by Ann Rule
The two, mother and daughter, had talked for a long time. Ronda was actually quite upbeat in her attitude when she said she didn’t mind walking away from her short marriage, but that she was determined to recoup the thousands of dollars she had put into the house, along with all her efforts in painting, decorating, and making it a home.
“I’m actually looking forward to getting on with my life, Mom,” Ronda said. “I just need a few days with you guys to decide a definite course of action.”
“You’re sure?” Barb asked. “You don’t have to put on a happy face for me. You know that.”
“I’m sure. I’m fine. I can’t wait to see you all tomorrow.”
Freeman, Ronda’s “little” brother who was seven inches taller than she was, would take his mother to the airport in Spokane. Then they would swing by Gramma Virginia’s house—which was right next door to Barb’s.
They were all beside themselves with anticipation; they hadn’t had a chance to really visit with Ronda since Mother’s Day. That was when Ronda had put an adorable tumble of black puppy fluff in her mother’s arms. Daisy was a very big dog now, and Barb wanted to show her daughter what good care she had taken of her. Ronda also had a new filly she hadn’t seen since Mother’s Day when the colt was only a few days old. And, of course, there was Clabber Toe. He would recognize Ronda at once, and it wouldn’t be long before the two of them would go riding off across Barb’s acreage.
Freeman pulled up in front of the Spokane airport, and Barbara asked him if he wanted to go to the gate to meet his sister.
“No, Mom, you go. I think I can wait. I’ll watch the door and get her baggage when you guys get back here.”
He hadn’t quite brought his car to a complete stop when Barb leaped onto the curb and whirled around to close the door.
“Slow down, Mom,” he laughed. “She’s not going anywhere. You have plenty of time.”
Barb Thompson walked into the main terminal, realizing at once that she’d forgotten the airport was in the midst of a massive remodeling. She had to walk all the way to the far north end of the terminal to reach the Alaska and Horizon Airlines arrival gate.
It suddenly became intensely important that she glimpse Ronda and give her a big hug. But when she got to the gate, she found out that Ronda’s flight had been cancelled, and the next flight from Seattle wasn’t scheduled to arrive until just before 3:00 p.m.
Freeman’s face dropped when he heard that. “She’s on flight 2198 now,” his mother told him. “It’s due in at two fifty-five p.m. It’s not that much longer.”
It was just a little over two more hours, but it seemed an eternity to Barb and Freeman. They drove home, not stopping at Gramma Virginia’s house. The phone was ringing as they walked in the door. Barb expected it to be Ronda, calling as she always did if she had a change in plans so they wouldn’t worry. But it was her own mother, demanding to know why they hadn’t dropped in with Ronda.
“Her flight was delayed, Mom,” Barb said. “We have to go back to the airport at three. Freeman’s on his way to your house now to grab a bowl of cereal. He’ll pick me up at two fifteen.”
“Darn,” Ronda’s grandmother said. “I don’t know if I can wait that long.”
Barb tried to make her mother feel better by telling her that Ronda would surely have called if she had changed her mind and wasn’t coming. Ronda always called. “You’re right, Gramma. I just want her here now, too! Maybe she’ll decide to transfer after her probationary six months on her store security job, and then we’ll have her here all the time. Wouldn’t that be great?”
“Don’t get your hopes up. You know how she feels about the weather over here.”
Barb busied herself loading the dishwasher, and just as she’d put the last plate in its slot, she glanced out the window over the kitchen sink. She saw a green-and-white squad car parked at her mother’s house. It looked like a Spokane County Sheriff’s unit.
She wasn’t alarmed. Whenever there was a loose or injured horse, the deputies usually came to her to ask her who owned them. She was the “go-to” expert on horses in her end of the county.
Daisy sat by the door expectantly, her whole body wiggling with delight as she was about to meet someone new. Daisy knew no strangers. She was always looking for someone to play with.
Barb was usually glad to help round up wayward horses, but it never took less than two hours. Right now, she didn’t want to be delayed when she was just about to go back to the airport to pick up Ronda.
But she realized that she couldn’t refuse to help; she lived so close to a four-lane, much-traveled highway. Ronda, of all people, would understand and she could call Gramma Virginia when she landed if Barb wasn’t home.
She opened her front door, and an older man stood there, gazing with some doubt into Daisy’s brown eyes. Barb grinned at the stranger and said, “She’s okay—she doesn’t know she’s a Rottweiler. She’s hoping you’ve come to play with her.”
At that point, Barb Thompson saw that her visitor had a bar with writing etched on it pinned to his shirt. She leaned forward and read “Chaplain.”
But what was he doing at her front door? Her world tilted only a centimeter off its endless axis and she felt a knot in the pit of her stomach. A chaplain usually meant something bad had happened to someone.
She would not allow herself to believe that had any connection to her.
“Are you Barbara Thompson?” the gray-haired man asked.
“Yes, I am,” she said, opening the door wider. “But I only have a couple of minutes. We have to get to the airport to pick up my daughter.”
He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “I have a message here. I’m so sorry to tell you that your mother has passed away and you need to call your father.”
Relief washed over Barb’s body. Whatever had happened, it couldn’t involve her or her family. “That can’t be right,” she said. “My father passed away years ago, and my mother lives right next door. You were just at her house.”
The chaplain pressed on. “I have a message that you are to call your father at the coroner’s office in Lewis County.”
She felt dizzy. Lewis County? She didn’t know anyone in Lewis County. Lewis County, where? What state?
“Do you have a telephone number? Do you have a name?”
He shook his head, apologizing. “I’m sorry—but that’s all I have.”
“Was there anything about a Ramsey, or a Clark, Liburdi or Reynolds?”
Again, he shook his head. If he hadn’t arrived in a sheriff’s car, she would have thought the man was demented—someone who went around knocking on strange doors and scaring the hell out of people. Why didn’t he have more information? This could all be resolved so quickly if he only had a name to give her.
“Your name is Barbara Thompson, right?” he pressed.
“Yes, that’s me. But my mother is right next door and she is very much alive. There must be a mistake here.”
“This is 710 West Highway Two, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“This is definitely the address and name I was given, and I was told to tell you that you need to call your father.”
Barbara wished Freeman would show up. The “chaplain” was giving her the creeps.
She suddenly recalled that there was another Barbara Thompson living in Spokane, a woman who worked at the racetrack. In the past, she had received some of the other Barbara’s mail and phone calls. She didn’t have any idea where the other woman lived, but she was sure the sheriff’s office could find out. Barb looked at her watch and told the chaplain that she really had to leave for the airport.
Once more, Barb jumped from her son’s car and headed for the Alaska/Horizon arrival gate. Luckily, Ronda’s plane wouldn’t land for another fifteen minutes. Barb knew she had plenty of time, but she found herself running down the corridor, darting between people, baggage, children, and strollers. All the chairs were taken when she got to the gate, but she didn’t care. She sto
od with her eyes glued to the double doors that would soon spring open and release scores of passengers. And Ronda would be one of them.
“It was Christmastime,” Barbara Thompson remembered a decade later. “Joy and laughter were in the air. We would be having Christmas together for the first time in nearly eight years. Ronda had to leave on the twenty-first so we planned Christmas dinner and our gift exchange early. It was enough that we could just be together.”
It was 2:50 p.m. and Barb watched the incoming planes circle in the cold sky and then taxi into their gates. Finally, she saw the Alaska Airlines jet and knew it must be Ronda’s plane. She watched the ground crew wave their big orange wands and lead it into a covered ramp, then heard its engines winding down.
In her mind, she could see Ronda’s face. She knew her daughter would be one of the last to deplane; she liked to let all those with babies, the elderly, and disabled passengers exit safely, and she always grinned widely when she saw her mother’s face change from impatience to delight.
Barb stretched and strained her neck, to see beyond the departing passengers as far as she could. At 3:00, the last of them straggled in—a mother holding a baby in one arm, and a little girl about five crying and pulling on her other arm.
No one else. But that could not be. Two flight attendants walked past Barb, pulling their luggage, talking and joking, and the plane’s door slammed shut behind them. She wanted to confront them and demand to know where Ronda was. But she didn’t.
“I was suddenly nauseated,” Barb Thompson recalled. “My mind whirled and I felt dizzy. Where was Ronda? I could see the chaplain’s face in my mind now. His words were screaming in my ears. ‘Your father wants you to call him at the Lewis County Coroner’s Office.’ It hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh my God! My baby! No, no, it can’t be! He hadn’t been talking about my little girl. She must have just fallen asleep and didn’t get off the plane. Any moment now the doors will swing open and there she’ll be.”
But Ronda wasn’t there. She hadn’t been on the plane, or even on the manifest list of passengers.
Barb made up every possible reason why her daughter hadn’t arrived as she had promised—every reason but the one that tortured her the most. She simply could not face that possibility.
Finally, she dialed Information and asked for the number of the Lewis County Coroner’s Office. When the operator asked her the state, Barb still didn’t know. At length, the operator came back on the line and gave her a number beginning with a “360” prefix. Barb’s knees buckled. That was Ronda’s prefix.
Lewis County hadn’t meant anything to her; she thought Ronda lived in Thurston County.
Knowing what she didn’t want to know, Barb Thompson called the number for the coroner’s office. She identified herself to the voice that answered.
“Are you Ronda Reynolds’s mother?”
“Yes . . . I am.”
“I’m sorry to inform you that your daughter died this morning.”
“How?” Barbara didn’t recognize her own voice. It was hollow.
“Your daughter committed suicide . . .”
She didn’t believe it. She never would. Over eleven years, Barb Thompson has worked to find the truth about her daughter’s death. She has seen it declared suicide, accidental, unexplained, and then suicide again.
But nothing fits. Nothing matches. There are a number of suspects in Ronda’s death and a number of motives. By the end of In the Still of the Night, the answer will surface. Readers may well be instrumental in finding the truth, and in doing that, find justice at last for Ronda Reynolds.