by J. A. Jance
And so Chrissy lay there and waited, sometimes holding her breath, sometimes not. Grandma Louise, Mommy’s mother, said that when you were scared like that, it was a good idea to pray. The problem was, whenever Chrissy prayed, she always asked for God to take Daddy away and not let him come home. Obviously her prayer hadn’t been answered, at least not tonight.
Time passed, and she had almost drifted off again when the expected quarrel finally started. At first it sounded like the distant rumbling of a thunderstorm blowing in off the ocean. Soon after that came the sound of raised voices.
“You stupid . . .” Chrissy wasn’t sure what that last word was or what it meant, but she knew it was one of her father’s mean words. Whenever he called her mother that, it usually made her mother cry. Only tonight that didn’t happen. Instead of crying, her mother argued back. Chrissy knew that was a mistake and she understood what would happen next. Not right away, but eventually, she’d hear the unmistakable sound of flesh on flesh. In the morning there would be a new bruise somewhere on her mother’s body—on her upper arm maybe or else on her back. The bruises usually ended up in spots that didn’t show once Mommy put her clothes on.
Waiting for it to happen was worse than listening to it happen. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Chrissy climbed out of bed and scrambled down the ladder, dragging both Oscar and her blanket with her. Instead of crawling into the lower bunk with Lonny, she made her way to the foot of the bed and to the spot where Rambo lay curled up on her own bed.
Rambo was a tall, scrawny dog, coal black, and with fringes of long, soft hair. When Grandma Louise had first brought her to live with them, the dog had been a lot smaller—little more than a long-legged puppy. Naturally, that had caused another big fight, with Daddy insisting that he didn’t want a dog and wouldn’t have one, but that time Mommy hadn’t backed down. Rambo had stayed, but only on the condition that Daddy give her a new name.
When Grandma Louise showed up with the dog, she had brought along a dog bed. Back then, the bed had been too big for the dog. Now it was too small. Lying stretched out flat, Rambo’s nose rested on the floor on one side of the cushion and her long tail trailed off the opposite side. When Chrissy approached the bed, Rambo raised her head and thumped the floor with her tail.
Pulling the blanket down over both of them and still clutching Oscar, Chrissy snuggled up next to Rambo, with her back pressed tight against the huge dog’s warm tummy. Once she was settled, Rambo gave a contented sigh and went back to sleep. With the dog’s warm breath humming steadily in Chrissy’s ear, the angry voices from the other room receded into the background, and, after a time, Chrissy slept, too.
Chapter 1
When the phone rang and my son’s name appeared in the caller ID window, it was as though someone had thrown a lifeline to a drowning man. “Hey, Pops, it’s Scotty,” he told me unnecessarily. “How’re you doing?”
Most of the time when people ask a question like that it’s rhetorical only—no one expects a real answer, and my reply was a long way from real.
“Great,” I said with as much heartiness as I could muster. “Couldn’t be better.”
Which could not have been further from the truth. I was anything but great. I was at home alone at Mel’s and my recently remodeled cliffside home on Bayside Road, in what real estate professionals like to refer to as Bellingham’s “historic Edgemoor neighborhood.” The view outside our floor-to-ceiling, west-facing windows was gray—an unrelenting gray sea beneath a gray sky glimpsed through a gray fog of drizzle. Despite the pops of color our talented decorator, Jim Hunt, had installed here and there as furnishings and wall hangings, the mood inside was unremittingly gray as well. Mel Soames, my lovely wife, was hard at work at her relatively new job as chief of police in Bellingham, Washington, while I was stuck at home alone, trying to come to terms with the realities of retirement.
I had done some work for TLC, The Last Chance, a volunteer cold-case unit that my friend and attorney, Ralph Ames, had hooked me up with. That included a case that I’d been able to help resolve that had come up just prior to Thanksgiving. The reality of TLC work is that it often involves plowing through old police reports searching for something someone else has missed. The problem with plowing through police reports is that it’s too much like . . . well . . . plowing through old police reports.
Besides, what alternatives did I have? Golf has never been my thing, and there are only so many crossword puzzles you can do in the course of a week before you’re ready to blow your brains out. As our neighbor up the street, Johannes Bodner, a guy who spent his formative years in the South African Defense Force, likes to say, I was not a happy chappie. The words “clinically depressed” hadn’t yet surfaced, but they were lurking around the edges.
“How are things for you?” I asked.
“So, so,” Scott replied, which was probably a far more honest answer than mine had been. If you’re in search of actual information, listening in on father/son conversations probably isn’t the right place to go looking.
“Any chance you’ll be coming into Seattle tomorrow?”
The truth of the matter is, I was free as a bird—no schedule to speak of, no mandatory meetings, no due dates on case reports. And I have to admit, the idea of having a chance to spend some one-on-one time with my son when there wasn’t a houseful of holiday company gladdened my heart. Driving eighty-some miles one way to do it? No problem, but I didn’t want to sound too eager. When it comes to father/son relations, being too eager is also bad news.
“Hadn’t planned on it,” I said cagily. “Why? What’s up?”
“I’m having my wisdom teeth pulled,” Scott answered. “Because of the anesthetic, I’m required to have someone there to drive me home afterward. The trouble is, when I made the appointment I forgot that Cherisse is in Vegas for the big consumer electronics convention this weekend. Still, it’s not that big a deal. If it’s not good for you, I can always run up the flag to Uber.”
The problem for me is that it really was that big a deal. I wasn’t there on the day when Scotty Beaumont, age six, bit into a Taco Bell burrito, lost his first tooth, and swallowed the same. My first wife, Karen, was in charge of parental duties at the time because, when the initial lunchtime crisis happened, I was in Seattle conveniently at work as a homicide cop. I wasn’t home later on when the second part of the lost tooth incident occurred, either—when Karen sat Scott down at the kitchen table and helped him pen a note to the Tooth Fairy, explaining how, although the tooth itself had gone AWOL, he hoped money would appear under his pillow all the same. (It did, once again as a result of Karen’s due diligence.) By that time of day—night really—I was done with actual work, but I had stopped off for a few stiff ones on the way home, with the ready excuse that I needed to have some “decompression time” between being a cop and being a husband and father.
This is a scenario that will be all too familiar to far too many—including all those guys I’ve met during the intervening years as a result of my long-term involvement with Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s usually among the collection of regrets that are a common denominator in one AA drunkalogue after another. That’s what happens when people finally decide to sober up and begin discovering what they missed out on while they were drunk out of their gourds, sometimes for years on end.
Occasionally, though, life reaches out and gives you a second chance, and this was one of them—a missed Tooth Fairy do-over, if ever there were one!
“What time’s the appointment?” I asked. “And where? Just let me know what time you want to be picked up.”
Because the appointment was set for 9 a.m., and because I didn’t want to be driving into Seattle from Bellingham in the peak of rush-hour traffic, I decided to go down that evening—midafternoon, really—because I didn’t want to be driving in afternoon rush-hour traffic, either. That’s one of the advantages of Mel’s and my keeping the condo at Belltown Terrace in downtown Seattle—it makes it easy for us to come and go when
ever it suits us.
It turns out police chiefs need decompression time every bit as much as, if not more than, homicide cops do, so I usually drive into Bellingham proper at mid-day each day so Mel and I can have lunch together, as long as she doesn’t have to go hobnobbing with some visiting dignitary or other.
Our favorite spot is a greasy spoon diner on Dupont called Jack and Jill’s. Jack died years ago. Jill, somewhere north of seventy, is a wiry, white-haired dynamo who is at the restaurant every day, running the show and keeping an eagle eye on things. The restaurant is two blocks from Mel’s office and comes with a side door that allows her to slip inside and duck into our permanently reserved back corner booth without garnering a lot of attention.
Some third wives might have objected to my driving nearly two hundred miles in order to take a forty-something-year-old son to a dental procedure, but not Mel. She’s been a huge asset in helping me re-establish better relationships with all my offspring—Scott and Cherisse, along with my daughter Kelly and her husband, Jeremy, who live down in Ashland, Oregon, with their own two kids. Taking my poor parenting history into account, let’s just say I’ve had some serious overcoming to do, and Mel has guided and facilitated that process as much as possible.
“What time are you heading out?” she asked, tucking into her Cobb salad.
Salads aren’t exactly my thing. I’ve always been more of a burger or bowl of chili kind of guy. “Right after lunch,” I told her. “I want to get a haircut this afternoon and then go to a meeting tonight.”
I may have changed residences, but I haven’t changed barbers, and my AA meetings of choice still mostly take place in Seattle’s Denny Regrade neighborhood, or as it’s currently referred to, Belltown.
“You’ve probably forgotten that Saturday afternoon is when we have our Fifth Avenue tickets,” Mel mentioned.
The Fifth Avenue is a longtime theater in downtown Seattle that specializes in musical productions. Mel has had season tickets for as long as she’s lived and worked in Seattle. She used to go with a friend. Now she goes with me. She was right, of course. I had completely forgotten about our theater date, but I managed to spare myself some embarrassment by not asking which show.
“Since you’ll already be in town,” she continued, “how about if I come down after work tomorrow? We can grab a late dinner at El Gaucho and then see Man of La Mancha the next day.”
Whew. At least I now knew which play we were seeing, and I took the idea of Mel giving herself a weekend off as a very good sign. “Sounds good to me,” I said. “Like an actual date.”
“Right,” she said. “Let’s just hope nothing happens to screw it up. I have a meeting with Mayor-elect Appleton this afternoon. Keep your fingers crossed.”
When Mel had signed on for the Bellingham chief of police gig, she had walked into a political hornet’s nest where she’d been forced to go head-to-head with the then-mayor, a woman named Adelina Kirkpatrick. From the moment I met Mayor Kirkpatrick, I’d had a bad feeling about her—a gut instinct that unfortunately had turned out to be dead-on right. Mel had uncovered some serious corruption issues in Mayor Kirkpatrick’s administration which had resulted in the now-former mayor’s surprise election day ouster by a dark-horse, write-in candidate named Lawrence Appleton. The new mayor’s swearing-in ceremony was scheduled for the following week. That meant that Mel was currently walking a tightrope between her incoming boss and her outgoing boss. Not fun.
“One on one?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said, “a cozy little meeting for just the two of us.”
Mel had met the man previously, but this would be their first comprehensive meeting. Given what had gone on before, I didn’t fault Mel for being concerned about it.
“You’ll do fine,” I assured her with more confidence than I actually felt. “He’ll be totally blown away.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”
By the time lunch was over, I’d had a much-needed attitude adjustment. As I headed south on I-5, it was raining pitchforks and hammer handles, but I even managed to find a way to be grateful for that. The mountain passes were a mess, but down in the lowlands it was rain rather than snow, and a warm rain at that—a Pineapple Express as the talking weather-heads like to call it. Unfortunately, according to the weather reports, the rainstorm was likely to be followed by an arctic blast—a sudden dry spell that would drop temperatures to frigid and turn wet road surfaces to glass. No doubt that was just the kind of foul-up Mel was worried about. From my point of view and considering our plans for the weekend, continuing rain for as long as possible was just what the doctor ordered.
I pulled into the parking garage at Belltown Terrace, parked on P-4, and then stopped off in the lobby on my way upstairs to empty the non-forwarded junk mail from our mailbox. Bob, the doorman, greeted me like a long-lost pal.
“Hey, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “Great to see you. How’s retirement treating you these days?”
“Terrific,” I said, passing off the lie with what I hoped appeared to be a sincere smile. “Couldn’t be better.”
“Have you heard about Marge?”
Margie Herndon was a registered nurse—a cranky one at that—who happened to be a longtime friend of Bob’s wife, Helen. That connection was enough to explain why I had ended up with her as my home-health nurse in the aftermath of my bilateral knee replacement surgery. She had turned out to be your basic Nurse Ratched–style rehab Nazi. Naturally she and Mel had gotten along like gangbusters. To be fair, the fact that my no-longer-new-but-still-fake knees work as well as they do can be attributed, in large measure, to Marge Herndon’s ability to crack the whip. We had gotten through rehab together, but it hadn’t exactly been a match made in heaven.
“What about her?”
“Helen tells me that she and Harry I. Ball are planning to tie the knot.”
Back before my unexpected and unwelcome retirement, Harry Ignatius Ball used to be my boss. That was when I still worked for the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, SHIT. (Unfortunate acronym. Sorry about that, but the name is not my fault.) Slightly more than a year earlier, Ross Connors, the attorney general, and Harry had been involved in a spectacular Christmastime traffic accident near Seattle Center. Ross Connors had been declared dead at the scene.
By the time someone used the Jaws of Life to extricate Harry from the smashed limo in which he’d been riding, the man was barely clinging to life. He survived. For months he had been a wheelchair-bound double amputee before recently being fitted with prosthetics. Shortly after the incident, when he had required nursing care in order to be released from the hospital, I had suggested that Marge Herndon might fill in the gap. At the time I had expected interactions between the two of them to be your basic oil-and-water combo. For a serious romance to have blossomed between the two of them? Nobody saw that one coming, most especially me.
Stunned by this unanticipated development, I believe my jaw literally dropped. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope,” Bob replied with a grin. “Obviously someone out there in the world of matchmaking is making sure that chain smokers hook up with other chain smokers. Makes life easier for everyone else. Helen says they’re planning on getting married in Vegas on Valentine’s Day. Your smoke-drenched invitation is probably already in the mail.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said, heading into the elevator. “That’ll be one to remember.”
“Your fault,” Bob said as the door started to slide shut.
I pushed it back open. “Nope,” I told him, “not mine, yours.”
I rode on upstairs and let myself into the penthouse unit. I had inherited a fortune from my second wife, and the money had landed during what was a serious downturn in terms of Seattle’s real estate. I had bought the condo at Ralph Ames’s suggestion because it was totally a buyer’s market back then, and the developer needed to unload it. Now it’s worth far more than I paid for it.
One of the things I like about li
ving in a high-rise is that you can go away for days or weeks or even months at a time, but when you come home, it’s always there waiting for you—just the way you left it. Nobody has broken in one of the windows or strung your trees full of toilet paper.
Without turning on any of the interior lights, I walked over to the windows and stared outside. The Space Needle was lit up, still lined with red and green lights and topped by the traditional tree. Brightly lit trees in Seattle Center sparkled through the downpour as did the decorated radio towers on the flanks of Queen Anne Hill. As far as Seattle was concerned, Christmas wasn’t over, but seeing all the celebratory decorations reminded me of everything that had been lost the previous Christmas. On the drive down, I had about talked myself out of going to a meeting that night. Why not just stay at home, holed up from the cold and wet? But now, thinking about Ross Connors losing his life and Harry losing his legs made me do an about-face.
Besides, I could hardly cite inconvenience as an excuse for not going. When I first landed in AA, my meetings of choice had taken place a few blocks up the street at a low-brow dive on Second Avenue called the Rendezvous. Back then, a lot of the attendees were beaten-up old construction workers and ex-fishermen. (Sorry, I refuse to use the more politically correct version, fishers. I believe “fishers” are actually weasel-like mammals, but I digress.)
One of the regulars at the Rendezvous had been a grizzled, old, retired halibut fisherman named Lars Jenssen, who first became my AA sponsor and eventually my step-grandfather as well, when he married my widowed grandmother, Beverly Piedmont. Although both of those wonderful folks are gone now, their short-but-sweet happily ever after was almost as unanticipated as the newly announced romantic entanglement between Marge Herndon and Harry I. Ball. Go figure.
Now with the Regrade’s ongoing gentrification, the local AA meeting is held much closer to home—directly across Clay Street from the entrance to Belltown Terrace’s parking garage—in a building that was once a union hall but had now been transformed into a church. The distance I had to travel up and down in the elevator was farther than I had to walk to get from one building to the other.