Payment in kind

Chapter 25

I was seated halfway down the wall when Erin Kelsey rushed headlong into the restaurant. Once inside, she paused uncertainly and glanced around the room before catching sight of me and hurrying toward my booth.

If anything, she looked far worse than she had sounded on the phone. Her hair was pulled back into a ragged, disheveled braid of some kind. The yellowish light in the restaurant is never flattering to anybody, but her face, contorted by emotion, looked downright ravaged.

I made a quick strategic evaluation as she came closer. She was wearing jeans and a bulky, sheepskin-lined jacket, which she made no move to take off. Over her shoulder dangled a good-sized purse. Both of those factors meant that concealed weapons were a definite possibility. I kept my guard up.

“Can I get you something?” I asked as she slid into the booth opposite me. “Coffee, tea-a drink?”

She shook her head. “No. Just water.”

I kicked myself then, remembering Max’s description of Erin as a devout Mormon. But even at the time, the irony of the thought struck me. Devout? If Erin followed the rules about what she could and couldn’t drink, wouldn’t she also follow some of the others as well, some of the more important ones like “Thou shalt not kill,” and “Honor thy father and mother”? Maybe Erin Kelsey was one of those people who scrupulously obeys all the little rules and ignores the big ones.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell which she was, and both our lives hung in the balance of my making the right choice. I needed information.

“What’s the matter, Erin?” I asked, trying to sound calm and reassuring, trying to win her confidence.

She shuddered and made a supreme effort to pull herself together.

“Who am I, Detective Beaumont?”

“What do you mean who are you?”

“You know what I mean, and don’t pretend you don’t. Uncle Max told us tonight that you’re the one who found out Kelsey isn’t my father’s real name. So if his name isn’t real, that means mine isn’t either.”

“Erin, what Max told you is true. Your father had evidently lived under an assumed name the whole time you’ve been growing up, but…”

“And why do other people know so much more about me than I do myself?” she interrupted.

Without warning, she opened her purse and reached inside. I readied my body to repel an attack, but instead of a weapon, she withdrew a long, narrow envelope and sent it spinning across the table toward me. I managed to grasp it in midair like some errant Frisbee before it could sail all the way to the floor.

“What’s this?”

“Look at it,” she ordered.

I did. It was a birth certificate. Erin Kelsey’s birth certificate, saying she’d been born in St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, to a couple named Peter B. and Carol Ann Kelsey.

“What about it?”

A flood of tears overflowed the long lashes and coursed down her cheeks. “It’s a fake,” she mumbled almost incoherently. “It’s nothing but a fake.”

“A fake? How can that be?”

“I don’t know how. All I know is that it is.”

“And how did you find that out?”

“Mr. Drachman. He told me earlier tonight that if he could do anything at all to help, I shouldn’t hesitate to call, so I did. He said he had a friend or two in Toronto, and maybe they could do something even though it wasn’t regular office hours.”

“And he did?”

Erin nodded. “According to the records in Toronto, no Erin Kelsey was born in St. Michael’s Hospital. I don’t even exist. Maybe I’m a figment of my imagination.” She giggled, almost hysterically. “I must have made myself up.”

I studied Erin warily. She was treading dangerously close to the edge, her story sketchy and difficult to follow.

“You’re satisfied that this is a fictitious birth certificate?”

She nodded. I had heard through the grapevine that Caleb Winthrop Drachman, much like Ralph Ames, was no slouch when it came to getting things done regardless of regular office hours or bureaucratic red tape. And again like Ralph, international boundaries were not necessarily a problem. I had no doubt that his verification or lack of it was accurate.

“But what made you think to have someone check, Erin? Most people take their birth certificate’s word for it. You didn’t come up with that idea all on your own. Did Max tell you to do it?”

“No. The phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“At first I thought it was the regular kind of call we’ve been getting, people calling to tell us how sorry they are, that kind of thing. This woman asked for me by name, so I thought it was someone who knew us, probably some friend of my mother’s from work. Except it wasn’t.”

“Who was it?” I asked.

Erin paused and took a deep breath. “I don’t know. As soon as she knew it was me on the phone, she said that she knew who I really was and then she started laughing, and she wouldn’t stop.”

“She laughed?”

“You should have heard her. But between times, she would say things. Like she said that if I was smart, I’d check out my birth certificate. I asked her what was wrong with it, and she said that was for her to know and for me to find out, and then she laughed some more.”

Pete Kelsey had mentioned something about a laughing telephone caller, too. As I recalled, the person who had given him the wonderful news about his wife and Andrea Stovall had laughed like hell the whole time she was lowering the boom. What was going on?

“Was that all?”

“No. Not exactly.” Erin paused, her eyes meeting mine, and a new urgency came into her voice. “She said that she had a message for Pete Kelsey. For me to tell him that he hadn’t lost everything, not yet, but that he would and that when he did, it would be…”

“Would be what?”

“I’m trying to remember her exact words. ”Payment in kind. That’s it.“

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, Detective Beaumont,” Erin said. “Do you?”

I shook my head.

Erin shivered again, holding her arms close to her body. “If you could have heard the way she said it…It was like listening to an icicle. Or a knife. She wasn’t laughing anymore, not then. It was a threat, and it scared me to death. I mean, my father may have done something wrong, but I’m afraid for him. I’m really afraid. He’s all I have left.”

For the first time in the whole process, I was afraid, too.

“Did you recognize the voice?”

“No.”

“So what did you do then, after you got off the phone?”

“What would you do? After what Max had just finished telling Grandma and Grandpa and me? I wanted to know for sure, to find out for myself, so I got out the birth certificate. Dad always keeps his important papers in the rolltop desk in his study. It looked all right to me, but I decided to call the hospital and check. They wouldn’t tell me anything, so then I called Mr. Drachman. I already told you what he found out.”

“Does he know you’re talking to me?”

Erin shook her head. “No. In fact, he told me not to, said that whoever it was couldn’t hurt my dad as long as he was in custody, but Mr. Drachman didn’t hear her,” Erin said. “He didn’t hear the way she sounded.”

By then, Erin’s teeth had begun chattering so badly she could hardly talk.

“How about a glass of warm milk?” I suggested. “Maybe that would help.”

Tears came to her eyes. “That’s what my mother used to give me, but yes, I’d like that.”

When the waitress brought the steaming cup, Erin held the thick white mug between her hands as if hoping to leach some of the heat out of it.

“Tell me about my father,” she said.

“I will, but first, let me ask you this. What time did you leave for Eugene on Sunday?”

“Right after lunch. Around one or one-thirty. Why?”

“Did you go straight there?”

“We stopped once for a break in Woodland, at the Oak Tree. That’s about halfway.”

“Did you say ”we‘?“ I asked, sitting up and taking notice. It hadn’t occurred to me before that Erin might have an alibi.

“Yes. My roommate was with me. Her name’s JoAnne McGuire. Why?”

“Your father didn’t mention you had a rider.”

“He probably forgot JoAnne was riding along. Her parents live in Tacoma, so I picked her up on the way down I-5. Dad never even saw her.”

“What time did you get into Eugene?”

“Almost nine. There was a big eight-car pileup on the freeway in Portland, and that held us up for quite a while. By the time we made it back to our apartment, they said on the radio that it was snowing hard in Portland, so we were just barely ahead of the worst of the storm.”

If that was the case, it would have been impossible for Erin to reappear in Seattle two or three hours later. It didn’t make sense.

“How can I get in touch with this roommate of yours?”

Erin jotted a number on a piece of paper from her purse and shoved it across the table toward me. “I’m sure she’ll be at the funeral tomorrow if you want…”

Suddenly the anguished look returned to Erin’s face. “Wait. Will my father be there too, Detective Beaumont? At the funeral? Mr. Drachman said he might be.”

“He might,” I agreed, “but I can’t tell for sure yet. Why?”

“I know Grandma and Grandpa want him there desperately, but I don’t. I don’t ever want to see him again. What would I say? How could I face him? If he lied to me about who he is, he must have lied to my mother as well. And why should this woman on the phone know more about me than I know myself?”

“Does your father have any enemies?”

“No,” she answered quickly, but then her eyes misted over again. “But then, what do I know about it? Nothing, nothing at all.”

She set the cup down and leaned back into the bench. I knew she was exhausted, and my heart went out to her. Possible killer or not, right then Erin Kelsey was far too worn out to be a danger to me or to anyone else.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”

But she shook her head stubbornly, defiantly, as though the milk had somehow revived her and given back some of her spunk. “Oh no, you don’t. You said you’d tell me about my father.”

“I thought Maxwell Cole already told you.”

“Uncle Max is a friend. He didn’t want to tell us any more than he absolutely had to. You’re not a friend, Detective Beaumont. You’re a cop, and I want to know the truth. What did my father do? It must have been something terrible, something awful, for him to hide out all these Years. Tell me. I’ve got a right to know.”

“I can’t tell you any more than Max did,” I told her.

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t been able to find out anything else. According to what we’ve been able to piece together so far, your father was a smart kid who went off first to West Point and then to Vietnam. At some point in time, something snapped and he made up his mind to never go home again. His own parents died in South Dakota years later without ever knowing for sure whether their son was dead or alive.”

“So he lied to them too?”

I nodded, and that was all Erin was willing to hear. She stood up abruptly. “Did you say you’d give me a ride?”

“Yes.”

“Take me home then, Detective Beaumont. I can’t listen anymore.”

I stopped briefly at the cashier’s desk before following Erin outside, where I found her waiting for me on the sidewalk. She seemed to be listening to the muted city noises around her. Just then, far away from us, the chill night air was split by the haunting wail of a distant siren.

“My car’s right over here,” I said.

I led her around the mounds of ice and snow that still littered the parking lot. Once on the street, I headed the 928 for Denny Way and Capitol Hill. Erin was silent now, huddled miserably against the door. I knew that no matter how much it hurt, I had to ask her one more question.

“Did you talk to your Auntie Andy today?” I asked.

“Don’t call her that!” Erin hissed. “She’s not my aunt. I thought she and my mother were friends. And no, I didn’t call her. I’ll never speak to her again.”

Once more, Erin Kelsey began to cry, weeping silently, her face covered with her hands. “I feel like such a fool,” she mumbled through her tears. “Such a stupid, stupid fool!”

We drove on in silence. If Erin hadn’t called Andrea Stovall, who had?

As we made our way down Broadway, I had to pull over to the side to wait for a blaring fire engine to rush past. Several blocks away from Boston, we began to encounter a whole phalanx of emergency vehicles-aid cars and fire trucks as well as police patrol cars. By then, looking up the side of the hill, we could see the eerily leaping flames of a house fire surging into the air. Although the flickering glow was visible, the house itself was still hidden from view.

“It’s my house, isn’t it?” Erin Kelsey breathed with despairing certainty.

“No,” I said. “Don’t be silly.”

When we reached the intersection of Tenth and Boston, a uniformed officer was diverting traffic away from the area. I stopped and hopped out of the car. I flashed my badge in his face and asked him if he knew the address of the burning house.

“Thirteen fifty-two East Crockett, I believe that’s the address,” he said.

Shock must have registered on my face.

“You know the house?” he asked.

I nodded.

“There’s not much more I can tell you,” the patrolman said sympathetically. “One of the guys from the fire department came by a few minutes ago and told me it’s a total loss. No victims so far, but they’re still looking.”

“Arson?” I asked.

“Probably, but that’s not official yet.”

“I know.”

I turned away from him and went back to the car to give Erin Kelsey the rest of the bad news. At least she hadn’t been there when the fire started, although I felt sure that whoever did it had meant her to be.

Realizing that gave me pause. If Erin hadn’t been meeting with me at the Doghouse when the fire broke out, she too could be dead, joining her mother as a youthful statistic in the realm of violent crime.

Suddenly I knew, knew in my gut, that whoever had called Pete Kelsey with the lie about Marcia and Andrea moving in together, whoever had called Erin and told her about the phony birth certificate, and whoever had called Andrea to say Pete Kelsey was gunning for her-those three separate, sadistic phone callers were all one and the same person.

Whoever it was, this laughing Cassandra had predicted that Pete Kelsey would lose everything, that it would be payment in kind for something, some crime he had committed in the past.

So far, Pete Kelsey hadn’t lost everything. Not yet. Not quite, but he had come close-very, very close-and at this rate, he still might.