Long Time Gone (3 page)

“Got married in college, got divorced three years later,” he explained, answering my unasked question. “Then I went back to our tenth class reunion and ran into Debby Drysdale. Remember her?”

Debby I remembered. If Ballard High School had had an “It” girl, Debby Drysdale would have been a contender. She was cute and smart. Head of the cheerleading squad. Homecoming queen our sophomore year and prom queen when we were seniors. I couldn’t imagine Debby Drysdale giving nerdy Freddy Mac the time of day. Once again, Fred must have read my mind.

“She was a bit out of my league in high school,” he admitted ruefully. “In fact, I don’t think we ever exchanged a single word.”

“I thought she married Tom…What’s his name again? I seem to remember he was a real jock.”

“Gustavson,” Fred supplied with a nod. “And yes, Tom was a jock—an all-state jock and a big-time jerk. Went off to college, got involved in drugs, and burned out his brain on LSD. Committed suicide the night of their eighth wedding anniversary.”

“Nice guy,” I said.

Fred nodded. “As I said, Deb and I met up again at our tenth class reunion. We were both single. She was looking for someone steady in her life, and I turned out to be the lucky guy. We’ve been married going on thirty years now. How about you?”

“Divorced once and widowed once,” I told him. “Other than that I’m doing fine.”

“Kids?” he asked.

“Two. Both married. One grandchild and another on the way.”

“Deb and I never had any kids,” Fred said with a shrug. “For a long time my whole life was my job—property development. Then, about eight years ago, I had a wake-up-call heart attack. The doc told me to change my life. Lose weight and lose my job or lose my life. So I went to see a hypnotherapist. He helped me so much that now I am one.”

As Fred spoke, he opened his briefcase and pulled out a frayed copy of the Ballard High School yearbook,
The Shingle
. Please don’t ask me why it’s called that. I have no idea.

He opened the book to a page marked with a slip of paper. He passed the yearbook over to me, tapping one picture in particular with his finger. “Remember her?” he asked.

I looked down and saw the picture of a girl—a girl with downcast eyes hidden behind thick glasses, no smile, and a sorrowful expression on her face.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said.

Fred closed the yearbook, returned it to the briefcase, and closed the lid. “I’m not surprised. Bonnie Jean Dunleavy was two years behind us when we were in school, but she’s a friend of mine—a friend and a patient. She’s also the reason I’m here.”

Glancing first at the open door, Fred looked back at me. “Do you mind?” he asked. With that he reached over and pushed the door shut. “It’s about a murder,” he said. “One we believe happened many years ago. I’m hoping you can tell me whether or not it really happened. This is a new experience for me—uncovering a crime like this from someone’s past—and I need to be really sure it’s the truth and not some little kid’s horrific fantasy.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m not a regular homicide detective anymore. I work for the Washington State Attorney General’s office. I only work cases I’m told to work, and I doubt Ross Connors would look kindly on my going out and chasing after some cold-case homicide that may or may not have happened.”

“It’s all right,” Fred assured me easily. “Somebody’s already squared it with Ross Connors. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

It sure as hell wasn’t fine with me. Ross Connors, the Washington State attorney general, happens to be my boss. He’s also a very political animal. The last thing I needed was to go messing around in a murder investigation that was connected to one of Ross’s cronies or to some big-time political contributor. Either one had almost limitless potential for career suicide.

“Bonnie Jean was in town for a conference over the weekend,” Fred continued. “She stayed over last night on the slim chance that I might be able to set up a meeting with you today. This morning, in fact,” he added. “Whenever you can get away.”

Talk about more nerve than a bad tooth! I was floored. Right about then I would have been happy for the return of the old pudgy Freddy Mac rather than his grown-up pushy and very cool counterpart.

“Hang on,” I said. “I’ll have to check with my boss.”

I left Fred sitting there beside my desk and went in search of Harry I. Ball. I more than half hoped he was still stuck in traffic. No such luck. He was talking on the phone when I popped my head into his office. “What is it?” he demanded, covering the mouthpiece.

“I’ve got this guy in my office…”

“I know, I know,” he grumbled. “The hypnotist guy. Word came down from on high about that. It’s your case, now get the hell out and do whatever needs to be done.” With that he waved me away.

I returned to my office with my worst-case-scenario suspicions fully confirmed. Whoever was pulling Ross Connors’s string had influence out the kazoo.

W
HEN I RETURNED
to my office, Fred let me know that my surprise luncheon meeting—a surprise to me anyway—was scheduled at Equus, the upscale restaurant in downtown Bellevue’s Hyatt Hotel. To get there from my Eastgate office, I had two choices. Get on I-90 and I-405 or stay on surface streets. With the cross-lake freeway mayhem still fresh in mind, I opted for the surface streets and that decision turned out to be on the money. I later learned that a garbage truck had jackknifed at Southeast Eighth, blocking all northbound lanes on 405.

I may not have known about the garbage truck at the time, but I did notice that traffic on Bellevue Way was bumper-to-bumper and slow as mud. It gave me plenty of time to anticipate my upcoming meeting with Bonnie Jean Dunleavy. I had no doubt she would have changed over the years every bit as much as Freddy Mac. I expected that LASIK surgery would have corrected her vision problems and so she would have ditched the glasses. And if she had hooked up with one of the movers and shakers in state government, she’d probably be wearing a size 3 dress and dripping in diamonds. I have a natural aversion to women like that.

I pulled into the Hyatt’s entry drive and was glad to see it had been thoroughly sanded. I always worry when I hand over the keys to my 928 to a valet parking attendant. Anne Corley gave me my first Porsche, and I wouldn’t have one now if it hadn’t been for her. For the valet car jockeys it’s just another high-powered car. For me the 928 is pretty much the only memento I have to remember Anne. I watched until my Guards’ Red baby disappeared around the corner of the building, then I went inside.

Midmorning is an odd time to show up at hotel restaurants. Breakfast service is generally over. The waitstaff, setting up for lunch, can be less than hospitable. I looked around for Freddy. He had left my office a good ten minutes before I had, so I expected him to be there first. That wasn’t the case. The restaurant’s sole diner was a woman sitting near the fireplace in the far corner of the room. As I walked in her direction, she stood and beckoned me toward her.

One glance made it clear that Bonnie Jean Dunleavy was definitely no fashion plate. I had expected designer duds. Instead, she wore a plain white blouse and a simple gray skirt topped by a matching gray cardigan. Instead of killer high heels, she was comfortably shod in Birkenstocks and heavy black stockings. And she wasn’t dripping in diamonds, either. Her only visible piece of jewelry was a gold crucifix that hung on a thin gold chain around her neck. She still wore glasses. The lenses were even thicker now than they had been in high school, but the once popular cat’s-eye style had given way to a simple wire frame. What set her apart from the girl in Freddy Mac’s yearbook was the expression on her face.

In high school Bonnie Jean Dunleavy had looked as though she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her eyes had seemed haunted somehow. The corners of her lips had turned down. This woman was totally at ease with herself. She approached me with a relaxed smile, an air of breezy confidence, and a hand outstretched in greeting. Something had worried Bonnie Jean as a teenager, but it no longer seemed to trouble her as an adult.

“Hello, Mr. Beaumont,” she said. “I don’t believe we officially ever met back in high school. After all, you were a senior when I was a lowly sophomore, but I certainly remember seeing you back then, and I’d still know you anywhere. It’s so good of you to come.”

She led me back to the table. I glanced over my shoulder at the entrance. “Fred will be here eventually,” she said. “He called a few minutes ago. He’s stuck in some kind of traffic tie-up on the freeway. Can I get you something, coffee or tea? It’s a little too early to order lunch.”

“Coffee would be fine,” I said.

She waved down a waiter and I ordered coffee. As soon as the waiter had left, she sat up straight, folded her hands on the edge of the table, and studied my face. “How much did Fred tell you?” she asked.

“Not much,” I admitted, probably sounding as grumpy as I felt. I’ve never liked being jerked around like a puppet by the whim of some invisible puppeteer.

“Did he mention that I’m not Bonnie Jean Dunleavy anymore?”

“No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “He made it clear that if you were going to know about any of this, it would have to come from me directly. He didn’t want to run the risk of violating my privacy. My name is Sister Mary Katherine now. I joined a convent—the Order of Saint Benedict—right out of high school. Now I’m mother superior of a small convent over on Whidbey Island.”

“He made no mention of that, either,” I said.

“It’s a long story,” she said. “Are you sure you have time?”

I thought about Harry waving me out of his office. “I’m at your disposal,” I told her.

“My folks married young. Daddy was eighteen and Mama was sixteen when they eloped. They left their disapproving families behind in Pennsylvania and came west. Neither of them had a high school diploma. In fact, I didn’t realize until after my father died that he had never learned to read. With benefit of hindsight, I suppose he was dyslexic, but I doubt people knew much about dyslexia back then. My mother covered for him as best she could, but he moved from one menial job to another and finally ended up working as a mechanic. By the time I graduated from eighth grade, I must have attended twenty different schools. That meant I was always behind academically, and the older I got, the further I fell behind.”

“It must have been tough,” I offered.

She nodded. “It was. Everybody thought I was stupid. Eventually I thought so, too. The summer before my freshman year, we were living in Seattle. My mother was working as a maid at one of the motels on Aurora, and my dad had a temporary summertime job working for a logging company over near Randle.

“I’m not sure how Mother did it, but somehow she wangled a scholarship for me to attend a weeklong CYO camp outside Leavenworth. We’d never had enough money for me to go to camp before, and I was thrilled. My parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary was on Saturday while I was away at camp. My mother drove all the way to Randle by herself so she and my dad could celebrate. They planned to have a picnic lunch up on Mount Rainier, but they never made it. On their way there they were hit head-on by a runaway logging truck that came careening around a sharp curve. They both died instantly.”

She told the story with only a trace of sadness, with the poise that comes from having adjusted to a long-ago tragedy, but hearing about the deaths of Bonnie Jean Dunleavy’s parents certainly explained the sad expression that had been captured so clearly in her high school yearbook photo.

“Because I was away at camp, I had no idea what had happened. Mother and I, and occasionally my father, attended Christ the King Church up on Phinney Ridge. The priest there, Father Mark, had taken an interest in us, and he was the one who had made it possible for me to attend camp. When word of the accident reached him, Father Mark came all the way to Leavenworth to tell me what had happened and to bring me back home. Realizing no one would be there at our apartment to take care of me, Father Mark had one of the camp counselors, Maribeth Hogan, leave camp to come be with me. She was there through the funeral and stayed for the remainder of the summer. Not surprisingly, we’ve been friends ever since.”

“You were lucky to have people like that in your life,” I said.

“More than lucky,” she replied. “As I said earlier, my parents came from Pennsylvania. They were pretty much estranged from both sides of their families. None of the relatives from back there bothered to come out for the funerals, but when the logging truck’s brakes were found to be faulty and it looked like there would be a sizable insurance settlement, those very same relatives—my father’s mother and my mother’s two brothers—descended on Seattle like a swarm of locusts, all of them bent on going to court to be declared my legal guardian. Father Mark came to see me and asked if I wanted to live with any of those relatives. I told him I didn’t even know them. The last thing I wanted to do was go all the way across the country to live in a strange place called Pittsburgh where I knew no one. Fortunately, Father Mark listened to me. I also think he suspected that my relatives were far more interested in laying hands on the insurance money than they were in looking after my welfare. He got in touch with Catholic Family Services. They placed me in a foster home in Ballard.

“Adelaide Rodgers, my foster mother, had entered a convent as a young woman but had been forced to drop out after only two years. Her mother had taken sick, and she’d had to go back home to help look after her younger brothers and sisters. These days you hear lots of horror stories about what goes on in foster homes, but Adelaide was wonderful. She was a loving, pious woman who went to Mass every Sunday and who lived her faith every single day. She believed in living frugally. She worked as a teller in a bank, but she sewed all her own clothing, and she taught me to do the same.

“Adelaide never used a dime of my insurance settlement. She said it was a nest egg for me to use when I was ready to go to college. She invested my money right along with her own. Over the years my nest egg grew to surprising proportions, and so did hers. Adelaide never officially adopted me. I don’t think it was possible for single women to adopt in those days, but as far as she was concerned, I was her daughter. When she died a number of years ago, she left me a small fortune and a farm she had inherited up on Double Bluff Road on Whidbey Island. She left me the property and the money but with an important request. She asked that I use both the property and the money to found a convent in her mother’s memory—which I did. It’s called the Convent of Saint Benedict.”

“Double Bluff Road. Isn’t there a country club somewhere around there?” I asked. “I think I went there for a conference once.”

Sister Mary Katherine—I had to teach myself to think of her as Sister Mary Katherine and not Bonnie Jean—smiled and nodded. “Useless Bay Country Club,” she said. “They’re neighbors of ours. We like to think of ourselves as the Useful Useless Bay Country Club.”

A nun cracking jokes and referring to her convent as a country club? That came as a bit of a surprise. “How did you go from Ballard High School to Mother Superior?” I asked.

“As I said, because I changed schools so much, I was way behind academically by the time I reached high school. Even with Adelaide’s nightly tutoring sessions, college prep courses were far beyond my abilities, but I was a star in Miss Breckenridge’s home ec classes.”

Miss Lola Breckenridge—I hadn’t thought of her in years. Even now it seems ironic that the woman in charge of Ballard’s home ec department had been an old maid. She was a tall, bony, yet imposing creature who dressed impeccably in designer-style fashions that she sewed herself. And she was tough. Boys who got crosswise with Miss Breckenridge in study hall or the cafeteria soon wished they hadn’t. A word from her to some misbehaving boy’s coach would have even star athletes benched for that week’s game.

“Home ec was great. Because of what I had learned from Adelaide, I could sew circles around the other girls. Miss Breckenridge even let me come in before and after school to use the machines. Next to Adelaide, Miss Breckenridge was the best thing that ever happened to me. I may not have been able to make sense of algebra or geometry, but if I could sew well, I knew I’d be able to support myself.”

“That’s what my mother did,” I put in. The admission surprised me. “She was a seamstress and a single mother. That’s how she supported us the whole time I was growing up.”

Sister Mary Katherine looked thoughtful. “That’s interesting,” she said.

Just then Freddy Mac came hurrying up to the table. “Sorry I’m so late,” he said, taking a seat. “Traffic on the freeway was horrendous. By the time I realized there was an accident at Southeast Eighth, I couldn’t get off. I had to wait it out. What have I missed?”

“Nothing much,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “I’ve been filling Mr. Beaumont in on some of my background.”

“Beau,” I interjected.

She smiled. “And I was just getting to you, Fred,” she added. “By the time I was a sophomore, Adelaide was worried that I was focusing all my energies on home ec. She wanted me to try my hand at something else. That’s how I wound up following Fred here around while he tried to teach me how to be a photographer. Despite his very capable mentoring, I never made the grade in the photojournalism arena, but he and I became good friends. We still are.”

The waitstaff, which had made itself scarce while there were just two of us, began hovering the moment the third member of our party showed up. They refilled coffee cups and took food orders. As soon as they disappeared once again, Sister Mary Katherine resumed her story.

“By the time I was a junior in high school, I knew I wanted to be a nun. With my sewing abilities, joining the Benedictine order was a natural.”

That one stumped me, and Sister Mary Katherine must have realized it. “How much do you know about the Catholic Church?”

“What I don’t know fills volumes,” I told her.

“Traditionally Benedictine nuns serve the church by sewing—making altar cloths and vestments for priests. That’s what we do up on Whidbey, too. Saint Benedict’s is a small convent. Twelve nuns and two lay sisters. We sew and we pray. For much of the day and night we live in self-imposed silence so we can spend our time with our hearts and minds focused on God rather than chatting endlessly about the weather. And that brings me to why we’re here.”

I have to admit I had been wondering. Nothing in Sister Mary Katherine’s story hinted at any wrongdoing, and she certainly didn’t strike me as a potential murderess.

“We’re supposed to maintain certain hours of silence,” she continued. “About a year ago I broke the silence by waking up screaming in the middle of the night. As I said, Saint Benedict’s is small. Having the mother superior roust everyone out of bed by screaming her head off was unsettling. I knew I’d had a nightmare, a terrible nightmare, but I couldn’t remember any of it. I had no idea what the dream was about. Eventually everyone returned to their own rooms, and we all went back to sleep. A few weeks later it happened again—exactly the same way. It’s gone on like that for months now. I started avoiding going to sleep at night because I was afraid of having the dream and disturbing everyone else, but having a sleep-deprived mother superior is almost as bad for a convent as having one who wakes everybody up screaming like a banshee.