Failure to appear

CHAPTER 21

It must have been one-thirty or two when I got back to Oak Hill B amp; B. Under the circumstances, Fraymore couldn't very well take Sunshine home with him. I don't think his wife would have approved or understood, so I brought the dog home with me. It was raining like hell by then. I guess I could have left her on the front porch but somehow that didn't seem right.

Oak Hill's posted rules say NO DOGS ALLOWED, but Florence doesn't encourage babies, either, and we'd been dragging Amber around with us for days. In a case like this, I figured it was easier to beg forgiveness than it was to ask permission. So I smuggled Sunshine upstairs to our room, relieved that Florence's noisy Natasha was shut away in some other part of the house.

I planned on waking Alex and explaining everything, but I didn't have a chance. Alex wasn't there. Neither was Amber. Alex's clothes, luggage, shampoo, and toothbrush had also disappeared. A terse note on my pillow announced that she was going to stay with Dinky. She said she had already made alternate arrangements for a ride back to Seattle, so I shouldn't worry about how she was getting home.

Damn!

Which is how I spent yet another romantic night in Ashland, sleeping in a bed with a damp old dog. Sunshine had impossibly bad breath, and she commandeered more than her fair share of the queen-sized mattress. I don't know about Sunshine, but I slept like a baby.

In the morning, I waited until everyone was at breakfast in the dining room, then I slipped Sunshine downstairs and outside. After a walk on the grass, I put her-muddy feet and all-in the backseat of my rented Lincoln, where she had the good sense to lie down immediately and go back to sleep. Nobody was the wiser, no thanks to tattletale Natasha. She barked like crazy the whole time, but no one, including Florence, understood what all the fuss was about.

I tried calling Alex at Dinky's, but she refused to talk to me, so I went over to the Ashland Hills to consult with Ralph Ames. As usual, his wise counsel was greatly appreciated. He couldn't provide any assistance as far as the problem with Alex was concerned, but he did have a suggestion about Sunshine.

He directed me to Jeremy and Kelly's new apartment in Phoenix, Oregon. It was a cute little duplex, actually, with a small but totally separate fenced yard. Once I explained the situation to Jeremy, he readily agreed to keep Sunshine with them. Because of the torrential rainstorm, we had no choice but to hie ourselves off to the nearest hardware store to locate a suitably dry, igloo-shaped doghouse.

On Thursday Painting Churches was onstage in the Black Swan, which meant Jeremy had the afternoon off. The weather was bad enough that by noon people at the Festival were already talking about canceling the outdoor performance in the Elizabethan that night.

I had spent part of the morning in Kelly and Jeremy's apartment and had seen the meager selection of cast-off dishes and furniture he was trying to pull together in order to have a place to bring Kelly and the baby the following afternoon. Finally, about eleven in the morning, I called a halt.

"Look," I said, "let's climb into the Lincoln, drive up to Medford, and take care of some of this stuff, shall we?"

And we did. It was a massive shopping trip. The Lincoln may be your basic land barge, but it wasn't nearly big enough for what I had in mind.

The whole time we were racing through Sears in Rogue River Mall, Jeremy kept telling me I shouldn't be doing it-but by then we were both having too much fun. We quickly advanced beyond the crib, high-chair, and car-seat stage to what-the-hell-let's-do-it. That attitude moved us into really serious shopping-as in couch and chair, queen-sized bed, towels, bedding, dishes, silverware, and pots and pans. I threw in a washing machine and dryer for good measure. In my mind, diapers and automatic washing machines go together.

A visibly salivating store manager and a platoon of helpful but wondering salespeople trailed us from department to department. When I wrote out a check for the full amount and asked if it would be possible to have the entire truckload delivered that afternoon, the store manager called my bank, verified the funds, and then said those wonderful words, ones that are always music to the ears of every cash-paying customer. "No problem," he said. "What time do you want it there?"

Jeremy and I finally stopped at a hamburger joint late in the afternoon. He took a bite from a double cheeseburger with bacon and grilled onions and grinned from ear to ear.

"Kelly's going to be surprised, isn't she?"

"Because you're eating hamburger instead of eggplant?"

He blinked. "You won't tell her, will you?"

"No."

"I mean she'll be surprised about the furniture."

"I hope so."

He took another bite. He was long and skinny. His prominent Adam's apple bobbed up and down when he talked or swallowed.

"I had a great time, Beau," he said, calling me by my first name without any prompting. "I haven't had this kind of fun with my own dad since Mom died."

I frowned. "I didn't know your mother was dead," I said.

He scowled back. "I thought I told you about that, about how Kelly and I met. In Natural Helpers."

I knew something about Natural Helpers. Lots of schools have them. They're sort of a grassroots, student-run counseling organization. Natural Helpers activities seem to bear some passing resemblance to twelve-step programs in that kids who have a problem of some kind can go there and talk confidentially to other kids who have already dealt with similar kinds of difficulties.

In my mind, I guess I had it pegged as a quasi-A1-Anon for kids. If you're a problem drinker, it's easy to assume that all the problems in the world stem from that. I remembered Jeremy had mentioned something about Natural Helpers in passing, and I had jumped to the hasty conclusion that someone in his family must have a drinking problem.

"No," I said. "I don't think you did."

He looked at me. "My mother died of cancer," he said. "Three years ago. I got into Natural Helpers years earlier, right after she got sick. I was about to graduate from college, but I went back to my old school last year to help with a Natural Helpers' leadership program. That's when I met Kelly. We ended up talking because…" He paused and shrugged. "Well, you know. She was going through the same thing."

Even then I still didn't understand, not right away. "What same thing?" I asked stupidly.

Tears brimmed suddenly in Jeremy Todd Cartwright's eyes. His young face filled with a look of compassion that went far beyond his tender years. "You still don't know, do you?" he said.

"Know what? What's going on?"

"Mr. Beaumont," he said softly. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this. I thought you knew. Kelly's mother has cancer. She's had it for more than a year."

"Karen?" I stammered. "She has cancer? How can that be?" I tried to focus my stricken mind on what Jeremy was saying, but his words drifted over me from far away, as if beamed to earth from a distant planet.

"Kelly's been stuck in denial, and I understand that. It happened to me, too, but I've been trying to tell her all along that it was wrong to run away, that she couldn't hide out from what was happening forever. I wanted her to go back home and face up to it, but she's stubborn. You know how women are."

But that wasn't true. Listening to Jeremy talk, I realized once again that I still don't know the first damn thing about women. Any of them.