It had started only three days earlier, although now that seemed a lifetime ago. It began with a ringing telephone and with me cursing the noisy instrument that I regard as technology’s worst blight on the human race. Telephones follow me everywhere. Even in my car. There is no escape.
The blaring phone jarred me to my senses sometime around seven o’clock on a drizzly Saturday morning toward the end of June. Friday night had been a late one. I wasn’t nearly ready to rise and shine, but homicide cops at Seattle P.D. are used to unscheduled, early-morning wake-up calls.
Around what locals call the Emerald City, people tend to knock each other off in the middle of the night or in the wee small hours of the morning, especially right after the bars close on weekends. If the work load gets too heavy for the regular night-duty squad to handle, they start calling for reinforcements. Being off-duty doesn’t mean you’re home free. When your name comes up on the rotation, you’re called and you go in, regardless of what you may or may not have been doing the night before. Having a personal life is no excuse.
I figured my early-morning phone call meant it had been another one of those busy Saturday-night-special Friday nights around Seattle P.D.
“Beaumont here,” I grumbled into the phone, wishing we could somehow convince the city’s crooks—the gangs, the thugs, and the variously affiliated drug dealers—to use each other for target practice during regular daytime eight-hour shifts. “What’s up?”
“This is Dave,” an unfamiliar male voice replied. “You know, David Livingston?”
I was still muffled in a warm, sleep-induced cocoon, and this joker had me stumped. I could have sworn I didn’t know anyone in the whole wide world by the name of David Livingston. The telephone must have passed along my blank silence, because a moment later good ol’ Dave gave me a helpful hint.
“You may not remember, but we met once, a while ago, down in Wickenburg, Arizona. I don’t think we were ever properly introduced.”
Jump-started now, the old brain finally fired and caught hold. Of course! That Dave Livingston. My ex-wife’s second husband. No wonder I didn’t recognize him!
I sat up a little straighter in bed. Of all people, what did Dave Livingston think he was doing calling me up? So early on an otherwise peaceful Saturday morning that I had not yet tasted a single sip of coffee, here was Dave, already up and about and letting his fingers do the walking.
In a universe full of complicated matrimonial merry-go-rounds, second husbands don’t often reach out and touch first husbands. By telephone, that is. It isn’t done. Not unless it’s a dire emergency—a matter of life or death or missing child support. We’re all reasonable adults, but there is a limit.
Now, though, I heard Dave, talking to me as calmly as if conversations between us were an everyday occurrence. Since child support has never been a source of controversy, my mind leaped instantly to all the other worst possible conclusions.
“Dave,” I croaked. “What is it? Karen?”
He paused a moment and cleared his throat. “No, not Karen.”
“The kids then?”
I said “kids” aloud, but even as I said the word, I knew it was a lie. I have fathered two offspring—Scott and Kelly. Scott, my firstborn, is as steady and responsible a kid as any parent, good or otherwise, has any right to hope for or expect. He’s never given any of us—Dave Livingston included—a moment’s trouble.
Kelly is something else, our collective problem child—a wildhaired, pain-in-the-ass-type kid who started wearing makeup and testing limits at the tender age of eleven and has been off the charts ever since. She had run away from her stepfather’s home in Cucamonga, California, some four months earlier, disappearing one week shy of her eighteenth birthday and several months short of high school graduation. Once Karen finally saw fit to tell me what was going on, I had hired an L.A. based private investigator to look into Kelly’s disappearance. All he had sent me so far was an outrageous bill.
“Kelly then,” I added. “Did you find her?”
“Sort of,” Dave Livingston allowed gloomily. “More or less.”
For a supposedly hotshot accountant, Dave was being damnably nonspecific. Meanwhile, my homicide cop’s mentality was working overtime, filling in the most gruesome kinds of missing-person details—the dry ravines where unsuspecting people sometimes stumble over vulture-scattered human remains. Memories of long-overlooked and rotting corpses loomed in my mind’s eye. Unfortunately, cops have chillingly realistic imaginations. We’ve seen it all. More than once too often.
“Tell me then, for God’s sake!” I urged. “What the hell do you mean, ‘more or less’? Is she alive or not? And if she’s alive, is she all right?”
“I haven’t talked to her yet,” Dave put in quickly. “Not in person; neither has Karen. As a matter of fact, Karen knows nothing about all this. She was so bent out of shape when Kelly ran away that I didn’t exactly tell her I was hiring a detective.”
Great minds think alike. So Dave and I had both hired private eyes. His had gotten results. I’d have to fire mine.
“So where is she?” I prompted. “Is she okay?”
“In a little town in southern Oregon. A place called Ashland. Ever heard of it?”
I had heard of it, as a matter of fact. Months earlier, the town of Ashland had been nothing more than a green-and-white freeway exit on 1-5, the last stop in Oregon before hitting the California border. Now, thanks to my new friend Alexis Downey, the director of development for the Seattle Repertory Theater and the lady with whom I had spent most of the previous evening, I knew a whole lot more than I would have otherwise.
From listening to Alex, as she likes to be called, I knew that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland has, over the last fifty-some-odd years, created a multimillion-dollar business out of doing Shakespearean reruns every summer. In Ashland the Bard of Avon translates into big business. People come from all over the country year after year to see the seven or eight plays that run concurrently in three separate theaters.
Because of increasingly stiff competition for regional arts dollars, Alex Downey keeps a close eye on all the theaters on what she calls “the 1-5 route.” She had even suggested that we might want to skip down to Ashland for a romantic weekend once over the summer to take in a couple of plays, all in the name of knowing what “everybody else is doing.”
At the time Alex mentioned it, a trip to Ashland had sounded like a treat—your basic roll in the hay with a dollop of culture thrown in for good measure. Now, that selfsame Shakespearean weekend didn’t seem like nearly such a good idea. The thought of running into my daughter on the streets of Ashland threw a real wet blanket on my fantasies of sexual/cultural adventure.
Call me a prude if you will, but I didn’t want to give my already headstrong daughter any bright ideas that she might not think up on her own.
“What’s Kelly doing there?” I asked. “Acting?”
When she was little, that’s what Kelly always said she wanted to be when she grew up—an actress. In high school she had played major roles in several school productions, but by then her mother and I were divorced. I never actually saw her perform onstage. My experience with Kelly’s acting capability came primarily from being on the receiving end of emotional temper tantrums whenever the two of us wound up in a nose-to-nose confrontation. Highpowered theatrics aside, I didn’t regard acting as a realistic career choice. All little girls can’t become actresses any more than millions of little boys can all grow up to be cops or firemen.
“Hardly,” Dave answered. “She’s working as a hotel maid and doing some baby-sitting on the side.”
Baby-sitting was no surprise. All her life Kelly had been exceptionally good with little kids, but I couldn’t imagine her working as a maid. Neither could anyone who had ever seen her room. Incredible irony—that’s what Mrs. Reeder, the beautiful woman who taught my senior English class at Ballard High School, would have called it. Kelly is the only person I’ve ever met who can totally trash any given room within fifteen minutes of entering it. On the odd occasion when she’s stayed with me in Seattle, I’ve watched her make a shambles of my whole apartment in far less time than it takes to say, “When’s dinner?”
“Kelly, a maid?” I choked. “You’ve got to be kidding.” I did my best to stifle a relieved chuckle, but Dave Livingston was not amused, and he wasn’t laughing, either.
“I’m not kidding,” he returned doggedly. “And I’m not making this up. I just found out. She plans to get married sometime early next week.”
That got my attention.
“Hold it! Did you say married? She can’t do that. She’s only eighteen years old, for Chrissakes. And she hasn’t done a damn thing about getting her education.”
“I know,” Dave agreed. “I was hoping you could go down there and maybe talk some sense into her thick skull.”
“Karen’s way better with her than I am. Has she tried?”
“Like I said,” he confessed uneasily. “I haven’t exactly told Karen about this. She was upset enough to begin with. When she hears what’s going on now, she’ll go crazy.”
Dave had a point—a good one. Once or twice I’ve had the misfortune of being in close proximity to Karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston when she’s busy kicking ass. It isn’t a pretty sight. Karen is a lady who knows how to indulge in histrionics. By comparison, Kelly is a rank amateur.
Wide awake now, I sat up and groped on the nightstand for pencil and paper. “Who’s the boyfriend?” I asked.
“His name’s Jeremy Todd Cartwright, the Third,” Dave answered.
“Sounds impressive. What does he do?”
“I’ve got a short bio right here. It says he’s a part-time actor and musician. Up in Ashland this season he’s in something called the ‘Green Show.’ He plays a character called ‘The Laredo Kid’ in a play called The Majestic Kid, and he’s ‘servant’ in Taming of the Shrew.”
I might have known—an actor. Talk about music to a future father-in-law’s ears. I could already visualize the flaky son of a bitch. Long, greasy hair. At least one earring. Maybe even a single tasteful diamond chip in one side of his nose. But then I forced myself to look on the bright side. If Dave’s bio information came from a current playbill, Kelly’s intended was at least working. He had a job. From what I know about actors, that’s highly unusual in and of itself.
“Great. Do you have an address for this boy genius?” I asked, sitting there with my bare feet on the carpeted floor and with pencil poised over paper.
“As a matter of fact I do,” Dave Livingston answered. “One-forty-six Live Oak Lane—the same as Kelly’s.”
The pencil lead snapped off as I wrote down the address. I wasn’t upset. Not much.
“So will you go see her?” Dave asked, almost pleading. “I need to hear what she has to say for herself before I tell Karen. I’ll give you my work number so you can call me here. It’s the end of the fiscal year. I’ll be working off and on all weekend. If you don’t mind, I’d rather Karen didn’t find out I’ve gone behind her back on this.”
I can only describe it as one of life’s supremely surrealistic moments, finding myself involved in an underhanded plot with my ex-wife’s second husband, both of us scheming together behind Karen’s back. But then, that’s what makes life interesting—those little unforeseeable surprises. I took down Dave’s work telephone number at the chicken-raising conglomerate in Rancho Cucamonga where he was the chief financial officer.
“How soon will you go?” Dave asked.
“That depends,” I told him, “on how soon I get off the phone.”
With that, we hung up. After a quick detour to the kitchen to start a pot of Seattle’s Best Coffee in my Krup’s coffeepot with its thermal carafe, I headed for the shower. I figured I could go a long way in my little red Porsche on a full tank of gas with a full pot of coffee along for the ride. While I showered, though, reality set in. Alex and I were supposed to have dinner together that evening, and Ralph Ames, my attorney from Phoenix, was scheduled to arrive on Sunday afternoon.
Once out of the shower, I called Ralph first. He’s an early riser. Alex isn’t. Ralph listened quietly while I brought him up-to-speed. When I finished my tale of familial woe, Ralph’s reply was infuriatingly unflappable and lawyerly.
“What’s the plan?” he asked.
“What do you think? I’m going to drive down, tell Kelly how the cow ate the cabbage, and put her on the first plane home.”
Ames cleared his throat. “That’s not exactly realistic, is it, Beau? What if she won’t go?”
“Won’t go?” I echoed. “Of course she’ll go. She’s just like me, stubborn as all get-out, but she’ll listen to reason. She has to.”
“Not necessarily. If she’s planning a wedding for next week, she may have decidedly different thoughts on the matter. After all,” he added, “she is eighteen, you know.”
“I don’t care how old she is. She may be eighteen, but she doesn’t have the sense God gave little green apples.”
Ralph Ames and I have these kinds of disagreements all the time. He came on the scene at approximately the same time that Anne Corley, my second wife, shot through my life like some brilliant, sky-illuminating meteor. The profound impact she had on me is totally out of proportion to the amount of time the two of us actually spent together. When she died, she left me with more money than I know what to do with.
Along with the money came Ralph Ames, who serves as general overseer of not only the money, but also of me. Through the years, and despite our somewhat divergent views, I’ve come to value both his unwavering friendship and his innate good sense. We argue from time to time, but more often than not I end up paying attention to what he says and doing things his way.
“Don’t you still have some use-it-or-lose-it-type vacation time coming to you?” he asked me after a slight pause.
When Ralph asks a question, he usually does so in the same way most good detectives do—knowing, before he ever opens his mouth, exactly what the right answer should be.
“You know I do,” I returned irritably. “We talked about it last time you were here.”
“So why not take some time off? See if you can schedule vacation for all next week,” he suggested. “That way, if it’s possible to bring Kelly around, you’ll have more time to make it work. If you drive down today and come right back tomorrow, you’ll be under a tremendous amount of pressure. So will she.”
“And what if I can’t make it work?” I growled, tweaked by Ralph’s irritating and unreasonable reasonableness.
“Look on the bright side,” Ralph returned cheerfully. “That way, you’ll be there in time for the wedding.”
Count on Ralph to discover some remote silver lining.
“Whatever you decide,” he continued, “I’m still planning on coming to Seattle tomorrow. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. And say hello to Alex for me when you see her.”
“Right,” I said. “She’s the next person on my list to call. I’ll give her your regards.”
I waited until I was seated in my leather recliner and drinking coffee before I dialed Alexis Downey’s number. Middle-aged dating is hell. First you have to sort through what’s out there to see if there’s anyone you like who might possibly like you back. Do that, and things become even more complicated.
In the past two months, I had discovered a good deal to like about Alexis Downey. There were also more than a few stumbling blocks—a major one being her huge, man-hating tabby cat named Hector. Another is her bed.
Alex prefers to sleep on one of those crazy futon things, which she folds up into an unusable couch by day and turns into an equally uncomfortable bed by night. She insists my king-size Posturepedic mattress hurts her back. So we spend time together, quite a bit of it, actually—fun, enjoyable time—but one or the other of us is always creeping home to our respective beds in the middle of the night. From a neutral-mattress perspective, a trip to Ashland might have been fun, but not now, not with Kelly living there.
Once I had Alex on the phone, I tried explaining to her exactly why I was on my way to Ashland by myself, why a joint trip seemed totally out of the question. At least to me.
Alexis Downey had her own thoughts on the matter. “Like hell,” she declared heatedly. “If you’re going, so am I.”
“But what will I tell Kelly about you?” I asked.
“What do you think you’ll tell her? Your sex life is none of Kelly’s damn business, that’s what. How soon are we leaving?”
After years of Fuller Brush training, I recognize assumed closes when I hear them even though I’m not always quick-footed enough to dodge out of the way. Alexis didn’t ask whether or not she was invited. All she wanted was an estimated time of departure so she’d know how long she had to pack.
“Can you be ready in forty-five minutes?” I returned.
“No problem. I’ll farm Hector out with Helen upstairs. Then I’ll call my friend Denver down in Ashland and get her working on rustling us up a room and some play tickets. At the last minute, tickets may be damned hard to come by.”
“Denver?” I said. “You have a girlfriend named Denver?”
“Denver Holloway. Didn’t I ever tell you about her? She’s directing at the Festival this year. If anybody can get rush tickets, she can.”
Advancing age has increased my ability to give in gracefully. “I’ll be there at eight o’clock sharp,” I told her.
After that I called Sergeant Watkins, the desk sergeant on the homicide squad, and filled him in. Watty wasn’t thrilled by my last-minute scheduling of vacation time, but he understood. He and I share the misfortune of being fathers to troublesome adolescent daughters. His youngest had married some two months earlier. Watty was well aware that I’d been worried about Kelly. He was one of the few people at the department who knew I’d hired a private eye.
“Good luck on straightening Kelly out,” he told me, “but I’m betting you won’t be able to change her mind one iota. As far as I’m concerned, boys are a hell of a lot easier to raise. With boys, you only have to worry about one penis. With girls, you have to worry about all of them.”
His helpful, fatherly comment didn’t improve my frame of mind. “Thanks for all the encouragement, Watty. I needed that.”
I could hear him grinning into the telephone. “Always glad to be of service,” he said.
I slammed down the receiver.
The Automobile Association of America says it’s a ten-hour drive from Seattle to Ashland averaging fifty miles an hour. I didn’t drive Triple A’s recommended fifty. I threw a hastily packed suitcase into the 928, gassed up, and collected Alex from her condo on Queen Anne Hill at eight on the dot. Once on I-5, I tucked the Guard-red Porsche in with the crush of fast-moving southbound traffic and stayed in the middle of the pack.
Fortunately, Alexis Downey isn’t a backseat driver. She doesn’t have to get out of the car every mile or two, either. With short but necessary pit stops in Portland and Roseburg, we turned off the freeway into Ashland at 4:45 that afternoon.
As we headed south, steady rain gradually gave way first to drizzle and then to occasional showers. While we were passing through the Siskiyous, partly cloudy blue skies appeared overhead. By Medford, it was full-fledged summer, but I didn’t notice. I was far too distracted to enjoy what should have been a pleasant, scenic drive. Preoccupied with thoughts about Kelly, I’m sure I wasn’t much of a travel companion to Alex.
Kelly had been missing from home for almost four months. I should have been overjoyed that Dave had located her. But I’m a cop in what I call the Nasty Nineties. I’ve seen what happens to runaways who take to living on the streets for even as short a period of time as a few weeks. I’ve witnessed the heartbreaking aftermath when anxious parents, thinking they’re getting their kid back, come downtown to pick up the pieces. Or else to identify a body. With all the stuff that’s out on the streets now—drugs, AIDS, herpes, gang warfare—even if the kid isn’t dead, what the parents get back isn’t the same person who left home a few days or weeks or months earlier.
Fortunately, Alex is a very patient woman. For most of the way, she left me alone, but finally even she could no longer tolerate the thick, oppressive silence.
“Have you decided what to do?” she asked.
“Murder’s out,” I replied glumly, “for professional reasons if nothing else.”
She laughed. “No. Seriously, Beau, what options do you have?”
“How about offering him a bribe, sort of a reverse dowry? Maybe Jeremy Todd whatever-his-name-is has heard through the grapevine that I’m supposed to be loaded. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s only in it for the money. Kelly has lousy taste in men.”
“Getting married isn’t exactly the end of the world,” Alex argued. “Some of the people I went to school with got married right after high school and are still married to each other. Some of them even seem to be happy.”
“He’s an actor,” I said.
“So? Actors are people, too. Besides, what makes you think he’s so awful? You haven’t met him yet. If he’s working for the Festival, he must have something on the ball.”
“Being a part-time actor isn’t much of a recommendation for a bridegroom,” I retorted. “Not much at all.”
In downtown Ashland, Alexis hopped out at a stoplight on the main drag, promising to call me on the cellular phone as soon as she knew for sure where we were staying. Despite all the No Vacancy signs we’d seen along the way, she seemed certain that we wouldn’t be forced to sleep on the street. In the meantime, I went off on a solitary hunt for Live Oak Lane. Ashland isn’t very big, and I figured if I drove around some, I was bound to stumble across it. Finding it might have been easier if I’d broken down and picked up a map.
The tourist guidebooks all say that Ashland is a lovely, picturesque place. Quaint, I believe, is the operative word. The shady tree-lined streets showcase prosperous-looking, newly rehabilitated but authentically Victorian houses of the gingerbread variety. Most of the bigger ones seem to have been converted into bed-and-breakfast establishments.
To an outsider, although there were lots of cars parked on the downtown streets, the whole place seemed almost deserted. Then, suddenly, at five o’clock and for no apparent reason, I found myself stuck in the middle of a traffic jam while the sidewalks bustled with hurrying pedestrians. That’s when I finally gave up, played against gender stereotyping, and stopped at a gas station to ask directions.
“Oh,” the attendant said. “You mean the coop. It’s not in town at all. It’s out in the county on the old Live Oak Farm. A bunch of actors live out there. Cheap rent and all.”
It sounded like a damn commune to me. Straight out of the sixties. All the more reason to want Kelly out of there and back home in California where she belonged. Surely, she’d listen to reason, wouldn’t she?
Don’t bet on it, buster, I told myself sternly. Why would she? After all, she never had before.