JP Beaumont 11 - Failure To Appear (v5.0) (22 page)

“What’s that?” I asked innocently.

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re one close-mouthed son of a bitch?”

“No,” I told him. “I don’t believe anyone’s ever mentioned it before. You’re the very first one.”

“The hell I am!” he growled, and slammed down the phone.

I tried clicking the switch hook, but the caller had already given up. Feeling guilty, I headed into the dining room in search of breakfast left-overs.

I still don’t understand why Ron Peters was so offended. If I had tried to tell him the whole story of my romantic interlude in Ashland, Oregon, we would have been on the phone for days.

CHAPTER
13

A
round ten, two young women from the Festival appeared. One came to take care of Amber. The other was a temporary fill-in as Oak Hill’s upstairs maid. Although I’m sure they were both just scraping by financially, neither would accept any payment. The substitute maid told Florence that she should fill out the time card as though Kelly had come to work herself. Nice people.

Cut free from our self-inflicted baby-sitting chores, Alex and I stopped by the hospital to see Kelly. The room had been fairly dark the night before. This morning the curtains were open, and the entire place was alive with flowers.

Some of the arrangements were obvious refugees from the canceled wedding. A few were commercial-type baskets, including a huge one from the board of directors of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But the ones that got to me most—the ones that put a lump in my throat—were the numerous amateurish but thoughtfully put together, homegrown variety in simple cut-glass vases. This astonishing array covered every available horizontal surface. It was as though all the gardeners of Ashland had collectively taken their green thumbs outdoors early that morning and plucked their flower beds clean of every colorful bloom.

When it comes to flowers, I don’t know much beyond the basics, which is to say roses. And some of the bouquets actually contained roses, but most of the flowers in that vivid assortment I couldn’t have named on a bet.

Looking at them ranged everywhere and spilling out into the hall, I didn’t think it possible that the people of Ashland would shower someone as new to town as Kelly with that kind of abundant affection. What I kept forgetting, though, is that Ashland is small-town America. In a place like that, people don’t have to know someone personally in order to give a damn.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Seattle, but Ashland was showing me that my home turf isn’t necessarily the only place to live.

Kelly was asleep when we first arrived. Alex waited around a while, then Dinky came to pick her up, and the two of them set out for Medford to do some shopping. I sat beside Kelly’s bed watching and thinking.

I knew that beneath the swathe of bandages the doctors and nurses had shaved off a huge patch of her long blond hair. If anything, the bruises on her face had grown darker overnight. But hair grows back. Bruises heal. The important thing was that she was still alive and most likely would recover.

A few minutes later, Kelly’s eyes blinked open. At first she looked around with the dazed, puzzled expression of someone who can’t remember quite who or where she is. Then her gaze settled on my face, and she smiled. Her hand sought mine, held it, and squeezed. No paralysis, at least not in her arms. I breathed a small prayer of thanksgiving.

“Hi, Daddy,” she whispered. “How long have you been here?”

“Just a couple of minutes.”

“Why didn’t you wake me? Have you seen the baby?”

I nodded. “She’s perfect. She looks just like you did when you were born.”

Kelly’s lips were dry and cracked. Positioning the straw, I helped her take a sip of ice water from a glass beside the bed. “Jeremy told me what you’re doing for Tanya,” she said. “That you’re helping her and taking care of Amber. Thank you.”

I didn’t want to take credit where it wasn’t due. I certainly didn’t merit thanks. “It’s all Alex’s doing,” I said.

Kelly closed her eyes. I thought she was sleeping again, but a moment later her blue eyes flutered back open. “Jeremy told me there was someone dead in the basement, some woman. I couldn’t understand it. Who was she? Why was she there?”

“Her name is Daphne Lewis. She was from Seattle.”

“If she was there and I saw her, why don’t I remember? Why is it all blank? I remember eating lunch, and the next thing is waking up here in the hospital.”

My own nightmarish remembrance of Daphne Lewis dangling on the end of the rope was still far too fresh. “It’s a blessing you can’t remember, Kelly, something to be grateful for.”

“But it seems weird to have that part of my life gone just like that. Erased. I keep thinking if I just concentrate…”

“Let it go, Kelly,” I advised. “Forget it. If you’re going to concentrate on something, focus on getting well so you can get out of here, go home, and take care of Karen.”

Kelly went right on as though I hadn’t said a word. “Daphne Lewis?” She frowned. “Who is she, and why do the police think Tanya killed her? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I gave up avoiding the issue and tried answering questions. “Tanya knew Daphne Lewis years ago. There’s enough evidence connecting them to arouse Detective Fraymore’s suspicions.”

“But Tanya’s so nice,” Kelly argued. “You don’t know her the way I do. She’s not violent. She would never kill anyone, no matter what.”

It was more or less the same thing Jeremy had said. Clearly, there was much about Tanya that neither Kelly nor Jeremy suspected, and it wasn’t my place to tell them otherwise.

“Kelly,” I said reprovingly. “Remember the other day? You told me to stop playing detective. Now I’m telling you the same thing. I’m not on duty here. Neither are you. Your only job is to get well.”

Kelly nodded and then winced, as though even that small movement pained her. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try.”

About then I spied Grandma Karen Livingston out in the hallway. The nurse had told us to limit both visits and visitors so as not to tire the patient. With that in mind, I told Kelly good-bye and got up to leave. Karen caught me outside the room.

“Dave went to pick Scott up from the motel,” she said. “We’re all going home today.”

“So soon? I thought you’d stick around for a while, maybe help with the baby until Kelly gets back on her feet.”

“No.” Karen shook her head emphatically. “I can’t do that. We have to go. I just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done.”

I felt like shaking her. What the hell could be more important than being there when her daughter was in the hospital? But since Karen was supposedly being conciliatory, I did the same.

“If the wedding is rescheduled for later this summer, will you come back?”

Karen met my gaze for a moment, then she looked away. “Maybe,” she said.

Maybe? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Kelly was Karen’s only daughter, and yet she couldn’t do any better than a lame “maybe” when it came to attending a wedding? Karen slipped away from me into Kelly’s room before I had a chance to reply.

Instantly furious, I stomped out of the hospital. Here I was bending over backward to get along. Why, then, did Karen have to be so damn difficult? The wedding Jeremy and Kelly had planned had been blown apart by circumstances far beyond their control. What would it hurt if our granddaughter was two months old or six months or even a year when the wedding took place? Call me an old-fashioned, romantic fool, but I still thought her parents deserved a real wedding to celebrate their marriage. I couldn’t understand why Karen Livingston didn’t agree.

I was pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the hospital when Dave drove up with Scott in the car. We all sort of milled aimlessly around in the parking lot for a while, struck suddenly dumb and shy by all the important things that needed saying but couldn’t quite be said. I made my good-byes and took off before Karen came outside. I no longer trusted my ability to keep a civil tongue in my mouth.

With Alex off shopping in Medford and with Amber safely under control, I found myself at loose ends. I didn’t have anything special in mind as I drove over to the Ashland Hills looking for Ralph Ames. My expectation was that the two of us would do some of what today’s young people call “hanging out.”

When I knocked, Ralph came to the door with a cellular phone stuck to his ear, held there by a shoulder to free up his hands for a yellow tablet and pen. I saw at once that hanging out was out of the question. Ralph was far too busy.

In a mad frenzy of activity, he had created the most technologically up-to-date, instant hotel-room office imaginable. His portable fax was hooked up and running, ringing and groaning as it coughed out sheet after sheet of burned-smelling, heat-sensitive paper. Ralph himself was hard at work transferring notes from the yellow tablet to his handy-dandy laptop computer. Periodically, he would have to lunge over to the wall and disconnect the fax from the phone jack in order to use the modem on his computer.

“How did people ever function with only one telephone line?” he demanded irritably over his shoulder when a harried receptionist somewhere left him sitting on hold.

“This may come as a shock to you, Ralph, but people actually survived on this planet before there were any phones at all,” I told him. “How much good does all this high-tech stuff do, anyway?”

“Not much so far,” he conceded, “but I’m just starting. What gives with you?”

Ralph carried on his part of the conversation, asking and answering questions, without ever taking his eyes off the glowing computer screen. He reminded me of one of those weirded-out videogame addicts. I probably should have taken the hint and left him to his work, but I was feeling nervous and anxious for some reason. I didn’t much want to be alone. In that frame of mind, distracted and preoccupied company was better than no company at all.

“Karen, Scott, and Dave just left,” I said forlornly.

“I know,” Ralph returned. “I was here when Dave picked Scott up. He was staying with me, remember?”

I had somehow forgotten that detail. “Scott’s in summer school now,” I continued. “Dave probably has to get back to work. I can understand that. What I can’t fathom is why Karen couldn’t stay on any longer to help out. It wouldn’t kill her to bend a little bit now and then.”

“Maybe she had something important to do back home,” Ralph suggested.

“Sure she did,” I agreed sarcastically. “What’s more important than being here when her daughter needs her? How about taking care of her only grandchild when her only daughter is damn near at death’s door? What’s more important than that? A hot bridge game? Maybe a tennis tournament?”

Ralph’s fingers paused over the keyboard while he looked me full in the face. “Are we feeling a little testy today?”

“I guess.”

“What’s eating you?”

“Everything and nothing.” Ralph kept looking at me, but his fingers started moving again, speeding over the keyboard with incredible dexterity without his having to look at either the screen or the keys. Ames is now and always will be a far better typist than I am.

“By the way,” I added. “I talked to Ron Peters in Seattle today.”

Ralph’s nimble fingers never missed a stroke. “What did he have to say?”

“I’m in some kind of hot water as per usual. Fraymore sent an official letter of complaint to Seattle P.D. in regard to my continued interference with his homicide investigation. Tony Freeman in I.I.D. handed the problem over to Ron.”

Ames shook his head. “That was fast. Fraymore must have written it and faxed it overnight. I had a feeling our behavior was offending the local constabulary. Don’t feel picked on, Beau. Gordon Fraymore would complain about me, too, if he could just figure out where to send the paper.”

Somehow, knowing I wasn’t the only target for Fraymore’s ire did make me feel a little better.

“I take it you’ve had your hands slapped?” Ralph asked.

“Officially, yes. Peters passed along Tony Freeman’s verbal message, which was, ‘You’re on vacation. Act like it.’”

“And unofficially?”

“Ron’s going to dig around up there in Seattle and see what, if anything, he can find out that might be of help.”

“I’ve always liked Ron Peters,” Ralph said. A moment later, he paused in his typing and frowned. “What are you up to today?”

“Not much. I guess I’ll hang out at the hospital. Worry.”

“I’ve got some legwork that needs doing, but I don’t want you to wind up in any more trouble.”

“Legwork’s something I’m good at. If you’ve got something for me to do that will keep me occupied, let me at it. We’ll worry about trouble later.”

“You’re sure?”

“What kind of legwork?” I returned.

Ralph reached over and shuffled through an already impressive stack of rolled-up fax-generated paper. Pulling out one sheet, he handed it to me. “I don’t have time to chase this down myself. It’s going to take all morning to prepare for the arraignment. On the other hand, I don’t see how Fraymore could possibly object to your doing this, since it has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder investigation, per se.” He paused and then added, “It may end up having some bearing on our defense, however.”

Glancing down at the paper, I was riveted by what I saw there—the names Roger and Willy Tompkins, along with a street address in Walla Walla.

“You want me to go see them?”

Ralph nodded.

“To talk to them, or to punch that guy’s lights out?”

“Talk,” Ralph said. “Definitely nothing but talk. We’ve got to learn whether or not these people will try to make any kind of trouble when it comes to sorting out long-term custody arrangements for Amber. If they’ll be reasonable, so will we. If they try to make things difficult, I’ll blow them clean out of the water.”

“Long-term custody?” I asked. “That sounds like you think we’ll lose and that you’ve already given up.”

“We have to be prepared for every contingency,” he returned darkly. Ralph Ames is not a man prone to discouraging words. Clearly, things weren’t going well.