by J. A. Jance
Word of Tanya Dunseth’s arrest preceded us. When James Renthrow and I arrived with Amber in tow, the response was enthusiastic and immediate. Maybe there’s something in that old line about no people like show people. The people gathered in Florence’s spacious living room, Tanya and Jeremy’s fellow cast members, were very much concerned, and they wanted to help. Someone started a sign-up sheet for volunteers to take turns watching Amber. Most mentioned they’d be happy to care for Karen Louise as well. It warmed me to know help would be available for Kelly once her out-of-town relatives returned home.
Florence had been busy doing more than just making coffee and serving cake. Calling in some of her B & B chips, she had found lodging for everybody, although not at a single location. At that time of year, last-minute accommodations in Ashland are the exception, not the rule. Still, Florence had managed.
Alex and I were scheduled to stay where we were. Dave and Karen ended up at someplace called the Auburn Street Cottage, where, I was told, although the shower was tall enough to stand up in, it was also outdoors—across a long backyard and concealed behind a lacy curtain of green growing vine. Scott and Ralph Ames shared a double room at the Ashland Hills.
There was a considerable fuss when Romeo and I first showed up, me carrying Amber and James Renthrow packing the diaper bag. Within minutes Alex personally took charge of the child. Since Alex’s underhanded scheming had precipitated this current crisis, that seemed only fair. I repaired to the kitchen, where I found Dave Livingston bird-dogging the phone. He poured two cups of coffee, kept one for himself, and handed the other to me. We both leaned against the kitchen cooking island to drink it.
“I hear Kelly’s condition has been upgraded,” I said.
He nodded. “The doc says it’ll be several days before we know if there’s any residual damage—paralysis, memory loss.”
My stomach knotted at the prospect. We stood in silent commiseration—two fathers caught in the aftermath of disaster—agonizing about an injured child, fearing the worst but stubbornly hoping for the best. Dave, a likable, ordinary guy, seemed as frazzled as I felt. His concern for Kelly mirrored my own. Realizing that—in the face of hearing Tanya’s appalling story, of knowing there were some other awful fathers out there in the world—made me feel incredibly lucky. And grateful.
I remembered then that I hadn’t seen Mrs. Livingston as I came through the house. “Karen’s still at the hospital?”
Dave shook his head. “I took her back to our place so she could rest. I’m waiting for Jeremy to call here when he’s ready to leave the hospital. There’s no phone in our room.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I told him. “Karen’s not the only one who needs rest. When Jeremy calls, I’ll go pick him up. I wanted to peek in on Kelly anyway.”
Dave examined my face, checking to see if I meant it. “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”
“None at all.”
“All right then,” he agreed. “Thanks. I don’t like leaving Karen alone for very long.”
I almost told him not to worry about Karen, but it was none of my business. When Dave left a few minutes later, I helped myself to some cake and wandered back through the house. Alex and Florence were making phone calls and trying to find a crib. Boris, Florence’s gray tomcat, meandered through the room, took one look at Amber, and departed for parts unknown. Natasha, Oak Hill’s tiny dust mop of a dog, stood her ground and regarded the child with wary curiosity.
The house seemed crowded, noisy, and overly hot. I ventured outside to the front steps and gazed up at a dazzling array of stars. When puny human frailties overtake me, stars can help put things in perspective, although stargazing in Seattle is a relatively rare occurrence.
I was still outside when the phone rang. Moments later Alex appeared at the door to tell me that Jeremy was ready to leave the hospital. She handed me the keys to Ames’ Lincoln. I found Jeremy waiting for me, pacing up and down the sidewalk outside the hospital entrance. Although official visiting hours were long over, I parked the car. “How’re things?” I asked.
“Better,” he said. “Lots better than they were.”
“Wait here a sec, if you don’t mind, Jeremy. I’d like to see for myself.”
He nodded. “First room on the left, just beyond the nurses’ station.”
I walked down the hall, ready to battle any nurse who tried to stop me. None did. Kelly lay sleeping, her long blond eyelashes resting on pale, bruised cheeks. Trying to see beyond the marks on her face and the bandages on her head, I recalled her as an impish little girl, sweet and innocent only when she’d been in bed asleep. Now she was asleep again, and I hoped to God she’d wake up. Trouble or not, I sure as hell didn’t want to lose her. Biting back tears, I rushed from the room.
Jeremy waited in the car, sitting with his eyes closed, leaning wearily on the headrest. He didn’t look up as I climbed into the car and switched on the ignition.
“I’m still scared, Mr. Beaumont,” he said doggedly. “And I feel so damn helpless.”
It might have been only three days since I’d first met him, but Jeremy no longer seemed like a kid to me. Maybe we both were growing up. Tragedy had temporarily scrubbed the wedding, but I sensed Jeremy Todd Cartwright III was a keeper. Bearing that in mind, it wouldn’t do to have him calling me Mr. Beaumont for the rest of our lives.
“We’re all scared, Jeremy,” I assured him. “And by the way, call me Beau, would you? Everybody else does.”
He sat up then and glanced in my direction. “Having a baby…I just never thought about it that much before. You have to take her home, feed her, take care of her, read to her, teach her things, help her grow up. How do you know what to do so you don’t hurt her? What if she gets sick? I mean, being a father is just overwhelming, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say,” I agreed, with remarkable restraint.
We were quiet, both of us presumably musing about the responsibilities of fatherhood. At least, that’s what I was doing. When Jeremy spoke again, though, he changed the subject. “I hear they arrested Tanya. Do the cops really think she killed both those people?”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Not Tanya,” Jeremy said decisively. “Never in a million years. She wouldn’t do such a thing. She’s one of the kindest people I know. She won’t even kill a spider. She carries them outside. I’ve seen her do it.”
Jeremy didn’t know even the barest surface of Tanya Dunseth’s real story, and I wasn’t at liberty to tell him. There’s a pervasive belief that the kinds of abuse suffered by Tanya Dunseth provide a fertile breeding ground for many of society’s psychopathic killers. And there’s a common tendency to forgive the trespasses of those once-tormented children. I had learned that myself when it came to Anne Corley.
To Jeremy I said, “Not killing bugs doesn’t necessarily translate into not killing people, but Tanya claims she’s innocent.”
“What’s going to happen to Amber in the meantime?” he asked.
“She’ll be all right.” I explained our hastily arranged child-care program.
Jeremy shook his head. “It’s not fair. Tanya’s worked so hard. Now she’s going to lose everything, probably even Amber.”
“We’re working on the problem,” I said.
And “we” were. My use of the plural pronoun was accidental. I realized only after the fact that I actually meant it, that I was now a committed member of the Save Tanya Dunseth Movement. Roped into the program reluctantly at first, now I qualified as a full-fledged volunteer along with Ames and the people who offered to baby-sit.
I asked Jeremy if he wanted to come by Oak Hill and visit with some of his friends, but he declined. He was scheduled for Majestic Tuesday afternoon. He wanted to get some rest.
The idea of rest—of crawling into a bed and actually sleeping—seemed uncommonly sensible. In fact, I was more than ready for an entire night’s worth of serious shut-eye myself, but it didn’t turn out that way. To begin with, Ralph was
back at Oak Hill when I returned from the farm.
I asked how things were going, and he gave me a surprisingly dour response. “Not so good.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Fraymore found a note in Daphne’s sweater pocket signed by Tanya. It says to meet her at the house after the play. Or maybe it says after Juliet. I’m not sure, because I didn’t see the note itself. Fraymore is sending it out for fingerprint analysis.”
“Does Fraymore know about the rest of it? About the Daphne-Shore connection and that bastard in Walla Walla?”
Ralph nodded. “Tanya told him. I figured we’d be better off telling him before he learned about it himself. Not that it made any difference. The arraignment’s sometime late tomorrow.”
“Any hope of posting bond?”
“What do you think?”
“I agree,” I told him. “It was a dumb question. Not even Ralph Ames is that much of a miracle worker.” Ralph greeted that with a sickly smile.
“What about Child Protective Services?” I asked. “When do you think they’ll get into the act?”
“I’ve held them off for the time being,” he said, “but I don’t know for how long.”
All in all, it wasn’t an uplifting conversation. Later that night when I tried to go to sleep, Ralph’s comments kept replaying themselves in my head, giving me something constructive to worry about. The two of us together hadn’t been able to save Anne Corley, and I doubted we’d be able to rescue Tanya, either.
The other obstacle to sleeping was Amber. Florence of Oak Hill is a miracle worker in her own right, but only up to a point. She hadn’t been able to conjure a crib out of thin air on such short notice. There was a second bed in the Iris Room—a twin—but it had no sides. There’s a good reason cribs and playpens are made the way they are. It’s hard to keep a rambunctious two-year-old confined to a bed with no rails.
So Amber Dunseth slept in Alex’s and my queen-sized bed. With us. Between us, actually.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said as we lay in bed with a restless and still wide-awake child wiggling between us. “I shouldn’t have interfered, especially not when you already had so much going on.”
Amen, I thought. I said, “It has been one hell of a day.”
“Do you think Ralph will be able to help Tanya?”
“I doubt it.”
“Oh,” she said.
Any more than I had with Jeremy, I wasn’t free to tell Alex the details of the harrowing story Ralph and I had heard from Tanya. I had no right to. If she chose to reveal that part of her history to others, that was her choice. It wasn’t up to me to make that decision for Tanya Dunseth, not even with Alexis Downey.
“Couldn’t Ralph do one of those plea-bargain things?” Alex asked much later. “They’re in the news all the time. Maybe Tanya suffers from some form of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and it caused her to go temporarily insane.”
On the face of it, temporary insanity really wasn’t totally out of the question for a change—if she had done it, that is. But I kept going back to Tanya’s insistence that Martin Shore hadn’t hurt her, that he and Daphne had, in their own dreadful way, made her life better. They had rescued her from a hellhole of unremitting abuse.
I could understand how the shock of seeing Daphne Lewis might trigger the return of Tanya’s loathsome memories and allow her to see into a murky past she had obscured in an effort to survive. Yes, it must have been terrible to recall all those years of pain and degradation. But if Tanya really was the kind of person who avoided killing spiders, why would she set out to murder the very people who once helped her? What was the point?
If she was going to go against her own beliefs and kill someone, why mess around with Daphne Lewis and Martin Shore when she could instead go after someone who really deserved it—like her father, for instance?
With those conflicting thoughts circling in my head, sleep became more and more elusive. When I dozed at all, it was on tiptoes for fear of crushing Amber. Several times I woke up in a panic and lay there listening for the sound of her breathing, afraid that something had happened to her while I slept. Once or twice a baby knee or elbow dug deep into my gut and shocked me awake. How do pregnant mothers ever get any sleep?
So much for yet another romantic night in Ashland, Oregon, I told myself grouchily around 4:00 A.M. Next time, we could just as well bring Hector along. That cat is trouble, but at least he’s trouble of a predictable nature. When everything else seems strange and out of control, it’s nice to have something you can count on, something whose behavior you can predict with reasonable accuracy.
In a universe awash in uncertainty, there’s reassurance in knowing that some things in life are unchanging, that they respond in an entirely preordained fashion, even if it’s only to bite a chunk out of your naked toes.
The one good thing about lying awake most of the night was that it gave me lots of uninterrupted thinking time. Since Tanya Dunseth was already in jail, it would seem I should have focused on her, but for some reason my thoughts turned again and again to Guy Lewis. Why had he suddenly checked out of the Mark Anthony? Was it before or after Daphne Lewis died in the basement at Live Oak Farm?
Between five and seven, I finally slept. At seven, Amber landed squarely on my chest and giggled uncontrollably at my startled “Oomph!” Alex and I were both still groggy, but Amber was wide awake and ready to play. She missed her mother, but she was willing to accept these two slow-moving folks as tolerable substitutes.
The child struck me as a happy-go-lucky, well-adjusted little kid who had no fear of strangers. What that said to me was that Tanya—despite her straitened circumstances and her own ill-used childhood—had somehow provided her child with a world peopled by a collection of trustworthy adult care-givers. Alexis Downey and me included.
It was a considerable challenge corralling Amber and bathing her before we were all due to go downstairs for breakfast. When Alex, kneeling wet-handed beside the bathtub, passed me an armload of squirming, towel-wrapped toddler, I forgot how short the bathroom ceiling was and rapped the top of my head a good one in the process of taking her. I whacked myself hard enough that I saw stars, but I didn’t drop the baby.
Minutes later I carried a fully dressed child downstairs while Alex grabbed a quick bath for herself. In order to avoid complicating breakfast preparations, I took Amber out on the porch to play. We were there when Live Oak Farm’s decrepit Econoline van turned into the yard and stopped. Jeremy Cartwright climbed out.
After returning Amber’s gleeful greeting, he went around to the back of the van and emerged carrying a high chair, which he set on the porch beside me.
“It’s Amber’s,” he said. “It’ll make mealtimes easier.”
Bless Jeremy’s thoughtfulness and consistent good sense. For someone who wore Birkenstocks, he wasn’t bad.
“Thanks,” I said. He turned down an invitation to breakfast, saying that Kelly was awake and he was headed to the hospital to see her.
“You actually talked to her? How’d she sound?”
“Much better,” he said. “But I want to see for myself.”
I was trying to decipher the workings of the unfamiliar high chair when Florence appeared at the front door saying I was wanted on the phone. “Who is it?” I asked. “Kelly?”
“It’s a man,” she answered. “I think he said his name is Peters.”
Ron Peters was my partner in Homicide before an on-duty accident robbed him of most of the use of his legs. A less stubborn man might have taken his disability pension and run, but Ron had fought his way back onto the force and into full-time active duty, first with a long, boring stint in the Media-Affairs Division and now, much more happily, as a special assistant to Captain Anthony Freeman, head of I.I.D., Seattle P.D.’s Internal Investigations Division.
“Hey, Ron,” I said. “How’s it going?” I had taken the call with Amber balanced gingerly on one hip the way I had seen Tanya hold her. Except my hips aren’t
shaped quite the same way. As soon as I tried to talk, Amber slid down my leg.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” Peters demanded.
Where to start? I wondered. With Kelly and Jeremy and their almost-but-not-quite wedding? With the brand-new granddaughter I had barely seen? With Tanya Dunseth and a double homicide? With Kelly’s serious fall that had landed her in a hospital?
“Not too much,” I said. “Just enjoying a little R and R.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Peters replied pointedly.
Right about then Florence’s Natasha made an appearance. Amber greeted the animal with a delighted squeal. “Dog! Dog! Dog!”
The ungodly racket in my ear meant she was also screeching directly into the telephone’s mouthpiece. “What’s that?” Ron demanded. “Where are you—a day-care center? Sounds like you’re locked in a room with a whole tribe of ankle-biters.”
“There’s only one child here at the moment,” I answered, hoisting Amber again. “Hang on.” Alex appeared just then and took charge of the wiggling Amber, carting her off to breakfast.
“That’s better,” I said with a relieved sigh. “Now that I can actually hear you, what were you saying?”
“I said it sounds as though you’ve been busy.”
“Not really. How are things up there?”
“Interesting,” Peters replied. “Captain Freeman dropped a bomb on my desk a little while ago. He suggested I handle it first thing.”
A tiny stab of anxiety flickered through my mind. Peters didn’t sound quite his usual self. “Maybe you’d better call in the bomb squad,” I quipped uneasily.
It was a joke, but Peters didn’t laugh. “It’s not that kind of bomb,” he said. “What I have in my hand is an official interdepartmental complaint, actually two-in-one. It’s from both the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department and from the Department of Public Safety in the city of Ashland, Oregon.”