Cruel Intent

Ali had suspected as much. “Here’s the deal,” she explained. “Back when Mom and Dad got married, times were tough, and they couldn’t afford much of a wedding. There were the two of them, Aunt Evie and her then-boyfriend, and a justice of the peace. That was it-the five of them. I’m afraid Mom has been trying to make up for that deficit ever since. It’s a total blind spot for her. I doubt she even realizes she’s doing it. When your father and I got married, she tried to pull the same stunt with us. If I’d let her have her way, our wedding would have been an out-of-control extravaganza.”

“But you stopped it?”

Ali nodded.

“How?”

“By putting my foot down and taking control,” Ali told him. “You and Athena will have to do the same thing. Tell your grandmother no and mean it.”

“But how can you stop something when you don’t even see it coming?” Chris asked. “By the time we got to the gym tonight, the food was already there. Mountains of it.”

Ali understood far better than Chris that food was the coin of her mother’s realm. That was how Edie dealt with the vicissitudes of life, with both the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies. Arriving babies or returning soldiers were greeted with cakes and cookies and immense bread puddings. Hospital stays called for soups or casseroles. Rounds of chemo meant plenty of mashed potatoes and bowls filled with red Jell-O. Deaths and funerals brought back the soup/casserole theme.

“Try turning it into a chess game,” Ali advised her son. “You win at chess by anticipating what your opponent is going to do several moves in advance. You’ll need to learn to anticipate what your grandmother is going to do as well, then you’ll have to come up with suitable countermeasures.”

“Easier said than done,” Chris grumbled.

“Don’t be so grumpy about it,” Ali said. “After all, that’s what you get for being the apple of your grandmother’s eye. You and Athena will have to sit Mom and Dad down and have a serious talk with them, but in order to make it stick, you’ll have to present a united front, diplomatic but absolutely firm. By the way, Athena was exceedingly diplomatic tonight,” she added. “She came in with her bags of groceries, but as soon as she saw what Mom had brought, she deep-sixed the grocery bags. I never heard her say a cross word.”

“There were plenty of cross words for me,” Chris complained. “As far as Athena was concerned, the whole engagement-party extravaganza was my fault.”

“Dealing with difficult relatives is one of the hazards of getting married,” Ali said. “And your grandmother isn’t the only one who’ll pull that kind of stunt. It turns out I’m putting together a little extravaganza of my own.”

Chris rolled his eyes. “What kind?”

“Thanksgiving.”

“Don’t tell me you’re cooking.”

“Be nice,” she told him. “But don’t worry. Leland will be supervising the cooking, if not doing most of it himself. So this is my official notice that you and Athena are invited, as long as you don’t have any other plans.”

“Okay,” Chris said. “Sounds good. We’ll be there.”

“Wrong,” Ali said with a laugh. “We’re talking Rules of Engagement 101 here, Chris. Don’t fall into the old trap of making unilateral holiday decisions. If you want to be happily engaged and end up happily married, you won’t accept any invitations without first consulting your significant other.”

“You mean I should ask Athena and then let you know?”

“Exactly,” Ali said. “If you know what’s good for you.”

“If she’s even speaking to me,” Chris added gloomily. He went off to bed then, leaving Ali absently petting Sam and reflecting on the conversation.

Where do I get off dishing out marital advice to anyone? she wondered. When it comes to being married, my own track record isn’t much to write home about. For instance, when she had told Chris he needed to put his foot down about his grandmother hijacking the wedding plans, it had been a case of “do as I say” rather than “do as I do.” Or did. Back when she and Chris’s father had been in a similar situation, Ali hadn’t exactly confronted the problem head-on. Instead, once the wedding arrangements had threatened to careen out of control, she and Dean had taken the path of least resistance and eloped to Vegas. No fuss; no muss. Edie had been furious, but despite the instant wedding, Ali and Dean had been a match made in heaven-right up until his death from cancer a few short years later.

Ali’s much later wedding to Paul Grayson had been far more to Edie’s liking. It had been a splashy Beverly Hills social event even in a milieu where outsize weddings were the order of the day. Edie and Bob Larson, a little out of their depth, had sat proudly in front-row seats when Paul, dressed in an impeccable tux, had stood in front of several hundred other invited guests and had solemnly vowed to love, honor, and obey.

In spite of all the lavish arrangements, Ali had learned, to her regret, that it had all been for show. Paul hadn’t meant a word of what he’d said, and he’d made a mockery of his wedding vows. In the dark of the night, sitting there alone with her aging, scruffy cat, Ali couldn’t help feeling a small chill tingle her spine as she realized Morgan Forester had done the same thing. She, too, had made marital promises that she had been unwilling or unable to keep. And now the young wife and mother was every bit as dead as Paul Grayson.

Ali went to bed a short time after that, but it took hours before she fell asleep. Awakening the next morning to the sound of Chris’s car pulling out of the driveway, she wandered out to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.

While she had been lying awake, she’d kept going back to Morgan Forester’s involvement with the Internet dating site Singleatheart.com. What had compelled a supposedly happily married woman to sign up for something like that? And what kind of people had she hoped to meet there?

Other cheaters, no doubt, Ali thought. Other people whose word couldn’t be trusted. So why had Morgan thought one of them would have more to offer than her hardworking husband, Bryan?

Without necessarily making a conscious decision, Ali retrieved her computer and dragged it over to the dining room table. Within a matter of minutes, she had surfed over to the Singleatheart website. At least she had arrived at the welcome page. In order to see more than that, she would have to register. To simply surf through the site or post a profile would cost a hundred dollars. To make a co

Ali hesitated. She had no interest in posting a profile, but she wanted to know more about the people who had. She waffled briefly, but before long, her natural curiosity won out. In order to register, she had to provide both her name and a screen name. Fortunately, Babe, her Cutloose handle, worked very nicely. Her names, along with a working credit-card number and billing address, allowed her to log on.

Her browser was set to limit pop-up ads, but once Ali was inside Singleatheart, her computer screen was immediately besieged by a cascade of competing images. Unremittingly explicit sexual scenes sprang to life on either side of her screen. As a news broadcaster, Ali had done two separate news stories related to commercial porn sites. She had expected a dating site to be somewhat less graphic, but it wasn’t. There were ads for sex toys that came in more varieties, shapes, colors, and sizes than she ever could have imagined. The lingerie for sale was outrageous, and the ads promoting it were even more so. This was a long, long way from eHarmony!

The middle of the screen contained an old-fashioned Mercator projection of the world with an arrow and a guide that advised visitors to click on a particular location in order to narrow their search. By the time she landed on the map for Arizona, she was told that the section contained 2,364 profiles. That many? she thought. Just in Arizona?