Long Time Gone

CHAPTER 4

For some strange reason, after that, my heart wasn’t into analyzing Fred MacKinzie’s taped interviews. Instead, I called Lars Jenssen-my stepgrandfather and AA sponsor-at Queen Anne Gardens, the assisted-living facility where he and my grandmother, Beverly, have taken up residence.

“Hey, Lars,” I said, once he’d adjusted his hearing aid so he could talk on the phone. “It’s Monday. Want me to come pick you up and bring you down the hill for the meeting?”

On Monday nights Lars and I usually grab a bite to eat and then attend the AA meeting that’s held at the old Rendezvous Restaurant on Second Avenue. And since Lars no longer drives (he’s ninety-three, so that’s a good thing!), I pick him up and drop him off. Lars has been sober for so long that I’m not sure he actually needs to go to meetings anymore, but he gets a kick out of being the oldest guy there-in terms of age rather than sobriety. As for Beverly? She let me know once that she appreciates having him out from underfoot occasionally, too. That way she can spend time hanging out with some of the other “girls.”

But on this particular evening, Lars turned me down. “No,” he said. “I t’ink I’ll stay home tonight.” His Norwegian accent tends to be thicker on the telephone than it is in person. “The missus isn’t feeling too good. I need to stick around and keep an eye on her.”

Beverly Piedmont Jenssen is a sprightly ninety-one. “Nothing serious, I hope,” I said.

“Oh, no. She’s yust a bit under the weather.”

Lars, a retired fisherman, loves his fish-baked, deep-fried, grilled, sauteed, stewed, and chowdered. On Monday nights when he’s out with me, we usually stop off at Ivar’s for clams. I can take fish or leave it. And on this occasion, leave it is what I did, opting for Mexican food instead, something Lars won’t eat.

Pulling on a leather jacket, I braved the weather and hoofed it up Second to Mama’s Mexican Kitchen. The after-dinner meeting was short. Only about eight guys showed up, all of them regulars. The people in attendance were far more interested in talking about the weather than they were in the Big Book or the drunkalogue, and rightfully so. By the time we came back out onto the street, it was snowing. And sticking.

Back at Belltown Terrace, the night doorman was among the missing, so I buzzed myself into the building with the keypad. Then I went upstairs and turned on the gas log. I checked the phone for messages, hoping to hear how things were going for Ron at home. All evening long I had been wondering how Heather and Tracy had handled the disturbing news of their mother’s murder, but my light wasn’t blinking. There was no message from them, and none from Harry I. Ball, either.

I wondered briefly if I should call Harry at home and tell him what had happened, but I got over it. Harry would find out about the case through regular channels soon enough.

You’re better off letting the wheels of bureaucracy grind away at their own pace on this one, I told myself. No sense borrowing trouble.

And trouble was coming. As soon as news of Rosemary Peters’s death hit the media, I’d be in it up to my eyeballs. For one thing, the fact that Ron and I were former partners was a long-established fact. Unearthing our friendship wouldn’t be difficult for anybody. I hated to think what someone like Maxwell Cole, an old fraternity brother and my longtime nemesis, who was a columnist down at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, would make of the fact that Ron had stopped by my condo to tell me about his former wife’s death before he went home to tell his two daughters. With a little imagination combined with journalistic license, Max would probably turn that visit, along with my presence on the Special Homicide Investigation Team, into the second coming of Conspiracy Theory.

After a several-hours-long hiatus, I forced myself to return to the VCR. I watched all three of the Sister Mary Katherine tapes in order. Carefully, in a nonthreatening fashion, Fred encouraged her to delve more deeply into the forgotten memories of that awful day that had clearly become pivotal in Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s childhood. It was a fascinating and eerie process. By the time the third tape ended, I felt as though I had been standing on the kitchen chair beside that traumatized and frightened little girl as she witnessed a vicious stabbing and murder. If I hadn’t been convinced beforehand, the clincher would have come during that last tape when Bonnie Jean revealed that when she had returned from her hiding place, she had discovered the body was gone and the blood washed away.

With my notebook open and a pencil handy, I went through the tapes again, jotting down questions and comments as I watched.

How much hand-eye coordination does it take to play jacks or hop-scotch? BJ has to be five or maybe six. Doubt kids younger than that could do either. So we’re talking about 1950 or, at the very latest, 1951.

She’s evidently not in school. It could be because it’s summertime (sunny) or that she isn’t going to school yet. If they were living in Washington State, when did schools around here start offering half-day kindergarten? Need to check school records to see if I can find her listed.

Need to take a look at the photos she still has, the ones in the boxes her foster mother kept for her.

Need details about the perpetrators’ vehicle. What make and model?

Need to check old DMV and driver’s license records for possible addresses on her parents.

What happened after the murder? There must have been an investigation. Did detectives ever take a statement from Bonnie Jean? If not, why not?

It was interesting to realize that I was treating this as an unsolved case simply because it was unresolved from Sister Mary Katherine’s point of view. More than half a century had passed since the murder. It was likely that the two people responsible for Mimi’s death had long since been brought to justice. Hopefully they had paid for their vicious crime either through execution or by serving long prison stays. Verification of that would, I hoped, put a stop to Sister Mary Katherine’s haunting nightmares. And, with any kind of luck, it would also short-circuit my own potential problem with the attorney general and the archbishop’s right-hand man.

I was so involved in watching the videos and taking notes that I completely lost track of time. Since my body was still functioning on Honolulu time, I was astonished to realize it was close to midnight. I was on my way to bed when the phone rang. I picked up, expecting the caller to be Ron Peters. Instead, it was his daughter Tracy.

“Uncle Beau?” she asked. “I’m downstairs. Can I come up?”

I buzzed her into the building. Despite the long elevator ride, when she greeted me, her light brown hair and her purple-and-gold Franklin High School jogging suit were both dotted with not quite melted snowflakes. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed.

“Tracy!” I exclaimed. “Come in. What on earth are you doing here?”

Overheated and still out of breath, she stripped off the damp jacket and dropped cross-legged onto the window seat. “You heard what happened?” she asked.

“Your dad stopped by and told me on his way home,” I said. “I’m sorry, Tracy, so very sorry.”

“I’m not,” she returned hotly. “Sorry, I mean. She never was much of a mother.”

By any standard, this was an unarguably true statement. Still, it was a hurtful admission for a teenager to have to make, and there were tears in Tracy’s eyes as she said it.

“Your mother was a troubled woman,” I countered, trying to make the poor girl feel better. “I’m sure she did the best she could.”

“Her best was pretty damned lame.”

While Tracy leaned back against the window, I hovered uncertainly near the front door. Now the hurt and anger in Tracy’s voice prodded me into action. “Can I get you something?” I asked. “A soda, maybe, or hot chocolate?”

“Hot chocolate would be nice. I remember how, when we were kids and came upstairs to visit, you always had marshmallows to put in our hot chocolate. Big ones, too. Not those puny little ones that taste like cardboard.”

“I remember all right,” I said. “But no marshmallows today. Sorry. When you and Heather stopped dropping by on a regular basis, that last bag of marshmallows turned to solid rock. If I had known you were coming…”

A few minutes later, when I returned from the kitchen, Tracy was staring outside at the falling snow. It was coming down steadily-the flakes as big as feathers whirling in the city lights. I handed her a mug of hot chocolate and then sat down beside her.

“Do your folks know you’re here?”

“No.”

“How did you get out without their knowing about it?” I asked.

“Through a door in the furnace room,” she answered. Tracy glanced up at me through lowered eyelashes. Catching what must have been a clear flash of disapproval on my face, she bristled. “Heather’s always sneaking in and out that way and getting away with it. Why shouldn’t I? After all, I’m older than she is.”

Sneaking in and out of the house hadn’t been part of my teenage years. I doubt it was for many kids back then. For one thing, my mother would have killed me. But things are different now. My own kids had straightened me out on that score while they were still in junior high.

“Heather sneaks out, too?” I asked.

“All the time,” she answered. “To see Dillon.”

“Who’s he?”

“Her boyfriend-Dillon. He’s a jerk. Mom and Dad don’t like him either. Since they won’t let her hang out with him, he comes by when they’re at work, or else she sneaks out to see him late at night, after they’re asleep.”

I wondered if Tracy was telling me this with the expectation that I wouldn’t tell her father. Or was she hoping I would?

“You said you needed to talk,” I told her. “What about?”

Suddenly Tracy’s tears began to flow. “Why did Rosemary have to try to get custody of Heather?” Tracy wailed. “Heather didn’t want to go. Why would she? Her friends are here. If she’d had to go live in Tacoma, she wouldn’t have known anybody. It would have been awful for her. Why did she have to go and spoil everything?”

I was struck as much by Tracy’s blaming the victim as I was to hear her referring to her biological mother by her first name, rather than calling her “Mother” or “Mom.” I certainly shared Tracy’s sentiments about Heather’s being plucked out of her comfortable home and settled situation in the Seattle school district in order to be dragged off to the wilds of Tacoma, but since it was now clear that Heather wouldn’t be making that move, how could everything be spoiled? Besides, with Rosemary Peters dead, I somehow felt obliged to defend the poor woman.

“I’ve never been a mother,” I told Tracy, “so I certainly don’t know everything that went on in Rosemary Peters’s life. I’ve been a father, though. I’ll be the first to admit that when my kids were little, I wasn’t much of a dad. I had a lot of the same difficulties your mother had.”

Tracy looked at me. “You did drugs?” she asked.

“My drug of choice was alcohol,” I told her. “I was into booze big-time. For years after Karen and I got divorced and while I was still drinking, Scott and Kelly didn’t have much to do with me. I don’t blame them. And you shouldn’t blame your mother either. Once she ditched the drugs, she probably realized what she had been missing all those years and simply wanted to reestablish a relationship with you two girls. It’s understandable that she’d like to get to know her daughters again. She was hoping to make up for lost time.”

My answer didn’t have much of a beneficial effect. Tracy turned away from me and stared out the window, saying nothing.

“Look,” I said. “What’s happened to your family is terrible. Your mother was never a responsible parent, and that’s too bad-for you and, even more so, for her. But having even a bad parent murdered is an incredible tragedy. It’s not something that goes away. It stays with you forever. When something like this happens, it comes completely out of the blue. It’s so unexpected that it hits you in all kinds of ways. Many of these reactions won’t make sense. Your mother essentially abandoned you to drugs, so maybe you think you shouldn’t feel anything right now, but you’re hurting anyway. And part of you is mad as hell at your mother for dying. That’s a standard reaction, too. It’s like she’s abandoned you all over again. That’s how grief works, Tracy. You’re alive and she’s dead. You’re operating in a storm of warring emotions. Anger is only one of them.”

Tracy took a ragged breath. “I’m scared, too,” she whispered.

“Scared of what?” I asked. “That the same thing will happen to you? That your mother’s killer will come looking for you?”

“No,” Tracy said, shaking her head. “I’m scared he did it.”

“He who?”

“I’m scared my dad did it, Uncle Beau. I’m afraid he’s the one who killed her.”

There it was, out on the table. The admission was shocking enough to take my breath away.

“That’s crazy!” I exclaimed. “Why on earth would you even think such a thing?”

“You don’t know what Dad’s been like lately,” she said. “It’s been like living with a stranger. And you should have seen what happened the other night when that poor guy served the papers about the hearing.”

“What night?”

“Friday. At dinnertime. It was like Dad went crazy or something. I’ve never seen him act that way. And then there’s whatever’s going on with him and Mom,” Tracy added. “They don’t even sleep in the same bedroom anymore. I’m afraid they’re going to get a divorce.”

I had been best man at Ron and Amy’s wedding. For years, while they rented a unit here in Belltown Terrace, Ron, Amy, and the girls had paraded in and out of my place with easy familiarity. I had known about the little comings and goings in their lives, their tragedies and triumphs. I had heard about soccer games and Girl Scout cookies and bandaged knees and fingers. Once they had moved into Amy’s folks’ old place up on Queen Anne Hill, a lot of that close, day-to-day interaction had fallen by the wayside. Still, hearing from Tracy that Ron and Amy’s marriage might be in trouble gave me another shock. Ron certainly hadn’t hinted anything about marital difficulties when he had stopped by earlier.

So I did the first thing people do under those circumstances-I hit the denial button.

“It probably just seems that way to you,” I said. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think they are.”

“They are, too,” Tracy sobbed. “Amy’s the only real mother I’ve ever known. What if Dad goes to jail and Amy divorces him? What then? She’ll keep Jared, but what about Heather and me? What’ll happen to us? Our whole family will be wiped out.”

While I was doing denial, Tracy was busy conjuring up every worst-case scenario in the book. If my SHIT squad colleagues were going to be asking me questions about Ron Peters tomorrow morning, this was information I would have been far better off not knowing, but I couldn’t ask Tracy to stop talking. She needed somebody to listen to her right then, and J. P. Beaumont was the only guy who was handy.

“I had no idea things were this bad,” I said quietly.

“And it’s all because of her!” Tracy said forcefully. “It’s been getting worse ever since she came to live with us.”

Teenagers aren’t long on using proper pronoun references, and her statement confused me. “Who’s living with you?” I asked.

“Amy’s sister,” Tracy said. “Aunt Molly.”

I had met Amy’s prickly older sister, Molly Wright, on only one occasion. What little I knew about her came more from published news stories rather than anything Ron and Amy had told me. Molly’s now former husband, Aaron, had been a high-flying dot-com millionaire CFO before the dot-coms all became dot-gones. Molly and Aaron had been an integral part of the local society scene, with their pictures prominently featured in the press coverage of various high-profile charitable events. When the dot-coms disappeared, lots of people lost jobs and money. Aaron lost both, and his freedom as well. In the subsequent financial meltdown, someone discovered that he’d been cooking the company books. What ultimately got him locked away in a federal prison cell was tax evasion.

“I had no idea Molly was living with you,” I said.

“Well, she has been,” Tracy said, “for months now. And she’s like, well…she’s not a very nice person. She’s always picking away at Dad behind his back and causing trouble.”

My one personal interaction with Molly Wright had been at Ron and Amy’s wedding. Had it been up to me, I would have upgraded Molly from Tracy’s tame “not nice” to a J. P. Beaumont eighteen-carat bitch. If Molly had installed herself under Ron Peters’s roof, I could see how the man might be feeling a little stressed out.

But Tracy hadn’t come jogging down Queen Anne Hill in what was now a full-scale blizzard to cry on my shoulder about her evil step-auntie. She had come to talk about her father. In light of the fact that SHIT was going to be investigating the case, I knew I should stay out of it, but Ron Peters is a friend of mine-my best friend. I couldn’t leave it alone.

“Tell me about your dad, Tracy,” I said. “What was going on between him and…”

I paused, uncertain of how I should refer to the dead woman.

Tracy stepped into the breach. “Rosemary?”

“Yes.”

Tracy shrugged and put down her empty mug. “I guess she started talking about the custody thing a few months ago, saying she wanted us to come live with her. I turn eighteen in just a couple of months, so I wasn’t worried about it, but Heather was. She turns sixteen in three months. It would mean changing schools just before her junior year, and that sucks. Dad asked Heather what she wanted to do. She said she’d run away from home before she’d go live in Tacoma, or else she’d do something drastic, whatever that means. Dad said fine, that he’d talk to Rosemary and tell her the answer was no. And he did, but then, last Friday, when we were having dinner, there was a knock on the door, which Jared opened. This guy comes in and serves Dad with papers because Rosemary isn’t taking no for an answer. She’s decided to take him to court.”

“What happened then?” I asked.

Tracy sighed. “Like I said, Dad went nuts. Friday is pizza night at our house. When the guy left, Dad picked up a pizza box and Frisbeed it at the door. Pieces of pizza went everywhere. I’ve seen Dad angry sometimes, whenever Heather and I did something bad, but I’ve never seen him act like that. It scared me, and it scared Mom, too. I know because I heard her talking about it with Molly later, after Dad was gone.

“Anyway, after he threw the box, he turned and wheeled himself out of the room. We all followed Dad out to the carport. Mom asked him where he thought he was going. He said Tacoma. He said he was going to talk to Rosemary and set her straight about a few things. Mom kept trying to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. He just got in the car and drove away like he hadn’t heard a word she said. She was crying when he left.”

“How long was he gone?”

Tracy paused before speaking. “A long time,” she answered finally. “Mom was upset, so I took Jared into the family room to watch Finding Nemo. I thought I heard Dad come home while we were still watching the movie, but I must have been mistaken. Jared and I both fell asleep on the couch. I woke up around two. I put Jared to bed in his room, and then I went to bed, too. My bedroom is right over the driveway. I had just gotten into bed and turned out the lights when I heard Dad’s car.”

I thought about that for a minute. “Your father said he talked to two Tacoma detectives this afternoon. Did he give you any details about how Rosemary died?”

Tracy shook her head. “It happened over the weekend. Some guy out walking his dog found her body by the water yesterday afternoon. They can’t tell exactly how long she’s been dead because of the cold.”

I nodded. Extreme cold weather delays some of the tissue changes medical examiners rely on in approximating time of death.

Exhausted, Tracy closed her eyes. Once again she leaned back against the cold window, as though she no longer had the energy to sit up on her own. She had come to me looking for a place to unload her worst nightmare-her suspicion that her beloved father had murdered her biological mother. I understood the kind of emotional barriers that had stood in the way of her doing that.

When a loved one turns homicide suspect, family members are usually the last to tumble to the idea that their husband or son or daughter or wife could possibly be guilty of such a heinous crime. Some, no matter how convincing the evidence, never do accept a family member’s guilt. The fact that Tracy had reached such a damning conclusion so early in the process was something I couldn’t ignore. The guys from my office wouldn’t ignore it either. No wonder Tracy was worried. So was I. Tracy was focused on her father’s angry outburst with the pizza box. I was concerned about how much Ron hadn’t mentioned when he stopped by to tell me about Rosemary’s death.

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” I told Tracy, trying to sound more reassuring than I felt. “No doubt your father has some perfectly reasonable explanation for where he went and what he was doing so late on Friday evening.”

Tracy looked at me pleadingly. “Do you really think so, Uncle Beau?” she asked. “Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

For an instant a terrible thought crossed my mind. Was Tracy as innocent as she seemed, or was her trip to see me a preemptive strike designed to point suspicion in her father’s direction and away from her? The thought was there, but looking into her guileless blue eyes, I banished it as quickly as it came.

“Would you believe a little of both?” I asked.

She gave me a faint smile. “I’d believe it,” she said. Unfolding her legs, Tracy reached for her jacket. “I’d better be going,” she said.

I glanced outside. Far below, streetlights and headlights glowed in golden halos through the falling snow. I looked down at the stoplight at First and Broad. While I watched, a vehicle stopped on the steep incline west of First began to slip backward. The first vehicle slid until it bashed into a second one that had been coming up the street behind it. The second car spun like a slow-motion top before ending up sitting astraddle the opposite lane. Just then a westbound car came through the green light. The driver slammed on his brakes and then skidded down the hill until he T-boned the passenger side of the second vehicle.

There’s nothing like Seattle in the snow. It can be an incredibly entertaining spectator sport as long as you’re not out in it.

“No,” I declared, turning away from the window. “You’re not going anywhere in this weather. You can sleep in the spare room. We’ll figure out how to get you home in the morning.”

“But what about…?”

“Your parents?” I asked.

Tracy nodded.

“I’ll call and let them know you’re here. I’ll tell them you came by because you were upset about Rosemary’s death and needed to talk.”

“They’re still going to be pissed at me,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so,” I told her. “They have so much on their plates right now, I doubt they’ll even notice.”

I gave Tracy one of my T-shirts to sleep in and a robe to wear. After she headed for bed, I called her house. No answer. That wasn’t a big surprise. It was late. Knowing what Ron and Amy were going through, I should have expected they’d turn off their phone. I left a message saying Tracy was with me and that I’d bring her home in the morning. I hit the sack then, too, but I didn’t sleep.

Ron Peters’s marriage was in trouble and he had been having serious difficulties with his ex-wife. I knew nothing about any of it, and yet I was supposedly his best friend. So what kind of friend did that make me?

Not so hot, I concluded. And not nearly as good a friend as I thought I was.