Trial By Fire

The last evening of the three, Ali and Reenie’s kids had gone through the yearbooks one by one, with Ali recounting stories about things she and Reenie had done together back then, laughing at their exploits and the weird clothing and the even weirder hairdos.

“Until I saw this, I had forgotten all about that Halloween party our senior year,” Ali said, studying a photo in which she and Reenie had been dressed in sheets turned into Roman attire. Or maybe Greek.

“How come?” Matt had asked. “Don’t you have a book like this?”

Matt, the older of Reenie’s two kids, was red-haired, while his sister was blond. She was a lighthearted whirling dervish of a child. Matt was more reserved and serious, their mother’s death still weighed heavily on his spindly shoulders. Ali didn’t want to add anything more to his burden by mentioning how poor her family had been back then.

“I think I must have lost mine somewhere along the way,” Ali had lied.

“Why don’t you take this one then?” Matt asked. “I think Mom would like you to have it.”

It was true. Reenie would have loved for her best friend to have it, and Ali had been overwhelmed by the little boy’s instinctive generosity.

“Thank you,” she had said, brushing away a tear. “That’s very kind of you, but if you and Julie ever want it back, you’ll know where to find it.”

With night falling outside the library windows, Ali had returned to her chair with the yearbook in one hand. On the way past the other chair, she paused long enough to scratch Sam’s furrowed brows. Sam opened her one good eye, blinked, and then closed it again.

Back in her own chair, Ali browsed through the book, paying close attention to the photos of the people who had been seniors with her and trying to make sense of what she knew had become of some of them in the intervening years.

She paused for a long time over the smiling photo of her best friend, Irene Holzer. It was difficult to comprehend that less than twenty years later, Irene’s loving presence would have disappeared from the earth. Reenie had died in a horrific nighttime car wreck in a vehicle that plunged off a snow-covered mountain road. For a time, officials had ruled Reenie’s death a suicide. They maintained that her recent ALS diagnosis had caused her to decide to end it all as opposed to putting herself and her loved ones through the devastating progression of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Only Ali’s dogged persistence had proved Reenie’s supposed suicide to be something else entirely.

Leaving the senior class behind, Ali paged on through the remainder of the book. She recognized some of the underclassmen by both name and face, but she didn’t know as many of them and had no idea what had become of most of them either during high school or after.

Halfway through the freshman class roster, Ali located the first photo of Sally Laird. Even in a low-budget, badly lit school photo, Sally was a knockout, with a straight-toothed smile and a halo of naturally blond hair.

Several pages later, Sally Laird was pictured again. This time she was posed in a tight-fitting and revealing uniform as a member of the junior varsity cheerleading squad. The third and final photo showed Sally as that year’s homecoming queen. Dressed in a formal gown and wearing a rhinestone tiara, she managed to assume a regal pose while clinging to the arm of a beefy uniformed football player listed as Carston Harrison.

Carston was someone Ali remembered. He had been a senior along with Ali and Reenie when Sally had been a freshman. Ali had been in a couple of classes with Carston over the years. He had been a less than exemplary student, long on brawn and athletic ability. He had scraped by with average to below-average grades while lettering in four different sports.

That homecoming photo notwithstanding, Ali didn’t remember Sally and Carston being an ongoing item during the remainder of that year, but she now realized they must have been. Having a jock like Carston supporting her candidacy and lobbying in her favor could go a long way toward explaining how Sally Laird had packed off the homecoming queen title as a lowly freshman.

As Ali closed the book, it occurred to her that Sally and Carston must have peaked early, and she wondered if anything the couple had done later on had matched their successes in high school.

The next morning Ali had gone straight to the Sugarloaf to pick up the promised sweet rolls. By the time she got there, the restaurant was in full breakfast mode, so there wasn’t much opportunity to visit with her mother. She grabbed the sweet rolls and a cup of coffee and headed for Prescott, where she hoped Edie Larson’s delectable treats would make Ali Reynolds the hit of the break room, if not the department. Mindful of her father’s advice about keeping her enemies close, Ali drafted none other than a grudging Holly Mesina to help carry the trays of rolls from the car, through the lobby, and into the break room.

The construction flagger now came over and tapped on Ali’s window, startling her out of her long reverie. “Pilot car’s here,” he said, pointing. “Get moving.”

When Ali finally arrived at the Congress substation, both of the deputies she had been scheduled to meet-Deputies Camacho and Fairwood-were nowhere around. The only person in attendance was a clerk named Yolanda, who looked so young that Ali wondered if she was even out of high school. The clerk may have been young, but when Ali introduced herself, Yolanda had the good grace to look embarrassed.

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “When they left, I reminded them you were coming today. They said they’d call and let you know they’d been called out and that you probably shouldn’t bother.”

Ali understood that it wasn’t Yolanda’s fault that the two deputies she was stuck working with happened to be a pair of jerks who had deliberately stood Ali up.

“They probably got busy and forgot,” Ali said easily, excusing them and thereby letting Yolanda off the hook. “Don’t worry about it. But since I’m here anyway, where did they go?”

“A rancher busted some cactus smugglers down along the Hassayampa River a few miles north of Wickenburg,” Yolanda answered. “We have a lot of that around here. It takes a long time to grow saguaros-like a hundred years or so. That’s why people try to steal them.”

“Tell you what,” Ali said. “Why don’t you get their location for me? This sounds like something that would make an interesting press release.”

She wasn’t sure that releasing information about a cactus-rustling ring would do much to bolster Sheriff Maxwell’s image in the community, but it was a start. While Yolanda waited for information from Dispatch, Ali put on a wi

“When did all this go down?” she asked. “And how did it happen?”

“Earlier this morning. The rancher is an old guy named Richard Mitchell. His deeded ranch is up by Fools Canyon, but he leases a lot more BLM land to run his cattle.

“Anyways, he was out checking fence lines on his Bureau of Land Management lease this morning and came across two guys in a rental truck loaded with cactus. He told them to stop, but they didn’t. When they tried to make a run for it, they, like, ended up getting stuck in the middle of the river.”

Ali thought about her days working in the east. People unfamiliar with the desert southwest might have jumped to an immediate and erroneous conclusion at hearing the term “middle of the river.” If you grew up near the Mississippi or the Missouri rivers, for example, you would most likely assume that someone “stuck” in the middle of any river would be over their head in water and swimming for dear life.

That wasn’t true for the Hassayampa. As the sheriff had said a day or two ago, “It’s a white horse of a different color.” For one thing, most of the time the riverbed was bone dry. There was no water in it-not any. A few times a year, during the summer monsoon season or during winter rainstorms, the river would run for a while. If it rained long enough or hard enough, occasional flash floods coursed downstream, liquifying the sand and filling the entire riverbed with fast-moving water that swept away everything in its path. People in Arizona understood that their very lives depended on heeding warning signs that cautioned, Do Not Enter When Flooded.