Queen of the Night. J. A. Jance
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the table, and place settings for two, including napkins, silverware, and glasses, had been carefully laid out on either side of the table.
Jonathan found this both fascinating and puzzling. He would have stayed longer to explore, but he wanted to get back on the road and follow Jack Tennant wherever else he might be going. Back in the moving Caravan, he disregarded the OPEN RANGE signs and roared down the road at speeds well over eighty miles per hour. Before he reached Sells, Tennant’s Lexus was once again in clear view.
It took over an hour to make it back to Tucson. Jack stopped off at what appeared to be an upscale shopping center and did some grocery shopping before he returned to the house. By then Jonathan’s arm was on fire. On the way back to the Tennants’ town home, Jonathan spotted an Urgent Care facility.
Better one of those than an ER, he thought.
Once he saw Jack Tennant pull into the garage and park next to his wife’s aging green Lincoln, Jonathan went back to Urgent Care to have someone look at his arm.
They did more than look. With a doc in a box supervising the procedure, a physician’s assistant and a nurse lanced the wound, cleaned it, and then put the arm in a sling. They also gave Jonathan a prescription for a course of antibiotics. He gave the Urgent Care folks Jack Tennant’s name and a phony social security number. When he went to the closest Walgreens to have the prescription filled, he wasn’t at all surprised to find that they had Jack Tennant’s name on file in their pharmacy.
“Do you want to leave this on express pay?” the clerk asked.
“Sure,” Jonathan said. Sitting waiting for the prescription to be filled, it pleased him to think that his mother’s husband’s Medicare account would be billed for Jonathan’s medications. He also doubted anyone would catch on to the switch for a very long time, if ever.
With his prescription in hand, Jonathan headed back to his observation post. On the way, though, he stopped at Sonic and stocked up on fast food. He didn’t know how long he’d have to wait before he found out what was going on, but if Jack and Abby Tennant were planning on an intimate dinner date out in the desert, Jonathan was determined that there would be at least one uninvited guest in attendance.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 4:30 P.M.
92º Fahrenheit
When Jack finished smoking his cigar, he went back inside the house. In the family room he found a tray loaded with drinks laid out on the counter in the wet bar. On it were glasses, a pitcher of premixed Bloody Marys, a bucket of ice, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, and a plate of celery sticks for stirring, as well as a dish of salted peanuts. The peanuts were for Jack. He loved them. The Tabasco sauce allowed them to season each drink to taste. Abby liked her Bloody Marys spicy enough that sweat would pop out on her forehead as she drank them. Jack preferred a somewhat milder recipe.
Jack found Abby sitting on the couch with her newly polished toes tucked up under her. She appeared to be lost in contemplation. He paused long enough to pour his own drink before joining her on the couch.
“A penny for your thoughts,” he said, touching her glass with his.
She smiled at him. “Just remembering,” she said. “Thinking about what my life was like five years ago.”
“You remember that day, too?” he asked.
She nodded. “Every detail,” she said. “I woke up that morning up to my eyelids in party problems. It was the first time I was completely in charge of the bloom party, and I was totally focused on that. For a change I was so busy doing other things that I was finally able to forget how much I hated being divorced. I believe it was the first time that ever happened.”
“And you never saw this coming?” he asked, smiling at her. “You never saw us coming?”
“Never,” she answered. “If I’d had an inkling of how much my life would change that day, I would have been more petrified about that than I was about the party. I might have been too nervous to get out of bed.”
“I don’t think so,” Jack said, shaking his head. “You can’t convince me you were scared of anything. The moment I saw you, I was smitten. I remember telling myself, ‘Wow! There’s one put-together lady. She’s ten feet tall and bulletproof.’ ”
Widowed for more than a year, Jack Tennant had stopped off in Tucson to visit his brother and sister-inlaw as one of the last stops at the end of a year-long solitary road trip, one he told people he had taken in order to find himself.
Five years earlier, he and Irene had been on the brink of divorce when Irene’s doctor had delivered the bad news—a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Their health plan from his years in the insurance world was a good one, but it was tied to his retirement. Had they divorced, Irene’s situation wouldn’t have been covered.
Because of that, they had stuck it out. Or rather he had stuck it out until the bitter end. And it had been bitter. Irene had told him time and again during that time that if it hadn’t been for the insurance coverage, she would have left him in a heartbeat. Having that thrown in his face while he’d been trying to be a good guy had hurt, and the hurt had been worse every time he heard it.
Once Irene was gone, he had sold the house in California—against everyone’s advice about not making any kind of major decisions too soon after the death of his spouse. In the end it turned out Jack was right and everyone else was wrong. He had unloaded their property in Pasadena for a tidy bundle long before the economic downturn gutted the California real estate market. Then he put the money in the bank, bought himself a brandnew Lexus, and hit the road.
For the better part of the next year he was a vagabond, setting off on a grand-circle tour, visiting places on a whim and as weather permitted, crisscrossing the country and visiting all the interesting and quirky places Irene had never wanted to visit. She was especially opposed to anything resembling a tourist trap, as she called them.
In the course of his travels Jack had put 25,000 miles on his no longer new Lexus. He had motored to Yosemite in California, Ashland and Crater Lake in Oregon, Mount St. Helens and the rain forests of western Washington, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Glacier in Montana, Zion in Utah, the Black Hills of South Dakota, the pristine lakeshore of upper Michigan, Niagara Falls, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and the battlefield at Gettysburg; Washington, D.C.; Charleston, South Carolina; Branson, Missouri; the Alamo in Texas; as well as Albuquerque, Roswell, and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
He had called Zack from Albuquerque, just to say hello. He hadn’t planned on stopping by to see him, but Zack had shamed him into it.
“If you’re on your way back to California, we’re right on the way.”
That wasn’t exactly true since Albuquerque was a lot farther north, but Jack had allowed himself to be persuaded mostly because he wasn’t eager to get back to California. His kids still lived there, but Jack no longer did.
The fateful phone call had taken place toward the end of June. At the time Jack had known nothing about Zack’s and Ruth’s involvement with Tohono Chul. As docents they would have lots to do the night of the bloom party, but they didn’t mention the possibility of a party on the phone when he gave them his ETA. In hindsight he now understood why that was—they hadn’t known exactly when the party would take place because no one knew exactly when the night-blooming cereus would do its thing.
He had driven up to their house at nearly five o’clock on a very hot June afternoon. Zack and Ruth had ushered him and his suitcases into the house. Then, after a little bit of small talk and giving him half an hour to shower and change clothes, they had loaded him into the car to go to the park to, of all things, a flower show.
At least that’s how Jack understood it. Jack Tennant had learned several things about himself during his months of solo traveling. Irene had always loved flowers—all kinds of flowers—but Jack didn’t much care for them. His low opinion about them hadn’t improved, not after visiting the Rose Festival in Portland, Oregon, nor after seeing the