A Last Goodbye by J.A. Jance Page B

role as a roving patient advocate. She had nixed the idea of staying with the wedding party at the Four Seasons and had instead checked into a guest room at the Convent of Saint Mary, a mile or so off the Strip. Everyone else—Ali’s son and daughter-in-law, Chris and Athena; their two kids, Colleen and Colin; B. and Ali; and B.’s second in command at High Noon, Stuart Ramey, had flown up on board a chartered Citation X that had picked them up at the tiny airport on a mesa in the midst of Sedona.
    They had arrived earlier in the afternoon, flying to an FBO, a fixed-base operator, at McCarran International Airport. The FBO’s hangar was clearly visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Ali and B.’s penthouse suite. After checking into the hotel and seeing their rooms, not all of the guests were happy campers. Colin and Colleen were devastated when they discovered that their room, although just down the hall from Grandma Ali’s spacious suite, had no fireplace.
    â€œHow’s Santa Claus ever going to find us?” Colleen had wailed tearfully. B. had put a stop to her temper tantrum by coming up with the brilliant idea that the twins could hang their Christmas stockings from the mantel in his and Grandma’s room on Christmas Eve and then come there the next morning to open them.
    â€œSo much for having a peaceful honeymoon,” Ali told him wryly once he had negotiated the peace treaty and the mollified kids had gone back down the hall.
    â€œDon’t try to fool me,” B. told her with a grin. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.”
    The kids’ problem had been easily solved. The same could not be said of Stuart Ramey’s. Ali had long suspected Stu of suffering from a high-functioning form of Asperger’s syndrome. Totally at ease in front of a computer terminal, he lived as a virtual hermit in the company’s headquarters building in Cottonwood, dining on take-out food that was delivered to his office, which looked more like a grubby room in a college dorm than it did a place of business.
    Eventually Ali had learned that Stuart’s solitary lifestyle and the reason he seldom left the grounds were both due to the fact that he had neither a driver’s license nor a vehicle. His fully guided trip to Paris, scheduled to happen in mid-January, would be the man’s second-ever airplane flight. His first had been today on the Citation X, riding from Sedona to Vegas. Stuart had spent most of the flight sitting tight-lipped and silent, both hands gripping the armrests while his face turned several interesting shades of green.
    Given all that, when B. had told Ali that Stuart would be attending the wedding, she was nothing short of astonished. She was even more so when B. mentioned that Stu had offered to play the organ for the ceremony as well as sing a self-accompanied solo version of the “Wedding Song.” Stuart Ramey could play the organ and sing? Who knew?
    But that wasn’t all Ali hadn’t known about the man. In addition to his fear of flying, Stuart was absolutely petrified of elevators. The latter deficit was apparent at the Four Seasons check-in desk when Stuart, still shaken from the plane ride, was handed the key to his room on the thirty-eighth floor. Glancing at the room number on the envelope, Stuart balked and said if he had to get there by elevator, he wasn’t going.
    The Four Seasons is located on the upper floors of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. A very patient hotel desk clerk had spent the next twenty minutes working out a peace agreement with her counterpart at the overbooked Mandalay Bay. Working together, they ultimately made it possible for Stuart to stay in a part of the building that was accessible by a series of escalators and only two flights of interior stairs.
    And then there was Ali’s father. Bob and Edie Larson weren’t especially religious, but they had always taken the commandment