Cold Betrayal

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

Would 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 disco

Bella had been part of B. and Ali’s family for just under three months. In the begi

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 di

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, A

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.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Ali glanced over her shoulder at the scatter of files that littered her desk. They contained information on students from various Verde Valley high schools, all of whom had been nominated as possible recipients of that year’s Amelia Dougherty Scholarship. The scholarship was named in honor of A

The rules of the award stated that the recipient had to have graduated from a high school in the Verde Valley. At the time Ali had been granted her award, there had been only one of those—Mingus Mountain High in Cottonwood. Now there were three, all of them with scores of deserving students.

Knowing that she held the futures of some of those students in her hands, Ali took her selection responsibilities seriously. In the begi

Teachers at the various schools were encouraged to nominate students for the award. Once the recipient was chosen, he or she would be invited to tea at Ali’s home—usually toward the end of March or early in April—to receive the award in the same way Ali had been given hers, at a celebratory afternoon tea. Awarding the scholarships that early in the academic year gave recipients who might otherwise not have attempted to enroll in college a chance to do so. In the past several years Ali had expanded the tea attendees to include as many previous recipients as were able to attend.

This year a total of seventy-three nominations had come through the application pipeline. Leland, operating as Ali’s boots-on-the-ground intel agent, had tracked down information on all the nominees and she had wi