
“And I’m sorry for being short-tempered,” she told him. “But I’d had my hands full all day, and I wanted to catch you up on what all’s going on in an actual conversation rather than trying to stuff the whole story into an e-mail.”
“Like what?” B. asked.
“For starters,” Ali said, “Stu has been given more than two million dollars’ worth of Owen Hansen’s Bitcoin fortune, he passed his driver’s test, and he and Cami are in Burbank on their way to Santa Barbara, where they’re going to load up Owen’s cache of computers and bring them back here so Stu can reboot Frigg.”
“Wait,” B. said. “Can you break some of that down into bite-sized pieces?”
She did so, and it took the better part of an hour. “I’m suitably impressed with all of you,” he said at last. “That was a brilliant move on Cami’s part to ask about taking over Owen’s abandoned equipment. And you and Stu are right, rebooting Frigg is the only way out of the monetary mess that will arise once those taxes come due. They’ll have to be paid come hell or high water. But what really amazes me is that you and Cami got Stu to agree to accept the necessity of utilizing used equipment. He’s one smart guy, but he comes with a few notable quirks.”
Ali laughed aloud at that one. “I’ll say,” she agreed.
They ended the call a few minutes later when B.’s car service showed up at the hotel. Ali turned off the fireplace, took her empty mug back to the kitchen, and then let Bella out for one last walk. “Come on, girl,” she said. “Time to go to bed.”